Well, it was a tough weekend. We lost Richard Pryor, and Gene McCarthy. Over 100 people (including some 75 school children, aged 12 – 16, headed home for the holidays) were killed in a plane crash in Nigeria. Firecrackers set off a fire on a bus that killed at least 40 wedding guests in Pakistan. And fallen soldiers are being shipped as freight on commercial airliners, stuffed in the cargo hold with with suitcases.

Now we come to the last Monday edition of Morning Sedition. It just aint right.

Remembering Gene McCarthy, it strikes me just how different times are today – or at least how different the Republicans of today are form the Democrats of the late 60’s. Lyndon Johnson lied us into war – or at least, into escalation of war – with the Tonkin Gulf incident. Eugene McCarthy (and Bobby Kennedy) knew this was wrong. They knew the Vietnam War was bad, and that we needed to get the hell out. So, McCarthy challenged Johnson, and Johnson was forced to not seek reelection. I recall watching that speech on TV. It was a real shocker, even to a 7 year old kid. Contrast that with today’s Republicans. They back Bush, despite the fact that we all – we all – know that this is wrong. But they don’t care about right and wrong. All they care about is power.

Unfortunately, Bobby Kennedy was killed, and Nixon won the election. Nixon kept us in Vietnam to save face (or some such shit). Some 30,000 soldiers had already been killed at that point, and more than 20,000 additional US soldiers died, needlessly, before the US finally withdrew. God only knows how many Vietnamese were killed; we don’t know, any more than we know how many Iraqi’s have been killed. I guess “them people” just aren’t worth counting.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take 50,000 US Deaths in Iraq to get us to withdraw.