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America road to decline started after LBJ. We had these new deal presidents who were just political duds. Nixon brought America off of the gold standard which and switched the US to petrol dollar. America true downfall started with the election of Ronald Reagan. The very things Ronald Reagan championed for, are things that will anger Trump supports and voters, the alt-right, anti globalists, pro blacks, and to a lesser extent Bernie Bros. Ronald Reagan was pro immigrant, he was anti union, he was the one who envisioned NAFTA which will be later propped up by Bush Senior, and passed by Bill Clinton.
I wouldn't worry about racist, everyone in America is a racist including you!
Many Americans might be prejudice, but I believe that most are NOT racists.
[/b]Wow, defensive much? It appears you were a child or a young teen during most of the American involvement in the War in Vietnam - I was a young adult then, in college and starting in my profession. Huge difference in our experiences and our perspectives. That means we're going to remember that time very differently.
I would say the same thing to my own seniors, who remember the Korean War - I remember it too, but was a young child then, and my memories are of sitting at the kitchen table being shushed by my father, who was trying to listen to a radio news broadcast about the war, and of later meeting an American missionary who had been a prisoner of war in Korea, and being scared of her, as I thought prisoners were all bad people being punished, and being puzzled why the rest of my family was being so welcoming and friendly towards her. Obviously my understanding was lacking - but I was a child.
You should not feel insulted in any way by my asking your age, and your response is excessive. No insult or diminishing of your opinion was intended - reread my previous post.
Again, I am not trying to personally insult you, but your theories and understanding of the fall of the Soviet Union, the course of the war in Vietnam and American involvement in that war - and its outcome - plus your comments about Chile - are lacking. I lived that time, as an adult whose peers - and friends - were directly involved, often due to the draft and not their own wishes, in that war, while others in my age bracket were marching in the streets in opposition.
Do you even remember the fall of the Berlin Wall? Do you remember Kennedy's visit to Berlin? Do you remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October, 1962? Do you remember the Kennedy inauguration? Did you ever see Kennedy, or Johnson, or Eisenhower? Do you remember the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1967?
I did. I was there. My fifteen years' seniority over you mean there's a huge difference in our experiences and how we remember them. Since you're clearly very interested in this era and how the events and decisions of that time continue to influence things today, I'd urge you to read and also to watch old news broadcasts and documentaries about the various aspects of what happened then. And talk to the older Baby Boomers, folks like me, who lived through it, often very painfully, as young adults. Learn what it was like.
Your comment about us "showing the Communists we would go wherever necessary and make one hell of a mess wherever they planted a foot" is reminiscent of Kennedy's famous line in his inaugural address, about how we'd bear any burden in the defense of freedom. That is a noble ideal, but attempting to follow it got us into a huge and terrible mistake, as what we were doing in Vietnam was not really "defending freedom" but supporting a very questionable and corrupt government. That notion is fine - as long as we take a very careful, hard look at just what we're defending, and just how heavy the burden of that defense may prove to be.
Vietnam cost us hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what?? A vet friend of mine - former Marine Second Lieutenant, highly intelligent man - was there in the thick of it during the worst of it, and he says that we were not really "defending freedom" or keeping the domino theory from coming to pass - the forces we were fighting, Viet Cong, etc. were mostly peasants who resented and fought first the French who were occupying their country - and then us and our allies, who were doing the same thing. My friend says the ordinary North Vietnamese soldier didn't have a clue about democracy or communism - they just knew outsiders were fighting them and occupying their country and destroying their crops and terrorizing their families...we didn't belong there.
We never did...
So I hope you'll read, watch those documentaries, maybe cut down on cutting down other posters here whose own experiences and viewpoints which differ from your own, and be a bit more open to others' opinions instead of being so defensive. Best wishes to you.
Originally Posted by phinneas j. whoopee;51883218
[B
How stupid is that. I have made this point three times now. You cant have your dollar back when your lotto ticket loses. You cannot remove the ugliest battles of a war and win it. More to the point you dont have the luxury of removing whole events in history and expect the same outcome. I guess this concept is foreign to leftists whose existence drifts between fantasy and reality.
[/b]
What the sam hill are you talking about?? The unfortunately eliminated (thanks, C-D formatting) part of my post to which you seem to be responding concerned the war in Vietnam, and how it was misrepresented to the American people as being part of "bearing any burden", ala Kennedy's inaugural speech, and how the domino theory was also very incorrect, that the average North Vietnamese soldier was not fighting for communism but to eject foreigners from his country, and that the American involvement in Vietnam was a huge and tragic mistake.
I have no idea what you mean by "removing the ugliest battles of a war" or "removing events from history". No one is doing that. It appears that you yourself have difficulty comprehending that your own commendable military experience is not necessarily representative of what occurred decades previously.
I am a moderate, not a leftist, btw. Perhaps that concept is foreign to you.
The biggest problem Johnson never envisioned that was an indirect and direct result of his welfare policies was breaking up the family unit due to income requirements. People stopped getting married and that family unit had nothing to keep it together anymore.
No one could envision it, except for maybe Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He wrote about it in The Moynihan Report. As it is, there was a rise in single parent homes in the Black population (particularly in the ghettos) starting in the 1950s. In St. Louis, mothers in the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects were forbidden to have their husbands live with them, or any grown men if they were on welfare. This was not the federal government's doing. This was a rule from the state of Missouri welfare department.
It leaves this to wonder. Why were women, even in the 1950s, choosing welfare over their husbands?
[/b]
What the sam hill are you talking about?? The unfortunately eliminated (thanks, C-D formatting) part of my post to which you seem to be responding concerned the war in Vietnam, and how it was misrepresented to the American people as being part of "bearing any burden", ala Kennedy's inaugural speech, and how the domino theory was also very incorrect, that the average North Vietnamese soldier was not fighting for communism but to eject foreigners from his country, and that the American involvement in Vietnam was a huge and tragic mistake.
I have no idea what you mean by "removing the ugliest battles of a war" or "removing events from history". No one is doing that. It appears that you yourself have difficulty comprehending that your own commendable military experience is not necessarily representative of what occurred decades previously.
I am a moderate, not a leftist, btw. Perhaps that concept is foreign to you.
You called Vietnam a huge mistake. I am merely stating the facts. You cannot change history without changing history.
You can speculate that not fighting the communist red china and USSR by proxy in southeast asia would have still lead to a favorable outcome in the cold war, but that is all you would be doing. Sheer speculation. Living in a fantasy of alternate paths of history not taken.
I prefer the realist version that we did what we did and what happened, happened.
Its a lot more respectful to veterans than giving them a lifetime of PTSD by telling them they went to hell and back for a mistake that meant nothing.
Oh and BTW you accused me of "cutting down.other posters in the thread".
At that point I had done nothing of the sort. You were mistaken.
People leave these sad, scared Trump supporters to waste their time and effort posting threads of no bearing on today's struggle to save a democratic America...
a lot of people say Ronald Reagan started the downfall of America's middle class and America as a whole, but I said the 1960's and 70's was truly the end and you know I blame don't you, the racist s.o.b. lyndon baines Johnson and later Richard Nixon, lyndon baines Johnson was a complete racist through and through, he has bamboozled the black community and he said I'll have n******* vote democratic in the next 200 years, plus he took us to an a war that's based on lies (Vietnam) killing our soliders for nothing.
and of course Richard Nixon, the scumbag who continued the stupid war in Vietnam, Watergate and most of them he killed the Bretton woods sound money in 1971 (which also cause the federal reserve to reduce the value of the dollar and killed America's middle class), he was a criminal and a globalist and thank god both of the monsters are dead.
LBJ is one of the few people responsible for Kennedy's death as well, he was a sick racist s.o.b. and a criminal.
if anyone is TRULY to blame for the downfall of America is those two.
If not for LBJ’s leadership, blacks and others would still be segregated and not allowed to vote. Which other POTUS of that era would have stood up and negotiated the legislation? Vietnam was his downfall, but it’s easy to be a Monday morning quarte4back after the fact. The Cold War was very real and the Domino Theory was the rule of the day. We had already fought a massive World War to defeat a warped political ideology and had actively been in conflicts like the Berlin airlift, Korea, atomic and hydrogen bomb, Space Race and Cuban missile crisis. How much of a stretch would it be to assume that the whole thing was a gamble that could never pay off with neither side winning.
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