But George McGovern was right

[davidinalameda]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/01/06/but_george_mcgovern_was_right/

THE DEMOCRATS see a hobgoblin under the bed, and his name is George McGovern. Low-grade panic is beginning to set in as pundits forecast a repeat of 1972: "As Massachusetts goes, so goes the District of Columbia." The prospect of "another McGovern" whets the appetite of Bush partisans while generating gloom and shame among Democrats. Howard Dean, for one, flees the association, while other candidates tar him with it.

Here's the problem: In 1972, McGovern was right. If there is shame attached to that election, it is America's for having so dramatically elected the wrong man. Apart from the rank dishonesty of Richard Nixon and his administration (a pattern of lies that would be exposed in Watergate), there were two world-historic issues that defined that election, and on both Nixon was wrong. 1972 was a fork in the road, and history shows that the United States made a turn into a moral wilderness from which it has yet to emerge.

Obviously, the first issue was the Vietnam War. Having been elected in 1968 promising "peace with honor," Nixon was well on the way to neither. Ground forces had been "Vietnamized" (the last US combat units would be withdrawn a few months after the election), but a savage air war was underway throughout Vietnam (Nixon had spread it into Cambodia, too, disastrously). After the traumas of 1968, Americans had willfully accepted Nixon's sleight-of-hand on Vietnam, and the news media cooperated. As one NBC television producer recalled, news executives decided that after 1969, the "story" would be "the peace negotiations, not the fighting."

[Racenut20]

1. Don't forget Kissinger.

His October 72 speech "Peace is at Hand".

[sallyseven]

2. At the risk of

sending some people into orbit, I would say this. We would have been better off with George McGovern. Look at his writings and his background. He was a good man, thoughtful and progressive. I think that his loss was a bad thing for the US. Look at the secretive, dishonest, person that we elected. I suspect that the American People object to honesty & integrity and are afraid of what it might mean to them. Look at what they think (at least 55-60%) is a good president!! Come on folks.

[MrBenchley]

3. You might also recall

that the 1972 election was "fixed" by Nixon and his "plumbers" and that it led to Tricky Dick taking the big fall.

[Martin Eden]

4. McGovern rips Iraq war and Bush in this April article in the Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&c=1&s=mcgovern

--snip--
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap--two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.

During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying." That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.

I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.

The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people. We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?
--snip--
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&c=1&s=mcgovern