Representative Tom Lantos; Craig Livingstone

Reuters posted the story today of the death of California Democratic Representative Tom Lantos.

Deb Schlussel posts more detailed information and some interesting facts about Lantos and his career.

Lantos at the American Hungarian Federation






My first memory of Lantos is from 1996, when Lantos confronted the Clinton White House bar bouncer and security officer Craig Livingstone, who resigned after the Clinton White House was found to have illegally obtained and kept confidential FBI files on hundreds of Republican citizens. After Livingstone became the scapegoat for this scandal, Lantos remarked to Livingstone during hearings before Congress, "With an infinitely more distinguished public record than yours, Admiral Boorda committed suicide when he may have committed a minor mistake."


Livingstone (left) being grilled by Lantos and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee




Congressman Lantos was 80.

Quote of the day - Ann Coulter

Republicans are so shell-shocked and demoralized by the success of the Bush Derangement Syndrome, they think they can fool the voters by nominating an open-borders, anti-tax cut, anti-free speech, global-warming hysteric, pro-human experimentation "Republican." Which is to say, a Democrat.

Ann Coulter - 2-06-2008

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn [Stevie Wonder/Obama campaign song]

It would be hard to believe you could come up with a Barack Obama campaign song thinner in content than a Barack Obama campaign speech, but Mr. Wonder has apparently accomplished it.

["Ba-rack O-ba-ma

Ba-a-rack O-ba-a-ma

Ba-ra-ack Obama-a … "

(Repeat until coronation.)]

Mark Steyn - 2-09-2008

Quote of the day - Larry Liston

In my parents’ day and age, (unmarried teen parents) were sent away, they were shunned, they were called what they are. There was at least a sense of shame.

There’s no sense of shame today. Society condones it. ... I think it’s wrong. They’re sluts. And I don’t mean just the women. I mean the men, too.


Colorado Springs Republican Rep. Larry Liston

We are so screwed.

Mitt Romney, as flawed a candidate as he has been, was the last best hope for the survival of the Republic. With his departure from the race, I am not quite ready to give up on the Republic. The final nail is not quite all of the way into the coffin.

Three things need to happen in order to save us from the destruction that a Presidential victory for the Clinton/Obama/McCain ticket would bring, all of which are unlikely:

(1) Mike Huckabee, as the last remaining viable alternative to McCain, will have to win the nomination, which is unlikely given the delegate count.

(2) Huckabee will then have to beat Hillary or Obama or both, which is unlikely given Huckabee's status as a weasel flip-flopper.

(3) Huckabee will then have to govern properly, also unlikely (see #2).

If any of these three things do not happen, get used to waiting in long lines to see government doctors. And get used to giving up all of the other luxuries and amenities that living in a free, prosperous nation has afforded us.

Because the stakes are so high, I am not yet ready to declare the Republic dead yet. Most of us are suffocating inside that coffin that is now being nailed shut. Once the Republic is dead, it is not coming back. More than 1800 years elapsed between the death of Rome's republic (@ 48 B.C.) and the birth of the American Republic (1776). I can not wait that long for the rebirth of freedom somewhere in the world.

So I am officially supporting Huckabee until such time as he either drops out or sells out to McCain. Like I said, we are sooooo screwed.

Quote of the day - Steve Czaban

Nothing like a “Republican” who opposes tax cuts, is in favor of amnesty for illegals, won’t allow waterboarding of Al Qaeda, and is ready to throw in with the Global Warming Hoax crowd to cripple our economy with absurd regulations.

And oh yeah, he also pushed through an unconstitutional restriction on free speech (McCain-Feingold), said Hillary Clinton would make a fine president if elected, and considered briefly becoming John Kerry’s VP running mate.

Talk about getting drilled!

Steve Czaban [Read the whole thing].

A Vietnam history primer; Tet Offensive

The Wall Street Journal today contains an article today that rebuts the MSM/DNC revised standard version of the Vietnam War:

On January 30, 1968, more than a quarter million North Vietnamese soldiers and 100,000 Viet Cong irregulars launched a massive attack on South Vietnam. But the public didn't hear about who had won this most decisive battle of the Vietnam War, the so-called Tet offensive, until much too late.

Media misreporting of Tet passed into our collective memory. That picture gave antiwar activism an unwarranted credibility that persists today in Congress, and in the media reaction to the war in Iraq. The Tet experience provides a narrative model for those who wish to see all U.S. military successes -- such as the Petraeus surge -- minimized and glossed over.

Arthur Herman provides some basic numbers that any student of that era's history should know:

The Tet offensive came at the end of a long string of communist setbacks. By 1967 their insurgent army in the South, the Viet Cong, had proved increasingly ineffective, both as a military and political force. Once American combat troops began arriving in the summer of 1965, the communists were mauled in one battle after another, despite massive Hanoi support for the southern insurgency with soldiers and arms. By 1967 the VC had lost control over areas like the Mekong Delta -- ironically, the very place where reporters David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan had first diagnosed a Vietnam "quagmire" that never existed.

The Tet offensive was Hanoi's desperate throw of the dice to seize South Vietnam's northern provinces using conventional armies, while simultaneously triggering a popular uprising in support of the Viet Cong. Both failed. Americans and South Vietnamese soon put down the attacks, which began under cover of a cease-fire to celebrate the Tet lunar new year. By March 2, when U.S. Marines crushed the last North Vietnamese pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue, the VC had lost 80,000-100,000 killed or wounded without capturing a single province.

Tet was a particularly crushing defeat for the VC. It had not only failed to trigger any uprising but also cost them "our best people," as former Viet Cong doctor Duong Quyunh Hoa later admitted to reporter Stanley Karnow. Yet the very fact of the U.S. military victory -- "The North Vietnamese," noted National Security official William Bundy at the time, "fought to the last Viet Cong" -- was spun otherwise by most of the U.S. press.

Vietnam is spoken or written of in vague terms. References to "quagmire," "another Vietnam," "the limits to American Imperialism," etc. have nearly paralyzed American foreign policy for more than three decades. American policy in Vietnam was successful until American leftist propagandists and politicians squandered our hard won victory:

The failure of the North's next massive invasion over Easter 1972, which cost the North Vietnamese army another 100,000 men and half their tanks and artillery, finally forced it to sign the peace accords in Paris and formally to recognize the Republic of South Vietnam. By August 1972 there were no U.S. combat forces left in Vietnam, precisely because, contrary to the overwhelming mass of press reports, American policy there had been a success.

To Congress and the public, however, the war had been nothing but a debacle. And by withdrawing American troops, President Nixon gave up any U.S. political or military leverage on Vietnam's future. With U.S. military might out of the equation, the North quickly cheated on the Paris accords. When its re-equipped army launched a massive attack in 1975, Congress refused to redeem Nixon's pledges of military support for the South. Instead, President Gerald Ford bowed to what the media had convinced the American public was inevitable: the fall of Vietnam.

The collapse of South Vietnam's neighbor, Cambodia, soon followed. Southeast Asia entered the era of the "killing fields," exterminating in a brief few years an estimated two million people -- 30% of the Cambodian population. American military policy has borne the scars of Vietnam ever since.