"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
— George Santayana

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell

"Want some wood?"
— George W. Bush

Chuck Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who also happens to be a Republican, has put into words what the nation needs to hear but his Democratic colleagues are too frightened to say. "'Stay the course' is not a policy," the Nebraska Senator recently told ABC News. "When you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost over 1,900 Americans, over 14,000 wounded, [you see] electricity production down, oil production down. By any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we're not winning ... we are locked into a bogged down problem, not dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam."

Though he wore a uniform during the Vietnam War, George W. Bush was not cut out for the rigors and sacrifices required of military life, in peace or war, on home front or front lines. Vietnam may as well have been Venus to him. He was just in it for the poontang and the picture-posing next to the big shiny jet … vroom vroom . When he's now asked about his disgraceful military record, Bush seems genuinely baffled that anyone would question his right to come and go as he wanted back then, even as the expense and time the government spent training him to fly fighter jets — during a time of war, no less — was wasted. So, of course, he didn't learn the lessons of Vietnam, as Hagel did; of course, his blithering mumbled catch phrases seem an adequate way to explain his psychopathic war policy.

Indeed, in Idaho this week — taking a vacation from his vacation — Bush said, "Democracy is unfolding. We cannot tolerate the status quo." Does he even know what is coming out of his mouth any more? After his grueling 10-minute chat with the press, Bush then went for a bike ride, caught some fish and drove a pick up truck over dusty backroads.

Let me take it a step further and suggest the parallels are much more obvious than Hagel hints, especially in the final nightmare years of Vietnam.

­ Each had a paranoiac imperial president (Nixon, Bush) surrounded by sycophants and dirty tricksters who loathed the press.

­ Each president initially "won" election by, at best, dubious margins. Nixon won in 1968 with 43.4 percent of the vote vs. 43 percent for Humphrey, while only 23 percent of the eligible voters went to the polls. Bush, of course, is the Ultimate Asterisk. He was not elected by the people but selected by the Supreme Court after losing the popular vote by 504,000.

Each administration featured a corrupt, malevolent, lying, money-grubbing vice president who aimed to divide Americans against themselves (Spiro Agnew, Cheney).

Each featured attorney generals who bent the law to suit political needs (John Mitchell; both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez).

Each administration severely curtailed civil liberties in the name of national security. Nixon's FBI — controlled by one of the most powerful men in American history, J. Edgar Hoover — aggressively pursued and in some cases murdered militants and other dissenters under the Cointelpro program; Bush's henchmen use the USA Patriot Act and the newly formed Homeland Security Department — the largest bureaucracy in American history — to do roughly the same thing.

Nixon needlessly, pointlessly and tragically expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia, the fallout from which we are still facing; Bush preemptively attacked Iraq as part of his open-ended "war on terror," and Americans will face the consequences of this horrifically stupid action — which millions of Americans loudly protested long before the bullets flew — long after we're all pushing daisies.

Nixon was felled by Watergate, a cheesy, stupid crime that led to an even more criminal coverup; Bush will be felled by Iraq-nam.