"It...is embarrassing...when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality..."

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Wed Aug-22-07 07:13 PM
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"It...is embarrassing...when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality..."

Olbermann's Special Comment on the Lessons of Viet Nam

Olbermann: Lessons from the Vietnam War

Keith Olbermann responds to Bush's comparison between Vietnam and Iraq

By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 8:55 p.m. ET Nov 20, 2006

It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.

And it is pathetic to listen to a man talk unrealistically about Vietnam, who permitted the �Swift-Boating� of not one but two American heroes of that war, in consecutive presidential campaigns.

But most importantly � important beyond measure � his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans.

And that is indefensible and fatal.

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.

�One lesson is,� he said, �that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.�

�We�ll succeed,� the president concluded, �unless we quit.�

If that�s the lesson about Iraq that Mr. Bush sees in Vietnam, then he needs a tutor.

Or we need somebody else making the decisions about Iraq.

Mr. Bush, there are a dozen central, essential lessons to be derived from our nightmare in Vietnam, but �we�ll succeed unless we quit,� is not one of them.

<...>

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of �peace With honor� are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they�re probably just as wrong now, as they were then ... Dr. Kissinger.

And the fifth crucial lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush � which somebody should�ve told you about long before you plunged this country into Iraq � is that if you lie your country into a war, your war, your presidency will be consigned to the scrap heap of history.

<...>

Yet these parallels � and these lessons � eluded President Bush entirely.

And, in particular, the one over-arching lesson about Iraq that should�ve been written everywhere he looked in Vietnam went unseen.

�We�ll succeed unless we quit�?

Mr. Bush, we did quit in Vietnam!

A decade later than we should have, 58,000 dead later than we should have, but we finally came to our senses.

The stable, burgeoning, vivid country you just saw there, is there because we finally had the good sense to declare victory and get out!

The domino theory was nonsense, sir.

Our departure from Vietnam emboldened no one.

Communism did not spread like a contagion around the world.

<...>

Finally, in Vietnam, we learned the lesson. We stopped endlessly squandering lives and treasure and the focus of a nation on an impossible and irrelevant dream, but you are still doing exactly that, tonight, in Iraq.

And these lessons from Vietnam, Mr. Bush, these priceless, transparent lessons, writ large as if across the very sky, are still a mystery to you.

�We�ll succeed unless we quit.�

No, sir.

We will succeed against terrorism, for our country�s needs, toward binding up the nation�s wounds when you quit, quit the monumental lie that is our presence in Iraq.

And in the interim, Mr. Bush, an American kid will be killed there, probably tonight or tomorrow.

And here, sir, endeth the lesson.

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