I was twelve, going on thirteen, the summer of 1968, and my parents were imploding; the political crises on television seemed a natural backdrop to my own family’s battles. But I do remember very clearly that it was not America’s finest hour, regardless. This summer there seems to be a weird current of proto-nostalgia among certain members of the punditariat in their thirties and forties, social media addicts on all points of the political spectrum, who seem to be half-hoping that “we” (they) can finally get their very own cathartic “war” – against the white supremacists, against the uppity minorities, against the dirty hippie kids or the sclerotic monsters of the political party machines — but this time, our side will conclusively defeat the forces of evil. And we’ll all be heroes for the history books!
That’s not how history works, though. Looks like I may have to get a copy of Michael Cohen’s book…
3) there were anti-war protests, riots after the murder of MLK, the Black Power movement was beginning to supplant the civil rights movement
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) July 8, 2016
5) America had not seen this level of sustained disorder and political dysfunction since the Civil War
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) July 8, 2016
8) But the reason it's not 1968 is because the country is in a much different & better place today than it was then.
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) July 8, 2016
9) I know that's hard to imagine w/what happened this week, but one of the reasons these events resonate is because they're out of the norm
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) July 8, 2016
11) That we pay attention to it now; that we demand change – both blacks & whites – is a sign of progress
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) July 8, 2016
18) But here's another major reason why this isn't like 1968; 2016 is likely the end of the line for Wallace-ism
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) July 8, 2016
27) Also I should probably add that I wrote a book on 68 that gets at a bunch of these issues https://t.co/rQfHxYfuIq
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) July 8, 2016
Baud
Fingers crossed.
PopeRatzo
It’s only July. There’s still time.
Elizabelle
No, it’s not 1968.
But 40% of the country has its own 21st century George Wallace, replete with his own airliner.
You’d think we’d be smarter, but this is a counter-reaction to very real social progress (and some very real angst at the middle class, which is getting hollowed out).
The Dangerman
The RNC will have the riots this year if Trump picks Flynn (which means he gets dumped … and it’s on).
AnotherBruce
@Baud: I really don’t think it’s going to happen. Bernie’s finally coming around. Hopefully that takes some of the steam out of the Bros. I’m sure they’ll stage their demonstration, but I don’t think it will be violent (although I worry about rat copulation) . But yeah, fingers crossed.
Baud
@AnotherBruce:
The threat of a primary worked! #WhatBrosWouldArgue
;-)
Hal
Had a white friend pen an ode to black on black crime and people taking responsibility for their own actions, and ultimately their own deaths at the hands of police, that’s turned into one of those social media back and forths that I normally hate.
But I also decided yesterday I was tired of that same trite bullshit I see on Facebook all the time from white friends and friends of friends that gets dozens of likes and right on’s! All almost exclusively from other white folks. One big circle jerk of whitesplaining and admonishing black people to take responsibility and stop blaming others for their mistakes.
I’m of the opinion now that however small and insignificant something like a Facebook comment can be, I think it’s important for people to realize the bubble they occupy and to stop thinking everyone fucking agrees with them.
rikyrah
No, this is not 1968 for many reasons. And, we have to stand tall for 2016.
Nobody is going back.
different-church-lady
Don’t get me started on 1973.
raven
The year started for me on the DMZ in Korea with the “Blue House Raid” across the border and the capture of the Pueblo. 2000 miles south the Tet Offensive started so few even knew what was going on in the “Land of the Morning Calm”. In April MLK was killed and I received an education from some militant brothers about real alienation and resistance. In May I came home and couldn’t stand stateside duty so I managed to get into a unit going to Vietnam. In June RFK was killed and things seemed more upside down. In August we were in the final days before we shipped out and we sat in the barracks and watched the convention in Chicago, my home town. At Christmas I got a letter from my old man that one of my best friends had been killed in Operation Meade River up in “I” Corps in late November. Last week made me wonder but I still don’t think we are where we were then.
NotMax
One 1968 was more than enough to slog through, thank you very much.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Dave Weigel is tweeting the DNC platform meeting, complete with shouts of WHORES (re the rejected ban on WS bankers becoming regulators and vice versa) and RACIST over racial gerrymandering from the Bernie camp, which would pit the Dems against certain provisions of the voting rights act. So, not exactly Vietnam War/draft level grievances.
Cacti
Sorry Boomers.
It’s not the 1960s.
It hasn’t been for about a half century. Move on. ;-)
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Hal:
Right on – that’s exactly the right thing to do. Some of these people live their lives in an entire conservative bubble, and never hear a dissenting point of view.
Suzanne
I’m taking Spaen the Elder out for some retail therapy. I need a break.
Tom D
Endorsing Michael Cohen’s rehearsal of 1968: I was there, involved, and it was so much more dangerous then. It seemed as pretty much every adult in the country had taken sides — over Vietnam, over civil rights, over hippies, over the draft. As Cohen says, the execution of a black person by police would not have been news. Police departments were white guys, period. Almost everything was white guys, period. George Wallace was running for president again, for god’s sake. The great advances in criminal defense lawyering had hardly begun so arrest mostly meant conviction. We were about to get eight years of President Nixon.
Our 2016 nominating conventions haven’t happened yet, but I was in Chicago for the ’68 convention and I can assure you Chicago was worse than Cleveland or Philadelphia will be. Way worse. Both inside the convention and in the streets.
Things are diffrerent now, and they are by and large better. Miles to go and all, but things are better.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Looks like Dems are going to endorse moving marijuana off the Controlled Substance List. Smart smart smart. We already have gay marriage, but yeah, purity idiots, both parties are just the same.
NotMax
re: taking tactics from Wallace, have mentioned this previously.
Let’s go to the video, explicated by one who was there in a top level capacity.
(Tom Turnipseed has long since come over from the dark side.)
Emma
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Ye gods. I took a quick look. FFS!!!
Doug R
Do they forget that we lost Martin Luther King AND Robert Kennedy in the space of a few terrible months? AND that we got the crook Richard Nixon as president? NOT wishing for times like that again.
Punchy
So Michael Cohen likes twitter…
bystander
Yesterday’s coverage on MSNBC hit new lows of narrative fabrication and fearmongering. At one point, when it was still believed there multiple shooters, the talkinghead – Brian Williams? – pondered whether this signaled the emergence of “urban armies”.
Anne Laurie
@Cacti:
But it’s not the Boomers I see pushing the “1968 do-over” fever dreams — it’s the forty-somethings on the NYTimes op-ed pages and the ‘young’ folk at NRO. Guys (almost entirely men! funny that) who totally would’ve resisted the draft & broken LBJ / served in Nam with abiding honor / lectured those rioting Negroes into middle-class compliance / smashed the system and instituted a permanent utopia, if only they’d been 15 years older. “We” pig-in-the-python babies fvcked a lot of stuff up, but it wasn’t a world we made that was breaking apart in 1968 — and we’re not the ones pining to LARP that summer over for media litigation purposes.
Tom Q
Thanks for this. It’s been a godawful week, but the need of many, especially in the media, to elevate this to Armageddon speaks more to their desire for hype than anything like dispassionate analysis.
I was 16 in 1968, and it did seem like society was coming apart — riots and assassinations; an incumbent president being forced to withdraw from the election race. And one very big thing WAS coming apart: the Roosevelt presidential coalition, which had ruled since 1932 (with even Ike championing New Deal programs), collapsed, and 57% of voters went for conservative candidates — partly as a result of accumulating forces, and partly in reaction to the events of the year.
This year, in contrast, we have, despite attempts to hype the Sanders primary showing, a relatively easy win for the candidate promising to continue the trajectory of a reasonably popular president, and polls showing her with 5-10 point national leads. These things wouldn’t be happening if chaos were underway.
One little thing that’s truly bugged me about coverage the past two days: people citing the fact that “more police died Thursday night than any day since 9/11”. This strikes me as one of those stats that’s factual on its face but designed to mislead. Yes, technically more police — 5 — died than on any day since the 24 on 9/11. But I daresay there’ve been days since where 2 or 3 police died, and that’s a more logical place to group these 5 than with the freakishly high number from 9/11 — unless your point is a form of hype or scare-mongering.
EBT
Let me counter all the awful news with a nice little anecdote. The restaurant where my roommate works hired a new kid one of his first jobs at 19 it sounds like. Kid identifies as a Neo Nazi, apparently his grandparents were SS or some much. After a month working there he is now seriously questioning all of the values he was raised with.
burnspbesq
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Berniacs should learn a little history. One of the best SEC chairs ever was the first one: Joe Kennedy. The revolving door brings talent into government that government would otherwise never be able to attract.
patrick II
Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
People were marching against the war, for women’s rights, for an end to racism, and it seemed reason would prevail. I thought the Civil Rights Bill was so righteous that after it was enacted people would see the error of their ways and change. I did not yet know Nixon and the “Southern Strategy”, or how deep the roots of intolerance and hatred ran. Nearly sixty years later, in some part because of our history and in some part because it is to the advantage of some to continue to advocate racism, fear and hatred, for their own gain, we still struggle with the “created equal” part of our nations charter.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Relevant catchphrase for them from old time radio.
“Vas you dere, Charlie?”
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@burnspbesq:
History is for corporate tools of the sell out Establishment.
burnspbesq
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Has anyone figured out how to do that without Congressional action?
D58826
Barak Obama would have been riding in the back of the bus and not AF1 in 1968. And while I detest his judicial views, if Clarence Thomas had tried to move into a house in Va. with his white wife he would have been hung from a lamppost. So yes way better than 1968 but still a bitter week. Maybe just the last spasms of America’s original sin beginning to die.
smith
@Tom Q: I agree that the context now is very different. I was 21 in 1968, and remember it as one of the worst years of my life. It seemed like the momentum that had been gathering to try to make the world more just and less violent was being slapped back, again and again and again, until there seemed to be no way out. People recall the turmoil here in the US, but also remember that in 1968 there were hopeful beginnings of what looked like a peaceful revolution in Czechoslovakia, a precursor of the Velvet Revolution, that was crushed by a Soviet invasion. It seemed like the hard lines that had been drawn everywhere in the world were going to hold for all time.
patrick II
@Cacti:
Yet the same battle against racism and unnecessary war with the same type (and sometimes the exact same) people continues.
History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
burnspbesq
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Most of us corporate tools of the sellout establishment wete once as naive, ignorant, and gullible as the Berniacs. I still have my McGovern button as proof.
Jeff Spender
Wait, what’s this about Bernie’s camp and racial gerrymandering?
gene108
@burnspbesq:
The pursuit of profits is evil. Anyone who pursued profits is corrupted. QED there is no talent in the private sector that is not evil and corrupted.
There are quite a few closet Marxists in this country. They just do not have a viable organized group to let their ideas out to the masses.
sharl
Ahhh, “Speechboy”. I hope his book is better than some of his dumbass tweets. Those tweets of his on the bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz Afghanistan come to mind.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@burnspbesq:
What’s Congress?/Berniac
mohagan
@NotMax: I was 16 in 1968 also and that’s a year I would never want to see repeated. As someone (Hunter Thompson?) once described it – a Pinto of a year.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Jeff Spender:
Some from Bernie’s camp didn’t understand that one of the benefits to Dems of racial gerrymandering gives more representation to southern AAs.
debbie
@raven:
I’m a couple years younger than you, but I can remember watching the same-night coverage of Kennedy’s assassination and thinking that along with everything else that had gone on in 1968, the world in fact was falling apart.
In the midst of last week, I did think it was 1968 all over again, but upon reflection, I’ve come to agree that it really isn’t exactly the same. But this still sucks major.
mike in dc
2016: GOP nominates a faux-populist outsider candidate running on a Wallace-esque message; loses horribly(god willing)
2020: GOP nominates a “true believer” conservative candidate running a standard dog-whistle campaign; also loses badly
2024: GOP nominates a woman or Person of Color saying stuff about diversity and inclusion but basically it’s the same policy platform; plus there are still congressional candidates and surrogates running the usual dog-whistle song and dance; loses by a smaller amount
2028: GOP nominates a moderate RINO squish on a platform with the absolute minimum possible civil rights policy changes to get 50.1% of the popular vote; possibly wins
That’s basically the scenario by which the GOP finally joins us in the 21st Century(or at least the early 1990s).
Emma
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I have tried and tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. I was a young stupid idealist once upon a time too. But these folks are just pig ignorant (the young) and/or pining for a impossible solution (the older ones). It’s wearying to keep up and damn near impossible to take seriously.
NotMax
@efgoldman
Recall, too, that among the first people to be charged with violating the barely months old Civil Rights Act were the Chicago 7 and Bobby Seale. Judge Hoffman was quintessentially antediluvian.
1969, but the ending of Easy Rider was not pulled out of thin air.
Jeff Spender
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Well isn’t that just stupid as all hell.
Cat48
I don’t think Bernie & Gang can be quiet thru the convention bc they have to show how pure they are. Also, Black Lives Matter will have to make noise somehow. They have promised to anyway. It’s not 1968. Trump’s racism, along with the crazy House sound like they’re still living in 1968. I try to avoid them, but not always possible.
raven
@debbie: Strangely, it was the first time I did acid.
eta, I was 18.
Davis X. Machina
@Emma:
@gene108:, et al.
1968 was also the time of Les evenements de Mai and Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible.
smith
Also in 1968: the Weatherman bombing in Ann Arbor, and act that served to undermine in the mind of the public any moral standing the antiwar movement might have had.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Emma:
Yeah, it’s hard having lived through all these decades of politics having paid close attention seeing what has and hasn’t changed in light of how some things – like human nature – never change, then watch ahistoricity and the consequential failure to learn the hard lessons that others have learned the hard way take hold again, in yet another election cycle. Frustrating as hell.
raven
@NotMax: Or Electraglide in Blue
raven
@smith: baloney, that’s what this wingnuts would have you believe.
David ?▶️Hillary/Harley Quinn 2016▶️? Koch
The septuagenarian bernouts aren’t rioting.
They’ll break a hip.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Jeff Spender:
Weigel said that the Clinton camp should have done some preparation for that, but, Berniacs are mostly white purity ponies so probably don’t have any feel for the racial implications of things they believe, because you know, purity before coalitions.
smith
@NotMax: Yeah, shackled and gagged in the courtroom — there’s an image of America’s greatness for you.
divF
@mohagan: I was also 16 that year. Our family concerns were a cross of personal and political – my father spent the year as a platoon sergeant in Vietnam, building reinforced concrete bunkers.
I was on a backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail the week of the DNC, so I missed the immediate impact of seeing that happen on national television.
smith
@raven: Maybe now, but my recollection is that it was a pretty mainstream opinion at the time.
Barb2
1968 – Bumper stickers on so many cars – America Love it or leave it
That was the SF Bay Area.
Black Panthers held first major press conference at Oakland Community College. UC Berkeley – Free speech movement. That started a couple of years earlier. Hippies everywhere. Feminists were sick and tired of text books using only male pronouns. Little things matter.
Hey youngsters we/you need to remember history because history does repeat (with added embellishments).
Equality for all? That goal has not been reached.
Adults wanted the youth to be mini adults. Kids today are fighting the same battles.
The draft. That’s the big difference. There was a huge draft induction center in Oakland. Lots of protests.
Depended on where you lived in 1968 – there was greater awareness of the war and social injustices in the SF Bay Area – but not so much in other places in the US.
Something is happening now – I’m not exactly sure what. (Fragments of lyrics of a song from that era – which could be a theme for this era.)
In 1968 there were a whole lot of angry white guys – they had the bumper stickers: Love it or Leave it.
Kathleen
I was a college student in 1968. I attended a predominantly white, Catholic, conservative college in Portland, Oregon. There were no anti war demonstrations on campus, so I missed the turbulence experienced by many other students on their college campuses. But I was raised by Democratic parents who held strong opinions so I was not politically unaware or apathetic. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr and the prospect of Richard Nixon with his “coded” “law and order” campaign and the rise of George Wallace terrified me more than anything. To me Nixon and Wallace embodied the malignant cancer of racial hatred in our national consciousness that had the potential to destroy the country. I understood (as well as any sheltered white college kid could) why African Americans rioted in the cities and was aware of the conclusions drawn by the Kerner Commission.
The cumulative effect of all those fear energies in play culminated in my thinking that the world was going to end – that some horrible force was going to overtake us – the morning I woke up and heard about RFK’s murder. And for some reason I’ve felt this summer to be kind of like 1968 redux in some ways. But I agree with Raven and Michael Cohen. The malignant virulence of Nixon and Wallace are being played out byTrump and the Rethuglicans, which scares me (in truth the Rethuglicans of the past 45 years have never stopped scaring me). But in many ways I think we are in a better place though we still have so far to go. On a negative note, one of the biggest differences is the role of the media and how it has contributed to the deterioration of the public’s grasp of “facts” While the media were not perfect and dominated by white men the broadcast media at least had boundaries around what was considered reasonable and rational behavior or views. I got the distinct impression while watching the news that the gate keepers considered Barry Goldwater to be an extremist and some reporters included term “extreme right wing” when describing candidates.
I recall someone somewhere posting a clip of Dr. King’s appearance on Meet the Press in the early or mid 60’s, when Lawrence Spivak was the host. The tone of the conversation was courteous, respectful and somber. The questions asked of Dr. King reflected the prejudices and fears that white people had but they were not posed in the cutesy, glib “gotcha” manner that characterizes the current cable/network TV spew. So while much has changed for the better, I fear the effects of today’s media is every bit as (if not more) toxic and scary as the Nixon and Wallace campaigns.
Jeff Spender
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: A lot of the Bernie people I know are all too willing to throw the Obama coalition under the bus. You see it in their blithe dismissals of the Black and Hispanic caucuses, but more so in that they just don’t seem to give a shit about minority issues except the ones that are the most visibale, like the shootings.
Them being able to have semi-decent representation? Never even comes up.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Bernie guy Ben Jealous got the platform to unanimously support his platform language re police reform – good language – so that’s a good thing.
Roger Moore
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Who says they don’t understand? I suspect that plenty of them know that perfectly well and are willing to throw those southern AAs under the bus in pursuit of their platonic ideal of the way things should be.
Jeff Spender
@Roger Moore: You see them sometimes arguing that the southern state shouldn’t count in terms of delegates. When you ask why, some say because they’re more “conservative.”
I think most people see through that.
Mary G
I’m close to AL’s age, 12 in 1968 and no, this year doesn’t seem as bad. Of course, I’m not 12, either. I always laughed when younger people would be like “wow, the 60s were so cool.” I was scared most of the time. TV news was so different. We saw Civil Rights activists beaten, set upon by snarling German shepherds, knocked down with fire hoses, and disappear in suspicious circumstances. Reporters roamed Vietnam and sent back footage of men dying in graphic ways. It felt like someone was always being assassinated. The only good thing was the music.
raven
@Mary G: The dope was pretty good.
? Martin
I was born in 1968, and I’ve long suspected that the shit going down the year combined with having a new kid is what drove my mom to be a Republican.
raven
@efgoldman: And the VVAW turned them on their heads. No one had ever seen vets of a war protest it while it was going on.
MomSense
@Suzanne:
Have fun!
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Jeff Spender:
Privilege. Starting last January when my FB feed started filling up with Bernie hagiography about his perfectness, his purity, and his most moral outrage, I realized that they believe Bernie invented all this anti-capitalism anti-Establishment stuff, and they do believe that racism and sexism are distractions, thereby dismissing those things, failing to appreciate that those issues are the fertile soil for economic exploitation. Oh well. We have come a long way from 1968.
chopper
ugh. oasis aint the beatles and this aint the 60’s.
smith
@efgoldman: I just looked it up, and found that it was the White Panthers who carried out the 1968 bombings in Ann Arbor. As you note, the Weathermen followed shortly after. Whoever was responsible, though, some elements of the left wing antiwar movement turned violent at that time and it made the cultural confrontation much more complex and much darker.
Cat48
@David ?▶️Hillary/Harley Quinn 2016▶️? Koch: They won’t riot, but I bet they scream a lot. Heh
delk
My mother’s father passed away in ’68. They had to go to Colorado and left me, my brother, and my sister with our 17 year old cousin.
She took us to the convention because she thought it would be a good place to meet guys.
Needless to say that was her last baby-sitting gig.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@delk:
Amazing story. LOL. Adventures in Babysitting.
Villago Delenda Est
Another good book that doesn’t focus on ’68 but certainly includes it is Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. Which was featured here, on this here blog, with Rick Perlstein taking questions and making comments a few years back.
Emma
@delk: Oh God. OHMYGAWD. I can JUST hear your Mom.
Iowa Old Lady
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Now that was an unexpectedly fun movie.
Jerzy Russian
@divF:
Do you mean you had a mistress at age 16, or were you literally hiking?
I don’t remember much of 1968, since I was a toddler at the time. My earliest political memory was when my Mom made me watch Nixon’s resignation speech on the T.V. because it was important.
Uncle Cosmo
@The Dangerman: There’s a story over on NBC News noting that there are 3 ways to deny Drumpf the nomination at the convention: Release pledged delegates from their pledges, require a supermajority (i.e., >62.4%) of delegate votes to nominate, or allow pledged delegates to abstain from voting. IMO the least obviously chicanerous* maneuver, but also the one least likely to work even if implemented, is the last.
I’ve been trying (& failing) to determine whether the Thuglican convention rules require a delegate to actively cast a vote for a candidate in any specified ballot, & specifically whether the rules require that a delegate pledged to a candidate on the first ballot to actively cast a vote for that candidate–or whether a pledged delegate could simply abstain (or vote the equivalent of “present”). The Wall Street Urinal (not linking to that pissoir) thinks that only 890 of Drumpf’s 1.542 delegates (pledged by primary results & otherwise declared, one presumes) are personally loyal to him, which is 347 short of the 1,237 needed to win the nomination. Convince 60% of the less-than-loyal to abstain on the first ballot & he fails to obtain a majority; & no one is pledged on the second or subsequent ballots.
Could they abstain? Couldn’t a Trumpster heading a state delegation simply report the results per the primary results? What happens then if one of the state’s delegates requests the chair to poll the delegation? Does the convention chair (ZEGS, last I looked) allow it or ignore it? If he allows it, what happens if a number of delegates refuse to vote, or vote “present”? Does he allow that?
If I’m running the KeinDrumpf campaign I’d be pushing for rules (1) requiring a majority of all possible delegate votes to win the nomination, (2) allowing any delegate (pledged or not) to abstain, and (3) requiring the convention chairman to poll any delegation at the request of one of its delegates (i.e., remove his discretion). You’d kind of have to have all 3, & It’d still be tight. (Say #1 fails & a majority of all delegates voting is sufficient to nominate. Even if all 1,542 – 890 = 652 of Drumpf’s allegedly less-than-committed delegates abstained on the first ballot, and only they did, it would take 1,237 – (652/2) = 911 votes to win the nomination. How hard would it be for the Drumpfsters to persuade, cajole or outright threaten enough abstainers to un-abstain? Or to shut down the mike of anyone requesting a poll of a delegation? Or [absent rule change #3] for the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver, in the interest of whatever’s left of party unity [or whatever the Drumpfsters have offered him], simply not to recognize such a request??)
Buy popcorn futures!
* Not a word but IMHO oughta be!
J R in WV
@raven:
I graduated high school in 1968, and after a driving vacation with the family I went away to college enrolling in the second summer session. So I got to watch Bobby Kennedy’s assassination on TV with college students. Then I got to watch the DNC police riots in Chicago in the TV lounge with college students.
In 1969 I worked for the anti-war movement. I actually met Gus Hall with other college student activists, one night in Washington in a little apartment. For those not up to speed, Gus Hall was chairman of the communist party, so I was in a position to know that the communists were against the Vietnam War. No one could have been surprised by that fact, really. I didn’t realize the meaning of that meeting for – at least another decade! Oh, yeah, my draft lottery number, which determined the order in which young men got drafted, was …. humm, 72, or 79, something in there. Which meant I got drafted first.
In 1970, early in 1970 I got the letter about reporting for a physical… I enlisted in the Navy, which mostly ensured a warm dry bunk and 3 hot meals a day. Oh, yes, very few swabbies were getting shot at.
1968 SUCKED badly, killings of our leaders, riots, war in Asia… it sucked bad! Not that things couldn’t get worse, again, but not yet, at least.
Cat48
@? Martin:
It was a scary year, but not scary enough to make me join the GOP. :). It’s usually loyalty to Lincoln, etc.
gene108
@NotMax:
????????
Not sure what the Chicago 7 and Bobby Seale had to do with the Civil Rights Act.
I thought the CRA was passed in 1964 and the first lawsuit filed under it was by airline stewardesses.
stinger
@EBT: That’s really good to hear.
TriassicSands
@Doug R:
I’m no fan of Tricky Dick, but he was a mixed bag. Crook? Yes. Paranoid? Yes. But also a pragmatist and the list of positive things that happened while he was president — many with his signature — is hardly inconsequential. By comparison, George W. Bush was much, much worse. He had no major accomplishments to offset the worst foreign policy decision in American history.
I don’t pine for the days of Nixon — I was in my twenties and hated him intensely — but he wasn’t the worst the GOP could manage by a long shot. Reagan was also far worse, and any of the potential Republican nominees in 2016 would have been worse than Nixon.
rikyrah
If Critics Think Death Threats Will Stop Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby, They Don’t Know Mosby
Tensions remain high as the prosecutor’s office finds itself under siege by threats and taunts from racists.
BY: ERICKA BLOUNT DANOI
The death threats come daily to the office of Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby as the trials of police officers in the death of Freddie Gray continue to go on.
There’s a sameness to the threats, which accuse Mosby of racism, of being crazy, and arguing that she should be “hung” for daring to prosecute six police officers over the death of Gray, who was in their custody when he died.
“YOU are a racist criminal! YOU are a worthless racist [expletive],” read one of the threatening emails.
“You are out of your mind. When the violence starts and they turn their anger on you, maybe the officers will be a little slow to react. You are a cop hater. Marilyn Mosby is nothing but a [expletive] Black Panther [expletive]. She should be hung,” read another.
There have been many more threats to Mosby since the indictment of the six police officers in the death of Gray, including people coming to her house and concocting fake news stories in which her husband is murdered and police officers do nothing.
“The threats have been turned over to the Baltimore Police Department and I have heard the FBI is investigating,” Rochelle Ritchie, Mosby’s spokeswoman tells The Root. “I guess some people wonder if she will be deterred from seeking justice in Baltimore City because of this. My answer to that is no. She will continue to seek justice for all victims.”
pat
The biggest differences between now and 1968:
It was mentioned in a previous thread, but the “Saturday night special” seems to have been the most prevalent weapon. Hard to do a mass murder with that. No AR15s available.
And everyone watched the same news shows and read the same newspapers. And I believe there was a quaint thing called the “fairness doctrine” so that one news outlet could not become all one thing all the time.
David ?▶️Hillary/Harley Quinn 2016▶️? Koch
People are such pessimitists.
When I think of 1968, I think of Joe Namath and the Jets, a 7-year old Barack Obama working side-by-side with Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers in the streets of Chicago, and the dramatic presidential run of Pat Paulsen.
I will say the old newsreel footage of Bill Daley and Abe Ribbicoff calling each other names and Gore Vidal humiliating Bill Buckley is a lot of fun.
CarolDuhart2
Changes for the better despite this horrible week compared to 1968 (I was 11).
Loretta Lynch. Attorney General. Back in 1968 if she was working at the Department of justice she would have been at best a secretary, typing memos and pouring coffee. For two reasons. Instead we get to see diversity in action: her, Obama, and the Dallas Police chief. Back in 1968 allies in law enforcement were few and far between. While there’s a long way to go, it’s not back when black people in any authority was very rare, and so the feeling nobody cared and nobody knew led to horrific riots.
There were weapons of war deployed on city streets back then. I remember lying on the floor in a darkened apartment, fearing flying bullets. This week, not a tank in sight despite massive protests, and no riots either.
debbie
@raven:
I was 15. Old enough to be angry, but with no ability to explain why.
@smith:
Before I’d heard about the Weatherman bombings, I took myself to an SDS meeting up at Ohio State University. I’d interviewed their leaders for my government class and, aside from the boys’ cutenesses, I liked that they were fighting for change. So I took a seat in the back and listened. Within 10 minutes, they were talking about carrying guns and making bombs, and I realized I couldn’t possibly do that shit. I snuck out and pretty much gave up on anything ever changing.
rikyrah
Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and the Hypocritical Screams of White America After the Dallas Cop Shootings
On Dec. 14, 2012, when a shooter entered a Newtown, Conn., elementary school and fatally shot 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7, for many white people, there was a realization that no one was safe. It happened again Thursday after a gunman opened fire in Dallas. But it’s not going to last.
BY: LAWRENCE WARE
Posted: July 9, 2016
………………………………………..
To be fully niggerized is to be vulnerable with no expectation of justice; to see black life taken unjustly and wait for the acquittal, the apology, and for life to move on. I’m tired of white tears being shed when black life is taken, only for them to dry up as CNN moves on to the next news story.
It happens over and over again. It happened with Trayvon Martin. Then with Eric Garner. It’s now happening with Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. In response to Dallas, many who were deafeningly silent in the wake of black death are now vocal in their calls for peace and understanding. They had nothing to say when black folks were dying, but suddenly they are social activists concerned about justice. Stop it. You’re no ally. You’re no accomplice. You’re no lover of justice. You’re a spectator to black suffering. We are little more than a tragic movie that brings up emotion but fades from mind once you’ve left the theater. While you may empathize with our struggle, make no mistake: You aren’t a part of it. You aren’t mistreated, threatened, accosted, embarrassed, beaten and held against your will because of your skin.
Maybe it’s the church in us, but after tragedies, we are expected to forgive. In fact, many of us feel compelled to forgive. I do not. Not any more. This criminal-justice system is not for us. It has never been. We are foolish to expect justice. If we are lucky, there may be a slap on the wrist, and possibly a public apology. There will definitely be a press conference, and an empathic appeal for peace.
Forgiving a person does no good if the system remains the same. We need policy, not a spectacle of black suffering that ends with a proclamation of forgiveness that absolves the system of responsibility. I’m not one for house nigger and field nigger analogies, but the constant appeals for calm and forgiveness sound mighty house-ish. I am able to condemn the killings of black men at the hands of those who wield state power without praising the targeting of police in Dallas. The same institutional racism that resulted in the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile could have led to the death of Mark Hughes if black Twitter had not worked diligently to fact-check the irresponsible targeting of a man lawfully exercising his Second Amendment rights.
debbie
@raven:
And cheap! And non-lethal!
rikyrah
From Jennifer Rubin of all people:
Ten mistakes Reince Priebus made
July 8
When the postmortem on the GOP 2016 presidential race is conducted there will be plenty of blame to go around. Candidates ran shoddy races, attacking one another and hanging around far too long. Voters gave way to anger, nihilism and rank prejudice. Elected leaders were reticent to speak up But it was Chairman Reince Priebus who will long be remembered for his series of spectacular errors. To review:
1. Priebus never understood that Trump had neither the means nor the inclination to run as a third candidate. Spend his own money?! Priebus put the entire party at Trump’s mercy by creating a suicide pact (the pledge) with Trump. Like the JCPOA, once the pledge was in place it was vital to keep it there. Priebus then began a dangerous approach in which appeasement, rationalization and out-and-out water-carrying were the rule.
2. Rather than going on bended knee to Trump to extract the pledge, Priebus should have used leverage (free debate time, access to RNC fundraising, rhetorical support and defense from the RNC) to demand Trump cease attacks on fellow Republicans, improve his tone and show some understanding of both policy and political mechanics. If Al Gore had shown up to run in the GOP race would Priebus have sat idly by? And yet that’s essentially what he did when a man who had no particular loyalty to the party moved in for a hostile takeover.
3. Pledges for any candidate were a bad idea. Kevin Williamson wrote recently: “The Republicans who promised to support the nominee no matter who made an error in judgment. That’s forgivable. But now it is time to admit the error, step up, and do the right thing.” Explicitly putting partisan loyalty over conscience, conservative principles and reciprocal loyalty from the candidate was another grave error from Priebus.
Keith G
It was in the late 60s…8 or 9…when one of the squires of our township (ie old white guy white with a name that appeared in several places/parks/roads) paid his first visit ever to our humble farm house. The short of it was that he wanted my parents to be in agreement with an informal community pact that would keep nonwhites from being offered the chance to rent or purchase property in our rural NW Ohio community.
Mother thought that was nonsense. Mom was an unapologetic New Deal Democrat and the squire was a Goldwater Republican, so Mr. W. Woods (a perennial member of the school board and often a rotating president) ever made it in the door to complete his pitch.
A lot of things have gotten better, some a lot better, some only a little. I do think we are on the frontier of advancement in many areas**
and part of the negative acting out we are experiencing is because of that.
** We still have to retool our concept of capitalism as our system to distribute scarce resources because the old understandings are not going to cut it.
rikyrah
Ben Phillips
@benphillips76
Everything about this is perfect.
Serena Williams recites Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.”
debbie
@rikyrah:
How about that Serena winning both singles and doubles! And with people having begun to talk about her decline! (Insert Team America’s Fuck Yeah!)
rikyrah
The 2nd Amendment Is So White: What the Past 24 Hours Have Taught Me About Black People’s Right to Bear Arms
Black America yet again bears witness to state-sanctioned violence at the hands of trigger-happy rogue cops—one in Louisiana, a state that has open-carry laws, and the other in Minnesota, where the victim had a permit to conceal and carry firearms.
BY: PRESTON MITCHUM
Posted: July 7, 2016
In less than 24 hours, two black men have been killed by police officers even though the Second Amendment indicates that they should have been protected. Black America yet again bears witness to state-sanctioned violence at the hands of trigger-happy rogue cops—one in Louisiana, a state that has open-carry laws, and the other in Minnesota, where the victim had a permit to conceal and carry firearms. The truth, however, is that the Second Amendment (and subsequent open-carry laws) does not apply to black people in America.
This past Monday, America celebrated its 240th birthday. We rejoiced, we attended cookouts and we were hopeful that equality could be within reach. Then, the next day, with the senseless killing of 37-year-old Alton Sterling—a black man who was shot several times while being held on the ground by police outside a Baton Rouge, La., convenience store—we realized yet again that “liberty and justice for all” does not apply to black and brown people.
I watched the killing of Sterling on Wednesday morning. I rarely watch these videos because they are triggering and it immediately becomes traumatizing to see unmovable, bloodied black bodies, but because it was shared so many times, I felt it was for a reason. It wasn’t.
The facts appear pretty clear. Two white Baton Rouge police officers responded to a 911 call about a man who reportedly possessed a gun. In the 48-second video, the officers tackle Sterling, one straddling his legs while the other kneels to his left. Sterling is visible from the chest up, his back on the ground, with his hands behind his back, and you can hear the interaction, along with screams in the background from onlookers not knowing what to expect. Officers can be heard saying, “He’s got a gun! Gun!” and “You f–king move, I swear to God.”
Seconds later, gunshots rang out. Sterling is shot in the head execution-style. The police officer originally on Sterling’s legs is now on the pavement with a gun pointed at the victim’s head. Blood is spattered on Sterling’s chest and is also on a nearby car.
Despite initial reports that Sterling possessed a gun, the newest video may highlight some inconsistencies. But even before specific details were released, I reminded myself that Louisiana is one of 45 states with open-carry laws (with varying restrictions), meaning that he would have the right to possess a gun in many public places throughout the state. But open-carry laws didn’t apply to Sterling because he is black. This caused me to examine why his possession of a gun, in a state that permits it, would require police backup. It doesn’t.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: Rethuglicans cannot help it. They are far more loyal to their party, and its regressive ideology, than they are to the country itself.
They are scum, and they are stewing in their own juices right now. I say turn up the fire. Fuck them.
Anya
@David ?▶️Hillary/Harley Quinn 2016▶️? Koch:
is that the same year when he was recruited by the CIA?
RandomMonster
I don’t know where I fit in the demographics of Balloon Juice readership, but I just want to say it’s great reading what folks here relate about what they were doing and remember in 1968. I was 4 years old, so my political insight was a little limited, to say the least. But I grew up in the cultural aftermath of that. Anyway, just trying to say that I value this forum for a lot of reasons, and this is one of those weeks where everyone should embrace some historical perspective.
Gelfling545
@Cacti:
We’ve mostly been the ones saying it is not much like that time. It’s those who were in the cradle or yet a gleam in their parents’ eyes who are trying to make the case for similarity.
ThresherK
@rikyrah: What a kick-ass, in charge person Serena is. (Plus all those titles don’t hurt.)
There are many performing / creative / athlete sorts who really shouldn’t word one about anything near politics or news. Glad to hear some of them got their heads on straight.
debbie
Has anyone pointed to this interview yesterday with RBG?
John Revolta
@efgoldman: I was a high school kid in Chicago, and there were local news crews on the scene. We got to see live feeds of tear gas and cops busting heads. And the chanting: The Whole World is Watching. The Whole World is Watching. It was scary shit.
Baud
@ThresherK: agree. One of the greats.
@debbie: she is right.
Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter
@TriassicSands: I disagree, and I imagine the people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia might too. Signing Democratic bills on domestic issues doesn’t make up for it. Reagan and Bush, bad as they were, just don’t have the same death toll as Nixon.
Villago Delenda Est
@Anya: I thought that was the year he was part of the first colony on Mars.
Roger Moore
@rikyrah:
While I think Rubin identifies all the ways Trump could have- and probably should have- been stopped, she’s assuming that it’s the role of the RNC chairman to make that kind of call. The underlying problem with everything she’s talking about is that RNC PR BS was fundamentally hired to be a functionary, not a mover and shaker. If the Republicans wanted and needed a national committee chairman who was going to be a real power and make serious decisions that could cut people out of the race, they needed to appoint somebody who explicitly had the power to do that and who had the personality to use that power.
Uncle Cosmo
@rikyrah: Nice catch! I found Point The Fifth particularly illuminating:
Da phuq? The only one of “the party’s values” that RNC PR BS didn’t show blind obedience to is “Never admit our bedrock despicable beliefs outright; always communicate them in codewords & dogwhistles to the proper audience.”
Mnemosyne
@Hal:
I mentioned yesterday that I had a long conversation with a Latina co-worker yesterday who I’m pretty sure had assumed that I was a typical clueless why can’t Those People behave themselves? middle-class white person. I think she was at least a little relieved to know I wasn’t a total moron and had actually heard of Michael Brown, John Crawford, etc. ad nauseum.
Mnemosyne
Testing? I think the mysterious vanishing post problem is ongoing.
ETA: I had responded to another commenter, but it wasn’t exactly deathless prose, so no huge loss.
Pamela
@Hal: Love this! Back in the day I went to a workshop at the YWCA about racism and one of the things I clearly recall even now is that it’s our job to say something when we see/hear it; that’s how you begin to create change (however slow)..
JGabriel
@different-church-lady:
Or 1979-80.
Actually, come to think of it, the entire decade of the 70’s pretty much sucked – aside from funk, punk and new wave, of course, and some decent movies.
Keith P.
Just came back from the Asian megamarket. I’m always blown away by how much cheaper stuff is there than at, say, HEB Central Market. I might pay 8 for a bottle of star anise at the latter, but can buy a bag 4 times as big for $1.50 at the Asian market. Ditto for Sichuan peppercorns ($4.79 for 14 oz vs. $15 for 4oz on Amazon).
Cat48
Twitter seems outraged as white privelege is trending, Obama just landed in Spain, & the Dallas PD is under threat from anonymous threat. They’ve gone to a parking garage & ordered no video during operation. No shots fired as yet.
germy
Man pulls gun on off-duty cop… and is arrested later at home.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jerzy Russian:
My first clear* political memory is also my earliest TV memory — Eisenhower’s inauguration, January 20, 1953. I had been vaguely aware of the 1948 Truman-Dewey campaign, and accompanied my mother to her polling place on various election days (it was in the gym of my school, which I thought was just the strangest thing!). And I knew that most of my adult family were “I Like Ike” and my mother was secretly “Madly for Adlai,” but they were really just names to me. Anyhow, our school (or at least my 4th-grade teacher) thought it was important that their students watch the swearing-in so they arranged with the few families that owned television sets to have several kids come over and watch the ceremonies. (I went to Bonnie Svec’s house; how strange the details that stay with one 60-odd years later!) I had never seen a TV before apart from displays in shop windows, but later that same year my family rented a television in order to watch the Coronation, and — like millions of other households who did exactly the same thing for the same reason, got properly hooked and bought our own set soon thereafter.
* I have snapshot memories of things like the Marshall Plan, only because my babysitter got married and went with her husband to Berlin as a volunteer. And I remember the end of WWII, but only because my uncle came home. The end of the war per se meant nothing to three-year-old me.
gene108
@debbie:
Last year or the year before, Serena was the oldest woman to win Wimbledon. The only other tennis player, I can recall playing well into her thirties was Matina Navratilova and by the time she was Serena’s age she had clearly lost a step.
Serena’s dominance at her age is unprecedented. She’s playing the best tennis of her career, when most people in the sport have retired.
chelsea530
@Elizabelle:
It’s the economy, stupid. (not you, of course)
Thanks to eight years of Bush/Cheney and a Congress that has been in Republican control when it matters.
Add to that the fear of “the other,” it’s pretty gratifying that people seem to be fed up, not with government, but with REPUBLICANS, who suck at doing anything that benefits most people.
We’re going to be okay.
smith
@John Revolta: Another interesting perspective on the 1968 convention is the movie, Medium Cool. It’s a fictional story set against the background of the real-life convention, shot as it happened, including on the receiving end of tear gas in Grant Park. I had the pleasure of attending a showing of it which also included a live interview with Studs Terkel, who has a friend of the movie’s director Haskell Wexler. Studs made some of the behind the scenes arrangements to sneak Wexler’s film crews into the convention hall, as well as introductions to people who helped him get locations at various sites in Chicago.
Tom Q
@JGabriel: “Actually, come to think of it, the entire decade of the 70’s pretty much sucked – aside from funk, punk and new wave, of course, and some decent movies. ”
…make that GREAT movies. Such a great decade for film, the rest of my life at the movies has suffered as anti-climax.
Cat48
@Pamela:
Race relations training can bring awareness to people that they’re offending other people. When I worked at Ft. Campbell, there was a lady who kept using the Nword, whispering it, but it was offensive. I finally complained & they sent her to Race Relations Training. This was in 1970 and she was furious, but it worked.
germy
Shell
I pretty much wore out my copy of the cast album of ‘Hair.’
wjs
Aw, hell no.
There have been two major and very racist developments this year. One, Trump, and two, the white privilege of the Bernie Sanders voters who decried Hillary Clinton’s wins in the deep south and her high support among people of color. These two racist points of view come from vastly different ideological places in our politics. Resenting people of color for anything at all, no matter how silly it may seem, no matter how un-scientific it really is, and no matter how stupid it might be politically is not going to go out of style after this cycle. It will keep coming back even after all the old white men die in the next twelve to twenty years. There are way too many privileged bros who will keep it alive.
Chris
At the risk of derailing a perfectly good thread onto hair-splitting,
Really? It was my impression that the Great Depression still ranked ahead of the sixties when it came to the breakdown of society and the near-breakdown of the governing system.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Indeed it is smart to move marijuana off Schedule I. Decriminalizing it nation-wide (with careful regulation and taxation and making sure that monopolies aren’t given to political friends) would probably be good too.
Part of Nixon’s landslide in 1972 was due, at least in part, to a few smart political moves that appealed to young people: 1) the 26th Amendment. 2) The winding-down of the Draft (which ended in December 1972) and the Vietnam war (after he ran the war machine in overdrive for far too long). 3) the lowering of the minimum drinking age in many states with #1.
If we want young people to turn out to vote, it helps a great deal to address things they care about. Reduced/eliminated indebtedness for College; a livable minimum wage; pay equity; sensible immigration policies; sensible environmental policies; and decriminalized pot are all things that lots of young people care about.
We could see a lot of progress starting in January if we keep our eye on the prize and turn out to vote.
Cheers,
Scott.
p.a.
’68 Nixon
’00 Bush
’16 Trump
History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.
Mnemosyne
@Davis X. Machina:
What all y’all said. 1968 was a year of worldwide turmoil not restricted to the USA.
Mnemosyne
@smith:
“Look out, Haskell, it’s real!” is a warning from a crew member than can famously be heard during one of the scenes filmed during the riots.
Chris
@efgoldman:
Yep. And having been raised entirely in a post-Civil-Rights-Act world in some ways makes it easier for them to be that way, not harder. They’ve been brought up to believe that “yes, all right, things used to suck for blacks, but then Martin Luther King ended racism by having a dream, and the only problem we’ve had since then are all the black racists and politically correct whites playing the race card and now it’s whites who are the disenfranchised minority.”
Frank Wilhoit
No, the country is in a much different and worse place than it was in 1968.
In 1968 there were functioning institutions; or, perhaps better said, the collapse of institutions was just beginning.
It may be argued that the division of the polity into irreconcilable factions, unable to coexist, began in or about 1968; but today it is essentially complete.
So in these paramount respects, we are much worse off today than fifty years ago. In other respects of lesser or approximately no importance, we may be better off; but those things may be blown away by a single breath if they are not grounded in a structure of functioning institutions: in other words, in the republic. But it is not even possible as a thought experiment to restore the institutions, because there are no propositions (of any nature, at any level) upon which the factions might agree.
Matt McIrvin
1968 was the good old days! All I ever had to do was cry and I’d get instantly fed or someone would change my diaper.
Schlemazel Khan
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Nixon’s landslide in 72 had one and only one cause. Starting in 1971 Nixon saw that he was losing to 7 of the 8 Democratic candidates for the nomination. CREP started running dirty tricks against each of them while supporting the one and only candidate polling worse than Tricky Dickless. The 7 each stumbled & fell on the campaign trail until only the one most easily beaten by that slimy shit was left. But even then the soulless bastard was afraid he might lose so he sent a team to bug the DNC headquarters in the Watergate hotel.
rikyrah
@debbie:
I love that Serena and Venus get to go to the Wimbledon Ball.
Serena has tied Graf.
Now, only Margaret Court stands between her and GOAT.
Uncle Cosmo
@p.a.: Lifted that straight from E. Z. Marx’s famous “The 18th Frigidaire of Combover Napoleon,” I gather…//
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
If we can have Common Core for schoolkids, we can have common basic standards for police training across the country that every podunk small town department must adhere to, just like even the smallest rural schools have to use Common Core. That we don’t already have that kind of requirement is a fucking embarrassment.
TriassicSands
@Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter:
But Nixon shares responsibility for Vietnam with the Democratic presidents who preceded him. There is no way to know what Nixon would have done regarding Vietnam had he been elected in 1960.
As for comparative death and misery tolls, they are difficult to measure. Nixon certainly doesn’t get the blame for all of the Vietnamese War related deaths; I’m afraid LBJ has to bear the most blame for what happened in Vietnam. Presidents have to deal with the wars they are handed. Do you blame Obama for both Iraq and Afghanistan? However, I think Bush must be blamed for the destabilization of the Middle East that his dishonest decisions led to and the continuing death and misery that have resulted.
As I said, it’s impossible to do a meaningful toting up of the blame that each president must shoulder, but Bush has none of the positives that Nixon had. I still look back at the Nixon presidency with an overwhelmingly negative view and I truly wish he’d never been president. But I’m still going to go with Bush as the worst and Reagan as far more destructive than he is given credit for.
History isn’t neat and tidy.
Mnemosyne
@Matt McIrvin:
I was still cozily floating in amniotic fluid, myself — I was born in June of 1969.
Chris
@TriassicSands:
I do, however, think you can make a good case that Nixon was the worst the GOP could manage at the time. As the 1964 election demonstrated, you couldn’t have gotten the kind of batshit-insane ideologue that now dominates the party into the White House – the public just wasn’t buying. Yet. Nixon was probably as bad as they could get in 1968. Give it another decade and change and Reagan, as you said, was much worse. Another decade after him, George W. Bush, who’s worse even than that. The party’s been in a worsening spiral for some time.
Tom Q
@Chris: I think Pearlstein in Nixonland makes the case that all those good things historians and liberals are always attributing to Nixon — like the EPA — were not a case of him being a semi-liberal, but of having to bow to what was still, on the Congressional level and in the country, a functioning moderate-to-liberal majority. It took another failed Democratic presidency, under Carter, to push the country full-on right-wing. (Disclaimer: I admire Carter today as much as anyone, but the problems the country was struggling with in 1980 — out-of-control inflation plus recession, international humiliation over the hostage crisis — made him un-re-electable, and paved the way for Reagan.)
Prescott Cactus
@rikyrah: I sent Mr Ware and e-mail and I asked how I could help. I hope he answers me.
Schlemazel Khan
@TriassicSands:
Have you ever heard the LBJ tapes? He is on the phone with McNamara. The Gulf of Tokin event had “happened” and Johnson was pretty sure it was faked. He sent McNamara over to the Pentagon to get at the truth. They are very frustrated because they are being stonewalled by the brass. Johnson finally admits if he can’t prove the alleged attack was fake the nation would demand he do something. It was a huge mistake and he knew it going in.
OTOH it was Nixon that torpedoed the Paris Peace talks. We could have been out in 69 but Nixon scuttled the plan by convincing the leaders of S. Viet Nam he would get them a better deal. Half the names on the wall belong to Nixon.
But the root of the Problem goes back to Ike. Dulles convinced him that Ho was a commie (he was not) so the US undermined the elections that would have reunified the nation under Ho. There were US Marines there as early as 1957. Ike’s people warned Kennedy when he took office that there were people in the Army that wanted a hot war and he needed to keep them in check.
But the US history goes back to Truman who supported the French efforts to retain their colony.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Schlemazel Khan: Dunno.
Nixon was a bastard and looked for enemies everywhere. He would have (unfortunately) likely won easily even without breaking into the Watergate and all the rest.
But…:
Was the youth vote enough to give Nixon his landslide? Dunno. But it certainly contributed.
Team D paying attention to the youth along with the rest of the Coalition is smart politics.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mustang Bobby
In the spring of 1968 I was for Clean Gene McCarthy, then Bobby Kennedy, and then stunned and in shock from June to August, watching the convention coverage from Chicago on the grainy black and white TV at my grandmother’s summer place in northern Michigan.
I turned 16 in the waning days of summer. I got my license and volunteered for the Democratic Party in Perrysburg, Ohio. My friends and I went around canvassing and handing out literature and working the GOTV effort for the Humphrey/Muskie campaign and the local candidates.
The thing about living through a maelstrom is that when you’re in it you can’t see what it’s doing outside. It wasn’t until the cold dawn of the morning in November after the election that gave us Nixon that it slowly dawned on me how we were truly and royally fucked.
rikyrah
Someone wanted to know about Netflix series in the previous thread:
Death Comes to Pemberly
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries
The Paradise
Land Girls
And, even though you’d have to read the subtitles to understand, Netflix has several Spanish Telenovelas that are terrific. they draw you in.
Schlemazel Khan
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
That is all maybe. The attacks on the democratic process (as well as the Democratic one) are established fact. The sad truth is that many of the anti-war youth were not so much anti-war as anti-me-having-to-fight and a direct line to the assholes that put St. Reagan in office 8 years later, W 20 years later & are proud supporters of Drumpf.
Mike J
Stuck here all day today. Boeing on the left, south lake Washington, Mercer Island, our lagoon, and our dock. Sadly I had to stand on the dock and watch other people sail, but on the other hand I got to stand on the dock and watch people sail all day.
Schlemazel Khan
@Mustang Bobby:
I’m a few months older than you. McCarthy was one of our 2 Senators. I had not been a fan of his after I had heard him speak during his Senate run. I totally understand the feeling of being inside the storm & not really seeing what it was until later.
Barb2
@Anya:
right!
I believe Obama was in Thailand when he was seven. Then Hawaii for grade school and college. He didn’t get to Chicago until he graduated college.
Hawaii very much shaped who he is. His speech endorsing Hillary was full of local Hawaiian kid stuff. His take downs of Trump are mostly a version of local Hawaii talk-story. This is the first time I’ve really seen the local style talk-story humor. It would be even funnier in pidgin English. Sort of like verbal Judo – Hawaiian style.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Baud: I think that if there are going to be riots, they’ll be at the Republican convention this year.
hilts
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Reporter Sydney Schanberg Dies At 82
h/t http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/09/485367489/pulitzer-prize-winning-reporter-sydney-schanberg-dies-at-82
Gravenstone
@shomi: Feel free to start yer own blog,, derf ol’ boy. Editorial content to your heart’s content.
Psych1
In 68 the good guys still had a dream and a peace movement.
Today the “good guys” support a war hawk for president.
Felonius Monk
@Mnemosyne: Are you talking about this scene from Medium Cool?
Chris
@Tom Q:
True. Although I think it’s not just the congressional majorities – it was also the Overton Window, so to speak. There were a lot of things modern Republicans are doing that Nixon didn’t try because he knew he couldn’t get away with it, but probably also quite a few that just plain wouldn’t even have occurred to him. That’s what happens when the party keeps drifting right forever.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@D58826:
Thurgood Marshall? I know he didn’t have a white wife, but he was serving on SCOTUS in 1968.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Schlemazel Khan: You probably remember the ’72 campaign better than me, but it seems to me to have been a nearly uniquely bad combination of circumstances for the party. I don’t think Nixon’s “dirty tricks” had much impact on the outcome (maybe the size of the landslide, maybe not).
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail:
The national party was still tearing itself apart in ’72. Nixon was doing dirty tricks and would be overtly breaking the law soon enough, but he also was finding ways to pass legislation and adjust policies that the young voters cared about (even if it was for selfish reasons (as is always quite-often the case)). I’m not saying Hillary should emulate Nixon. ;-) I’m saying it’s smart of her to address issues that young voters are passionate about (along with addressing other important issues).
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Fred Waltman
Turns out am a year older than you — I was 13 going on 14 during most of 1968. I was living in a college town in Iowa so most of the happenings that year (and earlier — Detroit, Watts, Newark, etc.) didn’t really mean anything to me, other than news on TV.
The two things that I remember from that time were how upset my parents were when MLK was shot (it is funny — not haha funny that I knew the name Martin Luther King long before I knew there was actually somebody named Martin Luther :) ).
The second thing was waking up one morning to see my mother crying — I had never seen here cry in my life. When I asked what was wrong she said “they shot Bobby Kennedy” — what makes this more astounding was she was still a Canadian citizen at the time — she didn’t become a US citizen until 1976 (and promptly got called for jury duty which nobody else in family ever had happen)
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Anne Laurie:
Wish I had a button to upvote this.
grandpa john
@SiubhanDuinne: @SiubhanDuinne:born in 1937, I will be 79 tomorrow. My first recollection is Roosevelts death. the train taking him back to Washington came through about 4-5 miles from where I lived and the local paper had pictures of people standing along side the tracks weeping as the train went by. I also can vaguely remember dad being gone at times earlier like 43-44. He was a carpenter and helped build baracks and other buildings on army bases,he was past the draft age. ONe of the bases he worked at was fort Lee VA.
Joel
1992 is a better comparison than 1968, and even then it’s not even close. A lot has changed in the last 24 years.
Baud
@grandpa john: Happy birthday, grandpa.
Matt McIrvin
@Joel: The current moment reminds me of about 1992-95 too. But there was actually more violence then.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@grandpa john: Happy Birthday Eve!
:-)
I hope it’s a good one.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who is getting close to 20,000 days, but isn’t there yet.)
dogwood
@Barb2:
He was in Idonesia, and college was Occidental and Columbia.
TriassicSands
@Chris:
Worse than Nixon at the time?
Barry Goldwater. Unelected, but nominated. And probably not a crook. But a right wing radical.
Had he not already been removed from office, Spiro Agnew would have been worse than Nixon. Probably even worse than Bush or Reagan. Nixon may well have been the worst that could actually have been elected.
Of course, it is all speculation. I agree with your statement about the GOP’s spiral (would that it were a death spiral — the death of the party).
I don’t think anyone in modern times has approached Trump’s unfitness for office. I still find it hard to believe that millions of people can watch him for more than a minute and think he should be anywhere near the White House. It’s horrifying to me.
Nixon is clearly one of the worst presidents in our history. It’s hard “defending” someone I held in such low regard. His presidency is rightly considered a failure, because, in the end, he was a crook and covered up a criminal conspiracy. His resignation was just a substitute for him being kicked out. However, if we lived in a vacuum and started with the US in no wars, the economy doing reasonably well, and presidents limited to one term, I’d choose Nixon over Bush (though I wouldn’t vote for either).
Note: I made a one term limitation, because Nixon, despite being a crook, almost certainly would have survived in office if he had not run for re-election. His anti-democratic mind set and utter lack of integrity led him to feel that he had to ensure his re-election no matter what. The great irony is that he would have beaten McGovern handily without any of the criminal activity.
Prescott Cactus
@Prescott Cactus: Reply
1) education
2) join the movement
SiubhanDuinne
@grandpa john:
I knew there was at least one person here older than me, and you’re it!
I don’t claim to remember FDR’s death, although I have some of those foggy, out-of-focus memories of my grandparents shocked and weeping at about that time, and over the years I’ve persuaded myself that their emotional reaction was to Roosevelt’s death.
A very happy birthday to you, Grandpa John! I’m turning 74 in a few weeks and not particularly celebrating this time around the sun, but next year, on my 75th, just watch out!!
Kathleen
@Schlemazel Khan: Interesting. I lived in Minnesota until fall of 1967 and supported McCarthy’s bid against Johnson. I thought that RFK was riding McCarthy’s coattails and was quite huffy about it, as only a self righteous 60’s college student could be. In fact, a group of University of Portland students waylaid RFK’s campaign during the Oregon primary and begged him to make an unscheduled stop at the school, to which he finally agreed; I sat on my hands while the rest of the student body erupted in wild cheering. I had no idea until just very recently what a jerk McCarthy was and sadly only came to appreciate RFK after he died.
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
Not to ignore our freedom-loving friends overseas the opposite direction of Vietnam.
Mary G
The thing that frightens me that could take us back to 1968 is a very hot summer combined with one of the whackaloons managing to assassinate the president. I would want to go to war myself.
J R in WV
@TriassicSands:
It is impossible to blame LBJ for the bombing in Laos and Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, the treacherous back door dealings with the negotiations in Paris… telling the NV that if they shut the door on LBJ that Nixon would deal with them fairly, then stretching the w ar out several more years so that he could play the same game in the 1972 elections.
How are you blaming that on Johnson?
And George Walker Bush, how is he better than Johnson? We still don’t know how many people’s deaths G. Walker Bush is responsible for, all of them, so far. It takes two sides to make peace, and Obama can’t do it alone. But one sick man can start a war, and George Walker Bush is that man for this generation.
No, Lyndon Baines Johnson did many great things, and his biggest blot as President is that damned war. Bush didn’t do anything good, he let New Orleans drown, he started a war over his ego, and it may well be that millions will die for that ego-driven war, in which case he will exceed Johnson AND Nixon’s combined death toll.
Iowa Old Lady
@TriassicSands:
This is where I am too. It’s stunning.
TriassicSands
@Schlemazel Khan:
Sorry, but presidents are responsible for what they do, not what they wanted to do, but didn’t. Without Vietnam, Johnson would undoubtedly be considered one of our finest presidents — his ranking is still quite high when “experts” are polled. But after Tonkin, he kept pouring tens of thousands more troops into Vietnam.
That’s fair. I hold Nixon and Johnson equally responsible without actually applying a meaningless percentage to either.
Our history is filled with tales of presidents being “forced” to do one thing or another. Kennedy faced a decision about ICBMs. He asked McNamara how many we needed. McNamara said something like 300 would suffice. Kennedy asked him why he was asking Congress for over a 1,000. Because the Joint Chiefs wanted 3,000 and 1,000 was the smallest number McNamara could take to the Hill without being crushed. The 1,054 we got started us on the way to tens of thousands of warheads. Maybe Kennedy should have fought for 300.
Kathleen
@grandpa john: Happy Birthday, Grandpa John!
Barb2
@dogwood:
Thank you. I realized my mistake after the 5 minute edit window and then my mind which holds massive amounts of trivia came up blank for exactly where he was in Asia for that tiny part of his life.
The biggest cultural impact on most of us are the teen years.
redshirt
1968 definitely had better music.
And a better space program.
Matt McIrvin
@TriassicSands:
I think the majority of them know perfectly well that Trump is a manifest fool and unfit for office, but they have been convinced by decades of propaganda that Hillary Clinton is worse. Some are hoping that Trump will resign or be impeached and his VP will be the real presidential candidate. Some figure he’ll just have some Cheney type telling him what to do, and some just see him as the sweet meteor of death that they’re hoping will destroy this corrupt society.
RandomMonster
@Psych1:
What do you define as a ‘war hawk’?
Joel
@Matt McIrvin: The riots were pretty damned dark.
LanceThruster
Z
Never in my lifetime has a potential 3rd party/outsider candidate have an actual chance to topple the establishment candidates.
All of Hillary’s “twirling, twirling towards freedom” speeches will never negate her status a a tool.
#StillSanders
#NeverHillary
(2x attempt to post)
MomSense
@Shell:
Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it. My hair.
I wore out my parents cast album.
Cacti
@LanceThruster:
Maybe it was the universe trying to tell you it was stupid.
J R in WV
@grandpa john:
Happy Birthday, Grandpa. Amazing to “talk” with someone who recalls FDR in their lifetime at all.
As a child (I grew up in a Republican household, capitalists, even the ones who worked in the coal mines!) I saw many portraits of FDR on the walls of living rooms of my friends. Later on, JFK too. And Jesus. For a long time I thought that was the holy trinity ;-) !
Take care,
J R
Baud
@Iowa Old Lady: Me too.
Emma
@LanceThruster: Maybe it was your guardian angel trying to stop you from making an ass of yourself.
Felonius Monk
@Kathleen:
And on June 8, 1968 I stood alongside the train tracks in Chester, PA with my wife and 3 small children for nearly 3 hours waiting to pay our respect as RFK’s funeral train passed on its way to Washington.
Schlemazel Khan
@Kathleen:
RFK urged certain people to provide money to McCarthy before he got in himself. I always assumed he used McCarthy to test the waters & see if LBJ was beatable. As a Kennedy fan I could have seen myself supporting him although I have learned a lot about the family, particularly JFK and I wonder if he would have lived up to the hype.
Because of my families ties to the state party I ended up at a dinner party with HHH the summer before the 68 convention. There were about 20 people there & I was a 16 year old smart ass so I asked him about Johnson and the war (I had been tear gassed that summer at 2 different demonstrations). He said Johnson knew he screwed up but he would fix it. He also told me that a vice-President does not have the right to publicly disagree with his President. I don’t know if he would have gotten us into Viet Nam or not had he been POTUS. I do wish he had won West Virginia in 59 and the White House in 60. We would live in a very different world today.
J R in WV
@Iowa Old Lady:
Me three. Trump displays his unfitness of office in the first few sentences he utters. Unless he is reading a speech others have written, he is pure ignorant evil, distilled into a toupee wearing fool.
If it isn’t a toupee, it probably isn’t, he should shave his head and buy a good wig, what he has is absurd.
Felonius Monk
@grandpa john: Happy Birthday, grandpa john. Have a great birthday tomorrow and may you have many more.
gwangung
@LanceThruster: Translated: “Don’t bother me with facts! I know what I know!”
Fool.
Schlemazel Khan
@TriassicSands:
That was not an attempt to forgive him. Johnson put winning the WH ahead of doing what he knew was right. OTOH, had he lost in 64 good ol bomb ’em to hell Berry would have been POTUS so the outcome might have been the same but without the Civil Rights act & voting rights act. LBJ was a tragedy in the Greek sense.
I think the ICBM story is about as good an example of how a President is not entirely in control as I can think of.
Chris
@TriassicSands:
That’s what I meant, yeah. Sure, Goldwater would’ve made Nixon look like FDR, but he didn’t have a prayer of getting elected.
I would agree that Trump is probably the most blatantly unqualified candidate put up by either party in… oh, quite a while (though I consider him the logical continuation of what the Tea Party Movement started). He does remind me of something I was saying around the time of the 2012 election: having lost two elections in a row with what they perceived to be “liberal,” RINO, establishment candidates, we’d be lucky if the 2016 candidate wasn’t wearing KKK bedsheets. Welllll…
Barbara
@Doug R: Not to mention Prague Spring and brutal Soviet suppression. Seriously, the urban riots began in 1965, in the Watts section of Los Angeles and spread to Detroit, St. Louis, Newark, Washington D.C., and other cities so that 1968 was the fourth year in a row of major urban unrest. The destruction of cities — and black owned businesses — intensified white flight and the decline of urban school districts. Some cities have never recovered. Student protests were not nearly as violent, but they were large, loud and very confrontational. Responding to student protests at the University of California turned Ronald Reagan into a national political figure. I guess if you were in college in 1968 you remember student protest as exciting and the dawning of a new era, and maybe that was true (although I think the participants typically overstate their own role in liberalizing society) but the truth is that it all but guaranteed the rise of law and order political culture.
Schlemazel Khan
@LanceThruster:
Ah well then, that makes it easy for us – go fuck yourself
different-church-lady
@JGabriel: Golden age for comedy: SNL with original cast, George Carlin, Firesign Theater, etc.
Schlemazel Khan
@redshirt:
WORD
Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter
@RandomMonster: “Good guys” seems a little hard to define too. The world is not so black and white.
Uncle Cosmo
Scott,
Nixon was a man of principle. One principle: What’s good for the political career of Richard Nixon is good for, well, Richard Nixon. Driven by a humbling childhood, he would do whatever could be done to further that career. Which was much more than needed doing–viz., the Watergate break-in when the Democrats were already coming apart at the seams. (NB I knocked on doors for the McGovern ticket in a Baltimore blue-collar suburb with more DINOs than a continent of Jurassic Parks.)
Nixon (& Kissinger) figured out that the primary opposition to the Vietnam War was a result of Americans getting killed–& that the opposition turned dangerous (for Tricky Dick’s electoral health) when the kids of the white upper middle class “opinion leaders” started coming home in body bags in great numbers. So: “Vietnamize” the conflict (i.e., fewer American kids in harm’s way), reform the draft to a lottery with a 1-year window of vulnerability in transition to all-volunteer services. It was brilliant–as soon as the kids were out of the crosshairs they & their parents went home & the mass demonstrations shrunk to a few hundred hard-core lefties.
You should never, never underestimate the endemic omphaloskepsis of what I call The Greatest Degeneration. It’s not a coincidence that much of the most virulent self-entitled voting behavior recently has sprung from 60-somethings on both sides of the aisle, Teapartier & BernieBeard alike. As a generational generalization, it’s all about us & it always has been all about us. For us anyway, & we’re the only ones who count… ::spits::
dogwood
@Barb2:
Long ago I remember reading some book or interview where Michelle Obama said that if you want to better understand her husband’s temperament, spend some time in Hawaii.
Felonius Monk
@J R in WV:
And just leave it — no wig. Then he would fit right in with many of his skinhead supporters.
Uncle Cosmo
@LanceThruster: Too goddamn bad FYWP finally let you through. You post like you’ve had your gastrointestinal tract surgically inverted: talking out of your arse while shit emerges from your mouth.
Now fuck off & die. Better yet, time being of the essence, just drop dead.
Dog Dawg Damn
@The Dangerman: what makes you think the GOP will dump him if Flynn is chosen?
LanceThruster
@Cacti:
Glob forbid something other than a Hillary tongue bath be viewed.
#SandersStein2016
Baud
@LanceThruster:
You forgot #FascistCollaborator.
ETA:. #VichyProgressives.
hovercraft
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
I think it’s more the ‘black man stealing/raping our women’ aspect that would have been the major issue in 1968. Remember Loving vs Virginia was decided in 1967 but there was still a great deal of resistance especially in the south.
redshirt
@LanceThruster: Weak trolling. 3/10.
Matt McIrvin
@Felonius Monk: He’s got a big, ugly scar under there as the result of “scalp reduction” surgery–according to Ivana Trump, it’s the reason he raped her (though she later made a weird statement to the effect that the event was not to be construed legally as rape).
Felonius Monk
@LanceThruster:
I see that our resident hemorrhoid has erupted again, Perhaps you should coat yourself with Preparation H(illary).
dmsilev
@LanceThruster: Oh, it can be viewed. And mocked.
Barbara
@Iowa Old Lady: One of my colleagues used to be the chief of staff of a Republican senator, but is a really nice reasonable guy. He was supporting Rubio. I told him that I hoped if Trump were a Democrat that I would feel the same way but that Trump is fundamentally unfit to be president. He still couldn’t quite believe that Trump was on the verge of being nominated. He knows that Hillary Clinton isn’t worse — he was working for the Senator when she was there. People like him, and Meg Whitman, have trouble absorbing that a lot of Republican voters really believe that the dog whistles that have been motivating them to vote Republican reflect certain truths that should be acted on — for them, it was a game and a strategy, but for Trump voters that’s why they vote Republican. I mean, at one level it’s unbelievable that you would not have realized Republicans had a tiger by the tail, but I think they just live in such a sanitized bubble they don’t really think about what it could mean for them. At a minimum, the crowning of Sarah Palin should have made it clear to them how easily a politician could win by stoking the dark side of the Republican voter id.
LanceThruster
@Felonius Monk:
Such rapier bon mots. I’m truly crushed beneath their thoughtful weightiness.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@LanceThruster:
I understand Stein has conditions under which she’d let Bernie run as a Green. Bernie has to meet some kind of purity test, which only Stein will be the judge of – it has to be conducted under a full moon using the blood of the most delusional bro after they’ve pledged that they will never again believe in the existence of any reality outside of the land of unicorns, ponies and rainbows, and Stein and Bernie are the alpha and omega. Sounds like you might be the chosen one, so run along.
smith
@LanceThruster: I’ve always been curious: Why do you use your p0rn name to comment on a political blog?
dmsilev
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: If it doesn’t involve a bird landing somewhere auspicious, like some avian Lady of the Lake bearing
a coconutExcalibur in its talons, then it doesn’t count.burnspbesq
@chopper:
1968 was a quiet year for the Beatles. The white album didn’t come out until Novembet.
The only album released in 1968 that i still listen to is “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.”
Glidwrith
@LanceThruster: Meh. You aren’t worth the creativity of original thought.
Luthe
Some music for this Saturday night:
You gotta admit Life magazine made 1968 look great.
My father said it sucked, everybody died.
Uncle Cosmo
@TriassicSands:
Agnew was a numbskull who owed his career in politics to yooooge dollops of good fortune. He was elected County Executive by heavily-Democratic Baltimore County MD in 1962 when the Democratic machine occupied itself with infighting. He was elected Governor of MD in 1966 when liberal & moderate Democrats split their votes between two competent candidates & allowed a race-baiting gadfly to take their nomination. Nixon picked this relative nonentity as his running mate after Agnew came to national attention by publicly berating the black leadership of Baltimore for not stopping the riots after MLK was killed. When he resigned the Vice-Presidency (part of an agreement to let him plead nolo contendere to charges centered on “having accepted bribes totaling more than $100,000 while holding office as Baltimore County Executive, Governor of Maryland, and Vice President”) the most astonishing thing was how small most of the payoffs were, $10K or less in cash in white envelopes. Not just a crook but a cheap crook too. When the MD judiciary disbarred him they called him “morally obtuse.”
And for all that, Spiro T. Agnew (changed by his father from Anagnostopoulos) was vastly more experienced in government & qualified to serve as POTUS than Drumpf. And arguably more ethical; I don’t recall him stiffing any contractors on his watch. (Just holding them up for 5% of the contract value.) Go figger.
burnspbesq
@LanceThruster:
Tongue baths are for closers. If bernie had gotten four million more voters to sign on the line which is dotted …
Keith P.
I’ve been binge-watching old HBO series on Amazon. Today is “Life’s Too Short”. I forgot how hilarious it is…”Cheggers Plays Cock”, the guys fondly discussing how they’d all kill each other, Liam Neeson’s attempt at comedy (“I have AIDS. I got it from an African prostitute.”)
Felonius Monk
@burnspbesq:
Aw c’mon. I’m still listening to Cheap Thrills and Boogie with Canned Heat(Fried Hockey Boogie). :-)
Jay
@burnspbesq: Did some checking on the Controlled Substance Act and it’s ultimately up to the Attorney General – no Congress needed. But the AG is supposed to rely on the recommendations of the DEA and the FDA. The FDA is inching toward moving marijuana off the schedules but not the DEA. This may account for why so little actual research has been done.
grandpa john
@SiubhanDuinne:The only downside is with that many past , you can’t
be sure of how many more there will be. I am aiming for at least 85. Got an 8 month old great grand daughter and I would like to be around long enough for her to at least have some memories of me.
Psych1
Sad and terrible that we lost Bobby. The Bobby at the end was not the early Bobby. He was one of the few that really learned, and changed, and grew. Usually it is useful to look at someones past behaviors to predict how they will act in the future. Bobby was really different.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Uncle Cosmo: Thanks. That’s a good word!
I think I’ve mentioned here before that one of my middle school classes had a debate in ’72 between a Nixon team and a McGovern team. This was in Cobb County, GA (Newt’s old district). I was kinda-sorta a Republican because I figured my parents were (even though they never talked about politics around me). But I was on the McGovern team. I did a lot of reading and arguing and ended up persuading myself that McGovern was right on the issues. It was eye-opening for me. But of course, teenagers can be very idealistic and impressionable…
I don’t recall who won the debate. ;-)
I get uncomfortable about generalizing too much about how selfish a particular generation is.
Obama’s a boomer, as am I. My wife is as well, and she’s about as Lefty McLeftish as they come (she’s furious that Bernie didn’t win and says it’s due to Corruption™).
Lots of people my age that I know aren’t spoiled or especially selfish, but they are more than a little beaten-down by the way life seemed to defeat them at particular stages in life. E.g. the ’79 gas crisis just as we were starting to drive on our own, the Reagan recession and gutting of solar energy research (which hurt J’s father’s research efforts), the gutting of unions and the middle class, the gutting of basic research in industry (AT&T, GE, IBM, etc.), etc. The lack of jobs even after going to grad school in EE where supposedly “you can write your own ticket!”.
Almost everyone has difficulties thrown up that they have to figure out a way to overcome, but it’s disheartening to hear growing up all the American Myths about how we’re always moving forward, we’re only limited by how hard we’re willing to work, there’s opportunity everywhere. And look at our parents and how they did pretty well, yet the advantages they had (nearly free college, low unemployment, a dynamic economy that had a growing middle class, good wages and overtime, a pension, etc.) seemed to be farther out of reach.
(Yes, I recognize this is First World Problems, and especially White Privilege Problems, but it is a genuine feeling of disillusionment.)
We need to direct those feelings of disappointment and disillusionment toward a productive goal – namely getting the reactionary Teabaggers out of office. That’s the first step needed to make things better. BernieBros are mostly on our side even if we want to strangle them sometimes. ;-)
Eyes on the prize…
Cheers,
Scott.
Barb2
@dogwood:
That is so true. Hawaii, the multi racial culture explains who Obama is. The GOP haters never had a clue. Trump has no real sense of humor.
My aunt told me that she really didn’t understand the kid (me) who came back from Hawaii as a teenager. After my Aunt retired she taught school in Hawaii for a couple of years. Then she understood the cultural forces that shapes the kids in Hawaii. She returned from Hawaii changed as well. Total immersion in a different culture will do that to you.
To understand Obama you’ve got to understand Hawaii.
I’m looking forward to more of the local da kine bradda taking on Trump.
(Yes I know Hawaii is the 50th state. I was there when it happened.) Hawaii is a cultural melting pot. Unique in the world.
Ruckus
I was 19 in 1968, was 1A and waiting for that letter. As bad as things may be today, 68 was worse. Assassinations of major leaders, Vietnam getting much uglier, DNC Chicago. Police were worse, we just didn’t know as much about it. What makes today seem worse is the almost instantaneous ability to know whenever anything bad happens almost anywhere and social media which gives every loon instant access to to broadcast their bullshit. Their bullshit hasn’t changed but it seems like there is a much greater percentage of it. But there isn’t a greater percentage, just greater exposure. We’ve had a black president for 7 yrs and he is a great man and has done a great job. We are getting ready to elect the first woman president, who is far and away the best choice and doesn’t scare me at all about how she will do. I have a black, male, HS classmate who posted on FB today that he has never been in prison, his grown sons have never been in prison, so maybe things are getting better. Granted that makes it 5 black men that I know of for sure have never seen prison, but I know more and am pretty sure many of them haven’t been either. There is hope, there has been positive change in the last 7 yrs. Yes old racist assholes are making a lot of noise but they are losing power and status and not at a snails pace. As more and more people wake up to the disaster that is Kansas and Florida and Wisconsin and Maine, (among some I’m sure I’ve left out) with their disastrous governors and conservative policies and more and more wake up to people like the Kochs and their attempt to purchase the country, and on the cheap at that, it is possible that we can make some real progress. It didn’t seem like that in 68.
NotMax
@gene108
I should have been more specific by referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included a provision inserted by a Congressperson from Mississippi making it a federal crime to cross state lines with intention to “incite a riot.”
That was the paramount charge against the defendants.
NotMax
@Barb2
Have long contended that the Hawaiian concepts of pono and of seeking consensus help explain much about Obama and about his political deliberations.
Prescott Cactus
@Psych1: New book just out about Bobby by Larry Tye. Caught parts of a 45 minute interview on NPR.
Downloaded but have not read. Bobby would be 90 this year. The author talked to over 400 people who knew Bobby during the last 3 or 4 years during the writing of the book. 1/3 are now dead. Ethel Kennedy gave him boxes of Bobby’s papers that had never been reviewed.
Ruckus
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I’ve stated here before that I’ve had 3 major careers in my life. The things that caused those changes were a natural disaster and a giant recession. I’m not the only person affected or did I even suffer the greatest. In that natural disaster my best friend and his wife lost their house and every thing but the clothes on their backs and 2 cats. I lost a business. How many people are still suffering from the recession? I’m not but it made my life a hell of a lot harder for quite a while and some of that will last the rest of my life.
My point is that people suffer all the time from events not of their own making. Has always been so and will always be so. Those aren’t first world problems, they are human problems. Yes living in a first world situation may make them less harmful in the long run for some but probably not less painful in the short term.
What we need to get rid of is the neanderthal thinking of the conservatives, the nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel labor ideals, the racism, the misogyny, the holier than thou bullshit, or as you say the reactionary Teabaggers.
Prescott Cactus
@Ruckus:
Arizona. Just helping.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
You wouldn’t have been ahead of me in the draft. If I hadn’t already joined I would have been going soon after the first of the year, my number was 15. One buddy was about 105 but he had joined the NG and another buddy was 315. Lucky bastard. Another friend had been drafted and was stationed in CO at the army language school for his 2 yrs.
ETA. Higgs, who doesn’t post here any more was sent to the Nam as a machine gunner on a river boat, the brown water navy. He got shot at.
NotMax
@efgoldman
Remember he referred to anti-war folks as “effete snobs.”
stinger
@J R in WV: It’s not a toupee. It’s a living shell. In sunlight, up close, or from the right camera angle, you can see right through it to scalp. Like many men, all he has left is a fringe. Most men will wear that fringe short, or grow it long and pull it back into a ponytail, or shave it off altogether. What The Donald does is grow it long and then swirl it around and spray it in place so that from a distance it looks like it might just possibly be a normal head of hair. In reality, it’s a thin but massive combover.
Sad!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I was arguing this with a moderately conservative friend. The reason why there are so many “white cops shoot black man” stories lately is the press is about selling sensualist and the majority find blacks being harassed and attacked by racists offensive.
Ruckus
@Cacti:
Thank you for saving me the typing.
Ruckus
@Emma:
Way too late for that. He’s already gone and done it.
Uncle Cosmo
@efgoldman: It was, to be precise, an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” & it was Safire that wrote his material. The most creative things Agnew ever contributed were the giggles when he read the drafts. Deeply, deeply stupid man.
I might mention that when I was 16 I was no more than 20 feet from Agnew as he dedicated our new large local library. Not likely I could’ve managed to grab a county cop’s gun & swisscheese the barstid, but it was probably my only chance to personally change history (probably for the better).
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
We’re old, we don’t know shit. That’s why no one listens to us. It is possible that they may be right some days though.
Uncle Cosmo
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Clearly I don’t. But I was trained as a statistician (after that first career choice of astrophysics crashed & burned) & I can generalize based on a sample size of tens of millions. Clearly there are many fine upstanding generous unselfish & politically astute Boomers (e.g., us//). But there is a general tenor of the cohort, a feeling of entitlement that in our young adulthood we had the luxury of choosing our own paths through life without having to make compromises. Our parents’ generation had emerged from WW2 into a period of widely-shared prosperity (not widely enough shared to be sure) that they felt they’d earned by dint of their struggles through the Depression & then the war, but by dint of those same struggles they understood how miraculous & tentative was that same prosperity we took so blithely for granted as permanent, nay, inevitable. Then when it turned out not to be either, we got bitter. Again, I generalize over the cohort. YMMV
TriassicSands
@Schlemazel Khan:
If Trump is somehow elected, he may be in for a big surprise.
“What do you mean I can’t fire the Speaker of the House?”
Ruckus
@stinger:
It is a much better comb over than I saw on a plane once. Guy in front of me, probably in his 70s, had 3, yes I said 3 strands of hair, probably 20 or so hairs each, greased up and plastered on shinny skin from just over his right ear to the left. Most blatant comb over I’ve ever seen. I was tempted to tell him that he wasn’t fooling anyone but then his wife started talking and I didn’t want to add any more misery to his life.
nutella
Since it’s an open thread, and apologies to everyone who is so over Trump:
From a very long Vanity Fair article:
The article includes many examples of Trump’s … um … style in both business and personal relationships from around the time when he was switching out Ivana for Marla. I had remembered that as tacky but apparently it was WAY beyond tacky.
wjs
@grandpa john: And nobody talked about how he died with his mistress, did they? There was a certain level of respect that is lacking right now.
LanceThruster
I guess when you’re backing such a piss-poor candidate (HRC), abusive sanctimony is pretty much all you’ve got.
redshirt
So we’ve literally got a Fuehrer COSplayer. And he’s the Republican nominee for President!
Uncle Cosmo
@LanceThruster: I guess when you talk out of your arse & shit through your mouth, sarcasm that would embarrass a fifth-grader is all you got.
Hillary will be an excellent POTUS, & the one thing that pisses me off about that is not so much that total wastes of the building blocks of life like you will benefit along with the rest of us, it’s that you TWOTBBOLs will spend her two terms bitching & moaning about the rainbow-shitting unicorns you failed to receive but deceived yourselves into thinking you deserved.
Saint BS has essentially trashed the “Democratic Socialist” brand for the next generation by acting out in classic borderline-early-Boomer fashion, making the election all about his petulant wrinkly-arse sense of self-entitlement. As a slightly less-borderline Boomer, I could see this looming the minute he threw his finger-wagging bad-tempered slept-in-my-cheap-suit tukhis into the race & it makes me want to slap him silly, um, sillier. Even now my guess is that he’s only going to endorse Hillary in exchange for a handshake agreement neither to primary his nearly-worthless arse in ’18 nor to go after Mrs BS for the financial shenanigans that killed off Burlington College. And it would only serve him right if once in office she reneged.
LanceThruster
I like and respect most of the posters here, but there’s an ugly sort of groupthink taking place here. This is the team that collectively slammed so-called ‘Bernie Bros’ for obnoxious behavior such as sexism against Sec. Clinton, but turns a blind eye towards their own ageism (“old coot” anyone? From a front pager no leds). I’m a big boy and can handle your negative waves, but smug and dismissive exacts a toll. Her supporters seem to exhibit some of the worst traits as gar as hypocrisy goes. People on the fence about Hillary see that. Does not bode well for her presumptive highness.
LanceThruster
@Uncle Cosmo:
Gent bent, I’ll take his wrinkly cheap suit over her Chairman Mao pantsuit anyday, She also wore a12K Armani smock/potato sack to lecture to proles about income inequality,
Good times!
LanceThruster
To those who derisively mentioned my ‘porn name,’ it is in the tradition of ‘Buck Rogers’ ans ‘Flash Gordon.’ I came up with the nom de plum playing ‘Megawars’ on Compuserv when everyone else was picking names like Kirk and Solo.
I have some continuity writing on the intertubes as ‘LanceThruster’ (even quoted in a friend’s book under that handle). I had been harassed at work by an American IDF thug for posts in the LA Jrwish Journal (I naively posted real name on registration page).
You can find me on FB as ‘William Charles.’ I was LT there too until Zio-thugs chose to be petty.
LanceThruster
@Uncle Cosmo:
TWOTBBOL’s?
Panurge
@Cacti:
True. It’s not the ’60s. Instead, it’s been an ongoing attempt to restore the 1950s, with the full collusion of Liberal America trying to show how they’ve Grown Up and can Adapt To Changing Times. Even if we vanquish the reactionaries once and for all, they still live in our heads, so ISTM that being “stuck in the ’60s” would at least mean we were looking forward again instead of backward.
Panurge
@Tom Q: And the way those problems got “solved” (or not) is at the root of where we are now. Boomers had hardly anything to do with that.