I was surprised the other day to learn that RenewAmerica owed its existence to Alan Keyes, because I’d always assumed it was founded by P.T. Barnum. Perhaps it was the warmth and unity I sensed among its contributors — a group of outcasts and misfits, united by their common differences, much like the family formed by the eponymous characters in Todd Browning’s Freaks. But as much as I love each and every wingnutty one of them, there is no more endearingly demented oddball than Fred Hutchinson.
Fred, with his toothy smile, clip-on tie, and pink rosebud pinned by a proud and loving mother to his short-sleeved, polyester dress shirt from Sears, is a refreshingly goofy arbiter of moral justice. It’s as if one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse favored pastels and resembled Napoleon Dynamite’s brother.
But even more darling is Fred’s bio, which is actually longer than his column. It isn’t really a conventional, shorthand resumé so much as it is a heartfelt account of one man’s spiritual journey from confused, vision-questing adolescent to smug middle-aged dork:
During my teen years, I discovered a passion for truth in my heart and also discovered I was a political conservative. During my college years I joined the debate team, got active in politics and discovered that I enjoy a philosophical approach to learning. I was deeply convinced that truth exists and can be found by those who mean to have it. I devoted myself to the search for truth and stuck with that devotion for the rest of my life.
Yes, the search for Truth inevitably leads to RenewAmerica. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced of Fred’s bona fides. Shall we get on with the column? Oh, I’m sorry, Fred, you weren’t done with your bio?
At some point, I realized that to find truth one must go to the fountainhead of truth, namely God. I sought God during my last two years in college culminating in a traumatic and supernatural moment when I met Christ at the cross. From that moment to this, I have never doubted my eternal salvation.
‘Nuff said! At this point, I’m more than ready for Fred to bust some Truth in our ass, but not only are we not done with his life story, we’re still two paragraphs away from the 1970s! So I’m going to skip ahead to the end, where we discover that — I hope you’re sitting down — Fred is an unemployed CPA. Anyway, let’s get on to his 400 word history of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia.
Columnist Bob Herbert has historical amnesia about the Vietnam war but has total recall about the liberal myths of the anti-war movement. The central theme of his essay of 6/08/09 was that it was the Vietnam war was unwinnable and therefore a pointless waste of lives. It was not unwinnable but it lasted much longer than it should have because of the Johnson — Mc Namera rules of engagement and the micro-management of the war.
Like Alcoholics Anonymous members and the manufacturers of Hebrew National hot dogs, I’m going to pause here and defer to a Higher Power — Doghouse Riley:
“The political and military leadership of the North understood the war to be primarily political. We didn’t, and we still don’t. We never understood the Vietnamese, or how to fight an insurgency; our commanders tried to refight WWII. Our largely indiscriminate bombing program in the South, and ham-fisted relocation efforts, served to magnify Vietnamese resentment of the Western colonials and their corrupt Catholic puppets. And yet some of us are still trying to argue that if we’d only fought a little more WWII we’d have won. Like the tout sheet says we were supposed to.”
The Nixon-Kissinger team went China to give China what they wanted, namely prestige and world celebrity. In return, China agreed to allow America to bomb North Vietnam aggressively, with a Chinese promise not to come into the war as they did in Korea.
That’s some awesome truth-seeking Fred. Of course, it might be worth mentioning — and correct me if I’m wrong — that by the time Nixon went to China in 1972, the People’s Republic had already withdrawn their forces from Vietnam, which by then was primarily a Soviet client, and begun backing the Khmer Rouge, who were involved in skirmishes with the North Vietnamese even before the fall of Saigon. Then there was that little matter of the Vietnamese-Cambodian war beginning in 1975, and the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. But that’s all nitpicking. The centuries-long history of relations between China and Vietnam probably wasn’t really all that complicated, and I’m sure Nixon and Kissinger knew exactly what they were doing.
Contrary to liberal myths, this bombing was very effective because it brought the North Vietnamese to the Paris Peace Talks (1973). The result was stalemate similar to the Korean War. In order to ensure that North Vietnam did not renege on the agreement, it was necessary to keep some American troops in Vietnam, give aid to South Vietnam and to retain the option of bombing. This was a win in terms of our goal to prevent the spread of Communism in South East Asia.
Yes, we had the North Vietnamese right where we wanted ‘em in 1973.
When Nixon was in Paris, enjoying the crowning triumph of his career, The Watergate burglars were captured. In the process of his downfall, the rage of the Democratic congress against Nixon reach a fever pitch. In this environment, the angry democrats in Congress were ready to swallow the all the myths of the antiwar movement. They cut off funds for the war, pulled out the troops and banned bombing.
Absolutely. Except for a couple of minor points…
- Nixon wasn’t at the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973.
- The Watergate burglaries took place almost a year earlier, in 1972.
- The Nixon Administration began withdrawing troops from Vietnam in 1971.
- Congress didn’t “cut off funds for the war,” since the war was over. They refused to allocate funds for renewed combat operations, and they cut aid to South Vietnam from $1 billion to $700 million. The South Vietnamese were forced to economize by reusing Handi-Wipes and giving up some of their premium cable channels, but there was no shortage of leftover ordnance.
Historically, a blood purge follows the violent take-over of power by Communists of the Marxist- Leninist brand. The blood purge in Cambodia in involved in the murder of an estimated 2,000,000 people. 3,500,000 or one tenth of the men, women and children of South Vietnam died from political violence after the war and one third of these, or 1,250,000 were murdered. Bob Herbert puts the number at 2 or 3 million, not mentioning that most of these deaths were murders of communist blood purge and not civilian casualties of American military operations.
Actually, Herbert is talking about wartime casualties (“More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese”) which is why he didn’t mention your blood purge thing. Now I think I see why you didn’t link to his column.
As a lefty, he wants to cover up the communist blood purge and make America look bad.
Is this like one of those viral ad campaigns on Twitter where you can win a MacBook Pro if you keep tweeting #bloodpurge?
The Paris Peace talks should have saved the lives of all those blood purge victims.
Guess so. Well you’re working hard for it. I hope you win.
The Democratic Congress who threw all those lives away.
(The Password is…Robert McNamara…)
They did it willfully even after they had been warned about blood purges. None of the Democratic congressmen who pulled the troops out and none of the anti-war leaders have ever apologized for engineering American defeat or for facilitating the blood purge.
Well. I guess there’s nothing more to say then, except…Good-bye.
Oh, and…Blood Purge!