tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764506766343254616.post8442544901046180053..comments2024-03-26T14:20:38.103-04:00Comments on The Thought Criminal: Hate Mail - You Are Such A Sucker The Play Left Is Made Mostly Of Them Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764506766343254616.post-12483270209870783682017-12-16T11:26:24.413-05:002017-12-16T11:26:24.413-05:00continuing:
Kennedy’s [Harvard] own assassination...continuing:<br /><br />Kennedy’s [Harvard] own assassination three weeks later laid the problems of Vietnam squarely on Johnson’s desk. Unhappy with U.S. complicity in the Saigon coup yet unwilling to deviate from Kennedy’s approach to the conflict, Johnson vowed not to lose the war. If anything, he encouraged his closest advisers to work even harder at helping South Vietnam prosecute the counterinsurgency. Those officials included many of the same figures who had acquiesced in Diem’s removal, as the desire for continuity led him to retain Kennedy’s presumed objectives as well as his senior civilian and military advisers.5 Uncertainty about his own foreign policy credentials also contributed to Johnson’s reliance on figures such as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara[U C. Berkeley, Harvard ] Secretary of State Dean Rusk [Davidson College Oxford University UC Berkeley School of Law,] and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy[ Yale – Harvard Fellow] all of whom had been with Kennedy since the outset of that administration. “I need you more than he did,” LBJ said to his national security team.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the Kennedy team, most of them Harvard and other Ivy Leaguers played on Johnson's insecurities about his own educational and class background, and other things and they were successful. <br /><br />The Kennedy mystique is mostly myth. If he hadn't been assassinated I suspect he would have been the focus of the freedom to lie with impunity given by the idiots on the Supreme Court in 1964, who knows, it might have led to his failure to win re-election as the free press made hay over his well known habit of screwing around - which was known to Republicans. We do know, though, that the media, Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy and their supporters used "freedom of speech" to drive Johnson out of the 1968 race, to go on to attack Humphrey (I remember how they clapped at the NBC newsroom when the race was called for Nixon) and the rest is the descent into fascism by the media created Ronald Reagan and Trump whose creation is even more a product of the "free press" under the ACLU and Joel Gora's fondest dreams. The Thought Criminalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01381376556757084468noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764506766343254616.post-77857259734181281952017-12-16T11:19:02.887-05:002017-12-16T11:19:02.887-05:00Only published your stupid comment because it is s...Only published your stupid comment because it is so obviously an example of the kind of snobby, Ivy soxer idiocy I wrote about. <br /><br />Here's what a University of Virginia gives, pretty much the consensus of scholars of that period conclude. I've put the educational institutions that produced the figures involved in escalation of the US presence in Vietnam in brackets.<br /><br />At the center of these events stands President Lyndon B. Johnson [Southwest Texas State Teachers College (later Texas State University)], who inherited the White House following the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy [Harvard]. The circumstances of Johnson’s ascendance to the Oval Office left him little choice but to implement several unrealized Kennedy initiatives, particularly in the fields of economic policy and civil rights. But LBJ wa]s equally committed to winning the fight against the Communist insurgency in Vietnam—a fight that Kennedy had joined during his thousand days in office. While Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower had committed significant American resources to counter the Communist-led Viet Minh in its struggle against France following the Second World War, it was Kennedy who had deepened and expanded that commitment, increasing the number of U.S. military advisers in Vietnam from just under seven hundred in 1961 to over sixteen thousand by the fall of 1963. Kennedy’s largesse would also extend to the broader provision of foreign aid, as his administration increased the amount of combined military and economic assistance from $223 million in FY1961 to $471 million by FY1963.2<br /><br />Those outlays, however, contributed neither to greater success in the counterinsurgency nor to the stabilization of South Vietnamese politics. Charges of cronyism and corruption had dogged the government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem for years, sparking public condemnation of his rule as well as successive efforts at toppling his regime. Diem’s effort to construct strategic hamlets—a program run by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu—ended up alienating increasing numbers of South Vietnamese, arguably creating more recruits for the Communists instead of isolating them as the program had intended. The shuffling and reshuffling of military personnel also contributed to Diem’s troubles, further undermining the counterinsurgency; indeed, by reserving some of the South’s best troops for his own personal protection instead of sending them out to defeat the Communists, Diem contributed to the very incident—his forcible removal from power—he was trying to forestall.3 A poor showing against the Vietcong at the battle of Ap Bac in January 1963 sparked the most probing questions to date about those personnel shifts and about the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). But it was the attack by Diem’s minions on parading Buddhists four months later that ignited the nationwide protest that would roil the country for the remainder of the year and eventually topple the regime. Both Diem and Nhu were killed in the coup that brought a military junta to power in early November 1963, ending America’s reliance on its “miracle man” in Vietnam.<br /><br />The Thought Criminalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01381376556757084468noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764506766343254616.post-50211248659397582412017-12-16T10:38:50.488-05:002017-12-16T10:38:50.488-05:00Hey, you're the idiot who said that LBJ got su...Hey, you're the idiot who said that LBJ got suckered into Vietnam by mind control from Ivy League elites.steve simelshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13247393763004076992noreply@blogger.com