September 24, 2018
The nation is failing as a direct consequence of these four catastrophic policies.
1. President Johnson's expansion of the Vietnam War, which set the stage for President Nixon's continuation of that disastrous war for an additional five years.
For those who missed the 30-minute lecture on the Vietnam War in history class, Johnson took a low-intensity guerrilla war in South Vietnam in which the U.S. was supporting a corrupt and venal South Vietnamese elite and expanded it into a full-blown war with over 500,000 troops on the ground and numerous other forces engaged in a vast regional conflict.
Johnson's basic motivation was domestic politics: being a domestic political animal, Johnson was obsessed by the possibility that the Republicans could accuse the Democrats of being "soft on Communism" and win congressional seats in the next election if he declared victory and withdrew from Vietnam.
To insure this wouldn't happen, Johnson relentlessly pursued a war in ways that guaranteed it couldn't be won while killing and maiming millions of people, mostly civilians, and squandering the lives of U.S. servicemen and women.
Johnson did not follow the Constitutional requirement of declaring war with congressional approval. He opted to undermine the Constitution with an open-ended declaration of Imperial Presidential Powers (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) to wage unlimited war based on a "fake news" fictitious attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
But the war itself was only one disaster of many. To mask the complete and utter failure of his "limited" war, Johnson launched a massive, concerted "fake news" propaganda effort in support of the "we're winning the war" narrative.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept18/policy-disasters9-18.html
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