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Posted on 02/24/2003 12:29:00 PM PST by cody32127
Edited on 04/23/2004 12:05:18 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Two of our former presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, have been talking a lot about their views and feelings on Iraq. It would be nice if they took to speaking less and thinking more. They could start with an event in the latter years of Dwight David Eisenhower, a former president who knew how to do the job. Forty-two years ago this spring, in April 1961, a young American president launched an amphibious invasion on a foreign shore. It was such a thorough failure that to this day the words "Bay of Pigs" are shorthand for "American military fiasco." The American-trained Cuban exiles who stormed the beaches of Cuba in hopes of liberating their homeland were, essentially, abandoned and left to die, denied the support they'd been promised by the U.S. government. Fidel Castro crushed them. The Bay of Pigs invasion was badly planned, poorly executed and almost wildly unrealistic. (Months before it began former secretary of state Dean Acheson told JFK, in a private Rose Garden conversation, that you didn't need Price Waterhouse to figure out 1,500 guerillas aren't going to beat 25,000 Cuban regulars.) And yet after the invasion, when Kennedy both acknowledged the failure and took responsibility for it, he won the support of the American people. His approval rating jumped to 82%. He rallied. History, and his administration, went on.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Greaser in the classic 1950's sense or in the Mexican sense?
Excellent essay.
This is the failure of the Democrat's policies. Their congenital inability to see the contradictions in their own perceptions of the world. The French (yeah, I know) writer and philosopher St. Exupery based is philosophy on the precept that humans, especially the supposed "intellectuals", cannot comprehend a paradox they were not taught. By the time they "wrap their mind around" the "counterintuitive", it is too late.
Carter and Clinton, as well as France and Germany are exhibiting this same lack of comprehending the constant paradox in world affairs.
If these two Bozo's have anything to say, they should say it in the Oval Office (metaphorically) and shut up. But then, they are Democrats.
Well, one denotes a West Side Story type of character and the other is a racial slur. The term is used both ways by different people. I suppose there may be different views as to which is worse, and for different reasons.
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