President Nixon’s great regret was that he did not bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong in 1969—instead of waiting until 1972—and bring the Vietnam War to an earlier end and with fewer U.S. casualties.
.. There is nothing to prevent the new GOP from writing history.
.. Folks in Pennsylvania, southeast Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia should be shown, by executive action, that Trump is a man of his word. And when the mines open again, he should be there.
.. He should order new actions to seal the Southern border, start the wall, and begin visible deportations of felons who are in the country illegally.
.. With a new education secretary, he should announce White House intent to work for repeal of Common Core and announce the introduction of legislation to put federal resources behind the charter schools that have proven to be a godsend to inner-city black children.
.. Trump should announce a date soon for repeal and replacement of Obamacare and introduction of his new tax-and-trade legislation to bring back manufacturing and create American jobs.
.. Donald Trump said in his campaign that that this is America’s last chance. If we lose this one, he said, we lose the country.
Trump’s Vietnam draft past sheds light on ‘sacrifice’ debate
In truth, there were no clear-cut, moral answers for young men faced with the Vietnam draft in the 1960s. But one thing was certain: If you didn’t go, someone else like a Richard would effectively take your place.
It was never so openly transactional as the Civil War, when a future American president, Grover Cleveland, paid a Polish immigrant seaman to take his place in the ranks. But the end result was not so different. Time and again, working-class, high school graduates were sucked into the fighting, while the wealthy and more educated found a way to stay out.
.. the inequities of the Vietnam draft were a harbinger of the much larger divide now between an educated elite in this country and those workers left behind in the more high-tech and globalized economy.
.. “Vietnam represents a class transition,” Kevin Phillips, the conservative political analyst and historian, told The Wall Street Journal at the time. “It began with the elites who were sure they could pull it out. It ended with a younger version of the McGeorge Bundys and Robert McNamaras walking away from it.”
Is America’s War on ISIS Illegal?
Does the captain’s participation in this undeclared war involve him in a mission to destroy, not “defend,” the Constitution?
Captain Smith, 28, has now brought suit in federal court to request an independent judgment on whether he is betraying his oath.
.. In August I published an essay in The Atlantic explaining that soldiers during the Vietnam War faced a similar predicament — and that two federal courts of appeal had considered their challenges to the war’s legality on the merits. The war ended before the issue could be decisively resolved by the Supreme Court, but I argued that these decisions would serve as precedents for a comparable lawsuit today.
.. Its aim was to prevent future presidents from following Nixon’s example in escalating the Vietnam War far beyond the limited authorization provided by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
The 1973 resolution requires the commander in chief to gain the approval of the House and Senate within 60 days of introducing forces into situations involving “imminent hostilities.” If he fails to gain congressional authorization, he must terminate his campaign within the next 30 days.
.. President Obama has repudiated the extreme claims made by former Vice President Dick Cheney and John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, who have denounced the War Powers Resolution as unconstitutional.
Draft-Dodger Trump Said Sleeping Around Was My ‘Personal Vietnam’
Draft-dodger Donald Trump once said that the danger he faced from getting sexually transmitted diseases was his own “personal Vietnam.”
In a 1997 interview with shock jock Howard Stern, Trump talked about how he had been “lucky” not to have contracted diseases when he was sleeping around.
“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era,” Trump said in a video that resurfaced Tuesday on Buzzfeed, “It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”