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TV: The Golden Era Reborn

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Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

FadeToBlack&Gold said:
Vietnam was even dumber and less justified than the Second Gulf War.

If we're very lucky, ISIS will be defeated and Iraqis will also transition to a one-party "market-socialist" oil state and welcome American tourists with open arms in about 40 years.
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Only if Jeremy Clarkson gets to ride through Northern Iraq on a stars and stripes motorcycle blaring Born in the USA in 40 years too.
 
Handyman said:
Well joe does think Climate Change is overblown because he once read an article in the Telegraph so take his thoughts with a grain...

Vietnam was a terrible idea from the word jump.
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How old are you Handy?

If you were not alive in the 60s you would not understand the time and the place as JFK wrote.

Let me explain. Southie is correct. The U.S. would stop at nothing to stop the spread of Communism. Dictators were OK, as long as they were our dictators. Start slipping and you got replaced via a coup. JFK kept our involvement small, like Truman did in Greece.

So the idea of stopping the Communists from taking over Indo China was US policy from Ike to Nixon. Ike and JFK knew a land guerilla war in Asia needed to be kept small. LBJ, on the other hand, had different ideas. We succeeded in Korea, against a higher mechanized force, therefore we should win in Vietnam against a lesser equipped army.

Once the balloon went up after tbe Gulf of Tonkin resolution, we should have won and kept the NVA North of the DMZ, but mismanagement from DC kept the field commanders fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. The Viet Cong were using Cambodia as a base. Could not attack them once the VC crossed the border. We could not cross the DMZ. You couldn't shoot unless shot at. The grunts knew how to win. They were let down by the leadership.

It was a war of capturing the hearts and minds. Guess what? The commies won that one. They convinced the American left that the peaceful people of Vietnam were innocent as purely driven snow. The left bought it - hook, line, and sinker. Our soldiers were called baby killers and spat on in airports returning from the front. Jane Fonda, may she sentenced to watching Barbarella non stop in Hell, went to Hanoi regularly and even posed for a picture with an anti aircraft gun - a weapon that was used to shoot down Americans. Commies good. US bad.

The US won the Tet Offensive - militarily, but lost politicaly when Uncle Walter went on national TV and said he didn't think the US could win the war. At that point, it became an end game. The white king would be checkmated, the number of moves would have to be played out but the result was inevitable.

And how did communism play out in Indo China? Reeducation camps, Pol Pot's massacres, boat people fleeing the regimes. A veritable people's paradise.

Yep - it was the right idea. The implementation by LBJ stunk to high heavens.
 
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joecct said:
How old are you Handy?

If you were not alive in the 60s you would not understand the time and the place as JFK wrote.

Let me explain. Southie is correct. The U.S. would stop at nothing to stop the spread of Communism. Dictators were OK, as long as they were our dictators. Start slipping and you got replaced via a coup. JFK kept our involvement small, like Truman did in Greece.

So the idea of stopping the Communists from taking over Indo China was US policy from Ike to Nixon. Ike and JFK knew a land guerilla war in Asia needed to be kept small. LBJ, on the other hand, had different ideas. We succeeded in Korea, against a higher mechanized force, therefore we should win in Vietnam against a lesser equipped army.

Once the balloon went up after tbe Gulf of Tonkin resolution, we should have won and kept the NVA North of the DMZ, but mismanagement from DC kept the field commanders fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. The Viet Cong were using Cambodia as a base. Could not attack them once the VC crossed the border. We could not cross the DMZ. You couldn't shoot unless shot at. The grunts knew how to win. They were let down by the leadership.

It was a war of capturing the hearts and minds. Guess what? The commies won that one. They convinced the American left that the peaceful people of Vietnam were innocent as purely driven snow. The left bought it - hook, line, and sinker. Our soldiers were called baby killers and spat on in airports returning from the front. Jane Fonda, may she sentenced to watching Barbarella non stop in Hell, went to Hanoi regularly and even posed for a picture with an anti aircraft gun - a weapon that was used to shoot down Americans. Commies good. US bad.

The US won the Tet Offensive - militarily, but lost politicaly when Uncle Walter went on national TV and said he didn't think the US could win the war. At that point, it became an end game. The white king would be checkmated, the number of moves would have to be played out but the result was inevitable.

And how did communism play out in Indo China? Reeducation camps, Pol Pot's massacres, boat people fleeing the regimes. A veritable people's paradise.

Yep - it was the right idea. The implementation by LBJ stunk to high heavens.
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No it was a terrible idea. We propped up a horribly corrupt Roman Catholic government in a Buddhist country. That's how stupid we were. We went to war in Vietnam for the same reason we go to war anywhere: to protect American business profits. And we got bonus points in Vietnam because a disproportionate amount of poor people got killed too!

Sure LBJ could've let the generals run things, it was one of the major lessons learned of the war, only thing was two problems: 1. The Generals of that era really couldn't be trusted. Let them call the shots and Hanoi probably gets nuked and the rest of Indo-China gets terrorized and burned. That would've looked really good to the rest of the world. 2. You know that whole Cold War thing? Sure, invade the North and Cambodia and then China and the Soviet Union get more involved and it keeps escalating and soon everyone is dead.

The point is, the war was unwinnable. The communists took how many years getting the French out? They would've just done same thing no matter what we did. It was an utter waste, it's just people of your generation can't comprehend that thought.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

joecct said:
How old are you Handy?

If you were not alive in the 60s you would not understand the time and the place as JFK wrote.

Let me explain. Southie is correct. The U.S. would stop at nothing to stop the spread of Communism. Dictators were OK, as long as they were our dictators. Start slipping and you got replaced via a coup. JFK kept our involvement small, like Truman did in Greece.

So the idea of stopping the Communists from taking over Indo China was US policy from Ike to Nixon. Ike and JFK knew a land guerilla war in Asia needed to be kept small. LBJ, on the other hand, had different ideas. We succeeded in Korea, against a higher mechanized force, therefore we should win in Vietnam against a lesser equipped army.

Once the balloon went up after tbe Gulf of Tonkin resolution, we should have won and kept the NVA North of the DMZ, but mismanagement from DC kept the field commanders fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. The Viet Cong were using Cambodia as a base. Could not attack them once the VC crossed the border. We could not cross the DMZ. You couldn't shoot unless shot at. The grunts knew how to win. They were let down by the leadership.

It was a war of capturing the hearts and minds. Guess what? The commies won that one. They convinced the American left that the peaceful people of Vietnam were innocent as purely driven snow. The left bought it - hook, line, and sinker. Our soldiers were called baby killers and spat on in airports returning from the front. Jane Fonda, may she sentenced to watching Barbarella non stop in Hell, went to Hanoi regularly and even posed for a picture with an anti aircraft gun - a weapon that was used to shoot down Americans. Commies good. US bad.

The US won the Tet Offensive - militarily, but lost politicaly when Uncle Walter went on national TV and said he didn't think the US could win the war. At that point, it became an end game. The white king would be checkmated, the number of moves would have to be played out but the result was inevitable.

And how did communism play out in Indo China? Reeducation camps, Pol Pot's massacres, boat people fleeing the regimes. A veritable people's paradise.

Yep - it was the right idea. The implementation by LBJ stunk to high heavens.
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This is an admirable summary of all the misconceptions the right has about Vietnam.

The good news is everybody else learned except the Neocons. The Neocons have to believe we would have won in Vietnam had it not been for those dirty hippies because otherwise their guiding star -- that every person on earth wants to live in Burbank -- goes up in smoke.

Vietnam was a proxy war between two powers that didn't give a single solitary sh-t about the people or the countries the war was in. It was naked real politik. All attempts to dress it up in other language are fables concocted at the time that stuck in somebody's head decades after everyone who invented them has not only forgotten them, but even themselves died and been forgotten.

Vietnam was a cynical geopolitical war, like our invasions of Central American countries in the first half of the 20th century, or of Iraq in the 21st. Empires fight wars like that all the time to preserve an advantageous international geopolitical balance (Vietnam) or try to change it to advance their interests (Iraq). Typically those are the interests of the ruling class, of course. The regular citizens of the "winning" country don't get anything out of it except lost limbs and PTSD.

it was a power play. Usually we win those (Mexico, Cuba, Philippines, Hawaii, Guatemala, Honduras) because we only pick on weaklings and use bombers against Molotov cocktails. Or at worst it's a stalemate but we take advantageous of the bloodshed to push imperialist dogma domestically (Iraq). In Vietnam we sauntered in with our big WW2-winning swinging dicks assuming the gooks would just die and they did to us just what we did to the British in 1783. An army that can't wait to go home and is fighting to stay out of jail, if the terms are anywhere near even, will not beat an army that is already home and is fighting for their lives.

We were the Harkonnen in Vietnam, joe.
 
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Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

ticapnews said:
It showed Boston winning the World Series, so in Kepler's eyes it's crap. ;)
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I don't remember that, actually. I just remember it as a shoddy commercial for MLB with the heart and soul of a crappy episode of This Week in Baseball. The last episode of New York was the same -- it was shoddy.

Basically Burns sucks when the pics turn to color. It may simply be that recent events have not been thought through sufficiently, by anyone, to produce anything like profound observations. Look at how beautiful and precise the statements are in New York about the 20s and 30s. Well, that's because they're being written by people like Truman Capote and F. Scott Fitzgerald. For the 2000s they're being written by people like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jerry Seinfeld.

Burns should never touch anything less than 50 years old. The material has still not set at that point, and all the observations concerning it are still a circle jerk of people lauding or dissing the people they liked or hated in life. It's just gossip.

Public disclosure: I also believe the waiting period for admission to the Hall of Fame should be 50 years after retirement.
 
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Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

So wait...now you have an issue with Doris Kearns Goodwin? What did she badmouth Dancing with the Stars or something?
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

joecct said:
How old are you Handy?

If you were not alive in the 60s you would not understand the time and the place as JFK wrote.

Let me explain. Southie is correct. The U.S. would stop at nothing to stop the spread of Communism. Dictators were OK, as long as they were our dictators. Start slipping and you got replaced via a coup. JFK kept our involvement small, like Truman did in Greece.

So the idea of stopping the Communists from taking over Indo China was US policy from Ike to Nixon. Ike and JFK knew a land guerilla war in Asia needed to be kept small. LBJ, on the other hand, had different ideas. We succeeded in Korea, against a higher mechanized force, therefore we should win in Vietnam against a lesser equipped army.

Once the balloon went up after tbe Gulf of Tonkin resolution, we should have won and kept the NVA North of the DMZ, but mismanagement from DC kept the field commanders fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. The Viet Cong were using Cambodia as a base. Could not attack them once the VC crossed the border. We could not cross the DMZ. You couldn't shoot unless shot at. The grunts knew how to win. They were let down by the leadership.

It was a war of capturing the hearts and minds. Guess what? The commies won that one. They convinced the American left that the peaceful people of Vietnam were innocent as purely driven snow. The left bought it - hook, line, and sinker. Our soldiers were called baby killers and spat on in airports returning from the front. Jane Fonda, may she sentenced to watching Barbarella non stop in Hell, went to Hanoi regularly and even posed for a picture with an anti aircraft gun - a weapon that was used to shoot down Americans. Commies good. US bad.

The US won the Tet Offensive - militarily, but lost politicaly when Uncle Walter went on national TV and said he didn't think the US could win the war. At that point, it became an end game. The white king would be checkmated, the number of moves would have to be played out but the result was inevitable.

And how did communism play out in Indo China? Reeducation camps, Pol Pot's massacres, boat people fleeing the regimes. A veritable people's paradise.

Yep - it was the right idea. The implementation by LBJ stunk to high heavens.
Click to expand...

Age has little to do with understanding Vietnam, joe. I lost friends there but drew 242, which makes it my life long lucky number. If I'd had more guts and been a little more mature, I would have given more than passive resistance. It was a farking disastrous decision. Dropping more bombs (which I assume is your point) would just have created a larger hole in someone else's ground.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Some were talking about Man Hunter (the Unabomber series). It's on Netflix streaming right now. Watched 2 eps tonight. I am intrigued.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

I just discovered the Vietnam doc on pbs.org and came here to recommend it. It really illuminates the depth of my ignorance. Yesterday I might have thought some of you guys knew what you're talking about. It's far more complicated than you know, or are admitting. But yes, a complete waste of blood and treasure (in a nutshell) in retrospect.
The thing that strikes me about the Cold War though, is that nuclear arms are not less prevalent or dangerous now than they were 50 years ago, are they? In my childhood "Russians" was code for, pure evil scary agents of Satan. Was the fear more escalated and immediate, or was it just the mind of a child?
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

geezer said:
I just discovered the Vietnam doc on pbs.org and came here to recommend it. It really illuminates the depth of my ignorance. Yesterday I might have thought some of you guys knew what you're talking about. It's far more complicated than you know, or are admitting. But yes, a complete waste of blood and treasure (in a nutshell) in retrospect.
The thing that strikes me about the Cold War though, is that nuclear arms are not less prevalent or dangerous now than they were 50 years ago, are they? In my childhood "Russians" was code for, pure evil scary agents of Satan. Was the fear more escalated and immediate, or was it just the mind of a child?
Click to expand...

It was (in my childhood) pure "Nuclear Chicken." You launch yours, we launch ours, everyone dies. So no one launched a darn thing. We are starting to see this happening again with North Korea. They are kind of new to that game.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Anyway, all aired episodes are online, in both censored and naughty-word editions.
We didn't one day wake up and decide to conquer Vietnam. The lead up is multi-generational. And there were no American corporations there...
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

geezer said:
I just discovered the Vietnam doc on pbs.org and came here to recommend it. It really illuminates the depth of my ignorance. Yesterday I might have thought some of you guys knew what you're talking about. It's far more complicated than you know, or are admitting. But yes, a complete waste of blood and treasure (in a nutshell) in retrospect.
The thing that strikes me about the Cold War though, is that nuclear arms are not less prevalent or dangerous now than they were 50 years ago, are they? In my childhood "Russians" was code for, pure evil scary agents of Satan. Was the fear more escalated and immediate, or was it just the mind of a child?
Click to expand...

Brenthoven said:
It was (in my childhood) pure "Nuclear Chicken." You launch yours, we launch ours, everyone dies. So no one launched a darn thing. We are starting to see this happening again with North Korea. They are kind of new to that game.
Click to expand...

Think about how attitudes are shaped when elementary school teachers nationwide were telling their children to hide under their desks from bad guys who wanted to kill them. A first grade teacher is probably the trusted person in a child's life, next to parents, and in most cases, parents were reinforcing that fear at home.

I went through it, as I"m sure others here did, yet that conditioning experience still amazes me. That drill was much more fear-inducing than fire or tornado drills.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War was a pretty good documentary. I imagine it's available on dvd if anyone is interested.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Last night's episode of The Vietnam War should be required viewing if for no other reason than reminding us that even on strong drugs, white people still can't dance.
 
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