Walter Cronkite did not lose the Vietnam War

I didn't realize that Vietnam had any relevance to anything in the current election, but apparently some conservative blogger on Yahoo - who was probably born - after the Vietnam War decided he had to show how the "liberal media" started and chose Walter's observation that the Vietnam Was was not winnable as that point.

Now I know that my friend RedStateVT devotes most of his blog to pointing out explicit ways in which the media is liberal, and sometimes I find him to be correct, but mostly I usually think they are just facts being lined up in a manner that is accurate and not friendly to a conservative point of view.  I find most mainstream media to be balanced.  I think if anything they bend over backwards to not criticize unfair conservative commentary of President Obama in order to be balanced in their view.  After all, the Affordable Health Care Act was designed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, but try to find an explanation of why everyone needs health insurance in any major media outlet.

Anyway, this Yahoo blogger blames Walter for giving encouragement for the Vietnamese to continue their war effort and drive us out.  Let us remember, Vietnam was having a civil war and 1st the French and then the U.S. decided to intervene on one side.  The Vietcong and North Vietnam did not need any encouragement to continue to fight.  They wanted one country and they were determined to drive out the colonialists.  The Vietcong were South Vietnamese and had plenty of support from their local populations.  You cannot win a civil war unless you either have overwhelming military control (The Union in the U.S. Civil War) or the support of the indigenous population (most other civil wars).  Our side did not have the former in Vietnam and the other side had a lot of the latter.  So this blogger was far to shallow in his presentation and wrong.

Unfortunately, this seems to be characteristic of partisan political writing of which we have far too much of these days from both sides of the spectrum.  The Truth requires an analysis of the facts and usually ends up with a proper policy that is somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum.

Please read my book review on the History of Religion which is now 5 or 6 blogs down.