more presidents

As part of choosing not to run Johnson had put out feelers to the North Vietnamese about ending the war but Nixon's agents had contacted the North Vietnamese to hold on because they would get a better deal from Tricky Dick.  I don't remember offhand if Henry Kissinger was involved in that, but it seems likely, his fingers were all over everything to do with Vietnam and Nixon.

Peace with honor, that's the slogan Dick ran on, hoping he could lure some doves with peace and some hawks with the notion that he, with his anti commie laurels, would bomb the fuck out of North Vietnam.  Like Johnson he didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.  It turns out he did bomb the fuck out of North Vietnam, and then as a tragic sideshow he bombed the fuck out of much of Cambodia.  A lot of the latter was Hank's work.  Since nothing much was going on there they soon ran out of targets but just kept on bombing anyway so as not to look weak.

Finally Nixon decided on Vietnamization which everybody in the wide world knew was not going to work and it didn't.  Then Watergate and Nixon was standing next to the helicopter with his hands outraised above him vees in his fingers.

Ford got into big trouble for pardoning Nixon.  Was there a deal?  I guess we will never know, though the fact that nothing has come out since then makes me suspect there wasn't.  I was pissed at the time, I wanted to see a stake driven through his evil heart, but in retrospect it was probably the best thing for the country.

But then we had this rising star, this good godly man Carter, who was well, ineffectual.  Then that great pre-Trump hero of all Republicans, Ronald Reagan.  At least he didn't get us into a war.  Well there was that Grenada incident.  Clint Eastwood made a movie about it, and it just seemed so silly to be sending Clint against the Grenadans, like Godzilla vs the ants.  Reagan did his Republican duty by transferring much of the country's wealth from the poor to the rich.

As did the elder Bush who followed him, though he did give us a pretty good war, which as I have said, I was against at the time, but now I think it was well done.

He got usurped by Bill Clinton.  I don't love Bill Clinton as much as I did when he was a dem island after 12 years of reps, he was way too accommodating to the reps than I would have liked but maybe that was the best deal at the time, and he did not increase the deficit, and had that pretty good war over Kosovo.  And he did have that blue dress thing, which was not all that bad but incredibly stupid.  And helped poison the water so that Bush the Lesser got in.

Nobody thinks he was very smart but he was amiable.  I think he had some right instincts and might have done well but then 911 happened and he let the neocons take power.  It probably fed his vanity, he wanted to be a war president, he liked standing there on that aircraft carrier in that glossy uniform.  Anyway many men and much treasure was lost in the mideast.

My hero tamped a lot of that down, the mideast war, but not near as much as I would have liked him to.

For all the evil that Trump has done, he has not led us into a war which still amazes me.  Maybe I'll speculate on that tomorrow.