"At the same time, it seems to me that if you were a traditional military voter, you might have some serious problems with Obama. The way he sometimes talks about the military, he talks about the troops — it can often seem narcissistic, political, and rub people the wrong way."
- the Doughy Pantload
"And we heard Obama today doing essentially doing penance for a country that spat on soldiers who returned from the Vietnam War."
- The Kraphammer of the Gods
Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth
By Kevin Baker (Harper's, June 2006)
Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of our fighting men must become the issue.
Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting the war.
...
It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left behind or that Jane Fonda's addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to undermine American forces.
And there you go.
(Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)
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