The attached scanned newspaper article was printed in one of my hometown newspapers last week. Now this particular "Guest Columnist" is a local man who, for the past several years, has written frequent letters to the editor of our weekly newspaper, The County Press. A new weekly appeared a year or two ago and subsists entirely upon advertisements (it's free). Norman E. Bullock's letters frequently assume a detached and satirical tone and are rarely anything special. He sometimes stumbles into political posturing and does not fare well at it. The subject article is one of these forays.
Now, it would be easy for me to read this article, marvel at the haughty tone, the numerous factual errors and the central numbskull conclusion, and then simply laugh it off. And I did that for one day. Then our local Republican Party members emailed me a couple of letters to the editor for any comments I had, or as templates to write my own. I decided to write my own. Here it is:
March 24, 2006
Letters to the Editor
LA View
169 W. Nepessing
Lapeer, MI 48446
Re: Guest Columnist Article
I read the ridiculous "guest columnist" article in the LA View the other day. In addition to the numerous factual errors contained in the article (the Tet Offensive occurred between January 1968 and June 1969, not in 1964…), I recognized the familiar tone of leftist/liberal historical revisionism. The mention of the heroic actions of Walter Cronkite in denouncing the Vietnam War and revealing the “victories” of the VC in their Tet Offensive was particularly onerous. The facts, of course, are that the Tet Offensive was unsuccessful and a terrible blow to the North Vietnamese, as it was their all-out attempt to win the war in one major series of battles, and they failed at this strategy (in fact the NVA achieved none of their stated goals in this offensive!). The Tet Offensive end results indicate that North Vietnamese casualties were approximately TEN times those of the South and it's allies (and this doesn’t take into account the enormous cost of this offensive, which was obviously not justified in terms of the results). In fact, it was a major blow to the political wing of the North, causing somewhat of a coup in operational circles of the nation. Those interested in a quick education on this subject (and a complete refutation of Norman E. Bullock’s article) can simply visit Wikipedia and type in “Tet Offensive” or Google the subject. History is plainly written, though current events continue to be subject to polemicist renderings…
Enter the liberal press, who lionized the North's action as a "success" and used it to ramp up the public's dissatisfaction with this unpopular war, and you see a failure become a success. It is a well-known fact that North Vietnamese generals admitted after the war, that they were losing and would have been forced to negotiate, had the leftists in America not so effectively destroyed the public's will to fight.
Make no mistake, this attitude is alive and well in today's press. The very suggestion that there is a lack of critical print media in the coverage of the Iraq campaign is ludicrous. It suggests that the writer is living on another planet, as this criticism is ubiquitous in both the print media and on television. The remnants of the leftists/liberals of the sixties point with pride at their greatest achievement, the ending of the Vietnam War. They look forward with glee to doing the same thing to the Iraq conflict.
Finally, I just don't understand the willingness of any paper to put to print the incoherent ramblings and unfunny attempts at parody of Norman Bullock. I could find more interesting prose in any High School English or Political Science class…and more truth.
Mike Mullins
Mayfield Township
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