TALK TO ME, KERRY

I graduated from high school in 1971, and from college in 1975. During my high school and college years, American involvement in the Vietnam War reached its peak, and slowly wound down. By the time I was eligible for the draft (Spring, 1972 was "my" lottery), America was was all but out of Vietnam.

I didn't want to go to Vietnam. I was thankful that I drew an extremely high number in the draft lottery and therefore wouldn't have to go. I was even more pleased that the draft was ended shortly after the lottery drawing (but nowhere near as pleased as the guy in my dorm who had drawn number 5 in the lottery).

The arguments about Vietnam were interminable. Some said that Vietnam was no threat to the US, whether under communism or some sort of right wing dictatorship. But even if a communist government in Vietnam was no threat to the US, surely the communists would not stop until someone stopped them. Since communists did not believe in real elections, or freedom of speech, or freedom of religion, or whole bunches of other things that I thought were important, they needed to be stopped somewhere, sometime, and we were the only ones who could stop them. Others said we shouldn't ever have been in Vietnam to begin with, so we had to leave. But we were there, and leaving could (and later did) have disastrous consequences, both for us and for the Vietnamese who had placed their trust in us. Still others said we couldn't win. But it was clear that we could in fact win the conventional war, if not war for "hearts and minds". God knows, I'm no military expert, but surely there was at least one way for a superpower to prevail militarily over a backwards third world country. I think all we had to do was stop trying not to lose and use those tools available to us. No, not nuclear weapons, but Special Forces, more conventional troops, more air power, more actions designed to interdict the North's logistics train, etc. But I think the decisive thing for me is that I felt I could no longer trust what my government was telling me about what was happening on the other side of the world. General Westmoreland or the President (Johnson or Nixon) would say one thing, and another thing entirely would appear on my television screen during the nightly news.

So I opposed the war in Vietnam. Was that a result of the fact that I really really didn't want to go there? Perhaps in part. Anyone who actually wants to be sent halfway around the globe to be shot at by people who want to kill him is not, in my opinion, functioning on all cylinders. With the convenience of hindsight, however, it is obvious that both the Johnson and Nixon administrations were not prosecuting the war to win, they were attempting to avoid losing. Nixon even said so. He just wanted to get out while avoiding as much of the negative consequences of defeat as he could. That meant that the war never would be won. And that, in turn, meant that my contemporaries (not to mention the poor bastards unlucky enough to actually live in Vietnam) were killing and being killed in what seemed at the time to be a hopeless and ultimately pointless exercise without end.

Obviously, the anti-war forces eventually won the domestic political battle and the US withdrew from Vietnam. And then an odd thing happened. The peace accords so arduously and solemnly negotiated and signed by the US and the leaders of North Vietnam in Paris were utterly ignored by the North. It was obvious that the government of North Vietnam had never intended to abide by any agreement with us pertaining to the independence of the South. Shortly after Congress prohibited any further monetary support for South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese sent a conventional army south and took Saigon. And we did nothing. We didn't even send money or supplies to our erstwhile allies in the South. We abandoned our allies and enabled the North to impose their particularly vicious brand of government there. The fall of Saigon was followed rapidly by "re-education camps" and a flood of boat people.

Did we realize in advance that these things would happen? Absolutely. And the fact that it happened, and that we knew it would happen and that we knew about it while it was happening made me ashamed.

Now I'm fifty years old (ugh!), and, at least partly as a reaction to the shameful behavior of our government in abandoning the South Vietnamese to the tender mercies of the descendants of Ho Chi Minh to achieve a wholly fake "peace", my political views have changed. My skepticism concerning government pronouncements remains fairly high, but I have also become much more distrustful of the people who supported the years long farce that was the negotiation and "implimentation" of the treaty ending the Vietnam war, and my trust in governments other than my own, especially non-democratic governments, is pretty close to absolute zero.

Which is why I would understand if John Kerry's views about the Vietnam war, and war in general, have changed since he testified before Congress in 1971. Kerry testified that "we found that most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart." Well, yes, I am sure that being free of strafing helicopters and napalm attacks were things that people in Vietnam desired. But I think they wanted more. I think they wanted to be free. I think they wanted so badly to be free that some of them left everything they had ever known, everything they had ever worked for, and went to sea in old, leaky, overcrowded fishing boats in an attempt to reach Hong Kong and the haven of the closest democracy.

Because I would understand if Kerry's views on the Vietnam War and war in general had changed over the last 30 odd years, I need to hear from him whether they have and if so, in what way. I need to hear from him because he wants me to vote for him for President. He wants me to help place him in charge of our armed forces. Does he still believe that communism was no threat to the United States? Does he believe that North Vietnam honored the Paris peace treaty? If not, does he believe they should have, and what, if anything, would he have done to make them honor it?

On a more contemporary note, what, if any, military threats does Kerry believe the nation faces today. Does militant Islam pose a threat to the US? How would he deal with an attack of the scope of 9/11? Does he believe that, over and above any failure of intelligence which may have resulted in a failure to prevent it, the US bears any responsibility whatever for the attack of 9/11? I won't be satisfied with platitudes about "internationalizing" our response or "increasing law enforcement and intelligence efforts". I want specifics. He would not have gone to war in Iraq? OK. He needs to tell me what precisely he would have done. Then I can compare the likely results of his actions to those of George Bush, and I can make up my mind.

I have to say, though, that Kerry's explanation of how his opinions had evolved over the years will need to be pretty convincing in order to earn my vote. He'll have to explain to me why he voted against the first Gulf War, then in favor of the second, then against funding the war he was supposedly in favor of. And he won't get my vote simply by saying George Bush misled him. He has to tell me what he wanted to do and why that would have been a good thing to do. And given that Kerry is saying that the War on Terror is more of a police and intelligence matter than a military campaign, I'd also like to hear whether and why he voted to freeze defense spending, and wanted to cut the intelligence budget (these last items are from Smash, no links available). Oh, and while Kerry's explaining things, perhaps he can tell me why he voted against military pay raises, cost of living adjustments, and family housing almost every time they came up (Smash again).

Until then, I am left to compare Kerry's voting record, for which, in my opinion, the kindest characterization is an attempt to be all things to all people, with Bush's record of disposing of two despotic regimes with minimal loss of life and attempting to establish something approaching democracy in each place.

The comparison, in the absence of a cogent and particularized explanation from Kerry, is not flattering.

 
O! CANADA!

I've been getting a good long chuckle out of the bruhaha (brewhaha?) about Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's appearance in Canada.

The "issue" was first brought to my attention by Damien Penny, who linked to this hilarious weather report by Triumph in Hawaii. Sample: "Howard [anchorman], don't worry about the light winds. Hurricane Isabel couldn't mess up your hair."

But a similar act in Canada about Canadians was, shall we say, not well received in certain quarters.

American talk-show host Conan O'Brien took his cameras to the Quebec Winter Carnival where he launched a satirical attack on French Canadians that is sure to further offend Quebeckers still stinging from comments made by CBC hockey analyst Don Cherry.

Canada's government has condemned a show by U.S. late-night television host Conan O'Brien that insulted people in French-speaking Quebec and seemed to suggest everyone in the province was homosexual

American talk-show host Conan O'Brien turned out to be Conan the Barbarian on his road show into Canada this week. His NBC program threw oil and matches down our national fault line Thursday night with crude jokes about French Canadians. This one ran under the headline "Canada AmBushed by Loose Conan." Self parody just doesn't get much better than that. The linked article is worth reading just to see how the ijit worked Bush into this.

Oh, alright, I'll quote him: "Could it be that our growing U.S. criticism has set the Bush government out for revenge? Do the Americans secretly want to split up our two solitudes so they can pick up the pieces? Could the last week's events be part of a CIA plot to grab our oil, lumber, water and snow? Or our few remaining hockey stars?" Was he serious? Well, he was a few paragraphs earlier when he said "But I wonder how [Conan O'Brien would] feel if we let Canada's Insulting Beaver Puppet loose on U.S. TV to yuk it up about Sept. 11. We all have our raw nerves and O'Brien just hit ours. Where will this loose Conan take his show next? Maybe Ireland, where he could try out his Catholic-Protestant jokes?"

And the sketch that created all this furor? Two days later it was posted on the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

 
MMMMM, COMMENTS!

Dr. S.A. Robertson is hereby awarded a prize (consisting of something completely worthless to be determined later) for being my very first commenter. Ever. Thank you, Dr. Robertson.

He points out that the political beliefs of the pool of candidates are skewed left, probably by biases built into the system which discourage conservatives from entering the fields to begin with. He is undoubtedly correct about the politics of the pool of potential candidates, and probably correct as to why. He concludes that it is therefore entirely possible that there might be no discrimination in hiring.

A valid point.

However, it was also once true that in a given field of employment, there were few, if any, minority or female candidates. In some cases, it still is largely true. Would an assertion that "we tried to find a candidate from [pick your excluded group], but received no applications from qualified candidates" work as a defense against a claim of racial or sexual discrimination in hiring, even if the assertion were absolutely true? I am no employment law expert, but I think that such a claim, by itself, would be insufficient. At the very least, it would have to be accompanied by a showing that, however small the pool of candidates from the excluded group, that pool was thoroughly searched and all qualified candidates within that pool were encouraged to apply for the position. The alternative is a system of what I call quotas and others call "goals and timetables."

And that raises a larger question. By complaining about Dr. Brandon at Duke, I am not advocating affirmative action for political conservatives. I think Duke should hire the very best philosophy professors it can entice to North Carolina. If that means that the hires will be uniformly liberal in their political leanings, it is only because Dr. Brandon and his colleagues, by calling people from half of the political spectrum dumb and casually dismissing them and their political beliefs, have been stupid enough to discourage half of the highly intelligent people who might otherwise have been interested in the field from pursuing a career in it. The result of this discrimination is that scholarship in the field will suffer by either declining or (more likely) not achieving as much as it otherwise might. There are advantages to diversity.

I think it is unfortunate that Professor Brandon, and those of his present colleagues who are perpetuating the problem, are not likely to suffer the consequences of that perpetuation, given the time frame in which those consequences will manifest themselves. But the "cure" of affirmative action is far worse than the disease. I do not understand how anyone could expect to achieve the elimination of de facto discrimination (by race, by gender, by political belief or by any other factor not relevant to the position being filled) by creating and enforcing a set of rules which imposes approved types of discrimination. It boggles the mind (mine, at least) to believe that substituting one set of discriminatory practices for another could somehow end discriminatory practices.

On the other hand, I would find the irony of Dr. Brandon being forced to undergo "sensitivity training" hilarious.

 
PROGRESS

I remember reading a short book in either elementary school or junior high (I'm old enough to have pre-dated the "Middle School" craze that swept the American Educational Establishment) in which an Italian priest travelled to Moscow at the height of the cold war with a tour group and poked fun at the Soviet Union by lavishing praise on on humdrum things like plumbing as sterling examples of Soviet superiority.

In that vein, CognoCentric proudly announces the advent of Comments! None of that old fashioned whining, "Send me an email! Please!" No, no, no! Both CognoCentric readers (consisting of The Daughter and one other person who prefers to remain nameless, but whose initials are probably Carey Gage) can now fill the echo chamber with high praise about the low thoughts expressed on this site.

Comments will be unregulated, but I hope to have the problem of deleting obscene or abusive remarks.

The opinions expressed in the comments do not necessarily reflect the views of CognoCentric (duh!).