History 101 at Yale

"It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn't support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay."

Senator John McCain, foreword to David Halberstam's book "The Best and the Brightest," regarding the Vietnam War.

How does the saying go? Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it? Then again, when you're hiding out at your parents' ranch to skip your National Guard assignment, boozing, snorting coke and carousing with women, I guess you can't really be paying proper attention anyway.

Which leads me to another point (I was going to end it with the last paragraph, but now I'm lit up). We all knew about Bush's sketchy past when he originally ran for office in 2000, yet so many people chose to ignore it. He got into Yale on his last name, same with Harvard B-school. Then skipped through the Vietnam War on a bogus National Guard assignment (again, because of his name). After all that, he continued to booze heavily, did hard drugs, and used that Harvard MBA to drive 3 separate companies into the ground. But millions of people voted for him to be our President. Aren't you embarassed? We are talking about one of the most powerful offices in the known universe, representing us in the most high-profile manner, and that's who you sent? A loser. List one noteworthy success GW had before becoming President. He even traded Sammy Sosa to the Cubs! And then, after all the fuck-ups from 2001-2004, you did it again? And then people wonder why I display misanthropic behavior from time to time? Just when I think common sense is the ONLY alternative, somebody goes and does this. I just don't get it!