Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [133]
Key Obama advisers Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, frequent New York Times contributor Todd Gitlin, and future Democratic officeholder Tom Hayden openly supported a communist takeover of Southeast Asia. They were given warm audiences with Cambodian and Vietnamese communists in Cuba—as well as with Democrats in Congress.
By the early seventies, the whole Democratic Party was getting mouthier about defending communist mobs around the globe. For years, liberal Democrats in Congress had been trying to amend spending bills with resolutions that would cut off all aid to the anti-communist governments of Cambodia and Vietnam. This wasn’t about ending the war: Nixon had negotiated a cease-fire in 1973, and there hadn’t been an American soldier in Vietnam for two years. Our allies in South Vietnam and Cambodia only needed material support to hold off the communist onslaught.
But when massive Democratic majorities swept Congress after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, there was nothing Republicans could do to prevent them from betraying our allies and handing Southeast Asia over to totalitarian monsters. The Democrats’ very first act in the new 1975 Congress was to cut off all aid to Vietnam and Cambodia, guaranteeing a communist sweep of Southeast Asia.13
Republicans frantically warned that cutting off aid would lead to wholesale slaughter, but Democrats turned a blind eye, refusing to send even ammunition to the besieged Cambodians and South Vietnamese. Senator John Kerry (D-MA) dismissed Republican arguments as “anti-communist hysteria.” Congressman Tom Downey (D-NY) said, “The administration has warned that if we leave there will be a bloodbath. But to warn of a new bloodbath is no justification for extending the current bloodbath.” Then-congressman Christopher Dodd (D-CT) said the “greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now.”
This would be like suggesting that the best way to help a woman being raped is to give her a little privacy.
The Democrats’ foreign policy bigwig, Anthony Lake, wrote a column in the Washington Post urging American support for the Khmer Rouge, which he touted as more “nationalist” than “communist.”14 Admired for his sage advice, Lake later served in both the Carter and Clinton administrations.
Backed by the Soviets, the North Vietnamese launched a major offensive, in violation of the 1973 Paris Peace accords. Without the material support promised by the United States under the accords, South Vietnam’s brave army couldn’t match the Soviet-backed North Vietnamese. But the Democrats respected the peace accords as much as the Vietcong did—so communist hordes swept through South Vietnam.
Weeks before the North Vietnamese had completely vanquished the South—whereupon they executed tens of thousands of South Vietnamese—a pro-Vietcong propaganda film, Hearts and Minds, won best feature documentary at the Oscars. At the ceremony, the producers, Peter Davis and Bert Schneider, praised the coming “liberati[on]” and read a letter of thanks from the Vietcong to “our friends in America.” For this, they received a standing ovation. (Bob Hope immediately drafted a disclaimer on behalf of the Academy that was then read by Frank Sinatra, over the strenuous objection of Shirley MacLaine.)15
When the Democrats cut off aid to the Cambodian government, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge constituted less than one percent of the population. By September of 1975, they had triumphed and the wanton slaughter had begun.16 In the next two years, communists in Vietnam and Cambodia would kill about 2.7 million Southeast Asians—far more than had died throughout the entire fifteen years of the Vietnam War. With the advantage of Pol Pot’s having studied in Paris, his slaughter was the more prodigious: