The Cellar - War-Losing Faction

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Why is there no ham?

No...ham... ??? Good question. "ham" burger ... Oh... from Hamburg.

Exactly. They're made out of Germans.

Don't you find it a little strange that Uder disappears, and now they're feeding us this mysterious food, "Uder-braten" ???

Well, that's what happened with Frank. The next day the menu had Frank-furters.

I don't even wanna know what happened the day before they served us fish tacos.

Is Abe Vigoda dead?

Edit: Just checked. He's still alive. What do you mean? "Fish" tacos?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla (Post 312608)

But seriously, folks: we had far too much of this during Vietnam, and in the end it paved the way for Communist victory and a free hand for their oppressions and abuses, did it not? Not exactly a triumph of the human spirit, here; more a victory for stupidity and weakness -- and for totalitarianism....

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griff (Post 312984)

...[i]This convenient amnesia allowed the ISG to overlook a record of bipartisan bungling and shortsightedness extending over a period of decades. Franklin D. Roosevelt got the ball rolling in 1945, promising protection to the House of Saud in exchange for preferred access to Saudi oil. Dwight D. Eisenhower made his own distinctive contribution, engineering a coup in Tehran and forging a fateful partnership with the Shah. John F. Kennedy chipped in with another CIA-assisted coup, this one bringing the Ba’ath Party to power in Baghdad. ...

Wait a minute. The Saudis, the Shah, Saddam, the Contras - they're all oppressive and abusiv..... oh, I get it!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla (Post 312959)

Well, Jebbie, bend over and for your really-hates, I'll inject you your due reward.:p All we really needed to do was to keep South Vietnam in supplies. ~snip

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. ARVN? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. :lol2:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla (Post 312959)

Well, Jebbie, bend over and for your really-hates, I'll inject you your due reward.:p

I didn't know we were at that stage of the relationship yet :blush:

Quote:

All we really needed to do was to keep South Vietnam in supplies. Congress was Democratic-controlled at the time, and Nixon, who with benefit of national experience, hindsight and strategic reappraisal in prosecuting the Vietnam War, was employing a more successful strategy, Abrams' style rather than Westmoreland's, disgraced himself all the way out of office with the Watergate scandal. With the President too politically vitiated and distracted to get Congress to measure up to the demands of common decency to an ally, Congress' funds cutoff doomed South Vietnam as an independent political entity -- and more than a few South Vietnamese as living entities, let alone independent ones. Would a Republican-controlled Congress have been that feckless?

If Nixon was so wise and caring he wouldn't have besmirched himself in the first place with Watergate. Or was it all a clever Democrat scheme to make sure communism could flourish? Either way supplying is what we did with a certain fellow named Saddam Hussein. Maybe you've heard of him? My point is that had South Vietnam won it didn't guarantee a good government.

Quote:

National level Republicans do behave in a genuinely anti-communist manner. Their Democratic counterparts -- "have done everything differently."* And they've failed a lot and lost a lot thereby. When it came to coping with the major threat to the United States and the rest of the world of the twentieth century, the Democrats ran the gamut between singularly imperceptive incompetence and general failure, and they spent a solid fifty years staying hosed up. They're still in this habit, and they're still just as incapable.

It's pretty hard to fail when you don't play. Republicans are 0-2 from where I sit. They started, they failed. What exactly have Democrats failed? Rwanda? At least we didn't start that. When it comes to something big like wars I'd rather err on the side of caution than firing and missing the target.

Quote:

South Vietnam's political fault lines seem really to be nothing more or less than the legacy of French colonialism and post-colonialism: in particular a policy -- seen also in Lebanon, to outcomes not very different -- of parceling out portions of a former colony's political power specifically to this or that faction/religion/definable group. The ruling South Vietnamese elite lacked close ties to the rest of the South Vietnamese population, particularly out in the sticks where the North's forces had freest hand. A political structure made from such rotten timber isn't going to handle pressure from outside at all, let alone anything approaching well. One good shove and crrraaackkkk, crunch!

Agreed. Which is why I'm not fond of the USA mucking in others affairs. Colonialism has been little but a mess in the end.

Quote:

Really, we went into Vietnam out of a humanitarian impulse. That we didn't succeed meant blood and sorrow, and no redress. That Vietnam has since enjoyed a measure of anti-Communist success, to the point where Communism is now maintained mainly as a sort of state religion to which one must outwardly subscribe at least if one wants to be an official, largely heals the ulceration.

Oh please. You believe it was for humanitarian reasons and not trying to be the primary superpower in the world (as opposed to the USSR)? I have some ocean front property I'd like to sell you.

Quote:

I didn't know we were at that stage of the relationship yet

Came as a surprise to me, too! :p Well, if either of us ejaculates mustard, we can use it on the hamburgers...

Dude, I live within pistol shot of Port Hueneme's City Beach. I've got all the ocean front I can stomach! Look again, though, at what we tried there -- at bottom, I can't see anything but a humanitarian impulse, especially with the understanding that international communism is not humanitarian by any definition, even Pravda's.

Your points are well taken; my point is that North Vietnam's winning did guarantee about the worst of all possible government. Pol Pot's government being an example of one that was slightly worse.

Yes, Nixon behaved stupidly -- and the thing about H2Ogate was the seeming routineness of it all. It had the flavor of something that had gone on for a very long time, among almost everyone in the political process, but kept behind the scenes.

For an exhaustive list of Democratic failures, that's going to take some time and offline composition to get it all down. Stay tuned -- but it makes rather dreary reading.

well.. that's why america is the 'great experiment'.. this is an evolving process... damn shame that the thing has been co-opted by the jocks and jarheads.

Perhaps if you're neither, you should really try beating them at their own game, or playing your game better than they play theirs?

There comes a point when bitching is jejune.

I thought bitching was losing :confused:

I guess our big deviation, UG, comes from the intent we view. I'd have an easier time believing your humanitarian view if the US did not have such a large number of prisoners and homeless types. Or even national healthcare. If I am not believe Vietnam was for humanitarian reasons then I wonder why the US gov neglects its own people.

yeah, true that.. good point