Todd Gitlin on McCain's Belief in War

Todd Gitlin, after reading my October piece, argues that John McCain is the very model of the unreconstructed Vietnam revisionist:

Like his father, John McCain thinks the Vietnam war should have been fought and could have been won. For its loss, on the strength of what he tells Goldberg, he blames--surprise!--the media and civilian authorities. (Here he resembles an earlier revisionist, John Rambo.) He blames Walter Cronkite for turning against the war. He seems to think that had it not been for Watergate, Nixon would have been free to use air power to stop the North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam.

I don't agree with Todd Gitlin too terribly often (though more often than some people might think), but I'm grateful he's paying attention to the actual life-and-death issues in this race -- preemption, preventative war, the future of terrorism, and so on -- rather than the nonsense that fills the Internets.