All The Wrong Lessons

The BBC headline read, "Bush Warns of New Vietnam in Iraq." Curious and thinking that this was sort of like warning JFK not to go to Dallas in 1968, I clicked thru...

President George W Bush has warned a US withdrawal from Iraq could trigger the kind of upheaval seen in South East Asia after US forces quit Vietnam.

"The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," he told war veterans in Missouri.

Ah, of course. I had forgotten that in Bushworld, Vietnam was a disaster only because the United States failed to "stay the course" and pulled out after only ten years and a measly 60,000 dead American soldiers and a paltry five million dead Vietnamese combatants and civilians. If we hadn't been quitters, if we'd had the balls to stick with it for another ten years, why then we would have won, dammit. If we quit at the first sign of hardship, like we did in Vietnam, we'll never win anything.

In Bushworld, it is reasonable to assume, then, that the main lesson of the study of history is that winners never quit and quitters never win.

In Bushworld, the main lesson of algebra class is that 2 plus 2 can equal 5 if you insist that is does long enough and loud enough.

In Bushworld, the main lesson of English class is that Winston Smith wasn't patriotic enough and couldn't see how much Big Brother loved him.

In Bushworld, the main lesson of science class is that when your hypothesis is disproven, you need to change to a new hypothesis and claim that it fit the facts all along.

In Bushworld, Aristotle was Belgian, the central message of Buddhism is "every man for himself" and the London Underground is a political movement.