This may be the most awesome passage in the history of wingnut media (via):
Journalists on the campaign trail saw (Lyndon B.) Johnson drunkenly board a plane armed with nuclear weapons and then accidentally drop them on the United States. Luckily, by the grace of God, they did not go off. None of this was reported, while newspapers editors worked in overdrive to portray Goldwater as eager to push the button.
(From Breitbart’s Big Government site.)
Let us savor.
David Koch
I didn’t know LBJ was a pilot.
Ash Can
Wtf are these people even talking about?
Citizen_X
@David Koch: Maybe it was Dubya.
joel hanes
or the bombadier.
Help the bombardier!
Where, after all, are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
Quaker in a Basement
What now? OK, LBJ got drunk. That much I can believe. Then he got onto a plane armed with nukes? And then LBJ–personally–dropped those nukes? And then the press covered the whole thing up?
Zow.
Citizen_X
@Ash Can: Forget it, Jake. It’s Breitbartown.
Morzer
I think I drove through them once. Nice little towns in Nebraska, as I recall.
Villago Delenda Est
I have it on authority every bit as reliable as “Big Government”‘s that Andrew Breitbart was one of the rent boys servicing various ranking White House officials during the George H.W. Bush administration.
Alison
lolwut
Mark B.
Yeah, I remember that, it was the same year that Junior Samples won the Nobel Peace Prize. “I searched the world over and thought I found true love, but you found another, and bffffft you was gone.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Citizen_X:
The deserting coward was a pilot, but lost his flight status when he refused to be examined by a flight surgeon, per regulations, because the flight surgeon would probably discover that he was self medicating with an illicit alkaloid.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Breaking News: Generalissimo Francisco Franco and Andrew Breitbart are Still Dead.
Mark B.
@Quaker in a Basement: the whole goddam thing lacks any shred of plausibility. The president can order pilots to drop bombs, but he doesn’t get anywhere near the aircraft that carry them. Even in the 60s, that shit was pretty well locked down.
The Dangerman
Kids, this is your brain on drugs.
TS
Rather scarey that the RWNJs have no idea as to the workings of “nuclear weapons” – and we thought Palin near the red button might be a problem.
Narcissus
Wait, what
Petorado
This is an obvious parody of Brietbart by some hackers. Point of fact: if the Brietbrats really wrote this, they would used the spelling “nucular.” Kerning, bitchez!
burnspbesq
I have no fear, ’cause London is drowning and I live by the river.
Morzer
http://deadspin.com/5989829/is-it-me-or-has-espn-been-taken-over-by-wetbacks-viewers-react-to-tonights-wbc-espn-deportes-simulcast
An impressive number of people seem to think that ESPN was broadcasting in Mexican…
Chris
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Also Ayn Rand, and William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan, and Jerry Falwell…
Anyone else got anyone else they wanna throw in?
SatanicPanic
LBJ partyin and droppin bombs
Mandalay
Somewhat OT, but not completely: What could possibly go wrong now that we have armed cops protecting the kids in our schools?..
Jennifer
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Here it is, over a year on, and Breitbart being dead still hasn’t gotten old.
NotMax
“Accidentally?’
As in “Step aside, son. Ah’m a- – ah say, ah’m a-gonna just see what this here big shiny red button does?”
Ludicrous assertion.
Also too, the warheads aren’t armed without first going through a complicated procedure.
In Breitbartistan’s Big Book of Defamation, extremism in defense of assholery is not a vice.
SatanicPanic
@Mandalay: Wow, three months is all it took. Even faster than I would have guessed.
Morzer
@Jennifer:
And, let’s face it, if anyone could lie for all eternity, it would certainly be James O’Keefe’s spiritual father.
scav
We were really going to win the war in Vietnam faster with bombs that don’t go off when we drop them accidentally from a designated driver airplane. Greatest nation on earth in it’s bloody heyday, –just don’t mention the tax rates.
Now I’m thinking of the Mambo cab from Women on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown kitted with an air force one logo.
Steve
If you look up “lolwut” in the dictionary you will find a picture of this item.
burnspbesq
@Morzer:
Deadspin = Breitbart Sports.
ETA: the WBC has been all kinds of awesome so far. Netherlands beats Cuba? Italy advances to the second round? Bench-clearing brawl between Canada and Mexico? What’s not to love?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Morzer: HP Lovecraft, via Metallica, FTW!
YellowJournalism
The only bombs that LBJ ever dropped while drunk were most likely into the White House commode, the quality of which would be on par with the reporting done for this story.
slag
I almost don’t blame rightwing media for being who they are. They are exactly who I expect them to be. The people I blame for enabling the ACORN episode (and so many others like it) work at CNN, ABC, NBC, and even Comedy Central.
The tie that consistently binds corporate media and Republicans is their common unceasing impulse to shoot first and ask questions later.
Morzer
@burnspbesq:
No, not really.
Morzer
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Does that leave us with Full Metal Lovecraft?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@burnspbesq: You’ve got that exactly 180 degrees wrong.
ETA: About Deadspin, that is.
Morzer
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
*nods head* True dat.
Roger Moore
@NotMax:
FTFY.
joel hanes
LBJ took the IRT
And saw the youth of America
on LSD
Roger Moore
I think they’re just a little bit confused. They heard that LBJ was drunk from dropping jägerbombs on an airplane and thought that meant something about nuclear weapons.
FlipYrWhig
@Roger Moore: it vaguely reminds me of this:
FlipYrWhig
Actually what it really reminds me of is “99 Luftballons.”
brad
@burnspbesq: Not at all, actually. You’re mistaking what they’re covering for their own views, I can only assume.
Does anyone know what zombie lie this Breitbarter talking about? I’m not familiar with the thing I’m seeing.
Spaghetti Lee
Fucker probably pushed the button with his dong, too: http://wonkette.com/469665/lyndon-b-johnson-called-his-penis-jumbo
Is there no end to LIBERAL DECADENCE??!!?
Spaghetti Lee
At some point, the conspiracy theories reach a point where you have to assume journalists aren’t interested in money and fame for the theory to make sense. For any journalist, that would have been the biggest story of his career.
FlipYrWhig
@brad: maybe some kind of version of this story? Atomic Bomb Dropped Here, Mars Bluff, South Carolina. But that was 1958.
karl
Read the article — like how the 1980s Goldwater (his handful of reasonable, centrist opinions led to accusations of senility by his far right former compatriots) is conflated with the 1960s Goldwater.
Dead Ernest
Okay, got this figured out. getting on the plane, LBJ popped, then dropped a red button off his trousers. This news then went through the ‘campfire circle’ of the media where it was morphed into the actor, Mr. Red Buttons (born 1919). He was then mistaken for the actor, Mr. Slim Pickens (also born 1919). Know for his role as the Col. in Dr. Strangelove who rode the bomb dropped out of the plane.
Nothing to worry about. Just the usual transmission of factual information problems that always happen in our more-than-one-person world.
Morzer
I suspect that our *ahem* “hermeneutic enterprise” would be greatly enhanced by substituting
for
Radio One
I’ve decided that I don’t care at all what the conservative weirdos at Breitbart really believe in anymore. They’re like the people who believe in UFOs, or Scientology.
? Martin
Why on earth would there be nukes on AF1? The most defensively armed plane on earth would have a weapon that it cannot possibly deploy while in service, and which would only put the Presidents life in further danger.
Only makes sense in Teatardia.
Redshift
@TS:
Actually, I find that somewhat comforting. I’d much rather they had no idea what they’re doing on the remote chance that they decide the fate of the country requires extreme action.
Joey Maloney
What’s the line on how long before this starts showing up in your crazy uncle’s FB feed as undisputed fact? I want the under.
scav
And the dears are now losing their collective shit about drone strikes on the home front while blithely noting in passing on the way to something important (mean hurty feely politics!) accidental nuclear strikes on the same soil.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
Fixed? More like mangled. That alteration removes it from being recognizable as based on a Goldwater campaign reference.
Morzer
@scav:
You wait until they start having visions of a naked Ashley Judd decreeing nucular drone strikes on Kentuckistan.
Ruckus
@The Dangerman:
Kids, this is your brain on drugs
In this case assumes facts definitely not in evidence. There may be drugs involved, OK probably are, but there is not one shred of evidence there are brains.
piratedan
didn’t someone tell them that Dr. Strangelove wasn’t a documentary?
cthulhu
@FlipYrWhig: Well, you learn something everyday. But it was really more of a non-atomic, atomic bomb since the part that makes it an atomic bomb stayed safely in the plane. The implication in the Breitbart insanity was that the bombs (more than one!) were intact atomic warheads. That all magically did not explode. That’s not your run-of-the-mill idiocy.
NotMax
@Minor point.
“Air Force One” is not a specific craft (although, of course, most often applied to the official presidential jumbo jet).
Any Air Force plane a sitting president boards is designated Air Force One until he steps off. If a civilian plane, the designation is Executive One.
Trivia: The plane carrying Nixon to California after he left the White House that last day lost its Air Force One designation mid-flight, the moment that Ford was sworn in. Pilot of that plane had to call air traffic control to inform them of the craft’s new designation.
NotMax
@? MartinMinor point.
“Air Force One” is not a specific craft (although, of course, most often applied to the official presidential jumbo jet).
Any Air Force plane a sitting president boards is designated Air Force One until he steps off. If a civilian plane, the designation is Executive One.
Trivia: The plane carrying Nixon to California after he left the White House that last day lost its Air Force One designation mid-flight, the moment that Ford was sworn in. Pilot of that plane had to call air traffic control to inform them of the craft’s new designation.
Fred
Sorry, I refuse to believe sentient creatures can believe or be so dumb as to write such crap. This has got to be a librul conspiracy to discredit their, uhm, uhh, whatever.
mai naem
This is an awfully written piece. Just, wow. Also, having listened to a bunch of LBJ tapes, I actually find it hard to believe the guy got drunk while he was president. It’s always possible but unlikely.
Djur
@mai naem: He just put acid in his Fresca.
Calming Influence
No harm, no foul. Quit yer whinin’.
Calming Influence
In dreams where you’re running around with no pants, tighty whiteys can seem like an epiphany.
SRW1
Didn’t know that LBJ’s fuckbombs were of ‘nucular’ caliber. Come to think of it, though, it sounds plausible.
But why are the Breitbrats claiming that LBJ dropped them accidentally on the US? For one, there was nothing accidental when LBJ released one and secondly they tended to be precision-targeted. At least in the sense that LBJ avoided collateral damage to the general public.
MomSense
@NotMax:
Oh, so funny!
Dream On
The only bombs LBJ dropped were on Vietnam, I think.
danielx
That poor chicken must REALLY be getting tired at this point.
PaulW
It couldn’t be the Goldsboro B-52 crash of North Carolina, that was 1961 (nowhere near the 1964 Goldwater campaign). They could be referring to a B-52 crash between Pennsylvania and Maryland in Jan. 1964.
Either way, LBJ couldn’t have been involved in either crash. At that point in his career he’d have sent a stunt double off to fly while he personally handled the money laundering with his land-deal buddy Billy Sol Estes. So you see, even in the mudslinging department, Breitbart’s Bullies STILL GET IT WRONG. >:-)
Patricia Kayden
@Radio One: True dat.
Biff Longbotham
@brad: The Breitbrats have, not surprisingly, scroood the pooch (again) on this story. Details, schmetails, right? They must be referring to this little oopsie where we ‘nuked’ Spain.
Paul in KY
@Quaker in a Basement: That was Slim Pickens, not LBJ!!
I know they sounded alike, but jeez…
Paul in KY
@YellowJournalism: Those bombs may have been witnessed by unfortunate staff members.
Brian R.
I gave up counting the many, many historical errors in that piece when it referred to the “Gulf of Tomkin.”
soonergrunt (mobile)
@? Martin: these are people who think there’s a minuteman missile under the white house.
Woodrowfan
@NotMax: What if it’s carrying the Secretary of Education who becomes President when Cylons wipe out most of humanity??
NotMax
@Woodrowfan
It then instantly becomes Cylon Target One.
Jay C
@YellowJournalism:
Which, considering President Johnson’s predilection for doing business while, ummm, doing his business, probably was done with reporters present….
Full Metal Wingnut
@NotMax: But didn’t Nixon’s resignation letter say “effective immediately?” Ford became the President of the United States the moment Nixon resigned. Just like LBJ didn’t need to be sworn in right away, the AF1 stuff was for show.
Villago Delenda Est
@Full Metal Wingnut:
No, the resignation letter said “Noon, Washington time”. He got out of Dodge before noon, so he left DC as President, and the resignation became effective after wheels up at Andrews.
Foregone Conclusion
@mai naem:
LBJ definitely gave up smoking for his presidency. I think he might have given up drinking as well. He just thought that he owed it to the country not to have a heart attack in office.
Afterwards? Well, he pretty much drank, smoked and ate himself into the grave in less than five years…
Xecky Gilchrist
@The Dangerman: Kids, this is your brain on drugs.
No, this is your brain off meds.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So Curtis LaMay let a politician near one of his bombers? Right…
Death Panel Truck
@Roger Moore: Bobby Baker said that LBJ used to drink a fifth of Cutty Sark every night.
@Foregone Conclusion: Four years and two days. He died two days after Nixon’s second inauguration.
NotMax
@Full Metal Wingnut
No, Nixon’s letter said “effective at noon on” whatever the date in August he named in the letter was.
Death Panel Truck
@NotMax: In his speech to the nation on August 8, he said “I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in at that hour in this office.”
His resignation letter, dated August 9, simply read, “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Reading the article it sounds like they meant the quote as a metaphor and blew it. Most of the article is a rant on how noble Goldwater was and how mean LBJ was.
Not sure of what is the point of rubbish like this. If a politician is to squeamish to throw some mud back in an election then what use is he as president?
shpx.ohfu
@Spaghetti Lee:
O ladybird
I have heard you wish to walk me through your garden
I crave your pardon if I woke you with my big thing
Ladybird
O ladybird
I have heard you wish to walk me through your meadow
You’ll spread your wings to fly in fright if I’m inside you
Ladybird…
shortstop
@Death Panel Truck: Correct. And that letter was delivered to the secretary of state at precisely noon on August 9.
NotMax
@Death Panel Truck
Thanks for the clarification.
Even having been there and paying attention at the time, the passage of years has conflated the two.
Death Panel Truck
@NotMax: I had to look up a copy of the letter to make sure I remembered it correctly.
I was an 11-year old paperboy on August 9, 1974. The paper I delivered the day before had the headline NIXON TO QUIT. My mother was all smiles that day. She hated that fucking bastard.
The next day’s headline read “Ford Sworn; says ‘nightmare’ over.”
NotMax
@ Death Panel Truck
One pleasant memory is of a virulent redneck “Love it or leave it” acquaintance, with whom I’d had many a spirited conversation about Tricky Dick.
After the resignation, the next time I saw him he came up and said, “I’m sorry. You were right all along.”
Death Panel Truck
@Death Panel Truck: Also too, there was a story below the fold on the “NIXON TO QUIT” edition that read “Jackson given secret funds, files show”, to accuse Scoop of being a crook, because both sides do it, doncha know.
Death Panel Truck
@NotMax: I have wingnut relatives who to this day say Nixon got shafted. I avoid talking politics with them. I have a blood pressure problem. ;)
JWL
@joel hanes: The Snowdens of yesteryear now work from home guiding drones half a world away.
Tonal Crow
Breaking news: Republicans make shit up, and the media don’t hound them for it day in and day out. Also breaking: dog bites man, and HUGE!!!!! sun rises in east.
Epicurus
@FlipYrWhig:
As classic as Clancy’s (his father’s) response: “The baby looked at you, Ralph?!?”
ottercliff
I read in a related article that Obama was flying the plane.
Tonal Crow
@ottercliff:
…BEFORE he was BORN!!!!!!!!
Uncle Cosmo
@Mark B.:
My folks (escapees from The Sticks) spent a fur piece of their reclining years watching Hee Haw reruns, & there are some immortal utterances that in passing were hammered sideways into my memory, including the discovery that got Junior Samples nominated for the Totie Fields Medal:
I can still hear them all on the porch singing, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all…”