Can’t Pat Buchanan punch Michael Kinsley in the face, just for old times’ sake?

A quick addendum to Scott’s post below before I run off to show my students the 1965 thriller Perversion for Profit. If Kinsley wants the Democrats to avoid “the Nixon Doctrine” of “Vietnamization,” he needs to recall first that neither the Nixon Doctrine nor Vietnamization were specifically Nixonian innovations. The Johnson administration, before it completely imploded, embarked on a policy of changing the color of the bodies in the bags — with the implicit recognition that the war as it was then being conducted was fundamentally not winnable. The American War in Vietnam was lost long before Nixon entered office. As I see it, though, the problem with Nixon’s plan of “Vietnamization” was not merely that it took so long — an additional five years of useless slaughter — but that it was premised on the idea that no matter what, the war had to continue in some form or other.