On Tuesday, I watched the GOP Debate on the Fox Cable News Channel. Right from the start, it was interesting. Even though there were too many people and too little time to really deal with answers, some of the responses were informative, and a few of the interchanges between debaters were fun to watch, as well as being the kind of statements (from Ron Paul, mostly) that made me want to throw something at the TV.
But something struck me at the very start, something I actually made a note about at the time. According to the Transcript in the New York Times, this is the first part of an exchange between Chris Wallace and John McCain:
MR. WALLACE: Thank you, Brit.Gentlemen, good evening. Let's start with the war in Iraq.
Senator McCain, you say that you are willing to be the last man standing for U.S. involvement in Iraq. But the Iraqi government has failed to meet one political benchmark after another for political reform. Why should Americans continue to fight and die while Iraqi politicians continue to do so little?
SEN. MCCAIN: We have to continue because it's not just the Iraqi vital national security interests that are at stake here, it's America's vital national security interests. If we fail in Iraq, we will see Iraq become a center for al Qaeda, chaos, genocide in the region, and they'll follow us home.
After we lost the war in Vietnam, we came home, they didn't follow us home. You read Zarqawi, you read bin Laden, you read al Qaeda, they'll tell you they want to follow us home.
I thought as soon as I heard it that it was a good answer, because I agree (as I have posted before) that if we pull out of Iraq, the Iraqi assets of oil profits and land will be a windfall to the terrorists who would immediately take over. I believe that there would be genocide and chaos in the area. The terrorists will absolutely “follow us home” and attack us in the United States. The Islamist radicals admire strength and victory, and their ranks will swell with men who want to be part of the defeat and humiliation of America, and who will seek ways to damage us further on our own shores.
Is was only a little later that I realized that there was something else deeply important in the response. Now, the North Vietnamese Communists were eager to overrun all of Vietnam, and they didn’t “follow us” militarily back here. The Islamist radical terrorists have a wider goal, such as wiping out the Western world and forming as large as possible an Islamist caliphate under Sharia law. They are already carrying out terrorist actions in Africa, Europe, Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, etc. There are even Al Qaida followers in South America. So we can expect them here in the United States in large numbers if we pull out.
But the statement about North Vietnamese not following us home reminded me of something I had read online a couple of years ago. There is a blogger called “Zombie” who posts photos and descriptions of a lot of anti-American activities such as peace rallies, protest marches, other Leftist activities, etc. He does it so that those of us who go to his site can be informed about what is really going on, as opposed to the highly slanted reports from the Main Stream Media. His pictures are always well taken and really informative.
One of his presentations was called “Anatomy of a Photograph”. In it, he shows what he calls “An analysis of a single seemingly innocuous photograph, and the pervasive media bias it reveals.” It is the photo the San Francisco Chronicle published on the front page of its Web site, on September 24, 2005: a close-up of a teenager wearing a bandana across the lower half of her face, with words on it saying “People of Color Say ‘No to War!’”.
Zombie states that he, too, had taken a picture of the same teenager and he shows a copy of it from further back, showing that several teenagers were marching side-by-side, holding a long banner that said, “Youth Against War”. Each of these teenagers wears a bandana with the same slogan, “People of Color Say ‘No to War!’” printed on it in the same letters.
Then Zombie shows a photo from still farther back, and it becomes obvious that the marching teenagers are being, as he says, “stage-managed by an adult, who is giving them directions and guiding them toward the front of the march. But who is she?” he asks.
His last picture is from a different angle, showing the back of the woman who is giving the teenagers the directions, and, as he puts it, “It turns out that the woman giving directions belongs to one of the Communist groups organizing the rally—if her t-shirt is to be believed, since it depicts the flag of Communist Vietnam, which has been frequently displayed by such groups at protest rallies in the U.S. for decades.”
Zombie’s analysis is really interesting, and I would recommend going to see it in all its glorious color and detail. It is extremely memorable.
But it shows that, in a way, McCain was wrong.
It turns out the North Vietnamese did follow us home, after all.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Perri Nelson's Website, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Random Yak, 123beta, Adam's Blog, Right Truth, Stuck On Stupid, Webloggin, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, third world county, stikNstein... has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Nuke's news and views, The Pink Flamingo, Planck's Constant, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, The Yankee Sailor, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
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