But George McGovern was right

The Democrats see a hobgoblin under the bed, and his name is George McGovern. Low-grade panic is beginning to set in as pundits forecast a repeat of 1972: "As Massachusetts goes, so goes the District of Columbia." The prospect of "another McGovern" whets the appetite of Bush partisans while generating gloom and shame among Democrats. Howard Dean, for one, flees the association, while other candidates tar him with it.

Here's the problem: In 1972, McGovern was right. If there is shame attached to that election, it is America's for having so dramatically elected the wrong man. Apart from the rank dishonesty of Richard Nixon and his administration (a pattern of lies that would be exposed in Watergate), there were two world-historic issues that defined that election, and on both Nixon was wrong. 1972 was a fork in the road, and history shows that the United States made a turn into a moral wilderness from which it has yet to emerge.  article

And George McGovern made one big misstep, in my opinion, when he dropped his running mate Thomas Eagleton, another honest man, because Eagleton had had the good sense to seek professional counseling at a rough period in his life, and the Repukes were having an orgy over it. Keeping Eagleton may not have caused McGovern to do any better in that election, but it sure wouldn't have caused him to do any worse. And it would have allowed him to keep his integrity in tact. Still, I respect McGovern - one of a handful of politicians I can say that about.

As a nation, we are periodically given a chance to choose again where we will take our country, and that fork in the road was probably never so obvious as it is at this point in our history.

But let's face it, America, we don't want honesty and integrity. We want cheap gas and entertainment. No matter what the true cost.

One hears the complaint from today's Democrats that McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, did not tout his war hero's record, but that entirely misses his most important point -- that fear of war and glorification of war are simply not to be exploited for political purposes, whether at the personal level or the national.

...After the traumas of 1968, Americans had willfully accepted Nixon's sleight-of-hand on Vietnam, and the news media cooperated. As one NBC television producer recalled, news executives decided that after 1969, the "story" would be "the peace negotiations, not the fighting."

By 1972, Americans did not want to hear about Vietnam. They pretended that Nixon had ended the war. "And he has ended the war," the NBC producer said that year, "because you don't see the war on the tube anymore. So the war has ended, though we are bombing the hell out of those poor people, more than ever."

Sound familiar? I mean, recently familiar. When they say history repeats itself, they are not just whistlin' Dixie.

Nixon was the avatar of America's tragic Cold War mistake. His entire career was informed by a paranoid assessment of the Soviet threat. "It's a we/they world," Paul Nitze said when he served in the Nixon administration. "It's us against the Soviets. Either we get them first, or they get us first."

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.