To dig deeper - why did the media decide to mock true liberalism?

I've always placed that trend as being brought about by two changes.

Media consolidation due to loosening of the restrictions on media ownership, narrowing the scope of voices nationwide by concentrating the media even more firmly in hands of the plutocracy.

The shift from the media being made up of "reporters" to being made up of "journalists." Which was the professionalization of the media. As the requirement for admission became one of have higher degrees, they saw themselves as being professionals rather than working people. Consciously and unconsciously they saw the other as not being the wealthy and powerful, but instead the other was the masses of working people.

IMO, between those two pressures you saw the shifting of MSM coverage. You saw the media style faux liberalism where the masses were to be managed rather than advocated for.

The story of Movement Conservatism's rise is fairly simple. Eric Alterman explains in What Liberal Media that after the Barry Goldwater's crushing 1964 loss, Richard Mellon Scaife realized that for conservatism to win in its struggle against liberalism and take power in Washington, conservative ideology first would have to conquer society's intellectual and media realms. Scaife, thereupon and single-handedly, set-out to finance a right wing welfare system for conservative thinkers and polemicists.

Later, independent of Scaife's project, The Powell Memo was written and circulated:

In 1971, Lewis F. Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ... two months prior to Powell's nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court. ...

Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades.

The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy. Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building - a focus we share, though usually with contrasting goals.

One of our great frustrations is that "progressive" foundations and funders have failed to learn from the success of these corporate institutions and decline to fund the Democracy Movement that we and a number of similarly-focused organizations are attempting to build.

The Republican Party turned itself into a disciplined coalition of corporatists, militarists, soft-core white race bigots, and religious conservatives, including Evangelicals who would become the party's "get out the vote" foot soldiers.

Corporatists bought up broadcast media, eventually got rid of the fairness doctrine, and television and radio infotainment divisions everywhere began to reflect the same slant. For instance, General Electric bought RCA with its NBC television network in the late '80s. GE CEO Jack Welch then took an active role in advancing and recruiting the on-screen talent in the NBC news division. Apparently, Bill Gates liked what he saw going on at NBC and, in 1996, MSNBC was born.

In a related matter, all of today's celebrated broadcast pundits and most of those in the top ranks of print journalism are very affluent people. (Print journalists learn that they have to be invited as regular guests on television programs if they are to really cash in and be treated as VIPs.) For years now, conservative think tanks and the Republican Party have volunteered to help these dandies do their basic research and come up with their story lines. Gone are the typical pundits of yesteryear who had spent decades as working class journalists before they became commentators.

During an earlier era of corporate messaging, GE had groomed and sponsored one corporate spokesperson who would become the leading voice of conservatism:

General Electric Theater is an American anthology series that was broadcast on CBS radio and television. The series was sponsored by General Electric's Department of Public Relations Services.

Ronald Reagan became the show's only host on September 26, 1954 ...

The show made Reagan wealthy and famous: wealthy, due to his part ownership of the show, and famous, due not only to its ratings, but to his constant touring to promote the show. After eight years as host, Reagan estimated he had visited 135 GE research and manufacturing facilities, and met over a quarter-million people.

During that time he would also speak at other forums such as Rotary clubs and Moose lodges, presenting views on economic progress that in form and content were often similar to what he said in introductions, segues and closing comments on the show as a spokesman for GE.

Because the media celebrates the Scaife-Powell brand of conservatism, most elected Democrats have decided it is the wise political play to disassociate themselves from New Deal-Great Society liberalism, repudiate Presidents Carter and Clinton, and always have a kind word of remembrance for Ronald Reagan.

[That said, outstanding post BDBlue.]

I'll go read.

thanks!

Damn straight. But that's what makes her a b*tch, right?!!!

I love that line she used in her concession speech about how when the dogs are after you, keep running (something like that). We knew EXACTLY what she was talking about. It was incredibly personal and intimate.

I have to say that watching her so closely during the primary changed my own coping skills. When I see myself sinking onto the pitty pot, I now put my big girl panties on much more quickly. Also, I'm less likely to abandon my own pov because others talk louder or with more confidence.

Hillary has become a role model for me. NOT AN INFALLIBLE GOD. Just an unforgettable example of gumption and strength.

A shot in the ring in those conflicts? Really, the arguments were between far right and center-right, a perverse and fundamentally one-sided form of Manicheanism.

The media crap wouldn't work without an electorate either too under educated in skills like critical thinking or too busy trying to stay afloat amidst wage stagnation. The policies of the last 30-odd years have provided both.

Two of the more heartening things to me in recent times was Hillary continuing to win primaries even after the media declared her dead and the continued heat the Village is clearly feeling on healthcare (that an overwhelming number of Americans want a government plan no matter how many times their betters tell them they shouldn't). Not because either of these things will end the way I want them to, but because in both cases it appears the people stopped listening to the media. That's potentially a very powerful development if it continues.

You must be kidding? The Democratic Congress refused to do health care through reconciliation, which Bill Clinton argued for, and then they refused to even take a simple up or down vote. There was no caving. Further, he didn't fail to pass UHC and then just stop. He passed SCHIP, and argued every year for a Medicare buy-in to be offered to people 55 and older, and that with a Republican Congress.

and they loved it until the destruction became so obvious that even they couldn't deny it.

What they don't like is people who engage in that kind of behavior on the part of poor people, working people, and non-white, straight male people. So long as it's about bettering the lives of our betters, they love it. But that's pretty much how it always is. The cool kids are almost never the poor kids, are they?

I think it's basically corporatists engaging in the bullying behavior. It's an awesome way to enforce the social structure as anyone who went to high school can tell you. Very effective and they've used it very well.

But I certainly have a different version of events of the Clinton presidency and battles than this.

I could go down all your examples of Clinton "giving in" to republicans but everyone here knows the list. DADT, UHC, welfare reform.

You say he was trying to find consensus. Others make arguments for a strategy that was trying to minimize damage possible by republican majorities.

Even Digby wrote a great post during the primaries about how Clinton did a heroic job fighting off the ascending power of the Republicans in the 90's.

And here's Yglesias,

"In the American context, you can’t change the laws more than congress will agree to change the laws. The positions Clinton outlined were consistently more leftwing than the positions adhered to by the median members of congress (conservative southern Democrats in 1993-94 and conservative Republicans in 1995-2000). If Clinton had staked out a bolder, more leftwing position, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Conversely, had congress enacted Clinton’s health care plan, we’d say that Bill Clinton was, along with FDR and LBJ, one of the three great architects of the American welfare state. That didn’t happen, but not because Clinton was too much of a sellout — it happened because congress wouldn’t approve his proposal.

That made for a disappointing administration in many respects, but not for lack of trying on the part of the administration. And despite Clinton’s difficulty in enacting large-scale semi-permanent institutional change, his tenure in office really did make life much better for people at the bottom."

bite. But he tried. I give credit to someone who really passionately tries to pass something good, particularly with a hostile Congress, even when it doesn't happen.

... as an analutical tool, whether on the receiving end or not.

"Misogyny is at the heart of all forms of tyranny," though, that's interesting, especially since tyranny is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent. Why is it true?

Gen X wasn't old enough to be yuppies in the '80s, even though we were often blamed for such things by, say, 60's-era professors who accused us of selling out (though what we were selling out was never explained). And then we had to deal with the Bush I recession when we graduated.

So, what you're really saying is that Obama is a late boomer and acting like one -- because the late boomers *were* the '80s yuppies. I don't see where Gen X comes into this at all. Nor where you get the idea that Gen X disdains the left.

BTW, Bono, born in 1960, is a late Boomer generationally (whether the tag applies to someone from Ireland is another story). He's also had a career in music and has been doing humanitarian work since the '80s, when U2 first began getting famous but weren't yet huge stars. His early work focused on Amnesty International and famine relief.

Hate to break this to you, but the Millenials didn't exactly invent humanitarian causes.

Read his speech -- his first State of the Union message -- and look at what happened in his years in the Oval Office. Compare the promises to the results.

President Lyndon B. Johnson's
Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union
January 8, 1964

[ As delivered in person before a joint session ]

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the House and Senate, my fellow Americans:

I will be brief, for our time is necessarily short and our agenda is already long.

Last year's congressional session was the longest in peacetime history. With that foundation, let us work together to make this year's session the best in the Nation's history.

Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined; as the session which enacted the most far-reaching tax cut of our time; as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States; as the session which finally recognized the health needs of all our older citizens; as the session which reformed our tangled transportation and transit policies; as the session which achieved the most effective, efficient foreign aid program ever; and as the session which helped to build more homes, more schools, more libraries, and more hospitals than any single session of Congress in the history of our Republic.

All this and more can and must be done. It can be done by this summer, and it can be done without any increase in spending. In fact, under the budget that I shall shortly submit, it can be done with an actual reduction in Federal expenditures and Federal employment.

We have in 1964 a unique opportunity and obligation--to prove the success of our system; to disprove those cynics and critics at home and abroad who question our purpose and our competence.

If we fail, if we fritter and fumble away our opportunity in needless, senseless quarrels between Democrats and Republicans, or between the House and the Senate, or between the South and North, or between the Congress and the administration, then history will rightfully judge us harshly. But if we succeed, if we can achieve these goals by forging in this country a greater sense of union, then, and only then, can we take full satisfaction in the State of the Union.

II.

Here in the Congress you can demonstrate effective legislative leadership by discharging the public business with clarity and dispatch, voting each important proposal up, or voting it down, but at least bringing it to a fair and a final vote.

Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy--not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right.

In his memory today, I especially ask all members of my own political faith, in this election year, to put your country ahead of your party, and to always debate principles; never debate personalities.

For my part, I pledge a progressive administration which is efficient, and honest and frugal. The budget to be submitted to the Congress shortly is in full accord with this pledge.

It will cut our deficit in half--from $10 billion to $4,900 million. It will be, in proportion to our national output, the smallest budget since 1951.

It will call for a substantial reduction in Federal employment, a feat accomplished only once before in the last 10 years. While maintaining the full strength of our combat defenses, it will call for the lowest number of civilian personnel in the Department of Defense since 1950.

It will call for total expenditures of $97,900 million--compared to $98,400 million for the current year, a reduction of more than $500 million. It will call for new obligational authority of $103,800 million--a reduction of more than $4 billion below last year's request of $107,900 million.

But it is not a standstill budget, for America cannot afford to stand still. Our population is growing. Our economy is more complex. Our people's needs are expanding.

But by closing down obsolete installations, by curtailing less urgent programs, by cutting back where cutting back seems to be wise, by insisting on a dollar's worth for a dollar spent, I am able to recommend in this reduced budget the most Federal support in history for education, for health, for retraining the unemployed, and for helping the economically and the physically handicapped.

This budget, and this year's legislative program, are designed to help each and every American citizen fulfill his basic hopes--his hopes for a fair chance to make good; his hopes for fair play from the law; his hopes for a full-time job on full-time pay; his hopes for a decent home for his family in a decent community; his hopes for a good school for his children with good teachers; and his hopes for security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age.

III.

Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope--some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.

It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.

Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by State and local efforts.

For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.

The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.

Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists--in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.

Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice.

We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.

We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program.

We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects.

We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp program.

We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those abroad.

We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high-level commission on automation. If we have the brain power to invent these machines, we have the brain power to make certain that they are a boon and not a bane to humanity.

We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2 million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power.

We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our education program, improve the quality of teaching, training, and counseling in our hardest hit areas.

We must build more libraries in every area and more hospitals and nursing homes under the Hill-Burton Act, and train more nurses to staff them.

We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by every worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no more than $1 a month during the employee's working career to protect him in his old age in a dignified manner without cost to the Treasury, against the devastating hardship of prolonged or repeated illness.

We must, as a part of a revised housing and urban renewal program, give more help to those displaced by slum clearance, provide more housing for our poor and our elderly, and seek as our ultimate goal in our free enterprise system a decent home for every American family.

We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities as well as low-cost transportation between them.

Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this land.

IV.

These programs are obviously not for the poor or the underprivileged alone. Every American will benefit by the extension of social security to cover the hospital costs of their aged parents. Every American community will benefit from the construction or modernization of schools, libraries, hospitals, and nursing homes, from the training of more nurses and from the improvement of urban renewal in public transit. And every individual American taxpayer and every corporate taxpayer will benefit from the earliest possible passage of the pending tax bill from both the new investment it will bring and the new jobs that it will create.

That tax bill has been thoroughly discussed for a year. Now we need action. The new budget clearly allows it. Our taxpayers surely deserve it. Our economy strongly demands it. And every month of delay dilutes its benefits in 1964 for consumption, for investment, and for employment.

For until the bill is signed, its investment incentives cannot be deemed certain, and the withholding rate cannot be reduced--and the most damaging and devastating thing you can do to any businessman in America is to keep him in doubt and to keep him guessing on what our tax policy is. And I say that we should now reduce to 14 percent instead of 15 percent our withholding rate.

I therefore urge the Congress to take final action on this bill by the first of February, if at all possible. For however proud we may be of the unprecedented progress of our free enterprise economy over the last 3 years, we should not and we cannot permit it to pause.

In 1963, for the first time in history, we crossed the 70 million job mark, but we will soon need more than 75 million jobs. In 1963 our gross national product reached the $600 billion level--$100 billion higher than when we took office. But it easily could and it should be still $30 billion higher today than it is.

Wages and profits and family income are also at their highest levels in history--but I would remind you that 4 million workers and 13 percent of our industrial capacity are still idle today.

We need a tax cut now to keep this country moving.

V.

For our goal is not merely to spread the work. Our goal is to create more jobs. I believe the enactment of a 35-hour week would sharply increase costs, would invite inflation, would impair our ability to compete, and merely share instead of creating employment. But I am equally opposed to the 45- or 50-hour week in those industries where consistently excessive use of overtime causes increased unemployment.

So, therefore, I recommend legislation authorizing the creation of a tripartite industry committee to determine on an industry-by-industry basis as to where a higher penalty rate for overtime would increase job openings without unduly increasing costs, and authorizing the establishment of such higher rates.

VI.

Let me make one principle of this administration abundantly clear: All of these increased opportunities--in employment, in education, in housing, and in every field--must be open to Americans of every color. As far as the writ of Federal law will run, we must abolish not some, but all racial discrimination. For this is not merely an economic issue, or a social, political, or international issue. It is a moral issue, and it must be met by the passage this session of the bill now pending in the House.

All members of the public should have equal access to facilities open to the public. All members of the public should be equally eligible for Federal benefits that are financed by the public. All members of the public should have an equal chance to vote for public officials and to send their children to good public schools and to contribute their talents to the public good.

Today, Americans of all races stand side by side in Berlin and in Viet Nam. They died side by side in Korea. Surely they can work and eat and travel side by side in their own country.

VII.

We must also lift by legislation the bars of discrimination against those who seek entry into our country, particularly those who have much needed skills and those joining their families.

In establishing preferences, a nation that was built by the immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission: "What can you do for our country?" But we should not be asking: "In what country were you born?"

VIII.

For our ultimate goal is a world without war, a world made safe for diversity, in which all men, goods, and ideas can freely move across every border and every boundary.

We must advance toward this goal in 1964 in at least 10 different ways, not as partisans, but as patriots.

First, wc must maintain--and our reduced defense budget will maintain--that margin of military safety and superiority obtained through 3 years of steadily increasing both the quality and the quantity of our strategic, our conventional, and our antiguerilla forces. In 1964 we will be better prepared than ever before to defend the cause of freedom, whether it is threatened by outright aggression or by the infiltration practiced by those in Hanoi and Havana, who ship arms and men across international borders to foment insurrection. And we must continue to use that strength as John Kennedy used it in the Cuban crisis and for the test ban treaty--to demonstrate both the futility of nuclear war and the possibilities of lasting peace.

Second, we must take new steps--and we shall make new proposals at Geneva--toward the control and the eventual abolition of arms. Even in the absence of agreement, we must not stockpile arms beyond our needs or seek an excess of military power that could be provocative as well as wasteful.

It is in this spirit that in this fiscal year we are cutting back our production of enriched uranium by 25 percent. We are shutting down four plutonium piles. We are closing many nonessential military installations. And it is in this spirit that we today call on our adversaries to do the same.

Third, we must make increased use of our food as an instrument of peace--making it available by sale or trade or loan or donation-to hungry people in all nations which tell us of their needs and accept proper conditions of distribution.

Fourth, we must assure our pre-eminence in the peaceful exploration of outer space, focusing on an expedition to the moon in this decade--in cooperation with other powers if possible, alone if necessary.

Fifth, we must expand world trade. Having recognized in the Act of 1962 that we must buy as well as sell, we now expect our trading partners to recognize that we must sell as well as buy. We are willing to give them competitive access to our market, asking only that they do the same for us.

Sixth, we must continue, through such measures as the interest equalization tax, as well as the cooperation of other nations, our recent progress toward balancing our international accounts.

This administration must and will preserve the present gold value of the dollar.

Seventh, we must become better neighbors with the free states of the Americas, working with the councils of the OAS, with a stronger Alliance for Progress, and with all the men and women of this hemisphere who really believe in liberty and justice for all.

Eighth, we must strengthen the ability of free nations everywhere to develop their independence and raise their standard of living, and thereby frustrate those who prey on poverty and chaos. To do this, the rich must help the poor--and we must do our part. We must achieve a more rigorous administration of our development assistance, with larger roles for private investors, for other industrialized nations, and for international agencies and for the recipient nations themselves.

Ninth, we must strengthen our Atlantic and Pacific partnerships, maintain our alliances and make the United Nations a more effective instrument for national independence and international order.

Tenth, and finally, we must develop with our allies new means of bridging the gap between the East and the West, facing danger boldly wherever danger exists, but being equally bold in our search for new agreements which can enlarge the hopes of all, while violating the interests of none.

In short, I would say to the Congress that we must be constantly prepared for the worst, and constantly acting for the best. We must be strong enough to win any war, and we must be wise enough to prevent one.

We shall neither act as aggressors nor tolerate acts of aggression. We intend to bury no one, and we do not intend to be buried.

We can fight, if we must, as we have fought before, but we pray that we will never have to fight again.

IX.

My good friends and my fellow Americans: In these last 7 sorrowful weeks, we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as faith, and nothing is so degrading as hate.

John Kennedy was a victim of hate, but he was also a great builder of faith--faith in our fellow Americans, whatever their creed or their color or their station in life; faith in the future of man, whatever his divisions and differences.

This faith was echoed in all parts of the world. On every continent and in every land to which Mrs. Johnson and I traveled, we found faith and hope and love toward this land of America and toward our people.

So I ask you now in the Congress and in the country to join with me in expressing and fulfilling that faith in working for a nation, a nation that is free from want and a world that is free from hate--a world of peace and justice, and freedom and abundance, for our time and for all time to come.

Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-64. Volume I, entry 91, pp. 112-118. Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1965.

I've put some links in that go to the LBJ library, but there are other sources -- THOMAS, and the actual bills for the REA, Head Start, the Job Corps, and other similar legislation that doesn't get the press the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act got.

Why do you suppose LBJ remains so reviled?

There was a post here on the 88th Congress' record recently. The results compared to this speech, to my mind, speak for themselves. Before LBJ was done -- and make no mistake: he didn't "give it all to Dick Nixon and run away" -- he had seen his dream of a better, stronger, more solid America shredded by just such cluelessness as your celebration of "hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today" writ large and hammered home in headlines and TV coverage and he had gone out not to polling to verify that sentiment in the country but to actually talking to real people he knew who lived outside DC. He did the best he could for the country, rather than thinking about his own career or 'legacy', and while listening to Robert McNamara on Vietnam was a huge and inarguably tragic mistake, I note that it wasn't until Nixon's *second* term that the war ended -- not with real peace but with "vietnamization" and "withdrawal with honor."

Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed JFK. Oswald was a misfit, a former Marine, a Marxist who became disillusioned with the Soviet Union after living there, and an on-and-off one man pro-Castro activist who had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, a local Dallas John Bircher, earlier in 1963. President Kennedy became his target of opportunity when Oswald opened a Dallas newspaper one November day and learned that the presidential motorcade would pass in front of the very building in which he was employed.

Just curious kelly b, are you at all familiar with what Posner or Bugliosi (junior version here) have written on the subject?

There are Johnson tapes. LBJ thought Castro was behind the Kennedy assassination. (I can't find the phone conversation I'm looking for but this is well gone over territory.)

Lyndon Johnson inherited President Kennedy's national security team upon taking office and relied on its members for years. Support in favor of a Vietnam policy of escalation was their near unanimous view. RFK, himself, even after leaving the administration supported air strikes, naval operations, and an alliance with the South Vietnamese military well into 1967.

Listen to the first three minutes of Noam Chomsky here about back in the day. The Democrats had suffered politically for years from the claim that "Truman lost China." The United States was not going to abandon its commitment to fight the communists in South Vietnam. There were no peaceniks in high places back then, except for long time LBJ confidant Bill Moyers. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the House 416 to 0. Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK) were the only senators to vote nay on that bill.

JFK's inaugural address had been a Cold War Warrior's speech on steroids:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. 3

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge—and more.

It would have been easy for an all powerful intelligence to service to bring down JFK politically. For one thing, he was a very sick man and LBJ's knowledge of that probably helped get him get on the national Democratic ticket 1960. Fact is the CIA's really been the gang that couldn't shoot straight for decades and the Agency has never been in the business of whacking, or threatening to whack, U.S. presidents.

Part of the liberal/progressive/leftist political problem for decades has been an unwillingness to celebrate the accomplishments of President Johnson and the Great Society:

If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers' money ...

By the way, unlike John Kennedy of Massachusetts, Lyndon Johnson of Texas was out in front on Civil Rights issues during the same last few years they both spent serving in the Senate.

When was the last time that happened to Republicans? We lose the cultural debate because the high profile media is dominated by conservatives and by our presence, we validate their presentation of the liberal POV as being the minority - even when the elections say otherwise.

Why are we so terrified of Republicans filibustering? How is that scary? I say, let 'em filibuster a real health care reform bill and take a real battle to the airwaves. They want to filibuster then let them be at odds with what most americans want.

1. health insurance CORPORATIONS make money by denying sick people care.

2. Americans don't want a CEO who is more beholden to shareholders than the American voting public deciding how much care they can get.

3. Americans want doctors, not mid-level managers bucking for a promotion and a Members Only company jacket, deciding what treatment their insurance covers.

4. It will cost Americans less to pay for comprehensive, not-for-profit, government sponsored healthcare, than it will cost them to continue to pay for divisive private policies that can be terminated if you require to much care.

Those are the basic talking points that I know of, but they need to be finessed. But liberals are afraid to get down in the mud on these issues, though that's where the battle is fought - and so we forfeit the fight for not showing up. we need to tackle the private health insurance industry with the same visceral vehemence with which the conservatives go after government sponsored healthcare. We have the facts on our side, but you would not know it for the debate.