ike/"And You KNOW What I'm Talking about"

I'm excited about this new blog feature, entitled, "And You KNOW What I'm Talking about."

The quotation comes from a 2006 speech by Hillary Clinton (fast forward to 1:30 to see the clip), in which she told a room of African Americans that Congress was run like a plantation. "And you know what I'm talking about," she exclaimed after making the comparison. Suffice it to say, they didn't. And neither did anyone else. So this space will be reserved for those comments uttered without irony that make us wonder exactly what it was the person was talking about. Simple enough, right?

I couldn't think of a better way to begin than with this John McCain gem.

"We're all Georgians?"

WTF?

How many more regional, ethnic conflicts do we have to enter before we learn that not every dispute in Asia is over communism and not every dispute in the Middle East is about al Qaeda?

I hate sounding like a Democratic talking point, but nowhere, NOWHERE are the similarities between John McCain and George Bush more profound than on the "lessons" they learned from the Vietnam War.

Bush's words are eerily reminiscent of John McCain's worldview on Iraq and foreign policy in general:

"There is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields."

It was Ted Kennedy who responded to Bush's inane assertion that the legacy of Vietnam was anything other than the perils of involving ourselves in wars that should never be waged in places we never should have been.

"America lost the war in Vietnam because our troops were trapped in a distant country we did not understand supporting a government that lacked sufficient legitimacy with its people," Kennedy said.

Let's hope Barack Obama is blessed with the same backbone.