Ron Paul, the Libertarian in Congress — albeit with the “R” Republican after his name — apparently gave a floor speech at the time of Iraqi War Resolution about the “myth” that “war makes good politics” — saying that in the long-term wars tend to destroy candidates and politicians, so if you’re voting cynically for that reason — think long and hard.

The classic example is probably Woodrow Wilson. In his case, he brought US approval into the war mostly through a sheer propaganda manipulation assualt and crushing of dissent, and not surprisingly when the costs of war became apparent to the temporily mollified public — he was given the boot. The Party didn’t bother re-nominating him. For my purposes here, saying that yes — Americans have “changed horses in mid-stream”: While it’s true that you can’t say Americans opted to “change horses” in the middle of the World War — Americans certainly rejected his post-war Reconstruction efforts on where he wanted to put America in the world.

Harry Truman was the last president not bound by the twenty-second Amendment. And, out of loyalty — particularly because of his upset victory four years earlier, he would have won the Democratic nomination. But, he knew he would be cooked against Eisenhower, so he didn’t run. Public opinion on the Korean War was souring greatly. Eisenhower went on to suspend hostilities in Korea, which matched public opinion well enough.

Lyndon Johnson saw the writing on the wall when Eugene McCarthy won some early primaries. The Vietnam War made him a public disgrace. Thus, he dropped out of the race — Bobby Kennedy followed by Hubert Humphrey filled his place. And Richard Nixon was elected — as a convuluted dove-hawk hybrid.

Besides which, if you want to put “The War on Terror” as analogious with “The Cold War”: In addition to Truman and Johnson, we changed horses mid-stream when we booted Nixon (though not at the ballot box), Ford, and Carter.

So, we change horses in mid-stream all the time. I’d like to hope that the horse we’re likely to jump onto mid-stream in 2004 is going in a different direction than the horse we’re on … I guess we shall see.

Will Someone Please Put This Guy Out of His Misery?

Okay. So, that’s how things stood for Clinton in April. McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, and now this turd. Perhaps they better pull some shenanigans at the convention and get someone else in!

That’s the low-point, right? Nay. Things just kept getting worse.

Here’s the polling:
Bush: 36%
Perot: 34%
Clinton: 24%

Actually, take note of that: 56 percent support a 50 percent reduction in defense spending over five years; and 79% would support the position that the Europeans and Japanese pay the full cost of theirown defense, or we bring our troops home. Well, it’s the end of the Cold War, you know…

AND

Needs to just worry about getting enough votes to qualify for matching funds. His campaign is completely dead. He will suffer the worse loss in recent
history. This is especially odd, because he is the best candidate they have
had since Johnson.

More fuel:

Robert Novak, on CNN last night, blocked out the electoral college divvy state by state, if the election were held today. He had Perot with about 340 votes, Bush at about 170, and Clinton with 9. Perot gets most of the big blocks: California, Texas, Florida, etc. Clinton gets only his home state of Arkansas and D.C. So Perot is doing better than even his poll results show.

Nine… electoral… votes. And Perot is the new president. Got that?

Remember Bryan and his cross of gold? Where is he now?

I’m guessing that’s a show of support for just chunking the primaries and … finding someone, anybody, new at the Democratic Convention. As opposed to a plea to base our currency on silver.

This query was placed in the Reason Magazine blog…

Regarding Tom Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas:

If what’s wrong with Kansas is that they elect Right-leaning Republicans… when was anything right with Kansas?

2000:
Bush: 58.04% 6
Gore: 37.24%
1996
Dole 54.29%
Clinton 36.08%
1992
Bush 38.88%
Clinton 33.74%
1988
Bush 55.79%
Dukakis 42.56%
1984
Reagan 66.27%
Mondale 32.60%
1980
Reagan 57.85%
Carter 33.29%
1976
Ford 52.49%
Carter 44.94%
1972
Nixon 67.66%
McGovern 29.50%
1968
Nixon 54.84%
Humphrey 34.72%
1964
Johnson 54.09%
Goldwater 45.06%
1960
Nixon 60.45%
Kennedy 39.10%
1956
Eisenhower 65.44%
Stevenson 34.21%
1952
Eisenhower 68.77%
Stevenson 30.50%
1948
Dewey 53.63%
Truman 44.61%
1944
Dewey 60.25%
Roosevelt 39.18%
1940
Willkie 56.86%
Roosevelt 42.40%
1936
Roosevelt 53.67%
Landon 45.95%
1932
Roosevelt 53.56%
Hoover 44.13%
1928
Hoover 72.02%
Smith 27.06%
1924
Coolidge 61.54%
Davis 23.60%
1920
Harding 64.75%
Cox 32.52%
1916
Wilson 49.95%
Hughes 44.09%
1912
Wilson 39.30%
Roosevelt 32.88%
1908
Taft 52.46%
Bryan 42.88%
1904
Roosevelt 64.81%
Parker 26.23%
1900
McKinley 52.56%
Bryan 45.96%
1896
Bryan 51.32%
McKinley 47.63%

You have to go back to 1896 through 1912 to see the more clearly “progressive” candidate garner the Kansas vote noticably above the national average (and even that is befuddled by the 1900 election of McKinley. owned by more corporate interests than just about any president in American history.) Other than that, whatever’s wrong with Kansas has been wrong before the Cultural Shifts of the 60s and the subsequent backlash, and was wrong with Kansas as Roosevelt introduced his New Deal Reforms (in what is the largest Electoral Landslide in US History*, Roosevelt really only squeaked by Landon in 1936.)

Looking at the late nineteenth century voting record, through the post Lincoln era that historians have tended to think of as stacked with unimpressive presidents, I’m struck by how often a third party pretty well threw the election either to the Democratic and Republican Party in Kansas, but here it seems to be a 50-50 state.

*for the nay-sayers who’d look at Reagan’s 49 state victory over Mondale as the pinacle of Presidential Landslides: Reagan: 525 ev, 97.58% Mondale: 13 ev, 2.42% … Roosevelt: 523 ev 98.49% ; Landon: 8 ev 1.51%. Landon won Maine and Vermont. Now, here’s a question: What’s Right With Vermont?

GOP WINS 4 GOVERNORSHIPS

associated press, November 5, 1980

Republicans, riding the long coattails of Ronald Reagan’s march to the presidency, snatched four governorships from the Democrats while yielding none of their own on Election Day.

The GOP wound up with 23 governors, its best number in a decade. One of the more striking Republican triumphs was confirmed after sunrise today as Little Rock businessman Frank White ousted incumbent Bill Clinton in Arkansas.

At 33, Clinton is the youngest governor and was regarded one of the rising stars among Democrats. But his embrace of President Carter may have cost him dearly in a state swept by Reagan, as White wound up with 52 percent of the vote.

[…]

“A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Then again, when I alluded that to my Republican sister once, she pointed out that Reagan was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, sooo…

……………………

“Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us realize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

There’s a number of ways to view that quotation. #1: Reagan moved from alluding to John Wayne movies to alluding to science fiction movies. #2: Reagan was telegraphing a message about he knows that we do not know. “People say that the aliens are going to come one day to save us. While I say, the aliens are here and they’re here to eat us!” #3: Straight-forward inspirational words to put our world conflicts into perspective.

Or perhaps a mixture of the three…

…

What was this one all about?

I hear that that one was Pat Buchannan’s idea…

…

Davis A. Stockman claimed this, in a book I’ve not read by way of a blog entry excerpt:

Incredibly, Weinberger had also brought with him a blown-up cartoon. It showed three soldiers. One was a pygmy who carried now rifle. He represented the Carter budget. The second was a four-eyed whimp who looked like Woody Allen, carrying a tiny rifle. That was – me? – the OMB defense budget. Finally, there was GI Joe himself, 190 pounds of fighting man, all decked out in helmet and flak jacket and pointing an M-60 machine gun menacingly at – me again? This imposing warrior represented, yes, the Department of Defense budget plan.
It was so intellectually disreputable, so demeaning, that I could hardly bring myself to believe that a Harvard-educated cabinet officer could have brought this to the President of the United States. Did he think the White House was on Sesame Street?

…

Oh, and remember when the Bushes tried to kill Reagan?

Okay. Never mind that last one.

Carter is next, you know.

Bush must be disappointed. While he can wrap up the fight against communism with his WW2-tinged European tour into “War on Terror”, Reagan ceases to be a bullet-point in October. Or September. The best time for Reagan to have died, politically speaking, would probably be in time for a gala-memorial at the Republican Convention.

But this is pure cynicism. Even faux-cynicism.

1983 was an apocalyptic – tinged year. Despite what my 6th grade fundamentalist CCD teacher had said about the Cuban Missile Crisis being the climax of history, the spy novels I’m familiar with tend to hold the country in the dark on the dangerous events that destroy the world. Thus, a sober assessment shows that 1983 was the climax of all Ameri-centric world history.

Nixon memorials and TBN specials coming up soon at this url… Watch for them.

War Time Politics:

Indeed, our local Lancaster New Era noted in an editorial on the eve of the election, Nov. 6, 1944, that “The surprising thing about this war-time presidential campaign is that it was no different from all the others.” Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s opponent that year, spent much of the campaign deriding FDR as a “tired old man.” The Roosevelt administration, Dewey said the week before the election, was “the most wasteful, extravagant and incompetent administration in the history of the nation.” Dewey, in fact, spent that fall all but calling Roosevelt a communist, insisting that FDR was intent on selling the nation down the river to the reds.

…………..
And Dewey sayeth:
“American fighting men were paying in blood through a prolongation of the battle of Germany for the ‘improvised meddling’ of the Democratic administration and the ‘confused incompetence’ of President Roosevelt.”

That’s from an Associated Press article that ran in this very newspaper on Sunday, Nov. 5, 1944, the morning after a major Dewey address at Madison Square Garden in New York City. In it, Dewey derided the “Morgenthau plan,” whereby then-Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. suggested that after the war, Germany should be reduced to an agrarian economy and the Germans treated “in such a manner so they can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.”

Morgenthau’s suggestion, Dewey said, “put fight back into the German army” and was “as good as 10 fresh German divisions.” This he called the “tragic consequences of blunder,” which was “costing the lives of American men and delaying the day of final victory.”

Historians might indeed conclude that the Morgenthau plan stiffened German resistance. But ultimately, how was Dewey’s denunciation of it any different than, say, criticism of Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence that we didn’t need more troops?
……………..

Roosevelt “trotted out the bugaboo of his indispensability in the days ahead: the argument that he alone can handle foreign affairs because he is a close personal friend of Churchill and Stalin,” said the Lancaster New Era in its editorial endorsing Dewey the weekend before the election.

In a later editorial, the New Era called FDR’s attitude “un-American.”
……………

Changing war horses in midstream
By Gil Smart
Sunday News
Published: May 23, 2004 3:36 AM EST

I recall this conversation… probably my senior year in high school, probably my Journalism class. A fellow student, a young lady whose name escapes me, commented on the crass nature of today’s entertainment and landscape and said “I wish this were the 50s.”

To which I responded, “No you don’t. You wouldn’t get very far career-wise. And if I were to rape you, the judge would more likely get me off.”

I had gathered a sense, from my general sense of adolescent disillusionment I suppose or from somewhere or other, that there… are… no… good old days.

Actually, my seventh grade English teacher tipped me, and the rest of his class, off to this concept. Not that anyone there was paying attention, and not that I’m probably the only one who recalls that lecture.

I lifted the falling from an article from one of Russ Kick’s books, which when it gets to the 50s seems to reference, second-hand, from The Way We Never Were.

#1: 1820s to 1900: Of 20 million immigrants who came to America, 5 million returned to their place of origin.

#2: 1870s: Newsboys… sold newspapers until the age of 10, when they went on to bootblacking. Fierce turf and paper battles. Top of the heap earned about 30 cents a day. The majority were homeless. In 1880, there were 100,000 homeless children in New York City.

#3: WWI. “Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.” — Woodrow Wilson

The WWI analogy to our current day “Freedom Fries” was not “Liberty Cabbage” or the banning of Beethoven at Opera Houses; it would be the banning of Irish-American papers at various locations. (although, even there it falls apart, as France wasn’t exactly an ally of Saddam Hussein in the true sense.)

#4: 1920s: 56 percent of students graduated high school. 60 percent of Americans earned less than the amount considered necessary to meet human needs.

#4: 1930s: The Commander of operations against the “Bonus Army”: Douglas MacCarthur. His third aide: Eisenhower. Third calvary led by George Patton.

A March 1938 survey found that 41 percent of Americans believed that the Jews held too much power in the United States.

#5: WWII: The US Navy gave a group of recent high school graduates a test of basic math skills. 60 percent failed. A US Army poll at the end of the war found that 22% of GIs thought that Nazi treatment of Jews was justified, and 23% were unsure. A December 1945 Fortune survey found that 23% of Americans wished the US had had the chance to drop many more atomic bombs on Japan before they had the chance to surrender.

#6: 1950s: Mid-decade, only half of the US population had savings, and a quarter had no liquid assets at all. 97 out of 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth during the decade. There was an 80 percent increase in out-of-wedlock babies placed for adoption between 1944 and 1955. (Then again… this is the baby boom.)

The conversation was, plainly , not going where Roosevelt had intended. “Your press incited–violence and class hatred. Do you deny that?”
“I don’t deny or affirm anything. Do you understand that? I’m here at your request, Roosevelt. Personally, I have no wish to see you at all, anywhere, ever–unless, of course, we share the same quarters in h*ll. so I must warn you, no one says ‘Do you deny’ to me, in my country.”
“Your country, is it?” Roosevelt’s falsetto had deepened to a mellifluous alto. “when did you buy it?”
“In 1898, when I made war with Spain, and won it. All my doing, that was, and none of yours. Ever since then, the country’s gone pretty much the way I’ve wanted it to go, and you’ve gone right along, too, because you had to.”
“You exaggerate you importance, Mr. Hearst.”
“You understand nothing, Mr. Roosevelt.”
“I understand this much. You, the owner–no, no, the father of the country, couldn’t get the Democrats to nominate you for president even in a year when there was no chance of their winning. How do you explain that?”
Hearst’s pale close-set eyes were now directed straight at Roosevelt; the effect was cyclopean, intimidating. “First, I’d say it makes no difference at all who sits in that chair of yours. The country is run by the trusts, as you like to remind us. They can’t buy me. I’m rich. So I’m free to do as I please, and you’re not. In general, I go along with them, simply to keep the people docile, for now. I do that through the press. Now you’re just an office-holder. Soon you’ll move out of here, and that’s the end of you. But I go on and on, describing the world we live in, which then becomes what I say it is. Long after no one knows the difference between you and Chester A. Arthur, I’ll still be here.” Hearst’s smile was frosty. “But if they do remember who you are, it’ll be because I’ve decided to remind them, by telling them, maybe, how I made you up in the first place, in Cuba.”
“You have raised, Mr. Hearst, the Fourth Estate to a level quite unheard of in any time…”

— Gore Vidal. Empire. Nay, I haven’t read it. Ought I to?

Today’s William Hearst, aka Citizen Kane. Do you have to ask?

I like Chinese…

Quick footnotes of some of the following quotations. Take the first one for example: Thomas Friedman (like him or, as I will, lump him) finished a typical Friedmanesque editorial with the astute ” In that case, we will have to move to Plan B. Too bad we never really had Plan A.” Take the second one… destroy the village to save the village. Take the third quote… History is prologue. Take the fourth one: refresh your memory with three stupid words: “Bring It On”. Take the fifth quote: Maybe a cheap shot, but go ahead and google the term “Chicken-hawk.” Take the sixth quote: Did the powers that be even bother weighing into their considerations the consequence of shutting down that stupid newspaper?

#1: The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple where the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.
…………

#2: Do not interfere with an army that is returning home. When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.
……….

#3: If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.
………

#4: No leader should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no leader should fight a battle simply out of pique. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life. Hence the enlightened leader is heedful, and the good leader full of caution.
……….

#5: It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.
…………..

#6: Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical. If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are. Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.
……………