With a gun in my belt, a trained police force on speed-dial, and the National Guard standing by, that’s how.

How can you even walk down the street, know that so many people you pass are just waiting for the chance to stab you in the back?

Indeed, though decidedly more than merely decent, when the history is more conscientiously reviewed it’s a highly convincing argument. The ’73 Congress – led by Ted Kennedy and a few others – failed not merely to keep our promises vis-a-vis funds and armaments to the South Vietnamese people, they even cut funds for such humanitarian staples as medical supplies to the South. Lewis Sorley’s A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam is a well written, well documented and finely argued account of the Creighton Abrams years (post-Westmoreland) which evidenced military and popular (among indigenous South Vietnamese) and a general strategic victory. Defeat was grabbed from the jaws of victory essentially by the Left, the MSM (with some help furnished by the Soviets and Mao’s China) and other popular/political factors in the U.S. and the West in general.

Creighton Abrams’s overall strategy represented a volte face compared to Westmoreland’s, and Abrams, with the help of William Colby and Amb. Ellsworth Bunker, was hugely successful. The military war and popular war among the South Vietnamese peoples** was won.

** One example only: in 1969 alone, 47,000 Viet Cong (So. Vietnamese militia allied with the North) switched their allegiances back to the govt. of So. Vietnam. These types of incidents were caused by a variety of factors, including the continued use of terror by the North to force recruitments in the South, positive reasons such as land titles being granted in the South where previously only tenancy and predominated (a vestage not only from the French colonial period, but prior to that colonial period as well). In fact, by 1972 over 400,000 former tenant farmers had been given titles to land, in South Vietnam.

Sure. Just like he made Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, and Osama bin Laden understand.

You can’t MAKE people understand just by giving public speeches. You can help them understand, if they actually want to understand and it’s just a gap in communication preventing it, but you can’t MAKE a person understand if they do not want to understand, by any means short of beating them into submission.

No matter how carefully Clinton could try to explain his policies, I really don’t think he would have been any more successful at reaching an understanding with McVeigh, Rudolph, or bin Laden as he was with Arafat at Camp David. And I don’t think Bush would be able to make the press understand his views, even if he was as silver-tongued as Clinton, because they are just as determined to hate him with the same undying passion.

So what’s your agenda Neo?

We were attacked on 9/11, and you jumped on the what you thought was a great white stallion to carry you to safety. It turns out you landed on a hitching post. That’s gotta hurt. If you remain hysterically composed (ie, it’s the media’s fault, everyone but us has an agenda, the Baby Boom Generation ate my brain!) maybe nobody will notice.

Mugged by reality? Honey, you could’nt pick out reality in a lineup after said mugging.

Good Night and Good Luck.

Can’t the Left find some better technique than this amateurish propaganda attack called tu quoque?

For someone like me who reads propaganda of all variations and colors, I would prefer some variety you know.

But the duck got something right. The media sees Bush as an enemy that they must kill and imprison, just as Bush sees terrorists as an enemy that he must kill and imprison.

“… when he and Carl Bernstein slayed the Nixonian dragon,…”

(ZZMike, compulsive editor, suggesting “slew”. There is a “slayed”, but it doesn’t seem to fit here.)

“…this “reliable-but-unnamed-sources-tell-all method” is exactly the method favored by Bush and the administration when trying suspected terrorists, who are, under the administration’s proposal, not to be allowed to see the evidence against them…”

You’re confusing apples with oranges.

What you’re describing here is a protocol for dealing with unlawful combattants who are not “US Persons” – citizens and legal residents. Even then, the validity of the evidence is subject to rulings by the judge(s) in the case.

“US Persons” are afforded the many rights and protections of the Constitution and numerous federal and state statues.

What is not “…favored by Bush and the Administration…” is extending these rights to persons who have no connection to the US except to be caught in the act of waging war or plotting terrorism against the US.

That’s just not possible, I’m afraid. Not just for Woodward, but for anyone who relies on this “reliable-but-unnamed-sources-tell-all” method.

Wonder of wonders, this “reliable-but-unnamed-sources-tell-all method” is exactly the method favored by Bush and the administration when trying suspected terrorists, who are, under the administration’s proposal, not to be allowed to see the evidence against them.

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, no?