Coked up

I've said it before and will say it again (probably, if I can finally finish the post about Iraq and "genocide," I'll say it again tomorrow): most of what comes out of conservatives' mouths about what happened in Vietnam and after is simply made up. Not history. Mythology. No, worse: propaganda.

And worse than that, our conservative-enabling Sabbath gasbags lap it up. Digby tells me that Cokie Roberts assured her Sunday morning audience that the Democrats' move to end the Iraq war will prove a debilitating political liability for them, "just like it was in Vietnam."

I've been making the point for some time, but it was gratifying to be joined this April by a genuine member of the Washington establishment, Peter Beinart. Sometimes simple facts even penetrate skulls inside the Beltway. As he wrote in a column in Time:

They won the 1974 midterm elections in a landslide. Two years later, Jimmy Carter grabbed the White House. To be sure, Watergate played a major role in those victories. But if the party's efforts to end the war weren't the primary reason for its success, they certainly didn't hurt.

It's true that in 1972, antiwar crusader George McGovern suffered one of the biggest political wallopings in American history, losing 49 states to Richard Nixon. Surely then, Democrats suffered for opposing Vietnam? Actually, no. People forget that in 1972 Nixon ran on a peace platform too. In his convention speech, he boasted that he had ended the draft, withdrawn American troops from ground combat, pursued a negotiated settlement with North Vietnam and reduced U.S. casualties 98%. The fall was marked by feverish diplomacy between Washington and Hanoi, culminating in Henry Kissinger's declaration, less than two weeks before the election, that "peace is at hand."...

...George W. Bush isn't winding the Iraq war down; he's ratcheting it up, and the G.O.P. presidential front runners are following along. In 1972, polls showed that more Americans thought Nixon rather than McGovern would end the war. It's virtually impossible to imagine voters saying something similar about a Clinton-McCain or Obama-Giuliani race in 2008.

The real danger for Democrats in the Iraq debate isn't that they'll oppose the war too aggressively; it's that they won't oppose it aggressively enough.

Sad, really, that no one in Cokie Roberts' circle seems to have paid attention to these obvious facts. They're still stuck on Beinart's last argument, that Democrats can only prosper when they grease the skids for any damned war against "evildoers" that the Republicans can dream up.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future