Johnson started the Vietnam War through a massive escalation. Nixon ended it.
The thing about blood, though, is that there's always more to go around.
"Insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite unit as the Navy SEALs who killed former Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden, U.S. officials said Saturday. It was the deadliest single loss for American forces in the decade-old war against the Taliban."
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/08/06/afghan-president-31-...
"U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that they believe that none of the Navy SEALs who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although they were from the same unit that carried out the bin Laden mission."
"The sources thought this was the largest single loss of life ever for SEAL Team Six, known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/06/afghanistan-helicop...
Wars never end overnight.
Of course he could not publicly take credit for this, because that would have interfered with the image he was trying to project to North Vietnam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln
To your question, are you suggesting that you think that slavery fell clearly along the lines of liberalism and conservatism?
Also, according to wikipedia: "The republican party [..] founded by anti-slavery activists in 1854".
Now I'm no republican, as a north european you'll find me to be more of the social/liberal kind (yeah.. those two can be together), but I think the republican party has a pretty swell history.
Both parties have nothing to do with the parties they used to be even 50 years ago.
The republican party became evangelical/right wing in the end of the 70's. But it is not sustainable because of demographics.
A funny fact is most Latinos and Blacks are culturaly more conservative than liberal ( christians / anti-gay ...) , but given the hate on the right they are not going to vote for republicans. And Obama is certainly not a communist. He is not even a progressive.
I was looking for some sources to support that claim when I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia_in_the_Latino_commun...
and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia_in_the_Black_communi...
It's true! Wikipedia says so.
Uhh. Those states may be Republican now, but none of them went for Lincoln: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
> Then the republican Lincoln wins and a period of slave liberation and movement towards equal rights on a federal level begins.
Right, but during the 20th century there was a pole shift in US political parties. To oversimplify a bit: FDR made the Dems the party of economic liberalism and Lyndon Johnson made them the party of civil rights (on which Johnson famously stated: "We've lost the South for a generation").