Olbermann: Bush Ignorant About Vietnam War's Lessons

Keith Olbermann has a huge television platform -- and my, oh my, does he use it as effectively as anyone I've seen on the news in my lifetime. The host of MSNBC's Countdown program, began doing "special comments" a couple of months ago and his blistering commentary on George W. Bush and his whole cabal of lying, mismanaging miscreants has become a thing of beauty to Americans frustrated with the direction of our country.

Last night was another good one, with Keith taking on Bush again, this time for the president's drawing comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq -- Bush is currently on a Southeast-Asia tour -- and suggesting that the primary lesson to be learned from the Vietnam debacle was that “We’ll succeed, unless we quit.”

To the 30 percent or so of Americans who still support Bush, evidentially unwilling or unable to admit that he is simply the dumbest, most vacuous man to ever occupy the White House, I say this: Do you get it yet?

An excerpt from Olbermann's explanation, in case it needs to be made more clear:

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.

“One lesson is,” he said, “that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.”

“We’ll succeed,” the president concluded, “unless we quit.”

If that’s the lesson about Iraq that Mr. Bush sees in Vietnam, then he needs a tutor.

Or we need somebody else making the decisions about Iraq.

Mr. Bush, there are a dozen central, essential lessons to be derived from our nightmare in Vietnam, but “we’ll succeed unless we quit,” is not one of them.

Olbermann then goes on to explain what the lessons are: That Bush needs to listen when the American people no longer support his war, that without a stable local government we'll be in Iraq forever and that the ludicrous "fighting them there so we don’t fight them here" argument holds about as much water as the silly "Domino Theory" that cost us so dearly in Vietnam.

More Keith:

“We’ll succeed unless we quit”?

Mr. Bush, we did quit in Vietnam!

A decade later than we should have, 58,000 dead later than we should have, but we finally came to our senses.

The stable, burgeoning, vivid country you just saw there, is there because we finally had the good sense to declare victory and get out!

The domino theory was nonsense, sir.

Our departure from Vietnam emboldened no one.

Communism did not spread like a contagion around the world.

But this is all well-known history, lost on the leader of the free world who, sadly, is not much of a thinker. Meantime, Bush's war without end continues and more American troops and Iraqis will die today.

Here's the entire clip: