Fortunately for liberals, the Iraqis executed Saddam Hussein
the exact same week that former President Ford died, so it didn't
seem strange that Nancy Pelosi's flag was at half-staff. Also,
Saddam's death made it less of a snub when Harry Reid skipped
Ford's funeral.
The passing of Gerald Ford should remind Americans that
Democrats are always lying in wait, ready to force a humiliating
defeat on America.
More troops, fewer troops, different troops, "redeployment" --
all the Democrats' peculiar little talking points are just a way
of sounding busy. Who are they kidding? Democrats want to cut and
run as fast as possible from Iraq, betraying the Iraqis who
supported us and rewarding our enemies -- exactly as they did to
the South Vietnamese under Ford.
Liberals spent the Vietnam War rooting for the enemy and
clamoring for America's defeat, a tradition they have brought
back for the Iraq war.
They insisted on calling the Soviet-backed Vietcong "the
National Liberation Front of Vietnam," just as they call Islamic
fascists killing Americans in Iraq "insurgents." Ho Chi Minh was
hailed as a "Jeffersonian Democrat," just as Michael Moore
compares the Islamic fascists in Iraq to the Minute Men.
During the Vietnam War, New York Times scion Arthur "Pinch"
Sulzberger told his father that if an American soldier ran into a
North Vietnamese soldier, he would prefer for the American to get
shot. "It's the other guy's country," he explained.
Now, as publisher of the Times, Pinch does all he can to help
the enemy currently shooting at American soldiers.
After a half-dozen years of Democrat presidents creating a
looming disaster in Vietnam -- with Kennedy ordering the
assassination of our own ally in the middle of the war and
Johnson ham-handedly choosing bombing targets from the Oval
Office -- in 1969, Nixon became president and the world was safe
again.
Nixon began a phased withdrawal of American ground troops,
while protecting the South Vietnamese by increasing the bombings
of the North, mining North Vietnamese harbors and attacking North
Vietnamese military supplies in Cambodia -- all actions
hysterically denounced by American liberals, eager for the
communists to defeat America.
Despite the massive anti-war protests staged by the Worst
Generation, their takeovers of university buildings and their
bombings of federal property to protest the bombing of North
Vietnamese property, Nixon's Vietnam policy was apparently
popular with normal Americans. In 1972, he won re-election
against "peace" candidate George McGovern in a 49-state
landslide.
In January 1973, the United States signed the Paris Peace
accords, which would have ended the war with honor. In order to
achieve a ceasefire, Nixon jammed lousy terms down South
Vietnam's throat, such as allowing Vietcong troops to remain in
the South. But in return, we promised South Vietnam that we would
resume bombing missions and provide military aid if the North
attacked.
It would have worked, but the Democrats were desperate for
America to lose. They invented "Watergate," the corpus delicti of
which wouldn't have merited three column-inches during the
Clinton years, and hounded Nixon out of office. (How's Sandy
Berger weathering that tough wrist-slap?)
Three months after Nixon was gone, we got the Watergate
Congress and with it, the new Democratic Party. In lieu of the
old Democratic Party, which lost wars out of incompetence and
naivete, the new Democratic Party would lose wars on purpose.
Just one month after the Watergate Congress was elected, North
Vietnam attacked the South.
Even milquetoast, pro-abortion, detente-loving Gerald R. Ford
knew America had to defend South Vietnam or America's word would
be worth nothing. As Ford said, "American unwillingness to
provide adequate assistance to allies fighting for their lives
could seriously affect our credibility throughout the world as an
ally." He pleaded repeatedly with the Democratic Congress simply
to authorize aid to South Vietnam -- no troops, just money.
But the Democrats turned their backs on South Vietnam,
betrayed an ally and trashed America's word. Within a month of
Ford's last appeal to Congress to help South Vietnam, Saigon
fell.
The entire world watched as American personnel desperately
scrambled into helicopters from embassy rooftops in Saigon while
beating back our own allies, to whom we could offer no means of
escape. It was the most demeaning image of America ever
witnessed, until Britney Spears came along.
Southeast Asia was promptly consumed in a maelstrom of
violence that seems to occur whenever these "Jeffersonian
Democrats" come to power. Communist totalitarians swept through
Laos, Cambodia and all of Vietnam. They staged gruesome massacres
so vast that none other than Sen. George McGovern called for
military intervention to stop a "clear case of genocide" in
Cambodia.
Five years after that, Islamic lunatics in Iran felt no
compunction about storming the embassy of what was once the
greatest superpower on Earth and taking American citizens hostage
for 14 months. To this day, al-Qaida boosts the flagging morale
of its jihadists by reminding them of America's humiliating
retreat from Vietnam.
In addition to being wrong about Ford's pardon of Nixon,
liberals were wrong about a few other things from that era.
Democrats haven't admitted error in rejecting Ford's pleas on
behalf of South Vietnam because there are still dangerous
foreigners trying to kill Americans. Nixon is safely interred in
the ground, but the enemies of America continue to need the
Democrats' help.