[Overpaid Slacker]

I'm not saying conservatives are immune to propaganda, by any means. What I meant (and what I wrote) was that a few of the knee-jerk Blame America First crowd might want to do some kind of regression analysis to determine where it was started, by whom, and for what ends -- b/c it certainly wasn't meant to "improve" America or make it a better place through reasoned discourse.

Much of the liberal keening is about their inherent, unique ability to see root causes and primum mobile uncluttered (so the story goes) by such base motivations as conservatives suffer. In short, the Liberal ideological stock-in-trade is some kind of [I was going to type "God-given", but that won't work for the fashionably athiest] insuperable moral high ground resulting from predetermined intellectual superiority. This insufferable sanctimony is pierced by Pacepa's article, demonstrating that we benighted conservatives' cultural/moral/intellectual betters got suckered-- and many remain suckered.

It's not so much (as far as I'm concerned) whether there was torture by US forces in Vietnam or how much there was -- but rather that, when hostile foreign interests deliberately overstated the facts, and frankly just made a lot of ***** up, the bleeding hearts fell for it hook, line and sinker. Whether one guy got his ears cut off or 1,000, the Soviets and hostile foreign intelligence agencies found in the American and Western Left an audience ready and eager to believe the worst, and the US is still paying the price for their blindered righteousness.

Let's not forget Hanoi Jane, during her tour, scolding POW pilots "are you sorry you bombed babies?" The pilots, thinking it was an act (I mean it HAD to be an act, right?) each slipped her small bits of paper w/ their SSN's - so that when she got home, at least their families would know they're alive. Once the cameras were shut off, Hanoi promptly turned to the North Vietnamese officer and handed him the pieces of paper. The story goes that 3 of the pilots didn't survive the beatings that resulted. This story may or may not be true (I wasn't there, I don't know) but if it is, I am hard pressed to imagine anything more despicable than that act of self-righteous masturbation by that see you next tuesday.

JP