” neo-neocon Says:
October 23rd, 2015 at 12:11 pm

formwiz:

Yes, LBJ’s landslide in 1964 was so huge that many Republicans had to have voted for him. But to a lot of Republicans, he really was much further to the right than they were.”

I think that anyone who has even the vaguest childhood memories of that time, remembers that Goldwater was generally taken as some kind of lunatic.

My father didn’t vote for him.

One memory I do have was that there was only one Goldwater lawn sign in the neighborhood. It was next door to my little pal’s house and in the front yard of a childless – as far as I knew – but youngish middle-aged couple who had one of those meticulous Bentgrass lawns. The guy cut it with an unpowered reel-type push mower, and wore cotton gloves while doing so.

By the way, by way of carry-over from an earlier Neo comment, I mistakenly replied …

“Being a warmongering extremist may have been the only thing he was ever unfairly accused of.”

… when I carelessly skated over the actual subject of the remark, and on the basis of an earlier observation of Neo’s mistakenly placed Johnson as the subject of Neo’s newer remark.

She was not, as my negligent glance assumed, again referring to Johnson’s reputation with a nascent anti-war movement, but quite clearly instead to Barry Goldwater.

That said, I make no admission of error, since I am implacable of making earors.

Yes, LBJ’s landslide in 1964 was so huge that many Republicans had to have voted for him. But to a lot of Republicans, he really was much further to the right than they were.

My point in giving you a glimpse of where I lived at the time was that it went heavily Johnson in ’64, even though it was a pretty conservative area.

And I saw a lot of “Republicans for Johnson” buttons that fall.

nomen nescio Says:
October 22nd, 2015 at 8:34 pm

I was greatly disturbed by the article at Vox, and sent the author a brief email—which I am sure he will ignore—asking him whether he sees a problem with the precedents about which he is so enthusiastic being used by someone he finds less palatable than the Hildabeast, and asking, rhetorically, whether this might perhaps be the sort of thing that leads nations to “interesting times,” as the Chinese say.”

I hadn’t read the original (it is linked to as well) until a few moments ago.

Now that I have, I can easily say that Matthew Yglesias is someone I would not hesitate to leave dying in the middle of the road, or to “broom” off my porch if he ever showed his face there.

He’s an open enemy of my heritage of rights, liberty more generally and Constitutional government in particular; and thus is far beyond the pale when it comes to moral and political peer-hood.

It is unusual to have a two-bit totalitarian punk come out and declare itself for what it is, but on rare occasions they will do it.

Yglesias, is unfit to be an American, or to even draft off the wake of free men and women.

And to think that Neo blanched at the notion I would consign someone to hell for their politically evil deeds …

By the way, we’re not talking mainly about friends of mine here. We’re talking about the adults who surrounded me—the average liberal voters at the time (at least in NYC).

I was never of voting age when Johnson was running. I was a teenager. This is based on my general observation of people around me who were of voting age. They just weren’t paying attention, past what the Times and the nightly news told them. The internet did not exist back then, of course, nor did 24-hour cable coverage. It was very very different in terms of sources of information and amount of time spent gathering it.

As for a vague background idea that Johnson might have been a bit shady in his dealings, one thing that was probably operating in their minds (this is a guess; it’s not like we were having in-depth discussions about it) was that they probably were cynical about politicians in general. So LBJ would not have been considered such an outlier, unless there had been a publicized smoking gun—which there was not.

The people who dismissed him as uncouth and crass—that wasn’t based so much on my memories of people around me, as it was based on my memories of reading columnists to get an idea of basic liberal thought at the time. It was just a gut feeling, too—and a grief reaction to the shock of losing the young JFK in such a traumatic manner.

JFK’s assassination was deeply traumatic. Remember, also, that it occurred a very short time before the 1964 election (a single year), the only election in which LBJ was the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. And he’d already been president for a year.

It was NOT a normal election in any sense of the word, including and perhaps especially the emotional sense.

DNW:

The discussion about “knowingly” supporting came later.

I’m talking about what we originally were discussing when I made my first remarks about who knew what when. In relation to those remarks, I was responding to this from MJR, which only concerns those who voted for LJB and what they knew:

Matt_SE, 12:30 am –

They already voted for Lyndon Johnson.

(“Landslide Lyndon”.)

And for William Jefferson Clinton.

They knew both of these to be criminals.

Am I mistaken?

That’s why what the liberals around me thought is relevant, and what conservatives thought at the time is irrelevant. Your “knowingly” remark came later, and my objection to that was your eschatological comments.

“eschatological comments” That’s a particularly delicate way of my consigning Lyndon Johnson to everlasting hellfire for crimes both common and Constitutional.

And yes, my comments, with the qualification “knowingly” as applied to Johnson’s supporters, did come later. I’m the one who asserted that there was plenty of additional material apart from that previously mentioned to indict him for, implied that it had been much in the news, and then damned both Johnson and his “knowing” supporters.

Yes, that is an accurate description. I don’t challenge that.

As for your statement that what those liberals knew or didn’t know spoke “volumes about the political and moral sensibilities and standards of those around you at the time”–actually, what it really spoke of was their sources of information and how well the information that reached them was controlled. In those days “well-informed” people read the Times and watched the nightly 7 o’clock news. It doesn’t really say all that much about their morals, although it definitely says something about their politics, as shaped by the MSM and the environment in which they lived.

I’m kind of baffled here. Didn’t I quote you to the effect that your friends’ skepticism of Johnson, the only failed hurdle which they might have challenged him to cross, was based on looks, youth, and style? Is this not then the sum and substance of their test as it might have applied to any Democrat with “the right” politics?

That is to say, that character never even appeared on their checklist.

And again, I am not claiming that this says something directly about their morals, as in their direct actions. But rather it reflects on their moral sensibilities; i.e., what they consider as part of the constellation of evaluatively significant moral traits.

And Johnson’s very dubious and notorious character does not seem to be included in that constellation of significant stars.

What’s more, by the way, most of them did not like LBJ on the personal level. Most liberals in the northeast were still reeling from JFK’s assassination and felt that LBJ was an uncouth boor, as I indicated. However, he was a Democrat, and Goldwater was an arch-conservative who was successfully portrayed by the MSM as a warmongering extremist.

Being a warmongering extremist may have been the only thing he was ever unfairly accused of.

The discussion about “knowingly” supporting came later.

I’m talking about what we originally were discussing when I made my first remarks about who knew what when. In relation to those remarks, I was responding to this from MJR, which only concerns those who voted for LJB and what they knew:

Matt_SE, 12:30 am –

They already voted for Lyndon Johnson.

(“Landslide Lyndon”.)

And for William Jefferson Clinton.

They knew both of these to be criminals.

Am I mistaken?

That’s why what the liberals around me thought is relevant, and what conservatives thought at the time is irrelevant. Your “knowingly” remark came later, and my objection to that was your eschatological comments.

As for your statement that what those liberals knew or didn’t know spoke “volumes about the political and moral sensibilities and standards of those around you at the time”—actually, what it really spoke of was their sources of information and how well the information that reached them was controlled. In those days “well-informed” people read the Times and watched the nightly 7 o’clock news. It doesn’t really say all that much about their morals, although it definitely says something about their politics, as shaped by the MSM and the environment in which they lived.

What’s more, by the way, most of them did not like LBJ on the personal level. Most liberals in the northeast were still reeling from JFK’s assassination and felt that LBJ was an uncouth boor, as I indicated. However, he was a Democrat, and Goldwater was an arch-conservative who was successfully portrayed by the MSM as a warmongering extremist.

On the one hand …

“What the conservatives around you thought about LBJ and knew about LBJ was irrelevant to what I was saying and what we were originally discussing–which is what LBJ voters thought and knew about him.”

If that was the case, then they did not “knowingly support” in the sense of knowledgeably support and condone, him.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/knowingly

However, I have little doubt that many of Johnson’s most significant Democrat Party supporters and enablers knew quite enough to know just exactly what they were doing.

It’s amazing how little, people even now, want to know about Johnson, lest their worldview be completely upended.

By the way, I think you would probably agree that this remark …

“The main beef with LBJ held by the people around me was that he was uncouth, and he wasn’t young, handsome, witty, and cool …”

… has the potential for speaking volumes about the political and moral sensibilities and standards of those around you at the time.

One the one hand, I suppose, it could be read as saying “He was a perfect candidate on all substantial matters, lacking only …”

On the other hand …