{"id":1907,"date":"2004-04-16T12:05:56","date_gmt":"2004-04-16T19:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2004\/04\/breath-takingly-stupid\/"},"modified":"2004-04-16T12:05:56","modified_gmt":"2004-04-16T19:05:56","slug":"breath-takingly-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2004\/04\/16\/breath-takingly-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"Breath-takingly stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tI was deeply impressed by the quality of the reasoning in Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Vietnam Analogy” href=”http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/04\/16\/opinion\/16KRUG.html”>today’s Krugman:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

It’s true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size conflict.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Isn’t that brilliant?<\/p>\n

Of course, it only addresses one dimension of the analogy, and there are others he could have thrown in: “We were in Vietnam for 20 years, and although we’ve only been in Iraq for one year, time moves faster now” … and “In Vietnam, we carpet bombed, napalmed, and Agent Oranged, and in Iraq we used precision-guided bombs, built infrastructure projects, and restored the marshes, uh, well, probably for some bad reason connected to Halliburton or something, I guess?” and “in Vietnam we supported a corrupt dictator and in Iraq we deposed a corrupt dictator…uh, well, you know, we shouldn’t have done that because we had no permission from the UN or something.”<\/p>\n

In the end, Krugman has to invoke the spirit of Nixon to pull his ass out the rhetorical hole he dug for himself:<\/p>\n

\n

What we remember now is Watergate. But equally serious were Nixon’s efforts to suppress dissent, like the “Tell It to Hanoi” rallies, where critics of the Vietnam War were accused of undermining the soldiers and encouraging the enemy. On Tuesday George Bush did a meta-Nixon: he declared that anyone who draws analogies between Iraq and Vietnam undermines the soldiers and encourages the enemy. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems that Krugman wants to put himself in the center of some weird retaliation by the White House, so we have to say: Yo, Krugman, Iraq isn’t Vietnam and you aren’t Jesus, dude.<\/b>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was deeply impressed by the quality of the reasoning in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-uL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}