Sir;...Must you really ask why LBJ failed??? One word pretty much covers it: Vietnam.... Whenever a democratic president lets himself get sucked into foreign conflicts on ideological grounds he is making sweet love to failure... I have seen the guy, Johnson, on T.V....He knew how short was our attention span, and how quickly we demand victory...He was offered a creditable justification in the domino theory... The General, MacArthur, who knew we would lose, was dead...The other generals said they would win; and had no idea... But look at this situation even today... Kerry was seen to be hedging his bet on Iraq, voting both sides of the fense, and it cost him the election... H. Clinton voted for war to keep her political hopes alive, and killed them.... The democratic voters have more sense than their leaders, and sense enough to not follow losers.... Even when LBJ was done, and had given up on the war, and the presidency, he could not cut Hubert Humphry loose to chart his own course, and the democrats voted with their butts, and elected Richard Nixon and his secret plan to lose the war... The whole bunch of them were scumbags...Not one of them had the courage to pick their fights and walk away from a fight they could not win... The most basic concepts of military science were lost on them all from generals to president because their ideologies were directing all their actions... Party politics has ruined this country....Each party is playing for division, to satisfy no more than the absolute minimum -and still hold power...It gives to those demagogues on the attack the advantage over every defense... We Do not have the most able minds, but the most defensibly virtuous.... We do not have the most imaginative minds, but those most facile in principal... They would attack the whole world if they could defend their actions... They will let American soldiers die if they cannot defend peace... We do not have democracy... We have fickle public opinion.... We have competing ideologies as a substitute for real thought, and engaging discussion...The object and the necessity of true democracy is unity; consensus...Stupid presidents that bring this country to war without consensus deserve the contumely of history.... Is unity beyond us???The powerful do not want to concede any power to the people to decide on their own issues... They act without consensus in the expectation of consensus, and consensus is a thing of the past... That is the victory of party over democracy... It has ruined us... It limits every absolute good any president can do, and as Mr. Bush shows, the party process does not protect the people in the least from outrageous mistakes and moral turpitude... This system is crazy, and it will fall...I hope it does not manage to take us with it... Thanks...Sweeney

...nixon got elected in '68 for one reason ...he promised to end the war ...course, mr. buchanan was there, he knows that ...hes just trying to spin history to make the point that obama must fail for the gop to rebound and retake the majority in '12
...i cant wait to see the gop populist right coming out against the war in afghanistan like they do against gay marriage ...maybe israel/us policy will be next ??

Mr. Buchanan - I agree with everything that you said. I am just nervous to see someone like Rush Limbaugh or the neocons perceived as leaders of the Republican party. I thought this Obama defeat may finally drive the neocons out of the party, but apparently not. Of course this Obama-shlobama White House is showing its foreign policies are drafted by and for neocons, just like Bush jr. I just wish McCain had picked a better VP candidate ... and had not tried to sound so much like a neocon (although we know he desparately needed their support), then maybe, just maybe, he may have won the election. But I'll admit, I didn't vote for him. We need someone like Ron Paul. He might not be a great speaker like Obama (although this Obama-shlobama guy is overrated in the way he talks) but Paul's ideas are 100% better than Obama's. Lastly, unlike the fat and fat mouthed Rush, no matter who we have as President, I hope that the country and its economy will improve, and that we all succeed.