essential to national security

I'm no longer a member of the LP, but I'm glad to read their policy commentary and press releases to see that they haven't yet lost all semblance of principle, however much less radical they are from my current preferences.

But I think their principles in this release are much stronger than their grasp of history.

The scandal isn't that so many Americans tried to avoid going to Vietnam; it's that their government tried to send them there in the first place. The fact that Bush is sending troops to Iraq proves he hasn't learned that lesson.

Right on!

The tragedy isn't that Bush, the Guardsman, may have avoided Vietnam. The tragedy is that Bush, the president, has sent more than 1,000 Americans to their deaths in Iraq.

Right on! (But let's not forget the civilian body count!)

Contrast Vietnam and Iraq with World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, American teen-agers weren't lying to get out of the war; they were lying about their ages to get in.

Um ... OK ...

The point is that the American people know which wars are essential to national security and which are not, regardless of what the president says.

Now hold on a minute!

Does the LP seriously believe that WWII was essential to national security -- and that the American people (a dubious collectivist concept for a party supposedly based in philosophical individualism!) know that it was?

You mean FDR and Winston Churchill didn't plan US entry into WWII well before Pearl Harbor? You mean FDR didn't goad the Japanese into attacking through economic warfare and deliberate diplomatic sleights? He didn't refuse to communicate with them when they sought negotiations to avoid war? He didn't deliberately load up the harbor with derelict military hardware, which he considered worth losing, and sailors -- whom he also considered worth losing -- however many of them were needed to make so many Americans cry out for blood vengeance?

If the writers of LP releases don't know these facts, then they're not trying very hard. They're readily available to anyone who reads beyond government school textbooks.*

And if they do know these facts, then they are either (a) cynically manipulating public ignorance to promote their agenda, or (b) suggesting that Dubya should have goaded Saddam into somehow attacking the US first, so that Gulf War II could better resemble World War II.

So our choices are ignorance, mild cynicism, or a monstrous Machiavellian amorality beyond anything the neocons have said out loud.

I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, assume that they're still attached to principle, and accuse them only of laziness and ignorance.

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* I went to private schools, but the economics of school materials is such that the state governments -- and probably blocks of state governments -- determine which texts will be most massively printed and therefore which texts will be least expensive for private schools, too. Unless a private school teacher used primary materials, it's likely that a privately schooled person received just as much government approved history as the "publicly" schooled.