Let me finish tonight with this story of stealth and intrigue uncovered by Rolling Stone. I don't know about you, but it makes me think of the "Manchurian Candidate," that great movie about an American serviceman captured and brainwashed by the North Koreans, then returned to the United States as an assassin.
That's the movie. In this real-life story, it's the American military that's brain washing our own. The people in uniform are supposed to be taking their orders from the civilians. But, I get it: Want to keep up a war that's getting unpopular back home? Practice the dark arts on the ones coming out to check out the battlefront, give 'em so much BS they'll think victory's right about the corner. I'm waiting for Mitt Romney to say something about this. His Dad, by all evidence a good man, got himself knocked out of the 1968 race for President when he said he'd been "brainwashed" by the generals in Vietnam. Maybe Mitt ought to stand up now - like a good son - and say "Dad may have had something. Let's get to the bottom of this!" Somehow I don't think he will. The right-wing is so fundamentalist now that it attacks as heresy any breach with the military - or "Glenn Beck" or "Sarah Palin," any word that carries a hint of independent, gutsy thinking. Can't have any of that, can we? You know, back in the Vietnam War, they had a regular late afternoon briefing on the roof top bar of the Hotel Rex in Saigon. Used to call 'em the "Five O'Clock Follies" for the simple reason that what the Public Information Officers put out had no connection to what was happening in the countryside. Maybe Senators McCain and Lieberman and the other visiting VIPs should check their notes from their last trip to Kabul.