W dissed Trump. That automatically erases everything and he’s now one of the bestest Republican presidents ever!!
W is the best Republican president of the 21st century.
Oh, definitely, which I why I consider it unfair to just describe him in negative terms. Even Vietnam itself, I could picture the pervasive fear that communism had to be contained or else bad stuff would happen. We can chuckle at this now, with the benefit of decades of hindsight.
Yes, but being stupid enough to be a dupe for the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the other PNAC ideologues is not inconsistent with being basically decent. Bush was an idiot who was also a decent man who loved his country. Trump is a totally self-serving conman completely bereft of any morality whatsoever, not to mention a pathological narcissist and habitual liar. He’d happily throw the whole country under the bus for ten bucks and ten minutes of personal glory.
The Vietnam war was deeply evil, but also hard to pin the blame for it on any one individual, although since Johnson presided over the worst of the escalations and authorized them, history holds him accountable. I tend to see it the way that Robert McNamara recounts it in the powerful film The Fog of War, which comes across to me like an old man’s confessional and quest for absolution. They were all being deceived by military commanders, by established US foreign policy dogma, and by the fog of delusion that clouds all such major conflicts. Meanwhile Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act with extraordinary determination, and signed Medicare into law.
Maybe I’m not saying anything much different than you are, but I hesitate to blame Johnson for Vietnam. The Vietnam escalations occurred because of the circumstances of the day. It’s true that a stronger or more insightful president might have acted differently. McNamara believed that Kennedy would have. But that’s not a condemnation of Johnson’s morality or honorable intentions.
Of course, it’s also easy to believe that Kennedy would have done differently, when Kennedy wasn’t around any more at the time. Would he actually have? We can’t know.
I suspect a lot of his base admire him for that, because that’s exactly how they would behave if *they *were as rich and famous as Trump!
I can’t remember where I read it, but Trump supporters elected a president that behaves the way they think black people behave.
Yeah. Same with Obama.
We all know how much you hate being part of a society. Unless you benefit without cost to you.