American - Writer | April 2, 1948 -
The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.
Jay Parini
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For no good reason, George W. Bush and the best and brightest he could muster, including the likes of Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz, decided it made sense to attack Iraq.
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American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.
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I often think that the last holiday is the greatest, but then some really stand out in my mind. One of the best was one my wife and I had in the Lake District. We stayed in a B&B and walked around the countryside for two weeks.
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Ridding the world of poverty is, of course, a fantasy.
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The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it's connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.
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Sarah Palin is a figure of fun on the American left, easily lampooned as a know-nothing, gun-toting ex-beauty queen who loves God and the red, white and blue above pretty much anything else except for Todd, her macho husband, who races snowmobiles across the Alaskan tundra.
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'Bag of Bones' was a big, distorted yet wonderfully entertaining novel that rode high on the bestseller lists in 1998.
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History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.
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Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.
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Language kills, and inflamed rhetoric of the kind that spews almost daily from the lips of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and others running for public office in this country should be condemned.
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A long-running argument exists over whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. In my view, they certainly do.
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