I reserve this moniker for the most loony of statements. The President, has just informed us that we need to model the Iraq war after Vietnam. That’s right, the guy who for years lambasted anyone making this analogy, even going so far as to say (use) the line, “it hurts the moral of the troops”. Now he says the lessons of Vietnam learned are, we shouldn’t have left. So to save our souls (egos) in Iraq we have to play along with this bit of new (fuzzy) history (hindsight) and use it as a very real model (excuse) for staying the course (repeating history). So, to repeat, we need to use fuzzy hindsight to sooth our egos in order to repeat Vietnam.
Success is just a rubber room away.
UPDATE: Think Progress has the particulars:
A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear and the victory must be overwhelming. [Bush address to RNC convention, 8/4/00]
The Republican presidential front-runner also says he learned “the lesson of Vietnam.” “Our nation should be slow to engage troops. But when we do so, we must do so with ferocity. We must not go into a conflict unless we go in committed to win. We can never again ask the military to fight a political war,” Bush wrote. [AP, 11/15/99, reporting on Bush’s biography A Charge To Keep]
Think Progress » Post-War Bush Forgets Pre-War Bush’s ‘Lessons Of Vietnam’
