This kinda shocked me.  When I first saw this article I thought it was a scam, and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that way.  It's just so unbelievable after almost eight years of executive denial.  Thankfully, he still managed to get in a few digs at Barack Obama, so we can rest assured that he hasn't completely left the dark side...

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Despite the fact that the Democratic Party has not settled on its nominee yet, the party has started launching attacks on John McCain (one more reason to dislike McCain is that my fingers still want to type "John McClane," which is irritating because I feel bad comparing the badass Die Hard hero to Bush III).  Here the party lets McCain debate ( Read more... )

"American troops could clear territory, evacuate populations, drop napalm, defoliate crops, transform the landscape with bomb craters, take Vietnamese mistresses, vaccinate Vietnamese children, train troops, supervise interrogations and the administration of prisons.  They could expend, in a single day, more firepower than the French had during the ( Read more... )

"Only We Can Prevent Forests"

-Motto of Operation RANCH HAND, an aerial campaign that dropped one hundred million pounds of herbicides over four million acres in South Vietnam between 1962 and 1970 (quoted in Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), 82.)

This afternoon I ran into a former student and we ended up discussing, of all things, the Cuban Missile Crisis. I mentioned that I love talking about the incident in class because it's fun (and terrifying) to speculate on the series of events that could have resulted had things gone differently (USSR installs missiles in Cuba, US imposes blockade ( Read more... )

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