I am very sorry that JFK got shot. But it was 50 years ago.
And let us be frank: he was worse than Nixon on foreign policy, he was worse than both LBJ and Nixon on Civil Rights and on the need for government action in the economy, and his illiterate views on the relationship between Catholicism and the American Republic (he never attended any Catholic educational institution, not one day in his life) have made it impossible for an orthodox Catholic ever to become President of the United States.
History would be very harsh on him if he had lived, and America and the world would be much worse places.
Pretty people, however, get a free pass.
Johnson was a better President domestically, but he was brought down by the motley crew that accrued to Bobby Kennedy: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists.
Nixon was a better President both domestically and internationally, but he was brought down by the motley crew that had accrued to Bobby Kennedy: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists.
That motley crew is still there. It is preparing to nominate Hillary Clinton, whose husband used to be pretty. Yes, it really has come to that.
And let us be frank: he was worse than Nixon on foreign policy, he was worse than both LBJ and Nixon on Civil Rights and on the need for government action in the economy, and his illiterate views on the relationship between Catholicism and the American Republic (he never attended any Catholic educational institution, not one day in his life) have made it impossible for an orthodox Catholic ever to become President of the United States.
History would be very harsh on him if he had lived, and America and the world would be much worse places.
Pretty people, however, get a free pass.
Johnson was a better President domestically, but he was brought down by the motley crew that accrued to Bobby Kennedy: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists.
Nixon was a better President both domestically and internationally, but he was brought down by the motley crew that had accrued to Bobby Kennedy: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists.
That motley crew is still there. It is preparing to nominate Hillary Clinton, whose husband used to be pretty. Yes, it really has come to that.
You are, of course, absolutely right. It seems we don't disagree about everything.
ReplyDeleteKennedy continued Truman's legacy of finishing one war, then starting another (in Korea); Kennedy went one better and attacked both Cuba and Vietnam.
Chomsky is brilliant on his appalling foreign policy record.
He was also a fanatically liberal pro-abortion President, beginning a long Democrat tradition.
Long tradition of them both.
ReplyDeleteAnd it was Eisenhower, for whom I have a lot of time, who legalised abortion on military bases.
Just as it was Rockefeller who legalised it in New York, and Reagan who legalised it in California before going on to nominate no fewer that three pro-abortionist to the Supreme Court.
Whereas it was Carter, for whom I have rather less time as a President rather than as a former President than I have for Eisenhower, who signed the Hyde Amendment into law.
Hyde himself was not only a Republican but almost a kind of European Catholic monarchist. But both Houses were Democratic-controlled when his Amendment was passed, and it has never failed to achieve its required annual renewal.
There is also a ban on abortion at public expense written into ObamaCare, whereas Romney not only legalised abortion at public expense in Massachusetts, but he continues to derive an income from its performance.
Oh, the Rockefellers (like left-wing billionaire philanthropists George Soros and Warren Buffet) are longstanding population-control advocates who funded Kinsey and the sex-ed propagandists for many years.
ReplyDeleteObama gets round that deceitful "ban" by funding Planned Parenthood (which Romney vowed to scrap)-money which everyone knows, ends up funding abortion.
Oh, yes, I know about the Population control movement. I have done for many years.
ReplyDeleteThe attempts to circumvent Hyyde and Stupak-Pitts would be tested in court, if the pro-life leaders were not a bunch of GOP shills and klaxons.
Nixon wanted a more comprehensive scheme than ObamaCare, almost an NHS. Good for him.
1) "he was worse than Nixon on foreign policy"
ReplyDelete---If you judge by statements in the 1960 election alone, then, perhaps, but I do not think that would be quite proper methodology. JFK appeared as a more rabid anti-communist because he could - Nixon was tied to Eisenhower's record but was even more rabid himself when Truman was in office. If you compare the Kennedy and Nixon presidencies, I cannot understand this conclusion. It seems to me that Nixon was a bit more pliant to his advisors.
2) "he was worse than both LBJ and Nixon on Civil Rights"
---This is a very complicated topic but it is not obvious what your own position on relevant (to that time) civil rights issues would have been. In any case, the natural progression of time plays a large rôle in what different presidents risked attempting in civil rights.
3) "on the need for government action in the economy"
---They're about the same. JFK cut taxes but was quite interventionist in principle. Some of Nixon's policies, however, laid the seeds for America's coming industrial decline.
4) JFK did nothing to bar orthodox Catholics becoming POTUS. Underlying cultural barriers that have only changed their surface realisation, plus the unfortunate politics of American bishops, effectively bar orthodox Catholics from high-ranking (electoral) political life.
5) "Johnson was a better President domestically, but he was brought down by the motley crew that accrued to Bobby Kennedy: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists."
---?!?!?!?!?!?
6) "Nixon was a better President both domestically and internationally, but he was brought down by the motley crew that had accrued to Bobby Kennedy"
---RFKites undermined Nixon 6 years after RFK was killed?
LBJ was a criminal and I cannot think of anything positive from his White House that was not also supported by the Kennedys. Nixon was more intelligent, but ultimately not sufficiently strong and independent, president.
JFK stood round looking pretty and making fine-sounding speeches about Civil Rights. LBJ got on with it. He believed in it more, precisely because he was a Southerner.
ReplyDeleteThe ghastly RFK Coalition that had removed the greatest enemy of the Clan and of the Klan had expected to enter the White House in 1968. When that did not happen, it took its opportunity in 1973 to avenge itself on the man who come through the middle.
Nixon was Vice-President when Eisenhower ended the Korean War, pursued an even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, declined to intervene in Indochina, denounced the military-industrial complex, and delivered his still-inspiring advocacy of nuclear power as “atoms for peace” 10 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: civil nuclear power as the ultimate beating of swords in ploughshares. In 1960, Kennedy branded Eisenhower and Nixon as soft on the Soviets.
Nixon suspended the draft, pursued détente with China and with the USSR, and ended the Vietnam War. He declared that, “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” or, as Milton Friedman bitterly put it, “We are all Keynesians now.”
Nixon believed in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South.
Nixon insisted that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Zionist dissidents, who have turned out to have been just as unpleasant in their own way as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime.
Nixon was forced out over something that no one really found shocking then any more than we would find it shocking now, although I suppose that we ought to mourn the passing of a world in which they felt obliged to pretend that they were shocked by it.
Mr Lindsay, if Nixon was as good as you say, then why did he condemn Pat Buchanan for being an "isolationist" on foreign policy"?
ReplyDeleteTrue, he said Buchanan was an important voice and "should be heard"-but he also said he should never be President.
He wasn't perfect. But he was better than what had gone before. Or than what came after him and the very underrated Gerald Ford.
ReplyDeletePretty people get a free pass, and don't you know it, Mr. Lindsay.
ReplyDelete