In a twist…
…on the immortal words of LBJ, Councilman Steve Lipski was in the tent pissing in, since it’s logical to assume that the DC club crowd that was the object of Lipski’s uh, favors, was heavily Democratic in composition.
And speaking of LBJ—in my quest to find a good link for the Johnson quote to which I’m referring (that Johnson would rather have J. Edgar Hoover inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in, quote number four here), I found a page of quotations from LBJ listing quite a few insightful and /or funny ones that seem to retain their appropriateness today:
Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it.
Did you ever think that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.
I don’t believe I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn’t go to Harvard.
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: “President Can’t Swim.”
The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.
The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.
When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.
That last quote, as well as several others, tell me that LBJ might not have been too hard on Palin (except perhaps for strategic reasons, since he was a fiercely pro-Democratic partisan). He might have had a secret feeling of kinship with her because he suffered from the same condescension and accusations of being a classless rube despite his power, cunning, and intelligence.
Of course, in the case of LBJ, public knowledge of his private behavior really would have supported the charges of crudeness.
LBJ was a remarkable man cursed by both sides: the Left will forever blame him for Vietnam (while ignoring JFK’s involvement) and the Right will forever blame him for the Great Society (while pretending the man they voted into office after him didn’t exist).
As for Lipski, I wish the stories about him had omitted his state, also. (She writes sadly from NJ.)
You left out my favorite Lyndon quote:
“I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smell like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.” Lyndon Baines Johnson
Not THAT’S pure Lyndon
Great quotes. I love jackass; CIA/Princeton/family business; mayor.
One mistake LBJ would not have made: underestimating either Sarah Palin’s intelligence or ability.
LBJ was more likely to have underestimated a Kennedy’s intelligence and ability. Looking from Texas: most Kennedys seem cursed with low IQs. We wouldn’t allow them to coach a youth football team. (I’m joking. Except about football. Wouldn’t joke about that. Wouldn’t abuse those young men by allowing them to be coached by a Kennedy.)
I had to laugh at all the liberals that were saying that stimulating the economy from the bottom up (Obama’s “spread the wealth”) had never been tried before. We have been trying it ever since the inception of “The Great Society”. Trillions of dollars that have done little to stimulate the economy and done nothing more than keep millions of people dependent on mere subsistence payments from the government. Oddly enough one of the icons the democrats hold high – Bobby Kennedy – was against welfare. He said, “They want jobs and we give them a check.”
Read below – heck I know a lot of people who call themselves republicans who aren’t this conservative.
“In our generosity we have created a system of hand-outs, a second-rate set of social services which damages and demeans its recipients, and destroys any semblance of human dignity that they have managed to retain through their adversity. In the long run, welfare payments solve nothing, for the giver or receiver; free Americans deserve the chance to be fully self-supporting.”
These wonderfully prescient words flowed from Bobby Kennedy’s lips during the heyday of the Great Society. The welfare state, said Bobby, has “largely failed as an anti-poverty weapon.” His brother John agreed: “No lasting solution to the problem [of poverty] can be bought with a welfare check,” reported the New York Times.
This fellow on the Right will blame him for both The Great Society and for screwing up in Viet Nam. (See Summers’s On Strategy.) But he does have to be given credit for his part in desegregation.
If ever there was a mixed legacy, it is LBJs. He will not be my hero, but I can understand if someone else holds him in high esteem over Civil Rights. I will be heartsick if someone believes that The Great Society was of any benefit to the nation or the world.
How did a man who came up with so many quotable aphorisms have been such a failure?
He was my C-in-C for a time. His intentions were good, like so many of those of the liberal persuasion. However, skilled as he was at hard ball politics, he was a disaster when it came to war. Never had the ability to see that war was not like politics. He could not twist Uncle Ho’s arm the way he did his political opponents. And yet he persisted in believing that fiction.
His legacy is the failure of Vietnam, the failure of the Great Society (with its War on Poverty), and his “guns and butter” policy, which I believe led to the inflation of the 70s. As you say, NJcommuter, civil rights was his only success. To which I ask, why doesn’t this country see that Obama wants to replay the failed Great Society policies?
LBJ was a micromanager. A perfectionalist, aka control freak, that would never be satisfied until all the little toy soldiers and ducks lined up in a row exactly as LBJ ordered.
HIs outbursts of rudeness and profanity were boyhood attempts to lash out at what he cannot control using his charisma and magnetism. It must have worked for him early on and he never stopped using it.
Of course, in a real war requiring real competence and real leadership via the right amount of control and hands off mixes, LBJ failed miserably and he knew it. That’s why he didn’t run for re-election. If he can’t control things, he might as well quit. That defines a perfectionist. If you can’t do it perfectly, then don’t do it. If you haven’t done it perfectly enough, then that just means you need to exercise more control over it and over people.
LBJ never understood economy, that is why he believed that guns-and-butter policy is possible. As for present discussion about relative merits of trickle down versus bottom up economy stimulating, one should compare failure of FDR policies to end depression by public works and success of doing so by huge military spending from the beginning of WWII. The first approach did not create many jobs outside the public works themselves, while the second created lots of them throughout the economy due subcontracts in all private owned industries. Government spendings in both cases were comparable.
In part because the Republicans, who had an obligation to educate people (or to waken them to what they already knew) failed to do so.
I am just old enough to remember The Great Society and the harm that it wrought. Since it was a failure that must be laid at the feet of the Democrats, it is not taught in school. ANY Republican appeal to the lessons of history MUST now factor this problem in, just as we must consider that a scandal involving a Congresscritter whose party is not given in an MSM report to be a Dem.
I really find your defense of Palin quite perplexing, Neo. Whether this woman is “intelligent” or not is really quite beside the point — she was and is totally unprepared for the job she was nominated for, as one can see simply by watching her astoundingly unprepared performances in interviews with Gibson, Couric, and even Sean Hannity. Could she, one day, catch up? A woman who has spent her life mired in intellectual incuriosity is unlikely to be able to entirely change her ways, though one can always hope, the fact is she would be a dramatically less informed politician at the national level than any we have ever seen.
This is hardly “condescension” it is merely a straightforward observation, one that has been made by those on both the left and the right, as you well know, from Kathleen Parker to David Brooks. In any event, the likelihood of a Palin resurgence is asymptotically approaching zero at this stage, as it’s quite clear from the polls she was a major factor in McCain’s huge loss.
Mitsu, consider that, according to the left:
Ford = dumbest POTUS of all time,
until, thankfully for Ford…
Reagan became dumbest POTUS of all time
until, thankfully for Reagan…
Bush 41 became dumbest POTUS of all time
until, thankfully for Bush 41…
Bush 43 became dumbest POTUS of all time
until, hopefully thankfully for Bush 43…
Sarah Palin becomes dumbest POTUS of all time.
Could it be a pattern of the left convincing themselves that Repubs are ignorant? Nah. Just a pattern of Repubs exposing themselves as ignorant. Barack and Joe Biden certainly have higher IQs and shrewder judgment than Sarah Palin.
The Dems also said Eisenhower was dumb. I guess being the Supreme Allied Commander in WW II was an easy task.
Actually, I probably have a higher IQ than either Obama or Biden. That doesn’t mean I could do a particular job better, because intelligence covers many areas. OTOH, to judge by Biden’s gaffes, with a few years of training I might be a better Constitutional scholar than he is, and quite possibly a better senator. Unfortunately, I’m not as charismatic.
High IQ has nothing in common with good judgment. Nor intellectualism has. Remember, there is no important political issue in which 20 century intellectuals were on the right side of history. As Orwell said, “Only intellectual can be so stupid”.
Actually, gcotharn, I don’t think most Democrats considered Bush 41 “the dumbest POTUS of all time”, either then or now. He was certainly smarter than all the others on your list, with the possible exception of Ford, though I think he was a better president than Ford. I certainly would rank Bush 41 as probably one of the best Republican presidents we’ve had; thoughtful and pragmatic.
Palin, however, has no chance of being elected President, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over that one.
I thought the pissing / tent story referred to RFK. I don’t think LBJ had the leverage to force J. Edgar Hoover out, especially since he assumed the presidency after Kennedy’s assasination.
@Mitsu
I cede your point about Bush 41. It was overenthusiastic to include him in my list. I am happy to see you agree – via absence of protest – that the left widely considered Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, Bush 43, and Palin to be ignorami.
> If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: “President Can’t Swim.”
Along these lines is the joke, “If I flew, the headlines that afternoon would read: ‘President does bird imitations'”. LOL.
OTOH, my opinion of LBJ is too colored by his complete betrayal of duly-elected southern black reps at the 1964 DNC.