Not a comparison you want to make
In the past 24 hours, I have heard more than
one lefty commentator saying words like, "There is a feeling of hopefulness that
I haven't felt since John Kennedy was inaugurated."
Let's HOPE
not!
John Kennedy's first
significant act as President was to wimp out totally on the Bay of Pigs
invasion. He was too wimpy to support it fully, as planned, and he was too
wimpy to call it off -- he chose the absolute worst path, to follow through
partially, so it failed spectacularly, solidifying Castro's hold on Cuba,
weakening the USA's position in the world, and sacrificing many brave Cuban
patriots. (Jimmy Carter followed the wimp response model in planning the Iran
hostage rescue in 1979, and that resulted in the Desert One
fiasco.)
John Kennedy let the
Russians roll him on the Berlin Wall, the Vienna Summit, and the Cuban Missile
Crisis. The press and historians have re-written history to say the Cuban
Missile Crisis was Kennedy's finest hour, but it was his choice to escalate it
into a crisis -- probably an overcompensation for all the times they rolled him
in the past -- and the Russians got exactly what they wanted out of it when
Kennedy agreed to remove our missiles from Turkey. He was played like a
fiddle.
Then John Kennedy got us
into a land war in Asia with not only no plan, but no goal. He continuously
sent troops to IndoChina in ever-increasing numbers, and didn't really know what
he wanted to happen there. Sometime after he was killed, revisionists among his
inner circle said he planned to remove our troops after he was reelected in 1964
-- which, if true (and I don't think it was), would compound the error, in that
it would mean he was making military decisions on a domestic political
basis.
Kennedy was pretty much a
disaster. If he hadn't been killed, we would remember him as the lightweight
pretty-boy he was.
Posted: Wed - January 21, 2009 at 12:11 PM
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