Progressives: Master Revisionists.

This fairy tale quote by John Kerry (Newsweek 11/16/09) made me laugh out loud:
“With Afghanistan, as with Vietnam, we have a president facing pressure from the military. President Kennedy was strong enough to refuse to be pushed into combat operations. His successor, President Johnson, feared a public dispute with his commanders, so he failed to stand up to them when they insisted that the United States was headed for disaster without an escalation.”
Johnson, who the Progressives despised during his presidency, can be disparaged as a weakling who knuckled under to the evil military. But you see – it wasn’t his fault! He was still a good Progressive Democrat; the evil right-wing military FORCED him into escalating the Vietnam War!
On the other hand, Kennedy, a minor president (whose only claims to fame were avoiding a nuclear war that he had, himself, almost foolishly caused, and making a supply-side tax cut), but a Democrat patron saint, is shown as a strong man willing to stand up to the same dastardly evil military war-mongers.
The Progressives are master history revisionists: America was a colonialist empire, Nixon was responsible for Vietnam, Kennedy was assassinated by right-wingers, even the word “Liberal” was stolen by Progressives in the early 20th century (as outlined in “The Commanding Heights”, by Yergin & Stanislaw) – it actually meant what is known today as “Classical Liberalism”, essentially modern Libertarianism.