because he couldn't afford to be seen surrendering, a President Kerry would be forced to pursue combat more vigorously in Iraq

I wish I could be as confident of that assertion as you. I'd've thought a combat veteran could never be induced to slander his "band of brothers," but it didn't take much inducement for Kerry to do that in 1971. He'll be even quicker to sell out the Iraqis, I fear.

Mike:

If he'd been president in 1971 he'd have remained pro-war.

I take this to mean that oj now expects Kerry to win. Which is a great morale-booster, since oj's predictions are almost always wrong.

50-0

>50-0

That's, of course, after the two months of post-election lawsuits disqualify ALL Republican votes.

Bush will probably win 35-42 states. But the left, comfortably ensconced in CA, NY, and MA, will continue to believe that it really speaks for the country, and indeed, the world.

I also bet that Bush wins more than 75% of the nation's counties (last time he won 73%). Of course, to the NYT, ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN, and the rest of the hive, that percentage is irrelevant.

Jim,

Unless we start picking Presidents by county, it is irrelevant.

Kerry would probably invite Saddam to the White House, formally apologize to him and cut him a check for the damage we caused in his country. He would then have every American soldier who distinguished himself in the war hauled in front of a special court headed by Old Shaky Janet Reno and a few other alcholic Marxist Lesbian Genetic Mistakes for punishment for war crimes.

All this would be done to the cheering of the NY Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the MSM.

I fail to see where OJ gets the confidence that Senator Kerry would be politically forced to continue the occupation of Iraq, after the lack of any political price paid for abandoning South Vietnam. Why would it be any different now?

LBJ didn't abandon Vietnam, Nixon did. Truman didn't abandon Korea, Ike did.

I know Dave Barry's worn this out, but Alchoholic Marxist Lesbian Genetic Mistakes really is a great name for a band.

Then Janet Reno and Donna Shalala should perhaps start one.

OJ,

We did not 'abandon' Korea. We're still there. The simple fact is that the US did not want to escalate the conflict into a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets and the Europeans really didn't want that either.

oj - Back then, the Democrats were a majority party and wanted to keep conservatives in their coalition. Now they're a left-wing party and are looking for policy victories. A war abroad would interfere with domestic spending, and if Kerry backs off, the terrorists would wait till they have nukes before resuming the fight, so Kerry would have years of quiet and the illusion that war was unnecessary. A Kerry presidency would not be comparable to a Truman presidency.

pj:

Interfere with spending? FDR got us the debt 150% of GDP for WWII. Kerry could double it and not be there.

Bart:

North Korea is still oppressed.

Donna Shalala's an alchoholic?

OJ,

True. But what happened was a return to status quo ante, which is a lot better than JFK did in Cuba. Also, South Korea has flourished economically, politically etc, while North Korea has languished in Stalinist torpor.

The cost of ending Communism on the peninsula in 1953 would have been nuclear war in Asia, Europe and the US. Would it have been worth it for us?

Nuclear war in the US in 1953? Very unlikely. Delivery system?

How's North Korea better off than Cuba?

Yes, it would have been worth it to nuke Moscow and Peking in '53 and end the Cold War.

>Nuclear war in the US in 1953? Very unlikely.
>Delivery system?

B-29, B-36, and TU-4 heavy bombers. Dozens of free-fall bombs, mostly of kiloton range, with a handful (probably less than a dozen) of megaton range. Maybe pre-emplaced nuke charges. Not enough to cause long-term global effects, but enough to wreck a lot of cities and a few countries. After that would come the long, drawn-out WW2 encore performance plus whatever nukes survived or could be assembled as available.

And don't forget, before Stalin got nukes of his own, Russian doctrine was to counter American nukes with new types of poison gas (derived from that Tabun factory the Russians captured); up until the Second Russian Revolution, the USSR maintained huge stockpiles of gas.

And radiation (especially radioactive fallout and long-term effects) wasn't fully understood at the time.

And risk having Stalin bombing NYC, Washington and other major American centers? I don't think so.

Stalin was far more Kim Jong-Il than he was like Khrushchev. Even if we would have irradiated his country, he still would have taken a large part of our nation down with him.

Why do you think they finally got their act together and bumped him off in 1953?

Cuba is far, far better off than North Korea, both now, and in the future.

It's much less polluted, fewer people are dying of starvation, and once normal relations are restored with the US, they'll be packing in the American tourists. In fact, it might be a great place to buy a vacation home, in twenty years or so.

Plus, they've got that "100% literacy" and "world-leading health care system" going for them, which NoKo doesn't even pretend to have.

"The Alcoholic Marxist Lesbian Genetic Mistakes" is not only, imo, far too long a band name to be "great", it's also triply redundant.

Bart:

He couldn't. Indeed, Khruschev couldn't.