15th December 2003, 2:18 PM
Quote:Originally posted by A Black Falcon
Maybe Virginia doesn't have to worry about the huge amounts of pollution pumped into our atmosphere curtesy of the midwest coal-burning power plants that have contributed so much to our air quality problems, but the Northeast states do and have presented a pretty united front, from both parties, against the administration attempts to let those power plants pollute more.
And as for Vietnam, that war started during the Eisenhower administration and continued expanding through Kennedy and Johnson. Sure, it was a mistake, and their reasoning ("communism will spread") was flawed, but that's why Johnson didn't try for another term...
Point 1: You're right. Virginia has always been a relatively clean area. Thus, I have no use for environmental controls.
I do wish they'd commit to converting coal to nuclear power already though.
Point 2: Yes, the war started long before we got involved in it. But it was Johnson who got us in there en masse, no doubt about that. And, the planning and execution of that war was horrible. My dad reminds me that, when our fickle media reminds us that almost 200 casualties have occurred in Iraq in the last eight months, that 200 casualties were suffered in single DAYS in Nam. He tells me of how he and his friends feared Nam more than anything in the world, and that he's very thankful that he wasn't called over.
Johnson, by the way, didn't abstain from re-election out of regret for his decisions. He simply realized that he fucked things up so terribly that even trying would be a waste of time and money.
The funny thing is, preventing the spread of communism was a very noble goal, but in the end, we didn't need that war to do it. It's too bad we didn't know that communism would have collapsed under it's own weight a mere 25 years later.
YOU CANNOT HIDE FOREVER
WE STAND AT THE DOOR
WE STAND AT THE DOOR