The stabbed in the back myth

More important history -- and myth busting -- from Rick Perlstein.

The public memory of congressional votes on Vietnam from 1970 through 1975 is almost hallucinogenically jumbled. Republican propagandists rely on the confusion. This slender reed of a myth--that congressional liberals are responsible for the fall of South Vietnam--conflates the failed 1970-1971 votes to end the war in South Vietnam, and the overwhelmingly popular (and, on Nixon and Kissinger's terms, strategically irrelevant) vote to limit military aid to South Vietnam. It is but a short leap for a public less informed than Laird to reach the Rambo conclusion: that this was just the last in a comprehensive train of abuses--exclusively Democratic and liberal--that kept us from "winning" in Vietnam. And that, adding in the mythology about prisoners of war in Vietnam, American troops were, roughly speaking, "abandoned" there."

I could quote extensively from the piece which helps to remove the fog from that hazy, chaotic era.

Democrats should follow Chuck Hegel's lead and stop their defensiveness when talking about Iraq.