Now is the time at the Castle… when we dance
I was 15 and not-quite-a-half on April 30, 1975. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was pretty politically aware even at that age (I’d be a “Reagan ’76” partisan the next year, even though I wasn’t old enough to vote), and I knew quite a lot about the Vietnam War. Learned even more reading about it when I was in college.
Generals and politicians (though I may be repeating myself) should have been whipped through the streets over this. I thought so then and I think so now. There was no reason we couldn’t have won that conflict; we had them on the ropes after Tet, in 1968, but the media then as now lied to the American public. After the initial surprise, we’d regrouped along with the ARVN and beat the living shit out of the commies, nearly causing them to surrender. They did sue for peace and a cease-fire. But did the media report it that way? Of course not. And the commies sat at the Paris Peace Talks for years after that, shoveling bullshit, until Nixon fucked up so badly he had to resign, and Ford had little or not stomach to keep fighting.
And that’s how we got Carter and the four wasted years until Reagan soundly thumped his ass back to his peanut farm in Georgia.
Now we have Resident Bidet, good ol’ #rapistpedojoefauxpres, and friends, things are going to get worse before they get better. Inflation is already here and will do nothing but get worse until we get a handle on all that free faux fiat cash that’s been infused into our banking system. The Chinese are ugly (well, some of their women aren’t hard to look at, but their minds are ugly) and they’re not going to get any better until their population of young’uns crashes, which some folks say is already happening and that’s why Winnie the Xi is being such a bitch and trying to ruin the world — or the part of it that works, anyway — so completely and so fast.
Meanwhile, the Vietnamese still aren’t free, still nominally Commie (or, more accurately, an autocratic dictatorship, same difference) but at least they are halfway capitalist, these days, and inclined to be friendly with the US the Viet Cong used to hate. And they hate the Chinese more than we do.
I think there’s a lesson in that.