Demagogue

The Washington Post story about the deaths last week of six soldiers from a small Louisiana town concluded with this ironic paragraph:

The recruiting poster in the (local National Guard) armory has its appeal, too. “You can” is written above a photograph of a soldier rappelling. Beneath, it says: “and still make it home for dinner.”

Iraq, of course, has destroyed that notion for guardsmen.

Hearing of that poster made me think of the macho-cowboy statement that Ronald Reagan made the year before he was elected governor of California. Taking aim at LBJ’s Vietnam policy, Reagan said:

“It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home for Christmas.”

Interview with the Fresno Bee, Oct. 10, 1965

Actually, we tried Reagan's approach. Months before Reagan spoke, LBJ had given the order for Operation Rolling Thunder, in which a huge force of U.S. bombers attacked North Vietnamese targets.

During the entire Vietnam War, the U.S. military dropped nearly 8 million tons of bombs on North Vietnam or Vietcong targets – this was four times the tonnage dropped during all of World War II. In fact, it was the largest use of firepower in the history of human warfare.

Oh, wait. I almost forgot – Reagan was a kind and great man, a national treasure. Sorry, disregard this post. In fact, shouldn't we rename our blog after him?