Getting Past Vietnam-Era Condescension & Insecurity

There seems to be a pervasive and not-so-subtle streak of anger among 50-60 something pundits who describe themselves as "liberal" and yet who constantly attack the left for opposing the Iraq War, and then lecture the left about how we should have learned a lesson from Vietnam - this lesson being that progressive opposition to the war in the 1960s was terrible because Democrats proceeded to lose the presidency in the 1980s and Congress in the 1990s. To these 50-to-60-year-old cloistered, mostly male pundits, opposition to the War in Vietnam wasn't an act of courage - it is only portrayed as something horrible and never to be repeated because somehow we are all expected to believe it was the only reason for election losses decades later. Not surprisingly, almost all of the people pushing this narrative never served on the battlefield, and so the worst possible tragedy to them in their comfortable lives is not their arms or legs being blown off, but the party they nominally affiliate with losing elections - even though they have no evidence whatsoever to prove that those elections were lost because of the reasons they say they were.