joe leiberman was a profile in courage during the 2000 campaign. the way he prostrated himself before every democratic special interest group was inspiring. he shed his "principles" like a pro. and he is the best of that lot.

Scoop was a Pentagon superhawk, his NSC voting record was almost a consistent 100%. In 1975, the Vietnam conflict, which was a total cluster-f*** for reasons to numerous to elaborate here, was over. The ARVNs were done, there was zero point to throwing good money after bad, and the only thing left to do was to help the refugees. Scoop was integral in the defeat of Paul Warnke and the failure of Salt II. He also was responsible for Jackson-Vanik which hastened the Soviet collapse, and showed the swine in our banking and ag sectors that there can be limits to the amount of avarice Americans will accept from them. Scoop was among the last of a once-prominent but now extinct species around the world, the anti-Communist social democrat. Mitterand, Harold Wilson and Golda Meir were others. Moynihan was another, and the welfare reform he opposed was a badly flawed bill.

As for Lieberman, putting him in the same sentence with giants like Scoop and Moynihan is simply disgusting. CJM is 100% correct about the 2000 campaign. Lieberman would have happily ridden a unicycle down Pennsylvania Avenue on Shabbos while eating a ham and cheese on rye were it to gain him votes. He is a man utterly without priniciples in a sanctimonious way that only the phony religious types try. His protestations of religious orthodoxy leave me as cold as similar protestations from Chirac, who paraded his Catholic faith in a highly-public manner for a francais but then increased access to abortion while PM, throughout his career.

The South was doing fine until Ted, Scoop & company cut and ran. Moynihan was a featherweight--forget what he said, what did he ever do?

The second our troops left, it was just a matter of the NVA running out the clock. Their victory was inevitable. The ARVNs couldn't fight worth a damn, and the South Vietnamese government was a government so staggeringly incompetent and corrupt it would have embarassed Paul Reynaud or Pierre Laval.

It is one thing to say whether our fight in Vietnam was the right one, it is quite another to engage in self-delusion and believe the ARVNs were worth anything in the field. Kissinger's own writings make it clear he thought the South Vietnamese government had no shot.

Any decent political science library of the last three decades has about a shelf devoted to Moynihan. He was a great thinker, if not a great doer as it is tough to get much done when you are inebriated by noon every day. But he deserves credit for identifying issues from vouchers to welfare reform to standing up to 3d World despots long before anyone else either did or had the courage to admit it.

What did Aristotle and deTocqueville ever do? How good a President was Thomas Jefferson or James Madison? They were disasters.

I have to agree with OJ on this one. Everything I've read indicates that with proper support (logistics, air) the ARON would have held on. Certainly they fought until it was no longer possible.

"They were mostly centrist in rhetoric, not reality . . . "

So true and what so dumbfounds the left, including the MSM, is that Bush actually says what he means and does what he says he will do. It's a foreign concept and they don't know what to make of it.