That War Cleaves Us Still

Back in 1989, when the first President Bush noted in his inaugural address that the Vietnam War was still dividing the United States, I thought his remarks had a whiff of hyperbole, as it was then almost 15 years since Saigon fell:

For Congress, too, has changed in our time. There has grown a certain divisiveness. We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other’s ideas are challenged, but each other’s motives. And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other. It has been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter of a century ago; and surely the statute of limitations has been reached. This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. A new breeze is blowing, and the old bipartisanship must be made new again.

Papa Bush didn’t know the half of it.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who writes that “Everything old is new again“. Because there is no escape from the 1970s.

(Incidentally, the above “peace protest” is an exercise in restrained Gandhi-esque civil disobedience when compared to this infinitely more disgusting act.)

Update: James Taranto squares the circle.