Really meant to say the misleading cast of the reporting on the PP.

This is one of the great ironies from that era. As soon as Johnson took over as POTUS after the Kennedy assassination there was an intense animus towards him from the coastal elites as represented by the media who saw LBJ as a cornpone redneck buffoon. It perfectly mirrors today’s red state/blue state divide – except that Johnson was basically to the *left* of Kennedy. JFK had cut taxes while LBJ was probably the biggest big-government Democrat between Roosevelt and Obama. And the Vietnam policy that resulted in so much calumny towards Johnson (“Hey Hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today”) was forged by Kennedy’s Ivy League foreign policy team – McNamara, Rusk, Bundy(s), Rostow etc.

In fact the misleading cast of the Pentagon Papers may have even resulted from Johnson being more dovish than the JFK advisors. When they said “the Johnson administration” had decided to bomb NV at a time when “the White House” rejected the idea, the former may have been the advisors inherited from Kennedy while the latter was Johnson himself. I read “The Best and the Brightest” many years ago and IIRC Halberstam suggested that Johnson had doubts about the war but reluctantly went along with the JFK team because he had always focused on domestic policy going back to his stint as Senate majority leader and had little of his own expertise in foreign policy. But it was a lot more satisfying to blame Vietnam on Johnson than on the sainted JFK.

At least one can comment on WSJ stories, and I often do that, if only to state the reporter is a dummy for reason X or Y or Z. Lots of people read WSJ comments, it seems.

My home page is, regrettably, Yahoo, which does its own ‘news’, tending as the main story to feature yet another bald black NFL player doing something or being done to, or that there are many black NFL coaching candidates.

As a result, there is a tendency among people holding this view to demand perfection of the USA, while excusing horrible crimes that happen elsewhere. This explains how the USA can be viewed as a fascist society (e.g., the Patriot Act), while Castro’s Cuba is a bastion of all that is good. Because the USA is not perfect, it is therefore as evil as the worst of the worst. Because the benighted Third Worlders in Cuba have universal health care, everything else there must be wonderful. (On a tangential note, I wonder how many people holding this view realize how profoundly racist it is?)

The fundamental problem is that because of guilt (and other factors), these people cannot accept the fact that in 2006, the USA, despite its lack of perfection and somewhat violent history, is still qualitatively superior to Communist China in almost every measure of human dignity. The old aphorism is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Anyone seeking perfection in a human endeavor will not find it, and the difference between grown-ups and children is that grown-ups are able to understand this.
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