Orange County's most prominent talk-show host (take a seat, Joe Escalante) frequently proclaims himself independent of the Republican Party, but everyone knows that's a damn lie. Hugh Hewitt's latest example, however, is particularly egregious not only because he spins for the GOP, but he also skewers his old boss in the process.
In his post, Hewitt blames the Democratic Party of the 1970s for the Cambodian genocide and Vietnamese re-education camps and warns the Democrats of today that, similarly, blood will be on their hands if our troops pull out of Iraq. “America's Vietnam policy of intervention, manipulation, and then withdrawal represented a series of choices,” Hewitt writes. “The Democrats of those years, urged on by a hard left anti-war front, finally made a choice to leave, a choice with awful consequences. This is the crucial point: The Democratic Party and their supporters made that choice, cheered on by the anti-war left. They own the consequences.”
All fine and true, except for one crucial omission: it was Hewitt's old boss and fellow Orange Countian, Richard Nixon, who initiated troop withdrawals with his Vietnamization policy–any freshman history student can tell you that. So why not Hewitt? Why not implicate your boss in genocide, especially considering the Nixon-approved policies of bombing Laos and Cambodia largely sparked one third of the genocides (both old and continuing) you so decry? That's right–because that would mean admitting conservative culpability, and that's just something not included in the Hewitt dictionary. Hypocrite.
