VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL

Searchable and interactive site

According to this article in the Washingon Times:

The Washington Times has partnered with the Internet company Footnote.com on a new project that transforms Washington's Vietnam war memorial wall into an interactive, personal journey on the Web. The Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial allows you to search the names on The Wall and to drill down into the government's official war records to learn details about each of the 58,000-plus heroes enshrined on the wall. You can also add your own personal stories, remembrances and photographs.

The digital image of The Wall — actually thousands of photos fused together — locates each veteran’s name where it appears on the Memorial. From there, any visitor from The Times site can leave their stories and remembrances or upload photos of veterans.

VIETNAMESE TYRANTS SENTENCE PRIEST TO PRISON FOR FREE SPEECH AND ADVOCATING DEMOCRACY

A Vietnamese dissident was tried on Thursday and sentenced today - stories HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.

He was convicted of "spreading propaganda against the communist state." IOW: For exercising one of his inalienable, universal human rights - his right to make Free Speech.

Besides being a Free Speech advocate and a democracy activist, the "perp' - Nguyen Van Ly - is a Roman Catholic priest.

He's already served 15 years for similar "offenses" against the state. Now he will have to serve another 8.

That fat ugly insane leftist Rosie O'donnell - who thinks "Bush = Hitler" because of the Patriot Act - is silent.

So are McCain and Kerry who campaigned for years for normalization of the Marxist thug tyranny in Hanoi. (BTW: What is it about McCain that makes hi so love to cuddle up to the worst lefties in the Senate - like Kerry and Feingold!?)

And the ACLU is silent. As are Amnesty International and HRW.

WHY THE SILENCE?! They are silent because the perp's are leftists - LIKE THEM! Fellow travelers never criticize one of their own - they're like birds of a feather who flock together.

Besides, the American Left LOVES Vietnam - (because "they taught the USA a lesson!") - and therefore the American left could never bring themselves to accuse the Vietnamese commies of being tyrants because to do that they would have to admit that THEY WERE WRONG ABOUT HO CHI MINH AND THE WAR!

Proof of this can be found in Vietnam's neighborhood: The American Left finds it easy to criticize Myanmar - because calling the tyrants there "tyrants" does NOT cause cognitive dissonance.

(Some Leftists excuse the Vietnamese tyranny because, after all, they do "give" their "citizens" "free healthcare.")

UPDATE: Commenter David from Florida notes that AI and HRW have both issued statements attacking and condemning the Vietnamese gov't's actions. BRAVO! Now if they would only call a presser and keep as much heat on the Vietnamese tyrants as they do the Bush Administration! After all: there are really, honestly, truthfully 65 MILLION political prisoners in Vietnam! (IOW: they are NOT silent on the event, but only whispering their dismay -- whreas they SCREEAM BLOODY HELL when it's the USA they're bashing!)

AND THAT'S RIGHT: In Vietnam, there are 65 MILLION political prisoners living without liberty and in poverty - ALL COURTESY of the doves of the Democrat Party.

BTW: These Democrat doves (many of whom are the very same people: Byrd, Kennedy, Kerry, et al) are back in control of the party and they want to do the same thing to the Iraqis.

JAILED VIETNAMESE DISSIDENT TO BE TRIED. LEFT-WING "HUMAN RIGHTS" ADVOCATES SILENT.

BBC:

A Catholic priest is to go on trial in Vietnam accused of disseminating information to undermine the state and forming an illegal political party.

Father Nguyen Van Ly is a prominent pro-democracy activist who has been under house arrest since last month.

Father Ly, 59, has already spent 14 of the past 24 years in prison for his opposition to Communist Party rule.

THE LEFT IS CONSTANTLY CONDEMNING THE USA FOR GITMO (WHERE TERRORISTS PUT ON WEIGHT!), AND DEFENDING POLICE-KILLERS LIKE MUMIA, AND WOULD-BE GENOCIDAL TERRORISTS LIKE PADILLA, BUT THEY ARE SILENT ON THIS CASE. - JUST LIKE THEY ARE SILENT ABOUT THE BRITISH MARINES WHO ARE BEING HELD HOSTAGE - AND THE IDF SOLDIERS WHO ARE BEING HELD HOSTAGE.

THE LEFTIES NEVER UTTER A WORD ABOUT HOW THESE PEOPLE ARE BEING HELD ILLEGALLY IN DIRECT VIOLATION OF GENEVA (AND OSLO).

THIS PROVES THAT THE LEFT'S DEFENSE OF THE "VICTIMS" IN GITMO, AND OF MUMIA AND PADILLA -- AND OTHER SIMILAR CASES - IS REALLY ABOUT AMERICA-BASHING AND NOT HUMAN RIGHTS.

WE TOLD YOU SO: DEMS READY TO ABANDON ANOTHER ALLY TO TYRANNY

Well the DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED Senate did exactly what the DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED House did: voted for an arbitrary Iraq withdrawal deadline in an emergency spending bill LOADED WITH PORK!

We've been warning you all for three freakin' years - (especially during the Kerry campaign): the Dems will abandon the Iraqis the way they abandoned the South Vietnamese and the Contras. And you can throw in the Cubans, too!

And one day - if they take the WH, they will abandon the Afghanis... and then Israel, too. WHY?! They're COWARDLY, TRAITOROUS, LYING, CORRUPT APPEASERS WHO THINK FEEDING THE CROCODILE ONE ALLY AT A TIME WILL SAVE THEIR ASSES...

Making Headway

I have been pounding the drum for a while about the likely aftermath of leaving Iraq. There are many bad possibilities and some worse ones. So who comes to support my position? The ever reliably left Los angeles Times.

Congress should not hinder Bush's ability to seek the best possible endgame to this very bad war. The president needs the leeway to threaten, or negotiate with, Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, Syrians and Iranians and Turks. Congress can find many ways to express its view that U.S. involvement, certainly at this level, must not go on indefinitely, but it must not limit the president's ability to maneuver at this critical juncture.

Not a complete capitulation by the LA Times by any means, but a move in the right direction.

Standing on the edge of a precipice tends to have a sobering effect. Maybe you don't sober up all at once, but you at least take a step or two back and have a look around.

As an activist, I intend to keep hammering at the Vietnam analogies, because I think that is the most recent and clear historical analogy to our current and possible future situatiion.

H/T Q&O

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

Genocide Question

America left South Vietnam to its own devices in 1975, leading to 2 1/2 million deaths and totolitarian governments in Cambodia and Vietnam.

So I assume the anti-war mantra now is: if it turns out no worse than 'Nam every thing will be fine.

Also note that in '75 all the South was asking for was material support and airstrikes against the invading North.

The anti-war folks who constantly scream about genocide now want to enable another one.

OK.

So the question is: if our leaving initiates a genocide in Iraq should we go back to save the people we once promised to protect?

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

Turning Iraq Into Vietnam

London Calling. The Times Online has an article by the author of "Sideshow", William Shawcross, about how Iraq could turn out like Vietnam. (Bolding by your ed.)

At the end of 1975 I went to the Thai-Cambodian border to talk to refugees. Their horrific stories of people with glasses being killed as “intellectuals” and of “bourgeois” babies being beaten to death against trees were being dismissed as CIA propaganda by the anti-American Western Left, but it seemed obvious to me that they were true. I wanted to discover how the Khmer Rouge had grown and come to power; I wrote a book called Sideshow, which was very critical of the way in which the United States had brought war to Cambodia while trying to extricate itself from Vietnam.

But horror had engulfed all of Indo-China as a result of the US defeat in 1975. In Vietnam and Laos there was no vast mass murder but the communists created cruel gulags and, from Vietnam in particular, millions of people fled, mostly by boat and mostly to the US. Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble. I also think it wrong to dismiss the US efforts there as sheer disaster. Lee Kuan Yew, the former longtime Prime Minister of Singapore, has a subtler view. He argues that, although America lost in IndoChina in 1975, the fact that it was there so long meant that other SouthEast Asian countries had time to build up their economies to relieve the poverty of their peasants and thus resist communist encroachment — which they probably could not have done had IndoChina gone communist in the 1960s.

That long view seems to me to be the one that has to be applied to Iraq. I still believe the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the correct thing to do — and it was something only the United States could have done. For all the horrors that extremist Sunnis and Shias are inflicting on each other today, the US rid the world of the Pol Pot of the Middle East. So long as the vile Saddam family regime remained in power there was no hope of progress in the region. There is still hope — if we do not abandon the Iraqi people.

That is pretty much the key.

We must not abandon the Iraqi people the way we abandoned the people of South East Asia. I supported the abandonment at the time because I believed John Kerry, the Communists, and their American supporters. So I get the humble bit. In fact it is a stain on my soul. The best I can do now is never forget.

H/T Powerline via Instapundit

And for my e-mail buddy linearthinker who thinks this is very important. It is. It may be that the Revisionism of Vietnam is finally going to get revised. About time.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values