I Am So Great

So as to not be disowned by my family on Facebook I'm going to take out my frustrations here after seeing the right wing nonsense. There's a video from a guy named Bill Whittle that basically says America is the greatest country ever. I personally love this country and wouldn't want to live anywhere else. But on the right there's often a bizarre inability to admit even the most obvious of mistakes.

Just to take one comment from Whittle he says here that the US in the 60 years since WWII has never deployed our military as an aggressor. He identifies Vietnam as a case where the US was responding to leftist aggression.

So let's just recall the basic facts. In January 1962 JFK ordered the Air Force to commence bombing South Vietnam. I read that we conducted 50,000 sorties that year, half of which were bombing runs. How can someone possibly justify within their own mind the idea that this was merely retaliation? Obviously these peasants did nothing to us. The aggression presumably is the idea that the US had installed a puppet regime opposed by both the North and South Vietnamese and had blocked elections. So any efforts to overthrow that regime is called aggression. However the US military traveling half way around the world to bomb a country that was not remotely a threat to us? That's not aggression.

It kind of makes me wonder how Americans are viewed by foreigners. I asked a friend at work who was born and raised in Romania what he thought of the idea that in Vietnam the US was there because we were trying to repel Vietnamese aggression. He laughed his ass off. That's just one person of course. Maybe US propaganda is so effective that even some people outside our country think this story sounds plausible. I understand how it can sound plausible because I used to think the same thing. But when I think it through now I wonder if they think we're crazy.