Hey, it's not my fault you stopped paying attention to "Clean Gene" in 1968 when he was peddling his phony PR image and shitty poetry as he first helped get Nixon elected, as he took the path that Joe Lieberman would take later, as he failed to get the Democratic nomination in 1972 (as I recall helping in the sandbagging of the possible winner against Nixon, Ed Muskie) and turning on the party, convincing idiots in a number of states, such as mine, to make ballot access easier for many guaranteed losers to act as spoilers in future elections - Paul LePage's election here was thanks to such an effort to "make it fairer" - to slam the next Democrat who succeeded in winning the presidency - Jimmy Carter - as "the worst president" in American history before going on to endorse Ronald Reagan in 1980.
It's not my fault that you were grooving on the 70s rock and your sub-minor celebrity to have been paying attention to things back then. I'd already figured out that such figures and their pseudo-moralistic claims about victory through enabling Republican fascism was a guaranteed loser, and that was before the asshole joined in that landmark on the way to fascism, Buckley vs Valeo, in which the Supreme Court idiotically handed the country to de facto billionaire oligarch. I've read recently how that case led to the largely forgotten First Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti - which enabled corporations to use their "free speech" to fund ballot issues that they had a direct financial interest in, the recent enough to be remembered Citizens United decision that made things worse and the McCutcheon decision which pushed us farther along the road to fascism.
Byron White, in his dissent to part of Buckley vs Valeo pointed to the fact that what the Court was doing on behalf of Buckley, McCarthy etc. was to reimpose a mortal danger to democracy that the Congress had tried to prevent after Nixon had exposed how dangerous it was in Watergate:
The act of giving money to political candidates, however, may have illegal or other undesirable consequences: it may be used to secure the express or tacit understanding that the giver will enjoy political favor if the candidate is elected. Both Congress and this Court's cases have recognized this as a mortal danger against which effective preventive and curative steps must be taken.
But Eugene McCarthy knew he couldn't fund his vanity runs for president without big money from somewhere - probably Republicans looking to carry out Nixonian ratfucking - so democracy be damned. And every attempt the Congress and many that state legislators made to avoid that danger has been overturned or undermined by Republican-fascists on the court, in at least one case I remember joined in by what I can only believe was the temporary insanity of the kind that the culture of the law leads otherwise sane Democrats into.
So, yeah, Eugene McCarthy was a total asshole, a pseudo-liberal and a Naderesque figure instead of the great champion of liberalism that superficial and stupid 60s liberals remember because they weren't really paying much attention. His supporters then and those who hold the light stick, in lieu of a flame, for him today are dupes, idiots and attention deficient fools.
That whole line of idiot liberalism that enabled Republicans through spoiler candidacies that divide the left vote, that put their idiotic concept of free speech absolutism over the needs of egalitarian democracy and the real liberal agenda have been a plague on the American left for a long time. The effects of Buckley v Valeo, which we live with in the form of Trumpian Republican-fascism ruling the country, occupying the court is the direct result of asses like Eugene McCarthy making common cause with the likes of James Buckley. And don't get me started on Common Cause and their idiotic treachery in such things as them joining with Newt Gingrich to attack Jim Wright.
Hey, you're the idiot who said that LBJ got suckered into Vietnam by mind control from Ivy League elites.
ReplyDeleteOnly published your stupid comment because it is so obviously an example of the kind of snobby, Ivy soxer idiocy I wrote about.
ReplyDeleteHere's what a University of Virginia gives, pretty much the consensus of scholars of that period conclude. I've put the educational institutions that produced the figures involved in escalation of the US presence in Vietnam in brackets.
At the center of these events stands President Lyndon B. Johnson [Southwest Texas State Teachers College (later Texas State University)], who inherited the White House following the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy [Harvard]. The circumstances of Johnson’s ascendance to the Oval Office left him little choice but to implement several unrealized Kennedy initiatives, particularly in the fields of economic policy and civil rights. But LBJ wa]s equally committed to winning the fight against the Communist insurgency in Vietnam—a fight that Kennedy had joined during his thousand days in office. While Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower had committed significant American resources to counter the Communist-led Viet Minh in its struggle against France following the Second World War, it was Kennedy who had deepened and expanded that commitment, increasing the number of U.S. military advisers in Vietnam from just under seven hundred in 1961 to over sixteen thousand by the fall of 1963. Kennedy’s largesse would also extend to the broader provision of foreign aid, as his administration increased the amount of combined military and economic assistance from $223 million in FY1961 to $471 million by FY1963.2
Those outlays, however, contributed neither to greater success in the counterinsurgency nor to the stabilization of South Vietnamese politics. Charges of cronyism and corruption had dogged the government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem for years, sparking public condemnation of his rule as well as successive efforts at toppling his regime. Diem’s effort to construct strategic hamlets—a program run by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu—ended up alienating increasing numbers of South Vietnamese, arguably creating more recruits for the Communists instead of isolating them as the program had intended. The shuffling and reshuffling of military personnel also contributed to Diem’s troubles, further undermining the counterinsurgency; indeed, by reserving some of the South’s best troops for his own personal protection instead of sending them out to defeat the Communists, Diem contributed to the very incident—his forcible removal from power—he was trying to forestall.3 A poor showing against the Vietcong at the battle of Ap Bac in January 1963 sparked the most probing questions to date about those personnel shifts and about the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). But it was the attack by Diem’s minions on parading Buddhists four months later that ignited the nationwide protest that would roil the country for the remainder of the year and eventually topple the regime. Both Diem and Nhu were killed in the coup that brought a military junta to power in early November 1963, ending America’s reliance on its “miracle man” in Vietnam.
continuing:
DeleteKennedy’s [Harvard] own assassination three weeks later laid the problems of Vietnam squarely on Johnson’s desk. Unhappy with U.S. complicity in the Saigon coup yet unwilling to deviate from Kennedy’s approach to the conflict, Johnson vowed not to lose the war. If anything, he encouraged his closest advisers to work even harder at helping South Vietnam prosecute the counterinsurgency. Those officials included many of the same figures who had acquiesced in Diem’s removal, as the desire for continuity led him to retain Kennedy’s presumed objectives as well as his senior civilian and military advisers.5 Uncertainty about his own foreign policy credentials also contributed to Johnson’s reliance on figures such as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara[U C. Berkeley, Harvard ] Secretary of State Dean Rusk [Davidson College Oxford University UC Berkeley School of Law,] and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy[ Yale – Harvard Fellow] all of whom had been with Kennedy since the outset of that administration. “I need you more than he did,” LBJ said to his national security team.
Unfortunately, the Kennedy team, most of them Harvard and other Ivy Leaguers played on Johnson's insecurities about his own educational and class background, and other things and they were successful.
The Kennedy mystique is mostly myth. If he hadn't been assassinated I suspect he would have been the focus of the freedom to lie with impunity given by the idiots on the Supreme Court in 1964, who knows, it might have led to his failure to win re-election as the free press made hay over his well known habit of screwing around - which was known to Republicans. We do know, though, that the media, Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy and their supporters used "freedom of speech" to drive Johnson out of the 1968 race, to go on to attack Humphrey (I remember how they clapped at the NBC newsroom when the race was called for Nixon) and the rest is the descent into fascism by the media created Ronald Reagan and Trump whose creation is even more a product of the "free press" under the ACLU and Joel Gora's fondest dreams.