What happened to this country of ours?

[Red Steele]

the transformational politics of LBJ.

http://www.twincities.com/columnists/ci_25776959/george-f-will-lbjs-bifurcated-legacy

Good synopsis by Mr. Will, and no big words this time...he must have misplaced his dictionary.

Good point about FDR vs. LBJ, FDR still was pretty mainstream, and SS was a forced savings program of sorts, not welfare. Just like farm program payments and other business subsidies, they may be misquided but one thing they do not encourage is sloth and immorality.

[bruce MN]

Read that yesterday. Read it actually, in the other TC paper. Not often that both of them will run the same column. With that small indication of intense coverage probably meaning that it got heavy cover all over the country I'm expecting that it is going to reach near Manifesto status. Will has been visibly shaken by the inability of the old, post war emboldened Anglo economic and cultural elite to hang on to the reins for some time. Losing some of their control to the social and cultural revolution of the last quarter of the past century and now to the nativists on the far right. It's thinned them down and now the only face they have is the plutocrats of the gaveled 1 percent. I've read darn to near every column the man has written over the past 30 or so years and the two most memorable were both scathing critics of novels that he felty were conspiratorial in the wrong direction. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Delillo's White Noise. Naming the later as "treason". As for his knock on LBJ none of that was undertaken and signed into the law of the land without, first, passage in the Congress. A body that As it stood then as always elected by the people. That seems to be becoming exceedingly difficult for a considerable number of Americans to grasp.

[hardnox]

I'll go a bit further into places where he can't go and still make a living as a mainstream pundit.

At approxomately the same hour as JFK's shooting in Dallas, a guy named Don Reynolds was testifying before the Senate rules committee and providing damaging evidence of LBJ's corrupt activities as the Bobby Baker scandal unfolded. Simultaneously, TIME magazine has set the presses for a cover story on the dubious source of LBJ's wealth.

LBJ was done and accepted a bargain with the Deep State that he couldn't refuse. But from that point forward he was their property, 100%.

They wanted Vietnam and they got it. They wanted an end to the policy that had been in place since 1948 of denying military aid to Israel and a vast flood was unleashed. Kennedy's push to inspect the nuclear reactor at Dimona was abruptly halted.

Probably more controversial would be the assertion that the Deep State realized that it couldn't fight and win the Cold War when the rest of the world- particularly the Third World where it was being fought- had some justification in believing that the US did not practice the ideals that it preached in regards to civil rights and the substantial portion of its citizenry that was in a state of poverty.

It's also fair to speculate that in 1968 LBJ was notified that a successor(s) had been identified and his srevices would no longer be required.

1963 marks the major point of ascendancy of the Deep State via the First Coup.

[Red Steele]

just because people vote something into law through representative demcocracy does not mean it is good public policy.

You do understand this, right?

[Red Steele]

depends on which box of wheaties you open...the generic one, or the one with the special code decyphering ring.

[hardnox]

Or wich narrative you want to fit your own agenda.

[hardnox]

One of several veins of support for the preposterous Warren findings is among "conservatives" who intuitively recognize that considering the possibility that he had developed some very powerful enemies implicitly confers a special status upon his legacy.