Miscellaneous

52 years ago Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the rioting which broke out was the worst civil unrest in this country since the Civil War.  Women feared for the safety of their families, and voted accordingly.  Richard Nixon, a politician no one liked or trusted, emerged as the beneficiary.   He ran as the law and order candidate, and only the candidacy of segregationist George Wallace prevented him from winning in a landslide.

Democrats are the caring, Mommy party, while Republicans are the strict Daddy party.  If the rioting around the country continues, and gets worse, Joe Biden will wind up paying the political price.  He’s the Mommy party candidate, and when people feel unsafe, they don’t want Mommy, they want Daddy.

1968 was a nightmare of a year.  The country seemed on the verge of falling apart.  Lyndon Johnson had lied to the country about the war in Vietnam, and the President of the United States was therefor loathed by a strong bipartisan majority of the country.  I don’t think a more despised man ever served as President.

The war had the country split down the middle, but Tricky Dick Nixon figured out how to win a majority in the electoral college.  When someone says presidential politics is a popularity contest, have them explain President Richard Nixon.

All of which bodes well for President Trump.  He can’t win without the votes of people who actively dislike, even loathe him.  But the way things are going, he’ll get enough of their votes to win a second term.

You could even make a bumper sticker:  Rioters and Looters for Trump.

Robert A. Caro is one of the great presidential biographers, and his four volume “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” is a masterpiece.  The fourth volume was completed in 2011, and I’ve been waiting for the fifth, final volume ever since.  This will cover Johnson’s prosecution of the Vietnam War, and his ultimate humiliation.  It isn’t a pretty story, and there’s no way Caro can make Johnson look any better than he was.

Caro is 84 now, and he’s apparently having trouble bringing his story, Lyndon Johnson’s story, to an end.  He greatly admires Johnson’s passage of civil rights legislation, and doesn’t want to tarnish his reputation.  But as a professional historian, he has no choice.  I think that’s what taking him so long.

If you think I’m being too hard on Johnson, consider this.  Our POW’s were being tortured in North Vietnam, but Johnson made sure the American people never found out about it.  He was afraid the public reaction would force him to take the measures which could win the war.  But he didn’t want to do that, so we never knew.

When Nixon took office in 1969 the stories of torture were allowed to go public, and there was outrage.  Fearing that the American public would demand drastic action, the North Vietnamese stopped the torture.  From 1969 until they were released in 1973, our fellow Americans, who put their lives on the line for us, no longer had to endure the hideous brutality that went on from the time of their capture until Lyndon Johnson was no longer President.

That’s a story Caro has no choice but to tell.  And the great “civil rights champion” Lyndon Johnson will go down in history as the most despicable man ever to hold the office.

This is the story that sinks the stock.

My first taste of politics was the 1964 Republican National Convention, held in San Francisco’s Cow Palace.    I was the Chairman of the Tom Collins chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, which I had organized at Diablo Valley College in the East Bay, 20 miles west of the city.

A few of us went to the San Francisco airport to greet Barry Goldwater when he arrived.  I went to a speech at some venue and sat directly behind my hero, William F. Buckley, whose leg was in a cast from a skiing accident.  Buckley liked people to think that he had injured himself by kicking at a TV set, but it wasn’t true.  I was able to sneak into the Cow Palace to hear Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois nominate Barry Goldwater for President.  Dirksen was an old fashioned orator, and his speech, “The Peddler’s Grandson” was high level political rhetoric.

I’ve been hooked on politics ever since.  Political campaigns have always been the most fun, but legislative politics can be pretty interesting as well.  And in that vein, Monday the Tennessee House will vote on Wolf-PAC’s bill, HJR 809.

The Wolf-PAC team, led by Leah Lancaster, feels good about the vote, but you don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, and it isn’t a lock.  There are 99 members of the Tennessee House, 73 Republicans and 26 Democrats.

These people are not professional politicians, or professional legislators.  Legislating is just a part time job, and there’s hardly any money in it.  These men and women make their living as insurance agents, or lawyers, or merchants, or farmers.  They’re just regular people.  People with a desire to serve and a yen for politics, and political combat.  They enjoy what they do, and consider it an honor.

Few of them have any special knowledge or expertise in the things they’re voting on.  They’re more or less average Americans, with all the strengths, and weaknesses, that entails.

So, with a group of 99 citizen/legislators, you just never know.  One of them can get some crazy idea, and if he’s convincing enough, or influential enough, get a bunch of his colleagues to go along with him.  That’s what I’m concerned about on Tuesday’s vote.

However, our sponsor is respected senior statesman Rep. Kelly Keisling, a 69 year old insurance agent from Byrdstown, population 803, the county seat of Pickett County.  Kelly is a Great Living American, and I’m sure is more than capable of dealing with any unforeseen problems.  But just in case, the Reagan Project will be promoting this bill with key legislative leaders, and getting back in touch with an old friend, State Rep. Dennis Powers, of Jacksboro.

Dennis is an insurance agent, and a long time champion of Article V.  Babbie and I met him on our tour through the South, in the spring of 2014.  I’d stopped by Dennis’s office at the capital while we were in Nashville, but they were out of session, so I left a note with a staffer.  Later, in Charleston, South Carolina, we met him at a small dinner party hosted by David Biddulph of the BBA Task Force.

Dennis is quite a character, and I hope I’m able to get through to him before Mondays’ vote.  In politics, you leave no stone unturned.

 

 

Pre-Covid, and post-Covid, in the past, and in the future, yesterday, today and tomorrow, the United States Congress continually demonstrates that it is desperately in need of an intervention.  It can’t control itself.  It is so far gone, so steeped in corruption, so entrenched with the special interests which fund and control it, that only an outside force can return it to some semblance of normality.

Neither the President nor the Supreme Court has the authority to perform this intervention.  Instead, the Constitution grants that power to the people.  They cannot act directly, but must go through their state legislators.  Once they demand that action be taken, it will be taken, using Article V.

It’s not a question of if, but when.

At 4:30 EDT today Specex is scheduled to send two Americans into space.  It will be the first time since 2011 that such a feat has been attempted on an American rocket.  It’s a VBD, and will be exciting to watch.

The media is not interested.  Spacex is an Elon Musk venture, and President Trump will be on hand for lift off.  Musk is politically incorrect, and Trump, of course, is the devil incarnate.  So it’s no big deal.

If Obama was President, and Spacex was a Jeff Bezos project, the media would be all over this story.  Just another instance of slanting the news.  These people should be ashamed of themselves.