“Vietnam” on The Daily Caller

Former Republican presidential contender John McCain reunited with his onetime advisor Carly Fiorina on the campaign trail Saturday in San Diego, offering a blistering indictment of Barbara Boxer’s record on military issues and calling her the “most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today” — an assessment he said he’d made while having “the unpleasant experience” of serving with her. (more)

Michael Kinsley’s latest modest proposal in Atlantic magazine — that the Baby Boomer generation give something back to America because of all its profligate lifestyle and debt — is well-argued, and being a Boomer (1959), I’m susceptible to the guilt-tripping.  But I have some quibbles. (more)

Advocates of Big Government are forever creative in concocting new justifications for old programs. Supporters of more military spending are no different. One of the most unique arguments is that a bigger Pentagon budget is necessary to simultaneously protect and suppress the Europeans. (more)

BEIJING — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates met his Chinese counterpart in Vietnam on Monday for the first time since the two militaries suspended talks with each other earlier this year, calling for the two countries to prevent “mistrust, miscalculations and mistakes.” (more)

Democratic Connecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam.  His challenger, Republican Linda McMahon, in this new ad, reminds Connecticut voters about Blumenthal’s self-aggrandizement. (more)

Is America fighting a permanent war, or at least a war that will span generations? From the First Gulf War to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, to the military operations to enforce sanctions on Iraq, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and all our covert military operations in response to terrorist attacks on us in between, we’ve been at war for 20 years, and there is no end in sight. Is this our new reality? (more)

As they prepare to leave the stage, even Boomers themselves concede that things have not exactly gone according to script. Generalizations about generations are often foolish. Who’s to say when one generation ends and the next one starts? And people are individuals: any characteristic intended to describe almost 80 million people will be inaccurate in most individual cases. (more)

For weeks now I have been writing articles about those who selflessly volunteer to serve this great nation. While people have the right to oppose war, we should vehemently oppose those like the members of the Westboro Baptist Church who protest at the funerals of our fallen soldiers. Instead, “We the People” should unite to ensure that our fallen heroes’ families are taken care of. (more)

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Richard Blumenthal’s words are haunting him again. Already forced to apologize for saying he had served “in” Vietnam in the Marine Reserve rather than stateside, the state attorney general’s campaign for U.S. Senate is now being challenged to explain his assertion that he had “never taken PAC money” and has “rejected all special interest money.” (more)

The harm to military religious liberty posed by the possible dismantling of the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is only recently starting to get the kind of attention it needs.  If the military is forced to normalize homosexual conduct, service members’ religious beliefs that such conduct is immoral and harmful will likely be a casualty of the political push to radically alter military personnel policy.  This likelihood is demonstrated by the nationwide assaults on religious belief in the civilian world and by new evidence from an active-duty chaplain that is being revealed for the first time here. (more)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears at least to be trying to restore American prestige abroad.  Talking tough in Asia last week, she stared across the DMZ and told the North Koreans to back off.  In Vietnam she asserted that the United States still had a “national interest” in the region.  She intimated that America would not allow China to bully ASEAN nations into giving up their rights in the South China Sea or restrict our freedom of navigation through one of the world’s busiest oceans.  It is striking that Clinton, the most liberal Secretary of State since Cyrus Vance, is the most hawkish member of the administration’s national security team. (more)

Venerable historian Garry Wills recently posted a piece revealing his role at an off-the-record meeting President Obama convened with nine professional historians over a year ago.  Though a frequent critic of President Obama’s policies, I reacted to Wills’ piece with a kind of tingling cognitive dissonance: sympathy for the President and, frankly, disdain for the profession I admire enormously. (more)

As soon as Wikileaks posted the 91,000 reports they call the “Afghan War Diary” online, some people immediately compared them to the “Pentagon Papers.” Daniel Elsberg’s 1971 leak of a top-secret Vietnam War study revealed 20 years of presidential-administration deception about American involvement in Southeast Asia. The Afghan War Diary is a reprehensible and damaging revelation of secret intelligence sources and methods that places the lives of U.S. warriors and Afghani informants at greater risk, but the Afghanistan war’s “Pentagon Papers” it’s not. (more)

The leak of tens of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on the Afghan war, while illegal, has little significance for policymaking, Sen. John Kerry said Tuesday. (more)

HANOI, Vietnam — North Korea on Friday threatened the United States and South Korea with a “physical response” to planned weekend naval exercises as tensions with the communist nation rose in the aftermath of the sinking of a South Korean warship blamed on the North. (more)

BP PLC will sell its gas fields and gas pipeline in Vietnam as well as assets and exploration licenses in Pakistan as part of its effort to cover the cost of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a company spokesman said Tuesday. (more)

It feels like 1975. (more)

President Barack Obama should be worshiping at the grave of Richard Nixon. “Why,” you ask? (more)

Linda McMahon is a petite and friendly woman with that magnetic smile that political consultants crave. But when she starts talking about the Democrats’ financial reform package, she gets a bit of an edge in her voice. (more)

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — An acupuncturist who claims she can detect a man’s virginity based on a small dot on the ear has become a minor celebrity in Vietnam, where she is credited with helping to free three convicted rapists from prison. (more)