A NEW MOVIE, BUT THE SAME OLD STORY – AT 11:56 A.M. ET:   There's a new movie out called "The Post," kind of a modern-day "All the President's Men." Directed by Steven Spielberg, it deals with the Pentagon Papers case, wherein the U.S. Government tried to suppress internal documents that revealed, among other things, some artful lying about the war in Vietnam.

Liberals will love it.  Ah, for the good old days.  Vietnam.  Nixon.  Lyndon Johnson.  Who could ask for anything more?  And the movie stars senior Hollywood liberal Meryl Streep, who says she didn't know what Harvey Weinstein was doing all these years. 

I have not seen the movie, but Seth Lipsky, of the old New York Sun, a journalist I respect, feels it takes us in the wrong direction.  I'm not shocked.  From the New York Post: 

Yet this movie deals with only some of the lies about Vietnam. Inexcusable as they were, the lies told by the Americans were relatively small beer.

It was our Communist enemies who told the big lie — that the war was a struggle for liberation by Vietnam’s noble comrades, who took on the Americans with pitchforks. What hooey.

The truth is that the war was a conquest of free South Vietnam by a well-armed, Soviet-backed regime in the north. At the end, the enemy emerged from the jungles with tanks and surface-to-air missiles.

The Pentagon Papers disclosed that our own leaders, in effect, refused to heed evidence that we would lose the war — and sent our troops anyway. “The Post” seems to buy into this theory. Yet it wasn’t sending troops that turned out to be the error.

Rather, it was assuming we couldn’t win. On the ground in Vietnam, our GIs did just that. In the most famous battle, Tet in 1968, our soldiers trounced the Communists. The cause of free Vietnam was betrayed in the US Congress, which had been turned by the anti-war movement.

And...

It fell to President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to try — heroically — to keep Congress from abandoning Vietnam. But early in 1975, Congress cut off supplies of ammo and materiel to our ally.

The Communist conquest quickly followed.

Let President Trump — and his critics — remember: When Congress cut off Vietnam, it wasn’t about saving our GIs. They’d long since been withdrawn.

No, the decision by Congress was to retreat in the face of Soviet Communism. It was about abandoning the hope of free Vietnam itself.

Vietnam’s democracy died in broad daylight.

COMMENT:  Wonderfully written, and true. 

December 29, 2017