Opinion

Thanks to the dogged work of the fearless Martin Snapp, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain’s embedded reporter who is a member of Berkeley’s Veterans’ Day Committee, you can now read about the latest permutation of the city’s Nov. 11 observance in the San Jose Mercury News, the Contra Costa Times, the West County Times, the Berkeley Voice and the East Bay Daily Snooze, and perhaps in many more of the chain’s saturation coverage outlets in the Bay Area. Tuesday’s bottom line, if we think the Merc’s story was the end of the tale: Bill Mitchell, co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, has decided to skip the Berkeley event in favor of a Santa Monica one, and that means the local Disabled American Veterans are back in the line-up. -more-

Monday’s “revelation” that the Tonkin Gulf resolution, the basis for U.S. entry into the Vietnam conflict, was somehow “doctored” provides yet another opportunity to marvel at the apparent inability of the people who are supposed to be running this country to find out what’s going on. If we are to believe Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, it’s news to him. According to the New York Times, “Mr. McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.“ -more-