Hewitt has a column today on Curtis LeMay and John Murtha.
The 1968 election was a coming of age election for me. I was a freshman at Oak Park River Forest HS. France and Czechoslovakia had just gone through failed revolutions of sorts; the Democrats had their convention in town. I had watched the Illinois National roll down the Congress Express to a burning West Side and troops with bayonets positioned over the bridges in Maywood.
Politics and maybe revolution seemed all over. (The left talked revolution a lot in those years and it seemed plausible too.)
Watching Murtha a few weeks ago reminded me of LeMay. In part because there's just a physical similarity between the two them.
But the other reason was I knew a lot of Wallace-LeMay supporters from the southeast corner of Oak Park (It's next to Cicero and was a Wallace-LeMay stronghold in 1968).
Folks there slid easily between cut-and-run in Vietnam and nuke the bastards. Either extreme worked. If America went to war; it should be total war. Otherwise stay home.
I fear that's the American way because I remember how quickly my neigbors traded those extremes.
I fear the rest of the world doesn't understand this, that they'll listen to Murtha; and won't realize how quickly we can turn to a LeMay. (Sometimes a Murtha can easily morph into a LeMay).
What Bush has chosen to do in Iraq is hard and the hardest part is really convincing Americans who prefer clear-cut LeMay-Murtha solutions.
The other hard part is making American understood to the world because the great wars of the last century started by fools who seriously misunderstood our reluctance to fight, but once angered our preference to anniliate. It's a horrible thing about America to misunderstand.