Posted on 08/31/2020 4:46:27 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
I was gob stopped. As a young man I was just as brainwashed by the media as anyone else.
This began with listening to an interview of overturner of idols, Thomas Sowell, on how vain and puffed up intellectuals are.
Prof. Sowell was remarking that Nixon didn't care about intellectuals, but according to the true principle, that when a democratic country led around by the nose by academics, decides that a war is unwinnable, it becomes so; despite America's de facto !!!VICTORY!!! in Vietnam, when intellectuals managed to so raise the hatred level that Nixon saw he was in in a no-win situation, he threw in the towel: Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Patrick Buchanan wrote on the 25th anniversary of Watergate, about the true situation at wind-down of the Vietnam war. Despite the peripheral, off-topic anti-war cultural, popular propaganda of M*A*S*H (1972-1983), we actually !!!WON!!!--the Tet Offensive was a complete debacle to the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, they won not a single battle. If you know that already, you're smarter than me. I was completely hoodwinked.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Until I saw an unctuous individual babbling on about how our terrified city feared a coup d’etat by Richard Nixon in 1974, I had decided not to write on the 25th anniversary of Watergate. But that did it. Watergate was indeed a coup. It was the overthrow of an elected president by a media and political elite he had routed in a 49-state landslide the like of which America had never seen.
In taking Nixon down, that elite was not motivated by any love of law or the Constitution. It was driven by hatred.
The media and political establishment hated Nixon for his lead role in nailing Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy and in blistering its New Deal heroes as witless dupes of Joseph Stalin. It hated Nixon because he rallied the nation against them, when he called on the “Great Silent Majority” to stand with him for peace with honor in Vietnam, and turned Vice President Agnew loose on them to the delight of a nation that had come to detest media arrogance and bias. And it hated Nixon because he seemed, with the mining of Haiphong and bombing of Hanoi, to have won a war they said could not — and should not — be won.
With every provincial capital under Saigon control, and America’s POWs coming home, the left seethed with resentment. And when it was revealed in March of 1973 that there had been a cover-up of the Watergate break-in, the establishment united as one to destroy Nixon. Nixon shredded the Constitution! they howled.
But this is arrant nonsense. The Constitution was in tatters when Nixon arrived in the capital in 1969. It had been scissored to bits by Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, William Brennan and the rest of the merry men of the Warren Court. And every unconstitutional power grab by that renegade court was celebrated by this city.
Nixon had an “Enemies List,” they cried. How awful! But if anything terrible ever happened to anyone on that list — other than a lost invitation to a White House Christmas party — it has yet to be discovered.
Nixon abused the FBI to cover up Watergate, they said. Yep, he did try to keep the FBI from expanding the Watergate investigation into campaign finance. But earlier, many of the same journalists who professed themselves sickened by this “abuse of power” had been recipients of the fruits of the FBI surveillance of the hotel rooms of Martin Luther King Jr., with recordings and photos of King’s liaisons provided, courtesy of Lyndon Johnson’s White House. The press has never called to account the White House and Justice Department aides responsible. What did Nixon ever do to anyone, compared to what the liberals did to Dr. King?
Nixon tried to block The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing the Pentagon Papers! He sure did. To this day, I find nothing wrong with the elected head of the executive branch going to the Supreme Court to seek an injunction against publication of top-secret documents stolen from the U.S. Department of Defense by a disloyal employee.
The Pentagon Papers had nothing to do with Nixon. They detailed the decision-making of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which had marched us into the Asian war from which Nixon was bravely trying to extricate the nation with honor. Yet, Nixon was bedeviled at every step by the same hypocrites who had cheered on JFK and LBJ.
Did Nixon misuse and abuse his power? Yes, he did.
Instead of creating a “Plumbers” unit in the White House to run down national security leaks, he should have left the black-bag jobs, as his predecessors did, to J. Edgar Hoover. But Nixon was not hated so much for what he did wrong as for what he did right — exposing the near-treasonous conduct of much of the American left during Vietnam.
And when his presidency was broken, that left saw to it that aid to Vietnam was cut off, guaranteeing the defeat and death of the South in the all-out invasion by the Communist North in 1975. The mind-set of Nixon enemies was never more manifest than in their uncontrolled rage and hysteria when President Ford pardoned him, denying them the sensual delight of seeing Nixon in the dock. History, however, has a way of settling accounts.
Having destroyed Nixon, the liberals got Jimmy Carter, who announced that Vietnam was a “racist” war and Americans had gotten over our “inordinate fear of Communism.” During Carter’s one term, the Soviet empire drove deeper into Asia, Africa and even Central America, producing a conservative backlash that elected Ronald Reagan, who declared Vietnam “a noble cause” and led America to triumph in the Cold War. So let the left celebrate how it saved us all from Richard Nixon, as the republic recalls who it was that rescued America from the left and saved the world from the Soviet empire.
Pretty accurate summary of US domestic cold war politics.
The left was always contemptible.
Nice to see that Pat is finally willing to say it, now that the Media coup against President Trump is failing.
They're back.
Tet was an intelligence failure. The game numbers turned into the inflation of those numbers for competitive dollars, inflated budgets, careers, schmoozing etc...
And after Tet we still didn’t believe (or didn’t want to believe) the real data. It really was “war a go-go.”
NVC General Giap wrote a book after the war in which he said the very same things, that after TET the US just backed off, said we could have dictated any terms we wanted. But for the intellectual’s and the media..... what could have been!!
We had them quite beat. Then we stood down so as to be "fair" and let them regroup. I find out years after the war from Giáp, himself (his writings), that on two occasions the northern Party and government officials sent their families to China and after the 72 bombing were preparing for Occupation by America. All we had to do either time was keep up the pressure.
I knew all of this at the time. Nixon was taken out as surely as JFK, MLK and RFK were. Then they laid the black turd of “HE OPENED CHINA” on him. In fact it was NWO and Commie agent for sale Kissinger who brought this in. If Nixon would have survived to finish his term, China would have had a hard time become a powerhouse. N. Korea, being the “pit bull on a chain” of Red China could have been neutralized also. No false hero John K’erry. No Bill Clinton, or Hillary, or Obama, as the commie sympathizers would have rolled out quite differently.
PJB would have been a very good President, I voted for him in the primary, and wrote him in over GHWB a true traitor the same as his papa...trading with the enemies to the end.
Thank you for sharing that.
..it would have been very different if Nixon had won in 1960...
Nixon did win in 1960
How I discovered the news media lies: Returning from a one-year tour in Vietnam in March of ‘69 I was stunned to learn that everyone believed we had suffered a crushing defeat. Even my own parents believed it because Walter Cronkite told them so.
Finally! Now, after more than fifty years, people are starting to get it.
“I have been saying Watergate was a Media coup for quite a while.”
I agree, but Nixon was no angel either, and no better than the Bush’s, and probably worse than Bush Sr. (who doubled-down on many of Nixon’s Left Wing policies).
Touche
Ping Sowell
This is from 1997. Nixon was no conservative, and he covered up that he knew about the recordings.
Johnson was literally throwing the game. It was an easy win. Nixon quickly brought them to the negotiation table and got a North Korea like split deal. It held until democrats in Congress said we would no longer come to the aid of South Vietnam. This gave the green light to the North.
Not disguised. I saw them waving a large communist flag at a Hanoi Jane Fonda rally in California. I saw pictures of Hanoi Jane with enemy leaders motivating more American deaths. We lost because of numerous traitors in this country. Of course, we played ungodly music. Promoted fornication and drugs. Made media mockers and drugheaded entertainers more important than older, wiser leaders. The answer is in turning to God. Reagan was a grest president, who the media hated, because he honored God.
Waging war is always about logistics. Deny food and weapons to the enemy and you will win. The enemy decides when a war ends, when they have been beaten enough.
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Haiphong is the major port in North Vietnam. It was heavily bombed from 1965 until President Johnson ended it in 1968.
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In 1972, Nixon ordered the renewal of bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong (April 16) and the mining of Haiphong Harbor as well as other harbors and inland waterways (May 9). Our Navy blockaded the North Vietnamese coastline.
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Nixon defended his escalation of the air and sea war as crucial to cut off the flow of supplies to North Vietnamese troops fighting in the South and to protect the lives of American forces still in Vietnam.
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For the most critical and deadly 4 years in Vietnam, Johnson chose to let Russian arms to be delivered.
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In Congress, moderate Republicans joined with the Democratic majority’s disapproval of the escalation.
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Johnson is the most responsible for our loss of blood and treasure. Ultimately the war was fought and lost on the floor of Congress.
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