If This Is Groundhog Day, Where's Bill Murray?

Later that month Tom Wicker asked him on Face the Nation whether, in light of the administration claim that the "great threat from Asian communism" made victory essential for the security of the United States, it did not follow that "perhaps we ought to do as much as needs to be done?" The United States, Kennedy replied, had originally gone into South Vietnam in order to permit the South Vietnamese to decide their own future. Plainly the South Vietnamese did not like the future held out by the Saigon regime. So we had moved on to the national security argument.

"Now we're saying we're going to fight there so that we don't have to fight in Thailand, so that we don't have to fight on the west coast of the United States, so that they won't move across the Rockies...Maybe [the people of South Vietnam] don't want it, but we want it, so we're going in there and we're killing South Vietnamese, we're killing children, we're killing women, we're killing innocent people...because [the Communists are] 12,000 miles away and they might get to be 11,000 miles away."

Quoted from the RFK book I'm reading, p. 824.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to make comparisons between any two geopolitical situations, but isn't it somewhat odd that you could change a couple nouns and arrive at a statement that one could imagine a senator saying today?