LBJ was a crook.
Indeed. Anything that dirties up his reputation cannot be all bad.
......Among other nefarious endeavors.
IMO, M-Dowd is protesting the negative depiction of one of her secular gods, Lyndon “Loose Brains” Johnson.
It’s ironic that the filmmaker, in his eagerness to elevate Martin Luther King to god status (where MLK has already been for decades), makes LBJ look more like the bullying arrogant lout that he really was.
Leaving out the juicier LBJ quotes, of course.
There are plenty of JFK and LBJ puffers out there in historical circles but the political priorities came first including winning elections and acting only if public opinion shifted in the right direction.
The white population was willing after the dogs and water cannons at Birmingham to accept the Civil Rights Act, after the violence at Selma the Voting Rights Act and after MLK’s assassination the Fair Housing Act.
But as the violence spread and deepened a backlash against the CR Movement deepened and LBJ’s “poverty programs” created further resentment against people on welfare driving around in nice cars and such. The popularity of a song called “Welfare Cadillac” was symbolic of the feelings among many whites at the end of the 1960’s.
That's putting it mildly! He was totally amoral, committed only to wheeling and dealing. He stole his election to the Senate, grandstanded over NASA, made a total mess of Vietnam, started the modern welfare state and the War of Poverty which has cost us how many trillion. And so on...