Christopher Hitchens is an iconoclast’s iconoclast, famously willing to piss on anyone’s grave, whether it be Mother Tereasa, Bob Hope, or Teddy Kennedy. Interestingly, this time he smacks down with one hand whilst patting on the back with the other:

Sure, the “tragedy” of Chappaquiddick had its necessary moment, but even in those days Barbara Walters was doing her damage control, and it was amazing to see a clip of Walter Cronkite referring deadpan to the “driving accident” that had kept Kennedy away from the Senate. It must take some ingenuity at the networks, even so, to simply airbrush the fascist sympathies and bootlegging background of Joseph Kennedy Sr., his sons’ murder campaigns in Cuba, the recruitment of the mafia for same, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, the increasingly frantic and pathetic narco-addictions of JFK, the exploitation of unstable broads like Marilyn Monroe, and so much else besides.

In some ways, this banana-republic coverage was a disservice even to the recently departed. After all, it was in part the case that the youngest brother had lived down the criminal and narcissistic and power-mad background of his family. His best biographer, Adam Clymer, wrote, on the morning after he died, that it was arguably wrong to see a discontinuity in Kennedy’s career and that he had actually been a decent-enough legislator before abandoning any yearning for the White House after 1980. This may be true as far as it goes, but the obituaries would still have had to be somewhat different in tone, even given the servility of the journalistic profession, if Kennedy had died at the time of the Au Bar episode in Palm Beach, for instance, and had not decided to take some kind of a pull on himself and become a citizen again instead of a drone.

A former Senate staffer of his stopped by for a drink last week and told me that, without fanfare, the socialist president of Chile had come in person to the Kennedy home a few months ago to bestow one of her nation’s highest human rights awards on him. His work on that subject alone was a part atonement for his siblings’ deployment of what Lyndon Johnson himself called “a goddam Murder Incorporated” in the Southern Hemisphere. So, of course, was his labor on health care (where Richard Nixon had a better political track record than the Kennedy administration) and his last decision to keep looking life in the face for as long as he had breath. In those waning months, after being disgusted by malicious anti-Obama propaganda being spread in the Democratic primaries—later picked up and used by the right in the general election—he withdrew his support from a candidate whose victory would have meant the continuation of the dynastic politics represented by the family names Bush, Gore, and Clinton. What a favor he did us all by that repudiation! And how fitting that it should have been a Kennedy who did it. The political rhetoric of Obamaism, alas, is even more bloviating at times than Camelot was, but you can’t have everything.

A fitting roundup, really.  The story of the youngest of the Kennedy brothers was of wretched excess and abuse of privilege followed by genuine and rather remarkable redemption.   As Hitch puts it in the close, “Kennedy’s very last year was quite possibly his best, and how many men or women will be able to say that?”

They just don’t make pound cake like they used to:

Col. Henry A. Moak Jr. digs in to an Army ration pound cake from 1973 at his retirement party. (Staff Sgt. Sun Vega/U.S. Army)

Forty years later, Henry A. Moak, Jr., still loves his pound cake. The Army colonel popped open an old military ‘C’ Ration can of pound cake from 1969 at his retirement ceremony, and dug in. Moak got the drab olive can as a Marine helicopter pilot off the Vietnamese coast in 1973. He vowed to hang on to it until the day he retired, storing it in a box with other mementos.

After a formal retirement ceremony, dozens of friends and relatives joined Moak in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes as he opened the can to cheers. Moak joked earlier this week that he hoped the can wouldn’t explode. It let off a whooshing sound as the pressure seal broke.

“It smells good,” Moak said as he put a handful in his mouth. He jokingly staggered back a few feet and loudly cleared his throat, while one person yelled out, “Eeww, gross!”

Moak pronounced the cake “good.” “It’s even a little moist,” he said, wiping his mouth. He dared anybody “gutsy” enough to join him, and retired Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, who was the U.S. Army Europe commander when Moak served overseas, took an even bigger piece. “Tastes just like it always did,” Mikolashek mumbled with a mouthful of cake as Moak laughed and clapped.

The Army is a little less hubristic than its retired colonels and generals, however:

Moak said he wasn’t worried about getting sick from any bacteria that may have gotten into the old can, because it looked sealed. But the military discourages eating from old rations. “Given the risks … we do everything possible to ensure that overly aged rations are not consumed,” said Lawrence Levine, a spokesman for the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia. Levine named the threats as mold and deadly botulism if the sealing on the food has been broken, which isn’t always visible.

The Army had transitioned to MREs by the time I entered service as a cadet in 1984 but I had a few of my dad’s old C-rations in the early 1970s.  As I recall, they were decidedly less than delicious even then.

via OpFor

The Conservative Wahoo makes an interesting point: “Are There No Live People Worthy of the Medal of Honor?”

News yesterday of the upcoming posthumous award of the Medal of Honor to SFC Jared Monti, USA for conspicuous gallantry in Afghanistan. I am humbled and awed any time I read of the bravery and selflessness of those who earn this most sacred of honors, and my debt as an American to SFC Monti is incalculable.

That said, I wonder why it is that this country has been at war for nearing eight years and to my knowledge, not a single live person has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for action in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yes, I know that the standards are high, and that is where I want them to be.

But I would surely like to see the President draping that Medal over the head of a living, breathing hero. I hope that we haven’t reached the point where one must give his or her life for the MOH.

Looking at the list of Medal of Honor recipients, it certainly seems that we have.   We’ve awarded two for action in Afghanistan (Navy LT Michael P. Murphy and Army SFC Monti) and four for Iraq (Army SFC Paul R. Smith, Marine Cpl Jason Dunham, Navy MA2 Michael Monsoor, and Army SPC Ross McGinnis).  All died as a result of their heroism.   Similarly, the two men awarded the Medal for the Battle of Mogadishu (Army MSG Gary Gordon and SFC Randy Shugart) died in action.

No one has earned a earned a Medal of Honor and lived to tell the story since the Vietnam War.

Contrast this with Vietnam, which saw 246 Medals of Honor awarded, 154 posthumously.  Or Korea:  133 Medals, 95 posthumously.   WWII:  465 awarded, 266 posthumously.   WWI:  124 awards, 33 posthumous.

Clearly, it’s both harder than ever to get recognized with the Medal of Honor and harder still to do so and live to see it.

Correction: The original version said there had been no MOH action by a living awardee since he Liberty incident, for which CMDR William L. McGonagle was recognized. That’s not true. I was looking at a list arranged by conflict and, of course, Vietnam started before but continued after 1967.

Walter Cronkite has passed:

Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the networks’ golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called “the most trusted man in America,” died Friday. He was 92. Cronkite’s longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. at his Manhattan home surrounded by family. She said the cause of death was cerebral vascular disease.

Adler said, “I have to go now” before breaking down into what sounded like a sob. She said she had no further comment.

Cronkite was the face of the “CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, interrupting a live CBS-TV broadcast of the soap opera “As the World Turns.”

Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title “anchorman” was first applied, and he came so identified in that role that eventually his own name became the term for the job in other languages. (Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters.)

“He was a great broadcaster and a gentleman whose experience, honesty, professionalism and style defined the role of anchor and commentator,” CBS Corp. chief executive Leslie Moonves said in a statement.

CBS has scheduled a prime-time special, “That’s the Way it Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite,” for 7 p.m. Sunday.

His 1968 editorial declaring the United States was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam was seen by some as a turning point in U.S. opinion of the war. He also helped broker the 1977 invitation that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the breakthrough to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

He followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, “Look at those pictures, wow!” as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon’s surface in 1969. In 1998, for CNN, he went back to Cape Canaveral to cover John Glenn’s return to space after 36 years.

“It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” CBS News president Sean McManus said in a statement. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.”

Cronkite lived to a ripe old age and his health had been failing, so this is hardly a shock.    I wasn’t old enough during Vietnam for his controversial remarks to cloud my judgment of his career, which mostly came in the last five or so years of his time as anchor and then as elder statesman.

It’s often said that there will never be another like someone who has just passed on.  In Cronkite’s case, it’s not hyperbole.  He was universally respected but shuffled out the door far too early, just toward the end of the period when people were simply expected to go away when the reached a certain age.  At roughly the time same, David Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, and John Chancellor were moved along, too, with then-youngsters Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw brought in to fill their chairs.  All of them did so with distinction but they never occupied the same central role that the previous generation had.  And none will be anywhere near as powerful as even they were.   Katie Couric could well be the last anchor at CBS News; in any event, no one will much care.

And that’s the way it was, Friday, July 17, 2009.

Gary Farber continues his look at the latest document release from President Nixon’s archives and finds corroboration for his long held belief that Nixon and Henry Kissinger believed the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and “simply wanted to punt the issue until after the 1972 elections, after which they expected South Vietnam to collapse.”  And, of course, we learned not long ago that Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense for most of the Kennedy-Johnson era (and died this morning) had the same thought and similarly nonetheless prosecuted the war vigorously.

While I’m neither a military historian nor even a Vietnam War buff, for my money the best short case that Farber, Nixon, and McNamara were right remains Jeffrey Record’s Winter 1996 Parameters article “Vietnam in Retrospect: Could We Have Won?”   The piece is short and worth reading in full.  The conclusion:

Norman Podhoretz, who believes that American intervention in the Vietnam War was “an attempt born of noble ideals and impulses,” has concluded that “the only way the United States could have avoided defeat in Vietnam was by staying out of the war altogether.”[50] His judgment, in retrospect, appears to be as reasonable as any. The United States intervened in the Vietnam War on behalf of a weak and incompetent ally, and it pursued a conventional military victory against a wily, elusive, and extraordinarily determined opponent who shifted to ultimately decisive conventional military operations only after inevitable American political exhaustion undermined potentially decisive US military responses. Even had the United States attained a conclusive military decision, its cost would have exceeded any possible benefit. Vietnam was then, and remains today, a strategic backwater, and the US decision to fight there in the 1960s was driven by a doctrine of containing communism that in the 1950s was witlessly militarized and indiscriminately extended to all of Asia. Bernard Brodie observed in the early 1970s that “it is now clear what we mean by calling the United States intervention in Vietnam a failure. . . . We mean that at least as early as the beginning of 1968 even the most favorable outcome . . . could not remotely be worth the price we would have paid for it.”[51]

The key to US defeat was a profound underestimation of enemy tenacity and fighting power, an underestimation born of a happy ignorance of Vietnamese history, a failure to appreciate the fundamental civil dimensions of the war, and a preoccupation with the measurable indices of military power and attendant disdain for the ultimately decisive intangibles. In 1965, Maxwell Taylor confessed that “the ability of the Viet Cong continuously to rebuild their units and make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. We still find no plausible explanation of the continued strength of the Viet Cong.”[52] Four years later, Vo Nguyen Giap commented that the “United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn’t work here. If it did, they’d have already exterminated us.”[53]

The United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.

Richard Florida passes along this snippet from The illustrated History of Canada:

American draft dodgers in Canada were far outnumbered by the young Canadians who joined U.S. forces to fight in Vietnam.

This factoid may be in that category Stephen Colbert would call “truthy” and Dan Rather would call “false but true.”

Canada did not participate in the Vietnam War for a variety of reasons.  Still, “about 30,000″ Canadian citizens volunteered to fight with U.S. and other Western forces and 110 of them were killed in action and have their names on the Vietnam Memorial. According to Wikipedia, “Canadian immigration statistics show that 20,000 to 30,000 draft-eligible American men came to Canada as immigrants during the Vietnam era; estimates of the total number of American citizens who moved to Canada due to their opposition to the war range from 50,000 to 125,000.”

Regardless, the fact remains that a huge number of Canadian citizens volunteered to fight in a controversial war and a not insignificant number died there.  They, along with others in the Anglosphere (sorry, Québécois) have long been America’s most stalwart wartime allies, willing to pick up a rifle when others would not.

After several days of inflamed public debate following official confirmation that the United States government tortured suspected terrorists under specific authorization from the Bush administration, the inevitable pushback has begun.  Several reports now suggest that these extreme interrogation techniques had the desired effect, yielding valuable intelligence that saved lives.

The most interesting of these, alas, comes from CNS and is headlined “CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles.”

The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

[...]

According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack — which KSM called the “Second Wave”– planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.”

Marc Thiessen, who “served in senior positions in the Pentagon and the White House from 2001 to 2009, most recently as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush,” takes to WaPo’s editorial pages to proclaim “The CIA’s Questioning Worked.”

In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists “did not make us safer.” This is patently false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public — in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media.

[...]

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques “led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that “information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave.’ ” In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

The memo notes that “[i]nterrogations of [Abu] Zubaydah — again, once enhanced techniques were employed — furnished detailed information regarding al Qaeda’s ‘organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi’ and identified KSM as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.” This information helped the intelligence community plan the operation that captured KSM. It went on: “Zubaydah and KSM also supplied important information about al-Zarqawi and his network” in Iraq, which helped our operations against al-Qaeda in that country.

Peter Baker’s NYT report, “Banned Techniques Yielded ‘High Value Information,’ Memo Says,” is a bit less exciting.

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.  “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush adminis

[...]

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

[...]

“The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

The foiled LA attack has long been murmured about (Patrick Frey wrote about it in November 2007, for example).  It’s unclear from these reports how serious the plan was.  Certainly, we have seen reports of numerous “foiled” attacks that, upon closer scrutiny, appeared to be mere fantasies of incompetents.  Then again, we’re talking about the planner of the 9/11 attacks here.

But let’s take at face value that CIA interrogators managed to extract information that foiled a developed, 9/11 style attack, thereby saving, say, 3000 innocent American civilians.   Does that outweigh the moral and legal issues of waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times?   I’d say it does.  It’s as close to the “ticking time bomb” scenario as we’re ever likely to get.

[UPDATE: Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Timothy Noah examines the timeline and demonstrates we likely foiled the LA Towers plot months before KSM was captured! This doesn't necessarily obviate any of the other "high value information" but it would undermine the most impressive of the examples offered.]

Blair correctly notes that we may well have gotten this information using legal techniques.  Then again, we might not have.  These guys didn’t break before they were tortured.   Of course, we didn’t try very long if we managed to get in 183 waterboarding sessions during KSM’s first month in U.S. custody.  The most reliable forms of interrogation require establishing trust and can take weeks, if not months.

What we also don’t know is how much damage the fact that the world, including our enemies, know that we were torturing terrorist suspects did.   Blair wrote, “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”   The first clause in that sentence is undeniable; the second is not.

In my recent interview with retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, he observed that, in Pakistan, “We’ve forgotten Rumsfeld’s question: ‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?’ And we probably are. The drones may be killing a lot of Taliban and al Qaeda but they’re alienating the tribesmen we need to win the war.”  Remember all the hostage beheadings, wherein the victims were dressed in Gitmo-style orange jumpsuits?  Would they have occurred had we not done this?  We don’t know.  How many people joined al Qaeda and the Taliban after these incidents became public, convinced that the United States really is as degenerate as the jihadists claimed we were?  We don’t know.

When I was being trained on this issue as a young cadet a quarter century ago, in addition to the legal and moral factors explaining why we must treat captured enemy combatants humanely — even risking our own lives and the accomplishment of our immediate mission to safeguard them — was a practical lesson:  The other guy was a hell of a lot more likely to surrender to you if he expected to be treated well.   Americans were more likely to keep fighting in Vietnam even against overwhelming odds because they knew they enemy would treat them as subhumans, whereas NVA and VC soldiers would surrender to us knowing they’d get three hots and a cot.   Certainly, that proved to be the case in both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq; Saddam’s soldiers couldn’t throw their weapons down fast enough.

That’s not likely to be the case for some time now.

Several bloggers are pointing to MSNBC’s David Shuster’s quip that “[I]f you are planning simultaneous tea bagging all around the country, you’re going to need a Dick Armey.”

This is amusing on a number of levels.

First, it’s a very good line.

Second, the Left is applauding Left-leaning MSNBC for going after Right-leaning FOX for its touting of these tea parties.  Yet, it’s not as if MSNBC and other outlets haven’t hyped protests from the Left that were orchestrated by well-heeled interest groups.

Third, and most intriguing to me, is how quickly the use of anti-gay slurs[*] has caught on with not only the Left but with such conservative luminaries as Andrew Sullivan in describing the Tea Party protesters.  Seriously, what’s up with the juvenile “teabagging” sniggering?

Now, goodness knows, OTB hasn’t been a big fan of the movement  (see “Tea Parties Protest Stimulus,” “Tea Parties, Going Galt, Iraq, and Delicious Irony,” and “Protesting Banks“).  Then again, I think organized protests outlived their usefulness forty years ago and are mostly absurd spectacles (see “Protests Don’t Work” and “Protests Cause Closures” — but also “On Dissent“) .  But I’m not understanding the level of outrage aimed at these protesters by online intellectuals.

Large protests are always organized by elites with money. This includes not only the civil rights and anti-Vietnam marches of the 1960s and the Million Man March of the 1990s but the original Boston Tea Party.  There’s a collective action problem that has to be overcome by professional organizers.

The fact that many who are outraged by the bailouts and stimulus packages supported George W. Bush’s massive spending nor more obviates their right to protest than does the fact that many supporters of said bailouts and stimuli opposed Bush’s programs.  All spending is not created equal and differences in degree can become differences in kind.  Plus, protests are often rather irrational.

*UPDATE: Several commenters have challenged my terming “teabagging” an “anti-gay slur.”  Franklin correctly surmisses my meaning.  While the practice wouldn’t be considered a slur to those who engage in it — and, for that matter, heterosexuals could engage in it — its usage by opponents of the Tea Party protests is to ridicule with insinuations of homosexuality.   Ditto, too, the recent sniggering over 2M4M with allusions to gay hookups.

On Tuesday, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud responded to a $5 million reward for his arrest by threatening terrorist attacks in America.  “You can’t imagine how we could avenge this threat inside Washington, inside the White House,” Reuters quoted him as saying.  Today, he’s claiming responsibility for yesterday’s shooting spree in Binghamton, New York.

The diminutive Mehsud is considered the prime suspect in the murder of Benazir Bhutto and he’s taken seriously.  But most are skeptical. of this latest claim.

U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment about Mehsud’s claim, but Pakistani security analysts dismissed it as a publicity stunt.  The New York Times quoted representative Maurice Hinchey, whose district includes the town of Binghamton in New York state where the shooting took place, as saying indications were the gunman was an immigrant from Vietnam.

I suppose anything’s possible but it strains credulity that a Pashtun tribal leader has a network that includes Vietnamese immigrants in upstate New York.

Photo credit: The Sun

I’ve followed the discussion about the Bill Moyers “scandal” (see, for example, today’s (WSJ piece “Bill Moyers’s Name Is Linked to J. Edgar Hoover’s Abuse of Office”) out of the corner of my eye for the last couple of days  and am having trouble seeing what the big deal is.

Basically, as I understand it:

• Back in 1964, then-30-year-old Moyers was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson who carried out orders to assist in some vague way an investigation by then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about allegations that Motion Picture Association president Jack Valenti was a homosexual.

• Decades later, as a PBS talking head, Moyers is a preening lefty who has “gone on to promote himself as a political moralist, routinely sermonizing about what he claims are abuses of power by his ideological enemies.”

• This constitutes hypocrisy.

Am I missing some key point?

Because, if not, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly big deal.  People’s attitudes change between the time they’re 30 and 70.  They learn from their own mistakes and their other life experiences.  Furthermore, once-respectable views and attitudes become discredited.

In 1964, people trusted government much more than they would a decade latter, owing to Vietnam and Watergate.   So, “trust me, I’m the FBI director and know what’s good for the country” becomes “abuse of power.”

On the issue of homosexuality in particular, I often turn to a single, anecdotal example of how times have changed.   In 1967, lefty folk singer Arlo Guthrie, son of lefty folk icon Woody, released the Thanksgiving classic “Alice’s Restaurant.”  It contained the line, “And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them.”  Within maybe a decade, nobody respectable would use the word “faggot” in public in this manner.  (Although, as frequently happens, the epithet eventually came back into vogue as shock language acceptable for use by people in the targeted group.)

It seems perfectly plausible that young Bill Moyers did something that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time that he’d condemn if it were happening in 2009.

In response to my comment about Barack Obama taking office during “troubled times,” Charles Austin retorts:

Not to diminish or belittle the very real problems for folks who find themselves on the wrong side of the various bubbles out there, but if these are troubled times, then we really do have it pretty good. Has everyone forgotten the late sixties and seventies? Does Iraq really look like Vietnam? Does George Bush remind you of Jimmy Carter? This doesn’t feel anything like those days at all. The difference now is that our Oprahfied populace’s first reflex is to claim victimhood and seek an ever larger government to insulate them from being responsible for themselves.

If you are old enough to remember compare the evening newscasts of 1969 and 1979 to those of 2008. Which has changed more, the times or the reporting of the times?

I’ve said much the same thing in previous posts. I fully agree that Iraq is not Vietnam, our much-bemoaned political polarization is tepid, indeed, compared to the 1960s, and my own sense of the current economic mess is that it’s not as bad as the stagflation of the 1970s.

Having heard it said, repeatedly, by people with credibility on the subject that this is The Worst Economic Downtown Since the Great Depression^TM, I’ve reluctantly come to accept that as true.  It certainly looks to be a bigger systemic calamity.    Still, inflation is under control, interest rates are at historic lows, and even unemployment is reasonably low.

Perhaps some perspective is in order, then. As the great social commentator Barry McGuire described the situation in July 1965, mere months before I was born, it was quite grim.  We were, quite literally, on the eve of destruction:

The eastern world, it is exploding
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’

This remains the case today. Tie.

You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’

Now, not only are the age for killin’ and votin’ the same (18) but we have an all-volunteer force and even allow for conscientious objectors to get out of fightin’ after they’ve volunteered.

And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’

I’ve seen no reports of this, so presume it’s no longer the case. Advantage: Now.

If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save, with the world in a grave

This remains true. However, the demise of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War has markedly decreased the likelihood of such an eventuality. Advantage: Now.

Handful of senators don’t pass legislation

Still true and more frequent. Advantage: Then

And marches alone can’t bring integration

McGuire misapprehended the situation. Integration was indeed achieved. Advantage: Now.

This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’

So true. Tie.

Overall, you’d have to agree, we’re in much better shape now.

Danielle Allen takes to the editorial pages of WaPo to decry the regional disparity of military service in a piece titled “Red-State Army?”

Veterans Day in Maysville, Ky. Photo Credit: By Terry Prather -- Associated Press

Whereas in 1969 13 percent of Americans were veterans, in 2007 only 8 percent of us were.

Even more important than these general demographic shifts is the change wrought by the end of the draft in 1973. Until then, military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true. The residential patterns for current veterans and the patterns of state-level contributions of new recruits to the all-volunteer military have a distinct geographic tilt. And tellingly, the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states.

In 1969, the 10 states with the highest percentage of veterans were, in order: Wyoming, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, California, Oregon, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, Connecticut and Illinois. In 2007, the 10 states with the highest percentage of post-Vietnam-era veterans were, in order: Alaska, Virginia, Hawaii, Washington, Wyoming, Maine, South Carolina, Montana, Maryland and Georgia.

She gives the usual conjecture as to why the disparity exists and argues that mandatory national service is absolutely essential to save us from our dividedness.

Except that as Streiff, posting at RedState (ironically enough), points out, her premise is wrong. Indeed, it’s rather silly. Virginia, Hawaii, Washington, Maine, and Maryland all voted for Barack Obama! All of those but Virginia voted for John Kerry and Al Gore!

So, maybe we don’t need to fire up the draft just yet.

In a surprise move, General Eric Shinseki has been tapped as Barack Obama’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Gen. Eric K. Shinseki disputed the administration's strategy of invading Iraq with a relatively small force. He retired shortly after Baghdad fell in 2003. (By Charles Dharapak -- Associated Press)

Shinseki, a four-star general and 38-year veteran who retired shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, will appear with Obama in Chicago at a news conference today commemorating the 67th anniversary of the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor. Obama said Shinseki agreed to join the incoming administration because “both he and I share a reverence for those who serve.”

“When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans and I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling even more than those who have not served — higher unemployment rates, higher homeless rates, higher substance-abuse rates, medical care that is inadequate — it breaks my heart, and I think that General Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home,” Obama told NBC News’ Tom Brokaw in a interview taped for broadcast today on “Meet the Press.”

[...]

Notably, Shinseki led the Army at the same time that Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s pick for national security adviser, commanded the Marines. Both questioned Wolfowitz’s presumptions, before the war in Iraq commenced, about how the fighting would go, and they argued that the Pentagon was being too optimistic in its planning and should prepare thoroughly for worst-case scenarios.

[...]

Retired Army Gen. Colin L. Powell, who was President Bush’s secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, called Shinseki “a superb choice. . . . He is a wounded hero who survived and worked his way to the top. He knows soldiers and knows what it takes to keep faith with the men and women who went forth to serve the nation. He also knows how to run large and complex bureaucratic institutions. His is an inspired selection.” Powell, also a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supported Obama’s election. Shinseki, 66, was twice awarded a Purple Heart for injuries sustained in Vietnam.

A truly inspired choice.   While Max Cleland had been talked about for a second stint in the job and Tammy Duckworth was bandied about as a more unconventional choice, Shinseki will bring enormous clout to the post.  Presumably, too, he wouldn’t have taken the gig without assurances that he’d be able to make a difference.

James Fallows notes that Shinseki’s quiet service continued into retirement: “Shinseki, who could have had a lucrative career on the talk show/lecture circuit giving ‘I told you so’ presentations, has not indulged that taste at all.”

William “The Freezer” Jefferson, who has been under federal indictment for three years, narrowly lost a hurricane-delayed election yesterday to Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao.

Nine-term Democratic Rep. William Jefferson, who has been battling scandals and a federal indictment for the past three years, lost his bid for re-election on Saturday. Republican challenger Anh “Joseph” Cao, an attorney and community organizer, defeated Jefferson in the 2nd Congressional district race. He will become the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Cao had almost 50 percent of the vote to Jefferson’s 47 percent.

The 2nd Congressional district, in and around New Orleans, is mostly African-American and heavily Democratic, and Jefferson appeared to be favored to win re-election going into the election. “The people of the second district were able to transcend party, transcend race,” Cao said after claiming victory Saturday night.

Voters also chose Republican John Fleming over Democrat Paul Carmouche in Louisiana’s 4th District by a slim 356-vote margin. Fleming will replace retiring 10-term Republican Rep. Jim McCrery, a top-ranking Republican on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

Elections in the districts were delayed after Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana in September, setting up what should be the last two federal contests of 2008 on Saturday. Both races had two other contenders who drew a small percentage of votes.

While Republicans on Twitter and Memeorandum seem excited by these outcomes, I hesitate to read much into them. The 4th was a Republican hold. Given the margins, one presumes Jefferson would have won had the contest taken place on November 4 and turnout been normal. Indeed, if he’s still a free man two years hence, I wouldn’t be at all shocked if Jefferson runs again and wins. Certainly, it’s unlikely Cao will be able to hold on to a heavily Democratic district.

Still, it’s good to get him out if only for a while.  And Patrick Ruffini is right:

[T]here could be no more vivid example of why we need to run Republican candidates in every district than Louisiana’s 2nd. Cao won his seat more solidly than Fleming did in an R+7 seat. Starting with Obama CoS Rahm Emanuel, Democrats started to understand that Congressional races can be very nonpartisan under the right circumstances and that poor performance or other personal shortcomings by the incumbent can render even a hefty party ID deficit meaningless.  We can’t recreate Bill Jefferson in every district — the guy was indicted on 16 counts and the feds found 90 G’s in his freezer. It’s also an accident of history that the election happened today instead of on 11/4 when Jefferson could have ridden Obama’s coattails — it was delayed by Hurricane Gustav. There isn’t a Bill Jefferson in every district, but there is a Joseph Cao.

Now, there are plenty of “safe” seats where the incumbent not only has a huge partisan advantage but is also simply a very good Representative.  It’s not worth the opposition expending tremendous resources in losing efforts in those cases.  It is, though, worth grooming and running good candidates who can be funded if the incumbent suddenly becomes vulnerable.

The French National Archive has released video footage of John McCain being interviewed as a Vietnam POW. 

The Sky News report opens rather amusingly:

The video portrays the Republican as a hero but the message may be tarnished as he is filmed smoking a cigarette.

I suspect he’ll be forgiven.

He also describes being shot down over Hanoi in 1967, and parachuting into a lake. At times, when speaking of his family, McCain’s lower lip trembles and his voice breaks. “I was on a flight over the city (Hanoi) … and I was bombing and I was hit by a missile or anti-aircraft fire, I’m not sure which,” he said, adding that his plane “went straight down”. After landing in the lake, McCain said he “was picked up and taken to the hospital, where I almost died”.

This is rather odd:

French reporter Francois Chalais conducted the interview , which was first broadcast on French television program Panorama in January 1968.

The journalist’s widow, Mei Chen Chalais, is seeking payment from several television broadcasters in France and the US for the unauthorised use of the footage. Her lawyers have even written to the McCain campaign as its website features a few seconds of the footage, which Chalais said was done without her approval.

One would think the subject would have some rights to use the footage.