Who Can Stop the Madman - Part 2

There's a lot of talk these days of "The Madman Theory," the tactic dreamed up by Henry Kissinger on behalf of Richard Nixon by which an American president would scare adversaries to the negotiating table by doing something so savage and inhuman that those adversaries come to believe the president is likely to do anything. I'd like to make a couple of points on that.

First, it was nothing more than a convenient measure of how big a pair of sociopaths were the two people who thought it up. It resulted in the infamous Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, the largest bombing raid undertaken by the United States since World War II. And, having unleashed fire and fury on the villages and cities of North Vietnam, Kissinger and Nixon wound up agreeing to pretty much the same terms President Johnson might've gotten four years earlier, had the Nixon people not ratfcked the Paris Peace Talks.

Second, the Madman Theory only makes sense if the United States is not governed by an actual madman.

  Charles P Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.