A New Vietnam For The Left? - Warning Humor And Opinion Ahead.

Sometimes a humorous, considered opinion is a worthwhile read. Especially if it is based on current events. Humor goes a long way as well to tell the story and illustrate the point. Some will view this as 'spin". I don't as it is advertised as "Opinion" not "news". Read on. If you want to see the entire article, click on the title.

The Quagmire on Slothnor
The Left and Vietnam.
Jonah Goldberg - NRO Online
February 2, 2005


The year is 2456. The human colonies on Mars have been invaded by giant, laser-visioned tree sloths bent on crushing humanity and forcing the survivors to work as slaves in the massive dung mines of the planet Slothnor. In a last-ditch effort to save our species from extinction, the brave humans launch a counterattack on the Sloths' home world. Le New York Times (headquartered in Paris since 2018) blares in a bold holo-headline "Disturbing Echoes of Vietnam Conjured by Earth Aggression."


O.K., I'm kidding. It would probably take a few weeks before the Times actually invoked Vietnam. Perhaps they'd wait until we got bogged down in the actual marshes of Slothnor to start bleating about "quagmire." Who knows?

All I can say for certain is that I am no longer capable of being shocked by the Left's and the mainstream media's capacity to shove pegs of any shape into the round hole of Vietnam. A recent New York Times headline blared, "Flashback to the '60s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam." A cursory search of the Nexis-Lexis database shows that the words Iraq and Vietnam have appeared together nearly 800 articles in the last year — and that's just in the New York Times. The Washington Post: 764. The LA Times: 683. The Chicago Tribune: 526. Time magazine, a weekly publication, ran more articles mentioning Vietnam and Iraq (70) than it put out issues in the last year, and that doesn't even include letters to the editor.

Now, granted, some — even many — of those articles didn't rehearse the media's usual mode of Vietnam fixation. Some were merely about the campaign of John Kerry, who boasted incessantly that his service in Vietnam made him more qualified to be commander in chief.

Even so, Kerry's Vietnam fixation shares this in common with the media's Vietnam obsession: They have more to do with liberal baby-boomer myopia than with a war that ended 30 years ago (and that bears almost no resemblance to the conflict in Iraq).

Indeed, you can tell this fixation has little to do with Iraq because the war in Afghanistan prompted hundreds of comparisons to Vietnam as well. Between October 1, 2001, and October 1, 2002, the Times ran nearly 300 articles with the words Vietnam and Afghanistan in them. On day 24 of the Afghan campaign, Times's muckety-muck R. W. Apple revived the Q-word — which to liberals can only mean Vietnam — in a thumb-sucker titled "A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam."