Why Obama's Association with Bill Ayers should disqualify him from the Presidency
I've heard several people claim that it is unfair for John McCain and Sarah Palin to attack Barack Obama over his association with Bill Ayers. They say alternately that the association was not a close one, or that Bill Ayers is a perfectly respectable figure in Chicago politics who many people associated with
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Quite true. It was a war in defense of the Republic of Viet Nam, which was an ally of the United States of America. The United States of America was quite representative of the American people, because it was a functional liberal democracy; the Republic of Viet Nam only imperfectly so, because it was an authoritarian dictatorship. OTOH, the People's Democratic Republic of Viet Nam was even less representative of its people, because North Vietnam was a totalitarian dictatorship and hence needed even less than South Vietnam to please its populace.
The known history of East Asia (North Korea and South Korea, Red China and Nationalist China) strongly implies that East Asian dictatorships of the South Vietnamese type tend to evolve into actual democracies; while those of the North Vietnamese type at best evolve into merely strongly-authoritarian dictatorships (modern Red China) and at worst into monstrously-totalitarian dictatorships (modern North Korea). Hence, the fall of South Vietnam to North Vietnam was clearly bad for the South Vietnamese people -- assuming that you consider being ruled by a representative government to be better for people than being ruled by an un-representative government, as I and most Americans strongly do.
Americans were taxed (robbed, in a more honest vocabulary) to pay for it and drafted (enslaved) to fight it. Furthermore, the war was never even declared by Congress and was gotten into by deceitful means (the Gulf of Tonkin incident).
In order: income taxes are evil, but perhaps a necessary evil, as it is difficult to see how we could support the defense apparatus necessary to survive as a Great Power in the modern world without such impositions. The draft is probably an unnecessary evil, and we have managed without it since the 1970's.
The non-declaration of the war was an evil, since it muddied the legal position (had the war been declared, we wouldn't be talking about William Ayers' career, save to wonder if he'd ever be paroled from federal prison), unfortunately this is an evil that has sprung from the universal hypocritical pretense in America that we have been at "peace" since 1945 (even though we have fought four medium-sized or bigger wars and numerous small ones since then). I don't know what to say about this save that we should probably start declaring wars again. OTOH, the mechanism of Congressional resolution was accepted as legitimate by all parties in 1964 when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed; and it has been done repeatedly since. I look at it as "the new way of declaring war."
As to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident itself, briefly: there were two Gulf of Tonkin Incidents, the first one was real and the second one an error caused almost certainly by jumpy radar operators. Neither was "faked." The real "deceit" regarding the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a much deeper one.
I suggest you read an actual military history of the event sometime. The notion that it was "faked" has rarely been actively countered by the US military because believing that it was "faked" helps cover up what the destroyers actually were doing off the coast of North Vietnam, which was to escort in raiding parties.
OTOH, this doesn't let North Vietnam off the hook either, because North Vietnam actually invaded South Vietnam much earlier than the massive invasion of 1964-65: in fact the first NVA regulars were fighting in South Vietnam as early as 1960 or so. The causes of the war are a lot more complex and murky than you realize; though it happens to be true that North Vietnam started the war by invading the South.
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