Posted on 07/11/2006 6:14:32 AM PDT by InvisibleChurch
Why is the father of The Great Society ignored? Sure, he messed up with Viet Nam, but that's blamed on W anyway, but he made sure to transfer zillions of dollar$$$ from your back pockets to the back pockets of other people. What's up with that?
>>I have a "progressive" friend that truly believes that Nixon started the war.
Good lord.
Superimpose some Presidential terms on this data:
http://members.aol.com/warlibrary/vwatl.htm
Perhaps because the initials BJ stir memories of a more recent White House inhabitant?
Who's the arrow pointing to in that picture?
You got to remember that the parties then are different than the parties now. In reality there were really 3 parties back then, the northern democrats, the southern democrats, and the repubs. You could easily argue that there were 4, i.e. the liberal white shoe northeeastern repubs i.e. Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay etc. and the other repubs i.e. Barry Goldwater. Richard Russell of Georgia and Hubert Humphrey were members of the same party in name only :)
Anyway when JFK was probably blackmailed at the LA convention to put LBJ on the ticket and throw Symington overboard, it was if someone from another party was on the ticket. The Kennedy clan *hated* Johnson and marginalized him to the point that in 61, 62 it became a running joke. They would send him to BF Egypt for some assistant deputy minister's wife's cousin's funeral just to keep him away from the corridors of power. Also most folks think that in November of '63 the announcemnet that LBJ was going to be removed from the ticket was coming soon. Technically they were in the same party but by today's standards they weren't.
Kennedy and Johnson had no love for each other. One theory I've heard is that Kennedy offered Johnson the VP position believing LBJ would turn it down, and Lyndon accepted believing Kennedy would lose, and he would still have his powerful Senate job. In 1960 the Democrat-controlled Texas legislature put a bill through allowing him to run for Senate and VP on the same ballot. Back then, ballots were marked by scratching off the undesirable candidates (a system that really gave me a lot of satisfaction). The saying went around "don't be half-safe; scratch Lyndon twice!"
I disagree. Islamofascism is the problem it is today because Carter refused to help the Shah of Iran who was by far our most loyal ally in the region (possibly more loyal than Israel) and then he backed down to the jihadists who invaded sovereign American property and held Americans hostage. Sadly, one of Reagan's few mistakes is that he didn't fix this.
Same reason we don't often mention Nixon.
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Huh? I didn't know LBJ got run out of office in a scandal.
Yep. Truman should have told the French to pound sand, on the issue of getting their colony back. But we were trying to get the French to embrace NATO to protect Western Europe from the very real menace of the Soviet Empire, and doing the right thing fell to political expediency.
Because he was a collosal embarassment.
Fear of the underlying truths.
Well I should finish my thought before I post. I was saying it was because he was a collosal embarassment. He was a patriotic American that doesn't fit the current RAT mold.
He was a patriotic American....
With all due respect and no offense intended - do you really mean this? LBJ never gave a rats rear end for anyone or anything other than himself.
I've been saying for a while that LBJ is the worst domestic policy President of my lifetime, with Carter being the worst foreign policy President.
OK, I'll buy that.
Vietnam was the right war, fought the wrong way.
LBJ could hardly speak 5 words in a row without one of them being "f@@k" or "mother f@@cker".
Whenever he made a televised speech, his aides would be cringing in the background hoping that he didn't let an expletive slip out.
Congressman Albert Thomas
Exactly. Both militarily, and politically.
There is no doubt to me that Vietnam was a huge war of economic attrition in the 70 Years War against the Soviets, one that they couldn't afford. The Soviets spent huge amounts of treasure propping up Uncle Ho, and the costs to them help set things up for Reagan in the 80s.
There you go. Plus, even LBJ was an awful president, he was still a patriot as far as I could tell.
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