I don’t know if you had a chance to watch Bill Moyers’ Journal on Friday night (if not, you can watch it online here), but Bill – a White House Assistant in the Johnson Administration – used LBJ’s phone tapes and Moyers’ own personal memories to give viewers an inside look at Johnson’s deliberations on escalating the Vietnam War. When JFK was killed 46 years ago, there were 16,000 US “advisors” in Vietnam. War hawks warned Johnson not to “dither,” lest the whole of Southeast Asia fall to the Commies (the boogieman of time) and LBJ took the bait. By 1968, there were over half a million Americans in Vietnam, dying at a rate of about 1,000 a month. Johnson might have been remembered as the Civil Rights President, or for his War on Poverty, or his “Great Society,” or federal funding for education, or Medicaid and Medicare. Instead, he’s remembered for Vietnam. Moyers concluded:

Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we’re fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he’s got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.

I hope Barack Obama was watching. It’s funny, while I voted for Hillary Clinton in the New York Primary, one fear I had was that she’d be easier for the war mongers to manipulate into a military entanglement to prove she was “tough.” While I knew Obama would be no flaming Liberal (if only he really was the scary socialist that Republicans make him out to be), I thought he was smarter than that.

I hope I was right.

Over the weekend, the Senate voted to allow its health care reform bill to be debated. That’s nice, I guess, though it seems unlikely to get to a final vote if people like Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson have anything to say about it. The sad part is it takes 60 votes for cloture, so even if some horrible, tragic accident were to befall the DINOs and sad sack Joey Lieberman, it wouldn’t help. Oh, you folks in Nebraska, Arkansas, and Connecticut must be so proud of your Senators. Not as proud as you Okies, though. Your bold (and extremely intelligent) Senator James Inhofe has declared himself a big winner in the battle against the hoax known as Global Warming, telling Barbara Boxer, “we won, you lost, get a life.” Indeed, Senator, indeed. And well said, too. Of course, you’ll be dead before the effects of climate change really take hold (and, really, how much worse can it get in Oklahoma anyway?), so who cares? Take the money and run.

Like most people, my happiness and sense of self worth are tied to the success of my sports teams (though maybe not as much as this guy). As such, it was a pretty gosh gosh darn good weekend. Not only did our hoops team crush two highly-ranked teams in Cal and last year’s National Champs, North Carolina, but our poor beleaguered football team – which didn’t exactly start out the season “deep” and has lost something like 10 starters over the course of the season (including six over the past two weeks) – beat the crap out of a ranked (though obviously overrated) Rutgers. It’s a sad sign of how low our football team has fallen when beating the Scarlet Knights is a big deal, but hopefully order will soon be restored to the world, and beating pissant teams like Rutgers will once again be the norm. Next up, the final game of the season at UCONN (which got the “biggest victory in its history” on Saturday against Notre Dame). Hard to believe beating a crappy team like ND in double OT is that big a deal (hell, even SU beat ND last year, and didn’t need OT to do it).

Ah, well off to work. At least it’s a short week.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Dr. Who!