Teri O’Brien - America’s Conservative Warrior Princess

Wasn’t it great to have Walter Jacobsen on the show yesterday? He is a genuine broadcasting legend, and there is no one more knowledgeable about Illinois politics. Who better to talk about the George Ryan trial and the upcoming trial of some of the mayor’s insiders? Thanks again, Walter. You are the greatest, and I am proud to be your friend.

Unfortunately, time constraints being what they are, we didn’t have a chance to talk about Ted Kennedy’s appearance on Russert’s show (yes, Meet the Press). For the most part, it was unremarkable. The usual socialist drivel and Bush bashing from Ted the Head, including the predictable blah blah (the administration is the one cutting and running from the truth about Iraq, trumped up intelligence, more taxes are the answer to everything and if you disagree you’re “greedy,” the president needs to stand up to the “right wing”—stop me if you’ve heard any of this before). He did say one thing worthy of comment, something downright contemptible, IMO. Right up there with naming his dog “Splash,” in terms of his lack of sensitivity and ability to deny his own complicity the evil and morally bankrupt.

For the second time this week, he said that his vote against the Iraq war was the best vote he’s ever cast in the U.S. Senate. (The first time he said it was during last Thursday’s cringe-inducing interview on Larry King, in which the senator reflected nostalgically about his Nazi-sympathizing old man’s hopes that Ted could one day grow up and help stop war. I’m puking!) Better than your votes to cut off aid to the South Vietnamese and the Cambodians, Sen. Kennedy? I wondered that right after hearing the following exchange after Ted suggested a complete withdrawal from Iraq:

“MR. RUSSERT: If we got out and there was a civil war, chaos, and you saw al-Qaida moving in record numbers and Zarqawi exerting great control over the country, would you go back in?
SEN. KENNEDY: Well, first of all, I heard the same kinds of suggestions at the time of the end of the Vietnam War, the great blood bath, we’re going to have over 100,000 people that were going to be murdered and killed at that time. And for those of us that were strongly opposed to the war, heard those same kinds of arguments at the time. [emphasis mine] The fact is that the Iraqis have to win their own country, they have to be willing to sacrifice for their own country as Americans have been prepared to sacrifice, they have to stand up for their own country. And they have to be convinced that we’re not going to just have a permanent presence in Iraq. That’s what I think they believe today, and we have to disabuse them of it. The time has come, we have seen Americans do what they could do militarily, and the time has come for them to come home.”

Yes, Senator, the American Left was warned that their giving aid and comfort to the communists in Southeast Asia and their incessant, and eventually successful, demands that we abandon the region would lead to a bloodbath. They sniffed at the suggestion. For a visual, think of the haughty expression that is typical of one of the main proponents of the belief that only a couple thousand people—max—would be murdered after we withdrew, John Kerry, who you may have heard served in Vietnam. The warnings proved to be correct. In truth, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were placed in “re-education” camps after the communists took over, and an estimated 30% died of starvation. Hundreds of thousands tried to escape. Remember the boat people? The aftermath in Cambodia was even worse, where approximately 2 million were murdered. This in a country with a pre-purge population of 7 million. It’s hard to be precise about the exact numbers, since these repressive commie regimes aren’t the most transparent in the world, but it wasn’t the happy little reunification that Jane Fonda and her friends pictured while they were enabling our enemies.

Ted Kennedy clearly feels no remorse over his role in these deaths, choosing to forget that it was the Democrat-controlled Congress that cut off the funding to our South Vietnamese allies and sealed the fate of so many innocents. He has blood on his hands, and is blithely prepared to see it happen again, this time in Iraq. There is one difference between withdrawing prematurely from Iraq and our ignominious exit from Vietnam. This time the bloodbath might not be confined to a distant land overseas, but instead could return to New York, Washington, and other locales much closer to home.