By now you have heard Teddy Chappaquiddick’s speech blasting President Bush, which, I must admit, was rather uneventful for me. it contained the same rhetoric the senior drunk driver from Masachussetts has employed for about the last two years, and was in my mind rather unremarkable except that it inspired the folks over at Tacitus’s site to come up with a minor quip, as they labeled the speech the Ted Offensive. If you have not seen or heard the speech, here is a bit, with the relevant part in bold:
By going to war in Iraq on false pretenses and neglecting the real war on terrorism, President Bush gave al-Qaeda two years — two whole years — to regroup and recover in the border regions of Afghanistan. As the terrorist bomings in Madrid and other reports now indicate, al-Qaeda has used that time to plant terrorist cells in countries throughout the word, and establish ties with terrorist groups in many different lands.
By going to war in Iraq, we have strained our ties with long-standing allies around the world — allies whose help we clearly and urgently need on intelligence, on law enforcement, and militarily. We have made America more hated in the world, and made the war on terrorism harder to in.
The result is a massive and very dangerous crisis in our foreign policy. We have lost the respect of other nations in the world. Where do we go to get our respect back? How do we re-establish the working relationships we need with other countries to win the war on terrorism and advance the ideals we share? How can we possibly expect President Bush to do that. He’s the problem, not the solution. Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam, and this country needs a new President.
Predictably, the Vietnam reference has created quite a stir, and when I heard the Vietnam line- it was immediately clear what Kennedy was attempting to do. Kennedy wanted to call Bush a liar, and Kennedy wanted to invoke the failure, humilation, and loss of America’s worst debacle. With a reference to Vietnam, he accomplished both.
Not so, says Mark Kleiman– he was just trying to say that Bush was deceiving the country in the manner that LBJ and others did during the Vietnam era. Now granted- Mark typed this, so I don’t know if he did so with a straight face, or maybe he just wanted another chance to join the
Vietnam wa/is a complex era, and for a Senator of Kennedy’s prominent stature (pun intended) to invoke Vietnam is to conjure up a large number of memories. Chief among them is not deceit. Chief among them is the loss of 50,000 Americans in a war that many later came to believe was wrong (as many believed it was wrong at the time, as well). If kennedy wanted to conjure up the image of deceit, betrayal, and dishonesty, there is another standard-bearer that he could have chose from the same era:
Watergate.
But he chose the words he used for a reason, and despite the best efforts of his spinmeister’s in the blogosphere, people understood what he meant. And, I might note, others overseas understood what he meant:
Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand anti-U.S. Shiite Muslim cleric, warned the United States on Wednesday that Iraq would become another Vietnam-like conflict if Washington did not transfer power to ”honest Iraqis.”
The cleric whose militia followers have battled coalition and Iraqi security forces across the country for days accused members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council of being ”collaborators” and said ”they do not represent the Iraqi people.”
”I call upon the American people to stand beside their brethren, the Iraqi people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army, to help them in the transfer of power to honest Iraqis,” al-Sadr said in a statement issued by his office in the southern city of Najaf.
”Otherwise, Iraq will be another Vietnam for America and the occupiers,” the statement said.
Kennedy’s careless rhetoric is now being used as a rallying cry for a despicable Islamo-fascist who represents the opinions of an extremely small minority of the population of Iraq, and whose troops are currently engaged in hostilities with our men abroad. Of course, I fully expect that by pointing this out, I will be accused of trying to ‘stifle dissent.’
Hardly- Kennedy had his say, he said what he meant and presumably meant what he said, and now it is being used as agitprop in a battle against our men and women. No number of excuses from Kleiman and Kennedy can evade that.
*** Update ***
I just finished typing this- and then the Fox News panel has the same discussion.