This was all over my FB feed this morning (and as always, if I’m late to the party, my apologies for posting something you’ve all seen before).
I am too young to remember anything about Goldwater. The tag to the shorter video (this is the full-length one from LBJ Library) said Johnson won in the biggest landslide since 1820.
So on that hopeful note, here is an open thread. I’m trying to find my motivation today, I think I have Spring Fever and just want to goof off. But you know, bills to pay, pets to feed…
Face
Don’t you mean “won”, or are you referring to Johnson’s official Presidential airplane?
FlipYrWhig
@Face: I think for LBJ something else was known as Johnson One.
Aleta
The guy in the glasses seems fishy as well.
phein55
I’m still flashing on the nonchalance of lighting up a cigarette as if it was the most natural thing.
I quit close to 30 years ago, but the mannerisms still resonate.
Big Ol Hound
A reasonable responsible Republican speaking on the record. Does such a person even exist anymore. My first vote was for Johnson and against Goldwater so I’m familiar with this civility and was pleased to be reassured that my youth was very very different.
Elizabelle
And yet Goldwater became an eminence grise of the (old) Republican party, and tried to warn them about the bible thumpers swarming the gates.
Interesting ad. Guy would be a hipster today? And he lights up just as he’s discussed nuclear annihilation.
That he’s an actor comes across. Too bad they could not have found a non-actor. Clearly many Republicans switched sides in 1964.
(PS: how much of the landslide was a memorial to JFK, by those horrified by his murder? The whole country was not Dallas. In those days.)
Elizabelle
@srv: LOL. Very good.
Bill E Pilgrim
Damn, who is that actor. Seen him a million times, mostly in later years than this.
The mannerisms are very distinct. I can almost get it…
Edit: Gave up and Googled it.
TaMara (BHF)
@Face: I swear to you my brain said WON but my hands typed ONE. Thanks and it’s fix’d
TaMara (BHF)
@Elizabelle: That was my thought, too.
Elizabelle
“della – gate”, accent on gate
What regional accent is that meant to be? Vaguely southern?
TaMara (BHF)
@Bill E Pilgrim: According to Google:
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
In the 1960s it wasn’t a hipster thing to smoke a cigarette. In those long-ago days, more people smoked than didn’t. My dad had a pack-a-day habit, and he was a physician.
Bill E Pilgrim
@TaMara (BHF): I was trying to get it from memory. After giving up and Googling it and then looking him up on IMDB I finally got it: Lightman’s Dad, Mr Lightman, in War Games.
“I told you to fasten these lids on tight! Can we take a pill for vitamins, and cook the corn?”
Lots of other roles too, mostly TV, but that was the one that was nagging at me, knew he was familiar.
Chyron HR
@Bill E Pilgrim:
You probably would have guessed if you saw the second part of the skit where Ray Goulding comes in as this “Goldwater” jerk.
NonyNony
@Elizabelle:
According to the Wikipedia page about the ad (yes, the ad has a Wikipedia page) he was an actor, but he also really was a Republican. Who didn’t vote for Goldwater.
Frankensteinbeck
An actor with Tourette’s. Strange. I wonder how he could perform with those vocal tics? It was another time, I guess.
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid: Oh yeah. This was a year or two before Surgeon General Luther Terry’s report came out.
Today, he’d be roaming around in his Republican pockets looking for his sidearm!
dr. bloor
@srv: They grew up. Do you have a thoughtful point to make here?
Mustang Bobby
I remember the election of 1964 very well; I was 12 and just becoming politically active. I volunteered for the local All The Way With LBJ group and did doorbell ringing in my town.
Barry Goldwater scared the crap out of me even without the “Daisy” ad. He is said to have mellowed with age… even to the point of supporting marriage equality and abortion rights, but he said it had to do with his belief in personal freedom and smaller government… but that’s also why he said he opposed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Bill.
hamletta
@Frankensteinbeck: Tourette’s doesn’t always involve vocalization. I know a guy who has it, and he mostly blinks a lot.
cokane
say what you want about some of the LBJ mistakes, but his people sure knew how to make killer political ads
John M. Burt
Where are the rational Republicans today? As srv helpfully reminds us, they have become Democrats.
Meanwhile, the worst elements of the Democratic party (including the party’s militant wing, the KKK) have become Republicans.
I’m hoping that the GOP, nominating either the sociopath Cruz or the psychopath Trump, will nw cease to exist as a national party, the Democrats will become the nation’s conservative party, and a new party will appear on the left.
I’m looking forward to a day when I will no longer be a Democrat.
Frankensteinbeck
@hamletta:
I’m aware. I have Tourette’s, which is why I recognize that guy’s vocal tics.
Chris
Note that Goldwater, despite a spectacular defeat, embodied the movement that would eventually completely take over the party a decade and a half later.
WarMunchkin
@John M. Burt: A conservative realignment doesn’t really address the persistent presence of the racists and tea party types. There are a lot of them, and having a “true conservative” party doesn’t really change that. They’re part of the Republican coalition because the social left and economic left synergize very well, and there’s no foreign policy left. Everyone else is just people who hate those two groups.
Really give some perspective to the view that Republicans’ policy position is whatever liberals hate, updated daily.
Chris
@Big Ol Hound:
Reasonable Republican actually meant something back then because the party had moderate and/or liberal wings at the time. An Eisenhower presidency wasn’t just “less bad” than a Taft one would’ve been, for example – he genuinely did a lot of good stuff, much of it building off of the legacy Roosevelt and Truman had left him.
Nowadays, all you need to do to be crowned a “reasonable” Republican is be someone other than the loudest, most uncouth one in the bunch. Never mind that your policies are every bit as catastrophic and quite possibly worse.
cbear
@srv: Well played–FTW.
raven
I’m late. Fuck LBJ.
Mike in NC
Just voted in the open NC primary, using the Republican ballot. Voted against all the incumbent bastards, including our corrupt governor and my creepy congressman. All of the occupants of the klown kar were still on the ballot, so I was torn on which scumbag to go with. Drumpf is insane, of course, but both Cruz and Rubio are potentially more dangerous megalomaniacs. In the end I chose Rick Santorum.
Outside the polling place I walked past a car with Ben Carson and “Nobama” bumper stickers, and not surprisingly it was almost at a 45 degree angle to the lines in the parking space.
liberal
@Chris:
Though even by the 1970s, Des Moines Register columnist Donald Kaul could quip something to the effect that the liberal wing of the Iowa Republican Party had nothing to say; he had laryngitis.
Ridnik Chrome
I’m just amazed to see a Republican who’s not ranting incoherently or mechanically reciting a canned set of talking points. I had forgotten such people actually did exist once upon a time.
gogol's wife
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Wow, I was going to say it was a spoof, because he looked too modern to me.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
I think it was a combination of a bunch of things;
1) Dallas (and all the sympathy vote the Democrats got from that).
2) His opponent being LBJ, an extremely skilled politician who wasn’t at all too good to hit below the belt.
3) The fact that Goldwater actually ran an honest campaign – he believed on philosophical grounds that Americans should not have all the goodies of the New Deal and bluntly told them so. Instead of running on cultural resentments and anxieties and waiting until after you’re elected to try gutting Social Security (as, say, George W. Bush did).
4) The hardcore anti-communist rhetoric scared people, probably because it came at exactly the wrong time. For a decade and a half presidential candidates had been winning by out-McCarthying each other (Ike did it to Truman and Stevenson, Kennedy as surprising as it may sound did it to Nixon) and it had worked very well – but then the Cuban Missile Crisis happened and slapped some cold water on people’s faces. Goldwater’s rhetoric probably sounded a lot scarier in that context than it would have before – he was still working off the 1960, 1956 or 1952 playbooks.
And he didn’t have the whole massive infrastructure behind him that Republicans who succeeded him did. The movement was very much in its infancy back then.
Chris
@Mustang Bobby:
He didn’t mellow. The party just decided, out of the blue, that abortion was now the hill they wanted to die on.
I mean, this is kind of the problem with being a movement conservative; the party’s constant drift rightward means that the goalposts keep changing, in a way that no politician could possibly be expected to anticipate. That kind of thing isn’t so much a problem when you’re a progressive, in which case you accept that society changes, that its politicians will change with it, and that that’s often a good thing… It’s much more of one if you’re a right winger whose ideology rests on remaining inflexibly loyal to an idealized past, but whose party keeps redefining what that idealized past is supposed to have looked like.
Ruckus
@Chris:
The movement was very much in its infancy back then.
It really wasn’t all that new, part of what it was TV had started to take off and people got exposed. I’ve been saying for a long time that what we see today is the culmination of decades of this. Goldwater showed that being sensible, sounding good didn’t work, they had to appeal to people’s base instincts, like racism, to succeed. Which worked out for them as that is one of the pillars of their ideology.
Billy K
@Elizabelle:
That’s pretty callous. I doubt very much there were a whole lot of Dallasites happy about those events.
FYI: Dallas was blue then, blue now.
Kylroy
@Chris: Not entirely. Goldwater represented the last gasp of the party of Herbert Hoover. The actual coalition that enabled Herbert Hoover’s policies to become law, a gaggle of theocrats and racists, were not people Goldwater wanted in the party.
Goblue72
BJ Front Page:
Trump is Awful.
Trump – WTF?
Can You Hear the Trumpening?
Why is the Media So Obssesed With Trump?
More Stuff Involving Trump: Top 10 Trumpisms
Republicans Live in an Echo Chamber Called Trump
Meanwhile, crickets when it comes to the Senate, House or the states. Democratic Party in a nutshell.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: Wondered when that was coming.
raven
@Goblue72: Back for your afternoon lecture series?
Kay
The subgroups are horrendous for Trump. I think we should remember that the GOP primary electorate is NOT, actually, “America” defined and also remember that when Republicans fall in line (which they will) the “Trump is unbeatable!” narrative will be what they will promote.
Trump’s whole argument is he can increase the GOP share of white voters and he has to increase it A LOT- he has to have a higher share than Reagan and Bush I, because there are fewer white voters as a share of the total electorate. He’s currently showing as not even beating Romney there and that’s all he has. That’s the only way he can win- white voters.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I don’t think that’s really true. They took his messaging, but they didn’t adopt his belief system. He may have been an extremist about it, but Goldwater genuinely believed that the government should but out of people’s business for both good and ill. That’s how he could oppose the Civil Rights Act but still support abortion rights; he saw both of them as unwarranted government intrusion into private decisions.
Chris
@Ruckus:
New enough. The Southern Strategy didn’t exist back then – Goldwater was the very beginning of it, and I’m not even sure he was trying so much as stumbled across it by accident when the Deep South states protested LBJ. The infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets that sustain the Echo Chamber today didn’t exist back then – they’d be built up over the seventies and eighties. The grassroots get-out-the-vote church networks we call the “religious right” didn’t exist back then – they’d crop up later, much to Goldwater’s disgust. Big business wasn’t backing people like him back then – a few kooks like the Kochs, but overall the big business wing of the party backed liberal/moderate Nelson Rockefeller in that election, not him.
Most of the parts that make up the movement we know today hadn’t been assembled in 1964 yet, or weren’t even around.
@Kylroy:
Which is ironic, because they’re the only reason he even got as far as he did in the election. He may not have wanted them, but without them, he would’ve won nothing but his own state, if that.
NotMax
All you need to know about Goldwater in ’64.
He did temper his own excesses as the years passed, though.
1981: “I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the nuts.”
1993: “You don’t need to be ‘straight’ to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”
1994: “The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they’re gay. You don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that’s what brings me into it.”
J R in WV
I was 13 when the “Daisy” ad ran against Goldwater. I just watched it again on the Wikipedia page – an amazing
piece of political/social commentary, especially for the age in which it was created.
Now i can’t remember with certainty whether I saw it in its single solitary run on NBC’s Monday night movie, or later when it ran on commentary shows analyzing the commercial and its statement. It really hit me hard, as I was a younger child during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I tried to build a fallout shelter in our basement, with hand tools. It was hard cap rock, as hard a sandstone as you will find covering a high ridge. I used a sledge hammer, a pick, a shovel and a wheelbarrow.
The excavation later served my parents well as a spot for a new furnace, enlarged a bit with a jackhammer and a couple of full grown men working for the plumbing company.
Goldwater was scary, in his more pure way, more scary than Trump. Goldwater would have ended the world because it was the necessary and correct thing at the time.
Trumpf will end the world as part of a miscalculated clumsy feint with some other world leader who does not understand Trump is less sophisticated geo-politically than a Sovereign Citizen hiding out in the high plains desert. Perhaps igniting South Asia with a series of anti-Muslim rants directed at a fanatic Hindu leader armed with nuclear weapons, much to the dismay and surprise of Dear Leader Trumpf.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
I guess I think of him that way because I see him as the first explicitly anti-New Deal candidate to run in years (since when, World War Two or earlier? Even Dewey was pretty liberal I seem to recall), and I see the modern conservative movement’s primary goal as being the undoing of the New Deal.
You’re right that he was philosophically consistent in a way they’d never be. Barry Goldwater, last honest conservative – no less a disaster waiting to happen, mind you.
Goblue72
@raven: How mighty white of you.
Ruckus
It is interesting to look back at history and see the changes in political parties, how they function, what their ideals are, how they align with the public at large, what tilts them one way or another, and what they do when they fail. How a various times people will identify with a party that doesn’t really reflect what they feel, out of loyalty or hatred of what we have here, 2 sides, so you are with us or against us. Look at the Clinton/Sanders posts on BJ, people arguing about 2 good candidates when either of them will absolutely be better than the opposition. We have so little to argue about that we argue about minutia, They have so little to be proud about they argue about dick size.
NotMax
@J R in WV
Took a course from the guy behind the “Daisy” ad – Tony Schwartz.
Quote an interesting fellow, obsessed with recording and disseminating sounds of people, of life. Also the psychological affect of language and phraseology. Later in life he became a complete agoraphobic who hadn’t set foot outside his Manhattan house for decades. Had a beyond state of the art recording studio in the basement. That’s where the course was held.
Dork
@Kylroy: I’m too young to know, but I bet Hoover sucked as a president. And I bet that, today, Goldwater would be a refreshing change to the voters in parts of Michigan.
Kay
This is why we have to be nice to younger people :)
OMFG, they may save us all.
TallPete
@srv: exactly
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Big Ol Hound:
So far as I know, Bruce Bartlett and Josh Barro still consider themselves to be Republicans, even if they’ve voted for Democrats for a few elections now.
NotMax
Goldwater campaign slogan was “In your heart, you know he’s right.”
Which quickly became (courtesy of some anonymous opposition wag) “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”
Ruckus
@Chris:
We may be talking past each other.
Goldwater as a person was different but what he wanted from government was not all that different from conservatives before him. He was more honest and forthright as to what and why but not substantially different in policies.
The southern strategy was a way to bring their ideas to power, not their ideological goals. It has since turned into their goals, see Drumpf. When you spend decades getting gullible people to believe what they already do and that it’s OK to do so, you end up with that being what you are about.
Maybe it would be better to lay out the ideology/goals/methods of each side and see what that looks like. I’d bet that would make things a lot clearer to most people.
Mike R
@Goblue72: We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves. Lyndon B. Johnson
This statement and what went along with it tended to inspire a lot of fuck LBJ sentiment among whites and black guys that some us hung out with at that time. One can applaud the civil rights work LBJ did and still have a serious dislike of some other policies the Lyndon supported. Especially if you were between say, 18 and 26. You know the one that cost over 50000 servicemen their lives along with uncounted numbers of Vietnamese and Cambodians, Laotians if you get my drift.
Kylroy
@Dork: I was born in 1980, and I know Hoover was a total trainwreck of a President. Not grossly incompetent in the manner of Bush Jr. or Buchanan, just utterly idealogically incapable of dealing with the Great Depression. You’re right that both he and Goldwater would probably have not *poisoned children*, though; they believed in limited government, but that government should in fact be competent at what it does.
Linnaeus
@Chris:
A good economy probably helped LBJ, too. Real GDP growth in 1964 was about 5-6 percent.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mike in NC:
You could responsible for a late-breaking Santorumentum.
raven
@Mike R: Don’t tell him, he has “nothing left to lose”.
cleek
@Mike in NC:
i was thinking about strategic voting, but after MI, i think i’d probably just better vote for the Dem i want.
exit polling says 7% of the GOPs votes came from Dems (vs 3% for the other way around). that’s probably enough to change a close Clinton win into a loss.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Kay:
Wait for the punchline:
If they vote.
goblue72
@raven: Take your pill grandpa. Every day. Not just when you feel like it.
Ruckus
@Kay:
OMFG, they may save us all.
Wouldn’t that be nice. I don’t have to depend on the majority of old white people to agree with me. Which never seems to happen.
We depend on people younger than say 35 for so much. Military – they can die for us. College – otherwise we could just remain stupid. Actually vote for their long term future – they may be wrong sometimes but at least they are looking past their noses. Being a grandparent has got to be better than not, most of the time.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
And he appears to be driving Latino/Hispanic voters away from the Republicans, which makes things worse for them. It’s somewhat speculative, but there are reports of citizenship applications spiking even more than usual for a presidential election year because of immigrants who want to vote against Trump.
Mike R
@raven: Nor apparently has he ever had a clue.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Goblue72: You can work to change that!
Ruckus
@Mike R:
He’d have to find a clue, and I believe he couldn’t find his ass with both hands so looking for a clue would be right out.
NotMax
Michigan turnout.
R: 1,324,116
D: 1,194,424
Still much scutwork needed to goose Dems to the polls.
different-church-lady
Another stupid test…Sorry I keep doing this — still trying to figure out where the non-responsiveness in my infostructure lies…
different-church-lady
@Goblue72: You do understand that BJ is primarily a time-kill, yes?
Just One More Canuck
@goblue72: Follow your own advice
NonyNony
@Kay:
I mean, I predict that he’ll do better than he’s currently polling with white voters because right now there’s a whole lot of “I’m never going to vote for X” drama that clears out by November when it becomes apparent that your choice is to vote for X or see the opposing party win.
But yeah – it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that the white supremacist vote was already maxed out for Republicans by 2012 and that Trump might be losing the voters who really want to have that veneer of “respectability” that you’re supposed to get by being a Republican but honestly hasn’t been on the presidential ticket since Bob Dole ran in 1996. (And has really been a minority of the party since Nixon at least).
scav
I’m just thinking anger, despair, bickering are high-energy emotional highs that have suddenly replaced recreational drugs.
WarMunchkin
@Kay: I think you can reliably expect us to put the hurt on Trump in the general, but long-term, the revanche against black lives matter and women worries me tremendously. And it absolutely exists among younger people, and not just gamers and entertainment vortex people. I see the future Lee Atwater dividing the next Dem coalition along those lines.
But that’s for another election. Trump is going down in flames, and I’ve never been more confident in that.
NotMax
@srv
Or are unable to find their keyboard.
:)
Scamp Dog
@srv: Hey, I’m still here! And TaMara’s a front-pager!
goblue72
@Mike R: The problem is that Vietnam isn’t special. Boomers think its special – and given the outsized proportion of the adult population that Boomers have represented to date, until Millenials came of age – the IDEA that Vietnam is special has held sway.
Vietnam ain’t special. The U.S. has been engaged in various wars for foreign profiteering, empire building and dick swinging for well over a century. And Vietnam isn’t the first – and won’t be the last – war the U.S. engages in for less than savory reasons that involves killing a lot of brown people. Its shitty, and we need to stop doing it – but Vietnam ain’t special.
And since Vietnam ain’t special – and LBJ ain’t a special outlier of “stupid wars our Presidents have engaged in” – his remaining legislative legacy on balance to everybody else – and everybody else who will come after, well after the last Boomer bites the dust – is what matters.
And his enduring legacy is the greatest expansion of the U.S. social welfare state since the New Deal – which expansion has yet to be superseded. Even by Obama. And the greatest expansion of civil right for racial minorities since the passage of the 14th/15th/16th Amendments after the Civil War and the greatest expansion of gender equality since Suffrage. He is also the single President most responsible for ending racial quota based immigration and rapidly accelerating the browning of America via Latino and Asian immigration.
Medicaid.
Medicare.
Civil Rights Act.
Voting Rights Act.
Housing Rights Act.
The Immigration and Nationality Act.
The Public Broadcasting Act.
The Freedom of Information Act.
The Older Americans Act.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The nation’s first Clean Air Act.
Food Stamp Act.
The creation of the first federal public transit agency (that would become the FTA) and first real program to federally fund mass transit.
The creation of the cabinet level agency of HUD, the first Federal attempt to comprehensively provide for housing for all Americans.
And on and on and on.
There isn’t a single major aspect of American life affecting the poor and working classes in our country that Johnson did not touch – and put money where his mouth was. And a good portion of that money – and those rights protections – went to benefit people who were not white. And MOST of the laws, agencies, and program STILL exist to this day. No matter how hard the GOP attempts to destroy their legacy. The man took the New Deal and put it on steroids. And we saw the greatest reduction of American poverty in the immediate 10 year wake after those programs were created and before Reagan was elected to destroy America.
So yes, when pissed off Boomers still rant about Vietnam, and the years pass by, those rants become less and less relevant as views on his legacy – and more and more about the Me Generation being un-able to look beyond its own personal biases to see that LBJ was one of the few Presidents in our history – and certainly one of the few in the 20th century – who meaningfully shoved the money funnel down, and not up.
goblue72
@Just Some Fuckhead: The young voted in 2008 and 2012 and were the margin of Obama’s victory. Esp over Romney.
Romney took voters aged 45 and older in 2012. (Older Gen X, Boomers, Silents)
Obama took voters under age 44 and under. (Younger Gen X, Millenials)
Millennials voted Obama 60-36 vs Romney. They showed up and they voted.
But please, keep trashing the younger voters who put Obama in the White House.
raven
@goblue72: hahaha. Phony ass intellectual.
scav
@srv: Whereas you’re keeping to the hard stuff here.
Chyron HR
@goblue72:
Sure, Johnson may have prosecuted a horrifically bloody war for no good reason whatsoever, but at least he didn’t provide 1 of 98 yes votes for the AUMF, amirite?
Nate Dawg
@goblue72:
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You two need to get a room.
Goblue: lighten up a little bit. Getting old sucks. Humor is a good way to handle it. Also, you can’t predict the future, and millennials could turn just like the Boomers did, and then where will we be? So cool your jets.
And this is the thread topic that won’t die. Straight from late last night back into this afternoon. Jesus Christ, what exactly are you two arguing over?
Kay
@WarMunchkin:
I think it would bother Trump a lot if someone pointed out he polls poorly among young people.
He really IS thin-skinned and I think all politicians want to be seen as forward-looking.
goblue72
@WarMunchkin: Won’t happen – the Lee Atwater part. Younger voters are increasingly allergic to racist dog whistling. In part, younger voters are generationally more brown or bi-racial, and more likely to intermarry / date people of another race/ethnicity.
Trump may win the GOP nomination, but he ain’t winning the GE – absent one potential issue. He will be completely unable to pull the percentage of white voters he needs to generally. Millennials will flee him like the plague. Brown voters – any age – will flee him like the plague carried by carnivorous locusts.
Only black swan event is if Democratic voters are so generally demoralized that they don’t show up en-masse. And I have serious doubts about that as a Trump candidacy is guaranteed to piss off and anger Democratic voters so much they will walk over the proverbial molten glass to vote for whomever is not-Trump.
NotMax
@goblue72
Keep grinding that axe. Won’t be much longer and you’ll have a perfectly serviceable fruit knife.
Nate Dawg
@goblue72: OH jesus, I just dared read your stupid rant on Vietnam.
Vietnam was special. 57,000 American soldiers were killed. Compare that to Iraq / Afghanistan, and then consider that the population was significantly lower than it is today.
The icing on the cake was mandatory enlistment–yup, the draft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war
I don’t know if you’re a troll, but spouting off nonsense about how Vietnam wasn’t any different is just ridiculously out of touch, and it’s going to win you any points from anyone.
Makes you sound like a dumbass, to be honest.
raven
@Nate Dawg: And fuck the 3 million dead Vietnamese .
Nate Dawg
@raven: I figured I’d stick to the domestic side of things since the rant was mostly concerned about the freebies. (kidding!)
goblue72
@Nate Dawg: Voter preferences stick, even as people age. Millennials and younger Gen X are unlikely to wake up and vote GOP en masse as they age.
My problem isn’t older people. My problem is the generational blindness of many Boomers who can’t accept that “the kids” aren’t kids anymore – and since they are showing more LIBERAL voting preferences, for those purportedly interested in seeing more liberal public policy accomplished, one would think those younger voters would be welcomed with open arms. Instead of sneered at, accused of not showing up, and heckled for voting for the “unrealistic” candidate.
Pew Research.
Hat tip to source article.
raven
@Nate Dawg: Didn’t mean you but you knew that.
chromeagnomen
@goblue72: vietnam isn’t special. jeebus! are you jealous, want your own war? 50,000 americans died there, dwarfing the number of casualties we have taken anywhere since. it embroiled the country. i can’t think you were alive then, or you wouldn’t be saying this. yes, LBJ did any number of good things domestically, but the war KILLED his chances in 68. and anyway, it’s not all the boomers ranting about that war, it’s the right wing boomers, so generalize away.
and in your next comment you credit the youth for being the margin of victory. why not the gays, the blacks, the women, the old fucking left-wing boomers. we all had a part in that margin. christ. narcissism is everywhere.
jsrtheta
@Elizabelle: As I recall (I was pretty young), JFK wasn’t a deciding factor anywhere near as much as terror of Goldwater was.
Goldwater was an extremist who hijacked the Republican Party. Of course, these days, that could never happen…
Nate Dawg
@goblue72:
Got it. You’re just getting a kick out of spitting into the wind…..on every fucking thread.
Old people will always sneer at young people. The sky is blue. Get over it.
Want change? Get young people to show up in significant enough numbers to offset the olds. If Bern’s can do that, he can win. If he can’t, then he won’t. It’s just the way the world is, and I’m sorry you seem so unable to cope, but at some point, it might be a personal problem, and not the problem of everyone else here.
NotMax
@raven
Meant to ask if you ever got around to watching that bow and arrow fishing short on TCM.
Calouste
@Nate Dawg: Well, you could look at the Korean War: 36,000 dead American soldiers in only 3 years. Yet pretty much the only thing we hear about that war is M*A*S*H reruns.
Felonious Monk
@raven: Phony Ass. No intellectual.
Nate Dawg
@Calouste: Yes, I wonder what was different about it. Hrmmmm……
raven
@Felonious Monk: My bad.
goblue72
@Nate Dawg: No, it makes me not a Boomer.
Total U.S. combat deaths –
WWI – 53,402
WW II – 291,557
Korean War – 33,686
Vietnam War – 47,424
Total # American Military Deaths –
WWI – 116,516
WW II – 405,399
Korean War – 54,246
Vietnam War – 58,209
Not that special.
Total all dead –
WW 1 – 20,000,000
WW 2 – 65,000,0000 – 80,000,000
Korean War – 1,200,000
Vietnam War – 800,000 – 3,800,000
Not that special.
chromeagnomen
@srv: they’re all wars of choice, excepting WWII.
raven
@Calouste: Anyone who died in the military during the ocean War is counted in that number. It’s not a great many but still.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Nate Dawg: Fuck you. If I want to express a true fact about the unreliability of the youth vote, I will do that and you will suck it up and beg for more truth.
Eolirin
@goblue72: Do keep in mind that popular vote has fuck all to do with who becomes president. Saying people over age 45 broke for Romney and Obama would have lost without youth turn out is disingenuous when age breakdowns are not evenly distributed geographically.
This is not to say that youth turnout is unimportant. It isn’t, it matters, it needs to be courted. But the other parts of the coalition are just as important and it’s moronically reductionist to draw a line through the age demographic and call it a day.
Germy
George Martin’s arrangement for Strawberry Fields
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAeyV_MRxtA
(instrumental only)
A talented arranger and producer. Wrote a great memoir “All You Need Is Ears”.
goblue72
@Nate Dawg: Again, they don’t “have” to show up. They already showed up in 2008 and 2012. And if “they” don’t show up in 2016, the Democratic candidate won’t win.
Showing up in the midterms is a problem. But that’s a problem with Democratic voters generally.
Nate Dawg
@goblue72: Logical Fallacy alert.
The Fallacy of the Texas Sharpshooter: (a favorite among lame arguments on blogs, btw)
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/175/Texas_Sharpshooter_Fallacy
goblue72
@Eolirin: So show me (via data) that the youth turnout vote in 2008 and 2012 was over-concentrated in certain states and thus not as critical.
raven
@goblue72: “via data” what an asshole.
Nate Dawg
@goblue72: It’s a coalition party. Other segments of the coalition could say the same. Latino’s could take their ball and go home over immigration, for instance.
Do you think your argument about Vietnam is helpful in building the coalition? Do you think anyone who was drafted for that Democratic party quagmire of a nasty, evil war will come around to your point and say “Gee Whiz, this random internet person is right! Vietnam isn’t any different than any other wars, therefore I should vote Sanders (or something?)
Your point is so far afield, it’s not even amusing. It’s tiring.
Iowa Old Lady
@Germy: Every time I heard George Martin mentioned on my car radio, I thought I was going to hear about the trailer for Game of Thrones.
Fresh Air reran an interview with Martin that was interesting.
eemom
@goblue72:
Good Lord, you are insufferable. You’re like every cartoon caricature of a smart-ass kid rolled into one monotonous cyberwhine.
Grow the fuck up, peewee.
/boomer mama
Just Some Fuckhead
@Nate Dawg:
That is exactly what the candidate’s job is until you figure out how to make people vote from a blog comment.
Nate Dawg
@goblue72: They HAVE to show up for their policy preferences to be enacted.
Just like EVERYONE ELSE.
What is your fucking problem? Like, seriously, it’s like arguing the sky is blue with someone.
If you want your policy preferences enacted–you must show up and vote in numbers sufficient to make that happen.
This is a fact of life, and I’m sorry you can’t seem to cope with it, but no one here is
a) in charge of the system
b) opposed to the policy preferences of Sanders (generally)
c) opposed to the policy preferences of the youth (generally)
You aren’t preaching to the choir, you’re berating it. What exactly is your point?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@chromeagnomen:
gay votes have cooties, black voters are dumb so their votes don’t count, women’s votes; well you know how they are at times har de har har, and those old boomers votes are crusty old irrelevant votes.
Eolirin
@goblue72: It’s not that the youth vote was over concentrated… It’s voters over 45 voting for Romney who were over concentrated. Obama did not win Florida, for instance, by losing all the other demographics except young people and making it up there.
I’ll repeat this again: It takes a fucking massive amount of white male privilege to think that democrats win exclusively on the basis of young people.
Nate Dawg
@Eolirin: And their purity and white male privilege isn’t gonna put food on *my* table under a Drumpf economy.**
**(Although in fairness, my white male privilege probably will.)
But you get the point.
NotMax
@goblue72
Jupiter: 142,984 km diameter, 67 moons
Saturn: 120,536 km diameter, 62 moons
Uranus: 51,118 km diameter, 27 moons
Neptune: 49,528 km diameter, 14 moons
Earth: 12,756 km diameter, 1 moon
Earth – not all that special.
Standalone raw metrics can be fun.
Germy
@Iowa Old Lady: All these years I thought George Martin was an upper-class gentleman. I’m not an expert on the U.K. class system, but that’s the way he sounded to me.
I was surprised to learn he grew up in very humble circumstances, and had a cockney accent until he consciously changed his way of speaking, imitating BBC radio announcers.
A talented man. I also liked his work with Shirley Bassey; the Bond themes.
Linda Featheringill
@Mike in NC:
LOL! OMG Mike. Did you throw while you were doing that?
shortribs
@Germy: Thanks for posting that. I was a band geek, drummer in particular, and I liked that arrangement, would have made for a good drumline solo.
Linda Featheringill
@NotMax:
And that is just our solar system, with our rather small star.
Roger Moore
@goblue72:
Vietnam was different from our other colonial wars in two very important ways:
1) It was far larger and more damaging to the US than any other colonial war. More Americans were killed in Vietnam than in all our other colonial wars put together.
2) It was fought largely by draftees. Our colonial wars before that point were fought by the small, professional military that we kept in nominal peacetime until the Cold War. Our colonial wars since then have been fought by the much larger, all volunteer force we adopted in response to the political fallout from Vietnam.
The combination of factors makes Vietnam unique in the extent of political fallout it had on the country as a whole. You’re right to point out the positive legacy LBJ left with his domestic policies, but you’re making a mistake by ignoring the political damage Vietnam did to him. If not for the toxic legacy of Vietnam, LBJ almost certainly would have run, and won, in the 1968 election based on his amazing domestic record.
Think about the different between LBJ winning in 1968 and Nixon winning. We would have had an extra four years of extending LBJ’s policies. Perhaps more important, the Republican party might have decided that Nixon’s Southern Strategy was a failure and abandoned, or at least reduced, their reliance on racist voting.
Also, too, you’re being an asshole. Telling a veteran that they should get over their negative feelings from having been drafted and sent to risk their lives in pursuit of a stupid goal is plain obnoxious.
Chyron HR
TIL that True Progressives love the Vietnam War and wish those dirty hippies would stop bad-mouthing it.
Betty Cracker
@goblue72: Yeah, but unless you’re a complete dickhead who is utterly incapable of empathy and human understanding, it should be pretty obvious why one of the people LBJ shipped off to the rice patties might not take such a rosy view of his presidency, even sans indifference to social progress.
Obama has been a pretty good president, but if he came up and personally kicked you in the nuts, I wouldn’t assume you’re a racist who deplores universal healthcare if you said, “That motherfucker kicked me in the nuts!”
NotMax
@Linda Featheringill
The point attempted to be made to goblue72 was that context matters, not just raw numbers.
WarMunchkin
@srv:
Yawn. Try again.
JPL
@srv: Normally I try to ignore you, but that doesn’t tell me anything. During the contentious Obama/Hillary primary, what did the same poll say. If Trump wins the primary, the same folks who are saying never, will be kissing his ring.
Diana
@srv: Wasn’t this source of the old joke about the 1964 election? The one that went, “They told me that a vote for Goldwater meant we’d have a million men in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater, and sure enough we now have a million men in Vietnam.”
JPL
@WarMunchkin: Beat me to it. thanks..
Repatriated
@Nate Dawg: Something to consider about our recent adventures in the Middle East: the only reason we didn’t sustain Vietnam-level fatalities there is because we don’t have Vietnam-era medical technology. The casualties (wounded+KIA) are actually similar — what’s different is we now can save a lot of wounded troops who would have died on the battlefield back then. (Of course, this means the VA is helping a more-severely-disabled population of survivors without the budget to match…)
goblue72
@raven: I’m sorry old man if it hurts your tired brain to actually provide external citations to a position. I realize that not finishing grad school until you are collecting social security probably means you were kept back in a few years in grade school, but please try to keep up with the rest of the class.
trollhattan
@goblue72:
A badly needed missing metric: years of combat for each.
Eolirin
@JPL: It tells us something: Sanders supporters have a better opinion of Clinton than Clinton supporters did of Obama during a similar point in the primary process. So there’s a evidence that lingering contentiousness will be even less of a non-existent problem. :p
joel hanes
@liberal:
Donald Kaul
I really miss his Over The Coffee column on the back page of the Register.
It’s probably one of the main reasons that I ended up a liberal, despite growing up in a Republican family (Dad was a Goldwater partisan).
Kaul is still writing; my N. Iowa hometown paper runs his columns.
They’re less funny and self-confident, because this is a darker age.
I wrote him about ten years back to thank him for all the enjoyment his writing had given me over the years, and said that although I liked his new stuff, I missed some of the classic Kaul bits: the Q/A with the the man in the galoshes, and the Ankeny jokes. His reply:
Peale
@Eolirin: Nope. It’s really us Gays and Lesbians who swing the swing states for the Dems. Had we voted for Romney at 50%, he wins Florida, Virginia and Ohio. Heck, if he won 37% of us in Ohio instead of 15%, he flips that state. In summary, while we make up less than 10% of Dem Voters, you shouldn’t piss us off.
Why our pet Sanderista thinks spitting on the older voters who make up a much larger share of the Dem voters than the Gays and Lesbians is beyond me.
Nate Dawg
@Peale:
Seriously. Especially since some of us actually like getting spit on.
Bob In Portland
Here’s one going out for all the Trump supporters.
joel hanes
@Mustang Bobby:
Goldwater … is said to have mellowed with age…
Not sure about that, but he was at odds with later Repulicanism as it developed, especially the alignment with know-nothing Protestant Fundamentalism. He famously opined “All good Christians should kick Jerrry Falwell right in the ass.”
goblue72
@Roger Moore: He’s a bitter obnoxious nut. He shows not respect so gets none in return.
Also, I like how the qualifier is now “colonial wars”, not foreign wars. Nice moving the goalposts bub. Very Republican of you.
And nice ignoring Korea. Significant combat casualties count – not as high as Vietnam, but still significant. And the draft existed at the time. And it involved killing brown people in foreign lands. AND Korea was fought by draftees. Over the course of the Korean War, 1.5 million were drafted.
I know Boomers have this blind spot about Korea because they didn’t fight in it, but doesn’t make it go away.
trollhattan
@srv:
Oh, yes, Florida Mom is a Very Special Flower.
Amir Khalid
@srv:
Even if Bernie asks them to?
goblue72
@eemom: Enjoy the rocking chair. While I pay your SS checks.
Patricia Kayden
@Kay: Thanks for that poll. We must all remember that this fawning over Trump has nothing to do with what will happen to him during the general election where he will not be just facing adoring White audiences. There is a real world out there in which most of us live where Trump is not king.
Nate Dawg
@goblue72: When a rat backs itself into a corner, you don’t help it escape. You stomp on it.
Eolirin
@goblue72: I’m not aiming to prove my position here, nor do I need to. Your position is fundamentally incoherent at even a brief glance to anyone who understands how statistics works and has a passing familiarity with voting demographic patterns.
You’ll note I have been explicit in stating that the youth vote matters. I’m calling you out on making a category error; people over (and under for that matter) a certain age are not monolithic evenly distributed voting blocs. There are other components to those numbers, and they matter just as much if not more than the age variable.
Doug R
@srv: Hosting a liberal talk show with fart jokes?
Mike R
@goblue72: I am sure she will, just be careful if you ride your bike by her rocking chair she might stick her cane in the spokes. You certainly seem to do your best to emulate the personality of say a Ted Cruz type.
Patricia Kayden
@goblue72: Agreed. A Trump Presidency is a nightmare for anyone with a brain and should motivate our side to come out in droves in November. Just hope that this trickles down to the House and Senate. Would be nice for the new Democratic President to have Congress too so we could get some things done.
Paul in KY
@Billy K: The movers & shakers in Dallas back then were wacko Republican. That’s why it was Dallas he was shot in.
Paul in KY
@Chris: They went way to right when LBJ whupped them. Theory was that they’d never ‘win’ if they were always fighting on Democratic turf (being for welfare state, SocSec, etc.). They had to heighten the contradictions & find other ‘issues’ that were more in their wheelhouse.
trollhattan
@Patricia Kayden:
Do you really think he won’t continue scripting the campaign in the same fashion as now? I certainly expect him to.
“But, what about the debates?” some might ask, and to that I need only point all back to the Palin-Biden debate where she refused to even respond to those “gotcha lamestream media questions” and just haul out her talkin’ points for an hour and a half.
Now Trump is no Palin in terms of his ability to be belligerent on the fly versus her scripted belligerence, but his utter unwillingness to play ball will be a keystone of his campaign. That, and flashing his boobs.
Repatriated
@Patricia Kayden: It might trickle down. Many valid attacks on Trump cannot be made by Republicans, since they indict their party as a whole. Democrats can and will make them, with collateral damage to the GOP brand.
schrodinger's cat
@Repatriated: Trump is going to be toxic to the Republican brand, whether he gets the nomination or not.
raven
@goblue72: Respect, you little fucking punk. I’ll be hear to sweat your pansy ass every time I see you. Fucking weasel.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Repatriated: Ann Kirkpatrick has an absolutely brutal ad against McCain saying with increasing grumpiness and a touch of confusion, that he he will support the Republican nominee even if its Trump. That one is particularly tough on McCain because of that footage, but I imagine there’s a lot of hay to be made in Ohio, New Hampshire or Wisconsin, maybe even Iowa and PA.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Paul in KY:
Being from Massachusetts and a small child when Kennedy was shot, the grief around me at that time was so immediate and overwhelming, it literally broke my brain to hear at some point quite a bit later – high school, I think – that there were parts of the country that cheered to hear he was shot. It just simply was impossible for me to imagine that kind of hatred. I’ve accepted that that mindset exists now after a lifetime of witnessing it, but for all the deep contempt I held for GWB and still do, I never for a moment wished him to be assassinated.
Soylent Green
Then didn’t bother to vote two years and six years later when they didn’t get their pony.
NotMax
@trollhattan
No doubt whatsoever that Trump’s prime goal in debates will be to make Clinton cry.
He won’t succeed and will up the ante as debates continue, making him come across as more the depraved cretinous fool each time.
goblue72
@trollhattan: If that’s the metric, then the combat death per year of war would be worse for Korea than Vietnam.
At 211,000 total U.S. war casualties for Vietnam between 1955-1975, that’s roughly 10,500 per year.
At 128,000 for Korea between 1950-1953, that’s 32,000 per year.
World War 2 would be nearly 270,000 per year.
Again, I’m not saying that Vietnam wasn’t significant in terms of foreign wars the U.S. was involved in. Just that its not that special in the long view – and certainly not nearly as significant as the Boomer generation feels it is. And they are pissed at LBJ and always will be.
But in the long view – and in particular, in durable, progressive achievements benefitting working and poor people (as well as minorities, immigrants, and women) – LBJ’s legacy will continue to grow and the significance of Vietnam will continue to diminish.
In contrast, I feel pretty confident that George W. Bush will always be viewed as a shitty President. That Nixon will be view as an arsehole whose negatives outweigh positives. And that William Howard Taft was fat.
Chyron HR
@goblue72:
Have you considered the possibility that NONE of the glorious wars to stamp out Communism forever were a good idea?
liberal
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Assassinated? No. Hanged for the crime of waging aggressive war? Yes.
joel hanes
Boy, troll-feeding is working wonderfully in this thread.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@liberal:
I knew that would never happen. The most I hoped for was for him to choke on another pretzel, or something as totally ridiculous and ignominous.
Repatriated
@schrodinger’s cat: (and Jim, Foolish Literalist) : True. The “I will support Trump” statememts from the debates will make it easier to tar the entire GOP as the “Party of Trump”. Their Congressional candidates will be running against Obama’s 3rd term, ours will be running against Trump’s first.
Paul in KY
@Repatriated: We also were throwing many more people into combat situations, for many months, than in our latest ventures.
japa21
I wish everybody would ignore goblue. S/He isn’t really worth responding to.
NotMax
@the Conster, la Citoyenne
That pretzel could have given us President Cheney.
No thanks.
rikyrah
Luvvie has a recap of her time at the Black Women of Hollywood/Essence Luncheon:
Still Reveling in Joy From ESSENCE’s Black Women in Hollywood 2016
Awesomely Luvvie — March 9, 2016
Every single time I’ve gone to the ESSENCE Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon, I’ve floated away from it. No, I don’t walk away from there. I glide on clouds because that room is nothing short of spell-binding. It puts you in a high that you can’t come down from for at least a day. It is a room without ego, because everybody in there is doing epic things. It is a room without limits because the people in the chairs have shattered ceilings. And it is a room without doubt because the lives of the women in it testify to the power of believing that you belong.
Chris
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Wow. As opposed to nowadays, where if Obama were shot dead, I would be far more shocked if vast swaths of the country didn’t cheer.
FlyingToaster
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Living in a cell in the Hague, next-door-neighbor to Dick Cheney, wearing an orange jumpsuit for the rest of his days, yes.
Dead, no.
Most humans comprehend that killing people is wrong. Sometimes you have no choices left, but otherwise, don’t kill people. It’s a pretty basic concept. Along with “don’t start a land war in Asia” and “mind your own business, bucko”.
liberal
@Roger Moore:
I can’t find a source on teh intertubes right now, but I’m pretty sure this is false. IIRC roughly 2/3 of the men who served in Vietnam were enlisted. (If one were to have an extended discussion, it could be pointed out that some of those who enlisted did so because of the rumor, which the stats apparently bear out, that conscripts got more dangerous assignments.)
Miss Bianca
@srv:
ffffffftttt…speak for yourself, bra’…
Paul in KY
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: We were in France at time (at a US AFB base). I was 4 years old. I just remember how sad it was & all the adults were crying.
Chris
@Repatriated:
Our general election negative ads against Trump can just be a long series of quotes from prominent Republicans during the primary explaining why Trump is so terrible.
Granted, that might actually make his numbers go up, given how rightly unpopular the Marquis de Mittens and all his buddies are. Okay, bad idea. Never mind.
JPL
@trollhattan: hah May I call you Joe… Somehow when a male comes across to a female in a condescending way, it appears differently. Joe played it straight because Sarah had already used lipstick on a pig against Obama. Hillary will eat Trump alive and he’ll be carried off the stage.
goblue72
@Chyron HR: Never said they weren’t. Find where I said that.
Germy
@Chris: How about just using a long series of quotes from Trump himself?
FlyingToaster
@liberal: Definitely false.
Stats:
Doug R
@Roger Moore: You’re forgetting that Nixon sabotaged the peace talks. The war was gonna hang on LBJ no matter what he did, so he gave up.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@NotMax:
Didn’t we have President Cheney anyway?
Gin & Tonic
@goblue72: They already showed up in 2008 and 2012.
In 2012 45% of 18-29’s voted, as compared with 68% of the 45-64 and 72% of the 65+ brackets. This was actually a fairly significant decline in the 18-29 percentage from 2008. So less than half of the vaunted under-30’s can even be bothered to show up.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig:
IIRC he was portrayed as having whipped it out to prove a point in “The Right Stuff” (movie at least).
NotMax
@the Conster, la Citoyenne
No, we had shadow President Cheney.
Full Cheney a gazillion times worse, by definition.
Peale
@Soylent Green: But they’ve now decided that Socialism isn’t a bad thing, so you need to support it, if you want to be hip and trendy and youthful. Vote for the Socialist – its the future.*
*Unless you work int he defense, finance, insurance, oil & gas, agricultural industries. Then socialism might not be for you. In fact, it will be largely against you. Also if you are unfortunate enough to work for a corporation, soon you’ll be liberated from that nightmare.
goblue72
@liberal: Googling the Intertubes I found various random sources of information. Generally appears that only 1/4 – 1/3 of total forces were draftees. Majority were enlisted. Majority of casualties were enlisted as well. And contrary to Hollywood myth, racial minorities were not disproportionately represented (roughly 12% of the armed forces in the war).
In contrast, appears that roughly 2/3 of soldiers who fought in WW 2 were draftees.
trollhattan
@FlyingToaster:
Worth adding a lot of Vietnam era enlisteds chose to do so because of the draft–feeling they’d have a better run picking their service than letting the Pentagon pick for them.
I’m not sure why this conversation, but anybody who lived during Vietnam recalls how it was inextricably entangled with race and revolution and the Cold War, and burned into the nation’s soul for a decade. Also the first war to be broadcast in real time.
Kay
@trollhattan:
He’s really thin-skinned though. He never shakes off criticism. He returns to it again and again and again. He responds to everything anyone says about him, and some of what they haven’t said but he suspects they will say. He repeats poll numbers and wins in GOP primaries over and over to pump himself up. He whines about media coverage and “political correctness” constantly. It’s incredibly easy to get under his skin.
liberal
@FlyingToaster:
Yeah, I also recall how the numbers were completely opposite for WWII. I didn’t bring that up because of Moore’s qualifier “Colonial Wars”.
I talked about this with someone, and they pointed out that in WWII they basically took everybody. And I’m not just talking about everybody below 25. There’s no way they could do that w/o conscription.
IIRC the average age of a serviceman in Vietnam was way younger than that in WWII.
This is one thing that’s really bothered me about the idea “if we bring back the draft, we’ll stop getting involved in wars overseas.” IMHO, the best thing would be to bring it back without any reference to age or class. The minute some 55 year old crook from Wall Street gets drafted is the minute we wage no non-defensive wars, period.
liberal
@trollhattan:
Yeah, I pointed that out in my comment.
les
@joel hanes:
You too, eh? How the fuck did Iowa go from those days to Joni Ernst?
Paul in KY
@Doug R: I’m thinking that LBJ had already announced he wouldn’t run for re-election when Nixon’s lickspittles sabotaged the talks. If LBJ had still been going to run, he probably may have made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Would have gotten grief from Repubs, but he would get grief no matter what.
goblue72
@Gin & Tonic: You need to adjust for percentage voting for each party. That’s the critical party. 100,000 young voters who vote 2/3 for Democrats (66,000) is better than 150,000 older voters who vote 1/3 for Democrat (50,000).
(Numbers above for illustration purposes only.)
liberal
@Peale: Just to clarify, Sanders isn’t really a socialist. He’s a “democratic socialist,” which AFAICT means a much larger welfare state.
The definition of “socialist” is “government ownership or control of the means of production.” Under that definition, Sanders is not a socialist.
Paul in KY
@liberal: By all credible accounts, he had a pretty big shlong. Of course he was a very large man.
liberal
@les: How the fuck did Minnesota go from the DFL party to Michelle Bachmann?
I remember the night that Dick Clark lost his Senate race; my dad came and told me early in the morning. He was heartbroken.
I also remember “voting” for McGovern (Dad lifted me up to pull the lever in the voting booth).
Another favorite “Dad thing”: His saying, “A good Republican is a dead Republican.”
Paul in KY
@liberal: Your ‘socialist’ definition is more of a definition of Communism, IMO.
Paul in KY
@liberal: I like your dad!!
LAO
OT: Because I can not help myself: Bundy news New superseding indictment unsealed re: Malheur takeover. Adds 2 weapons counts (one of which is a 924(c) count. http://www.sltrib.com/news/3639596-155/malheur-occupiers-face-new-counts-in
And, according to JJ Macnab twitter feed: Ryan Bundy intends to go pro se.
Roger Moore
@Repatriated:
And I was thinking that the part where all the other Republican candidates talked about how dangerous and awful he is would make a wonderful anti-Trump ad. I guess you get the best effect by hearing them say one and then the other.
Iowa Old Lady
@Paul in KY: Jesus. What accounts are these? What in god’s name are you reading?
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
Though all he really needs to do is turn them out in about three specific states, and he wins. Last I checked, he was running ahead of Romney in those states.
joel hanes
@liberal:
As a Viet Nam era draftee, I can explain why these stats are probably more than a little misleading.
Draftees served a two-year hitch, but had no choice of military occupational specialty (MOS) — most of them ended up in combat arms (infantry, field artillery), with minimal specialty training. But the military would bargain: IF you signed up for an extra year, and thus became technically an RA (enlistee), you got to choose from a list of jobs which required more training, and most of which would keep you out of combat: quartermaster, signal corps, intelligence. OR you could take a combat arms job, but get a “guarantee” that you would serve in the US, or in Europe, in your first assignment.
So many many of the “enlistees” for the later years of Viet Nam had received their draft notice already, and took the 3-year RA hitch in order to stay out of foot patrols on the front lines. I was one of them. We count in the statistics as enlistees, but make no mistake: we were drafted.
Chris
@Paul in KY:
Isn’t it fair at this point to say that “socialism” (and “capitalism” for that matter) have become such broad concepts that it’s really hard to define them except in the vaguest terms?
FlyingToaster
@liberal: My dad was an enlistee in WWII; the recruiters showed up at Beechcraft in Wichita (where he was working as a co-op student from Wichita State) and took all of the guys between 18 and 26 who had taxiing licenses and could pass a physical, if they’d go. The guys who didn’t sign up then got drafted 18 months later — my dad joked he would have received his draft card about the time his crew was walking across China.
And, I should note, he would have likely been 4F, as his dad was already in his 60s by then.
NotMax
@Paul in KY
Let’s go to the tape.
(Not an impersonator.)
Roger Moore
@FlyingToaster:
I was more hoping for him living in a cell in Gitmo without ever having a chance to hear the charges against him, but I’m a fan of poetic justice. I also hope Grover Norquist drowns in a bathtub.
Bnad
Imagining this video being used to sway voters today makes me think of a line from Idiocracy…
‘Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in his ordinary voice, he sounded pompous and “faggy” to them.’
raven
@liberal:
trollhattan
@Kay: I do think the cameras he so desires can and will be his undoing, but since I misunderestimated his ability to not crash and burn during the primary/Republican willingness to ignore his many whoppers, I need to stop telling myself he isn’t a legitimate danger.
The Spy Mag editors relating how much energy Trump put into combating “short-fingered vulgarian” is both hilarious and an important tell. (“See, not so short.”) He simply can’t let stuff roll off his back without refutation. That’s one piece of hard-wiring I don’t believe is reversible.
Contrast with Hillary in front of the Benghazi morons.
goblue72
@trollhattan: Again, generational bias.
Photography had a similar effect on public sentiments during the Civil War (the first major war to be extensively photographed in real time)
World War 2 was extensively covered via newsreel – though likely shoved through a more controlled propaganda lens. Moviegoing by the general public at the time was frequent and similar in its role to the general public as TV is today.
Also, are we now mind-reading into the thoughts of people from 40 years ago now and prospecting as to “why they did it”? Jesus, can you just move the goalposts to Mars at this point? “Oh well, those people enlisted because they THOUGHT they’d get drafted – I know this because I have time travel telepathy and just know”
liberal
@Doug R: IMHO the best “defense” of LBJ, if you think he deserves one, is to point out that the US was involved long before he became president. By 1954 (Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva talks), the US was bankrolling 75% of the French war effort. IIRC the faintest tracings of our involvement goes back to 1946. Of course, he was the executive that committed forces on the order of 10^5 (Kennedy did have low 10^4 in-country “advisors”).
And now? Vietnam is a typical communist/authoritarian state quite happy to do business with us. Tens of thousands of Americans dead, and about 4 million Vietnamese.
What a fucking waste.
One thing about the fact that so many did enlist—even if they did it believing the war was right, if you’ve read the media from those days, it’s completely understandable. The notion that there was some halcyon past re the media is garbage. People are far more skeptical these days, AFAICT, and there are so many other avenues of communication.
goblue72
@liberal: They gotta punch their hippies. Its what they do.
Iowa Old Lady
@joel hanes: My BIL enlisted in the Air Force when his lottery number came up and counted himself lucky to do so.
Mr. Twister
@goblue72: You’re a horrible fucking person.
? Martin
@Iowa Old Lady: Politico Forum.
joel hanes
@Iowa Old Lady:
Probably Caro.
trollhattan
@joel hanes:
Did not remember that–thanks!
Roger Moore
@Doug R:
The war was going to hang on LBJ because he was the one who massively expanded our role there. I’m talking about the hypothetical where the war didn’t happen in the first place; our politics today would likely be completely different.
liberal
@goblue72: Chomsky claims that coverage actually increased support for the war, and IMHO he’s probably right about that.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@goblue72:
Only the deserving ones.
FlyingToaster
@Roger Moore:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
jl
is that a real GOP voter in that ad, or an actor playing a real GOP voter? He is doing what appears to me to be the fake thoughtful pause schtick, and I rarely see real people do that when they talk. And which I thought was a new fake real person ad thing, but if the guy is an actor, then I guess it is an old thing. And I am a little too young to have coherent memories of the 1964 election. I remember being scared by the A-bomb commercial and asking my parents about it. Other than that, I don’t recall anything.
On to substance: that commercial doesn’t apply to this year because the GOP is offering a sensible sane non-extreme candidate who has a chance of winning… oh… wait.. that would be Cruz…
liberal
@Roger Moore: Yeah, though the real question is whether, given the realities of Cold War politics at the time, any executive could have avoided getting sucked in.
I’m not going to argue that it’s clear it was unavoidable, but things were whacked out those days. The USSR and China had some kind of minor border dispute (well, at least minor by their standards), and many elites here thought it was a ruse to fool us.
NotMax
@joel hanes
Well phrased and 100% true.
trollhattan
@goblue72:
I’m not sure what you’re going on about at this point, but as someone who’s pretty versed in US 20th century history (not to mention living a good hunk of it) I can’t put much credence into your summary. Facts trump “bias.”
Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?
jl
Also, I heard on the news that Jeb wants some kind of confab with the fake moderate (but really crazy reactionary) GOP candidates before the next GOP debate. Is that going to take the GOP primary trainwreck up to a new level? Like an old state fair two steam engines crashing at full speed head-on while the crowd cheers and scalding hot huge pieces of boiler tank crash all around and spectators have to flee level? Since it is all a metaphor, I hope so.
liberal
@Paul in KY: Sorry. Read it in an actual dictionary. Socialism means, precisely, government control/ownership of the means of production.
Elie
@Matt McIrvin:
Show me your math… not seeing that
Peale
@Chris: Yeah. Capitalism isn’t really the problem. Its something called “neo-liberalism” that’s the problem, which used to mean something, but now is just can be a catchall complaint to level against parts of the economy that one doesn’t particularly like. You know, kind of like the Japanese didn’t like the butchers because butchers took the lives of animals, so the proper folk invented Burakumin as a caste so that they could show contempt for them without having to give up the meat, which I’m sure they found delicious. We now have the Bankumin, who are much better off than their Japanese counterparts, for sure. But don’t speak with the Bankumin. The progressives fear them. They carry the stench of death.
Iowa Old Lady
To interrupt our arguments, the OK Senate has passed a bill to take away the license of any doctor who performs an abortion unless it’s to save the life or health of the mother.
JPL
@jl: Comment 9 has a google link to explain the ad.
joel hanes
@les:
How the fuck did Iowa go from those days to Joni Ernst?
yeah, remember Republicans like Robert Ray ? An extinct species.
To answer your question, the Republicans used the traditional religiosity of Iowans as leverage — first, they grafted anti-abortion onto fundamentalist Protestantism (which had no tradition of opposing abortion before the issue was deliberately politicized). Then they relentlessly used that as the sharp tip of the culture-war wedge issues, dividing the electorate ever more deeply, until today Iowa Right To Life has inflammatory billboards up all over, and that fucking weasel Van Der Plaats is politcally powerful.
FlyingToaster
@goblue72:
A lot of us were here, then.
One of our (male) babysitters enlisted about a month after HS graduation. He wasn’t going to college, his dad (and most everyone around’s dad) were either WWII &/or Korean vets, and he had no particular skillset already. A lot of working class kids, starting in the 50s, simply enlisted because that’s what you did if you had no other prospects. The kids who did have skillsets were going to votech, and got deferments. Some enlisted to save the money on votech (one classmate’s brother wanted to be a welder, so he enlisted for that training).
One guy up the street — couple years later — got caught in some minor vandalism and the judge suggested that the charges would go away if he’d enlist. Which the kid promptly did. Which would not happen nowadays — the Army doesn’t need more assholes.
Yes, these are anecdata. But it was pretty damn common, back during the late ’60s.
liberal
@joel hanes:
Yeah, I alluded to incentives like that (the bit about probability of dying), but I didn’t know that stuff. Thanks for sharing, and sorry you had to deal with that shit.
gwangung
@goblue72: You wouldn’t know a hippie if one flowered bombed you and buried you in petals.
joel hanes
@goblue72:
mindreading … Oh well, those people enlisted because they THOUGHT they’d get drafted – I know this because I have time travel telepathy and just know
mindreading? You insufferable twerp, we remember because it happened to us
Go fuck yourself.
Technocrat
@Iowa Old Lady:
People say we’re winning the culture war because of gay marriage, but abortion rights in this country are seriously endangered. Politics isn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game, but that seems to be where we are at. Pass Obamacare, lose the Senate.
NotMax
@FlyingToaster
Yes. One side effect of the institution of the lottery was that if one’s number came up that was an inducement to enlist for many.
liberal
@Peale: I’m not sure how easy it is to define neoliberalism per se, but it’s not that difficult to enumerate the problems with now-existing capitalism that critics of neoliberalism have in mind.
Matt McIrvin
@jl: According to the article, he was both: he was an actor and the ad was scripted, but he was a real Republican who did have the feelings the character was expressing (the people who made the ad were sure to get one).
gwangung
@NotMax: #26. Eeep.
liberal
@joel hanes:
Maybe it’s just me, and I was pretty young at the time, but I don’t remember all this born-again shit, in Iowa or anywhere else. Maybe people were born-again, but it was just less political and more personal, and less organized on the whole. Of course, the Catholic Church also took a rightward tack.
raven
@FlyingToaster: ” the Army doesn’t need more assholes.
”
I beg your pardon.
Eric U.
What’s scary about Goldwater is that he sounds positively sane in comparison to today’s GOP — even the moderate ones.
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: My father-in-law enlisted because his number had come up. He was supposed to have an educational deferment, but the Army explained to him that the process for challenging the draft letter would take months, by which time he’d be well into his tour of duty.
So he enlisted in the Navy, on the theory that that might be slightly less fatal. And then he went home to find a letter confirming his educational deferment, but by then it was too late. He spent the war somewhere in the bottom of a destroyer tender.
trollhattan
@jl:
I’ve heard nothing about Jeb! since he dropped out, so it’s good to hear he’s recovered from Bar’s epic whoopin’.
Chris
@liberal:
The “Truman lost China” and “Kennedy lost Cuba” narratives were probably pretty high on LBJ’s mind.
(Never mind that Eisenhower was the one who lost Cuba – JFK just didn’t elect to let the Bay Of Pigs turn into a war to take it “back.” As with Obama and Iraq, the Democratic successor is responsible for what the Republican predecessor fucks up, and was even then. Assuming that you accept the narrative that countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam were ever America’s to “lose” in the first place, and the ludicrous arrogance that goes with it).
CONGRATULATIONS!
goblue72: don’t know what’s happened in your life recently but you’ve gone off the fucking rails here, hard. Chill. Show some respect. The people here are all on your side, and for some reason I missed you’re trying to start a fucking war with them.
As to a chapter of your revisionist history, I gotta speak up here. I was just a kid – young kid – but I saw most of Vietnam, saw who went, had a few friends whose parents didn’t come home.
Nobody willingly signed up to go fight in Vietnam. Vietnam was a shitshow and everyone in the whole fucking country knew it well before Kennedy got assassinated, even if they weren’t willing to say so in public.
They enlisted because the alternative was to get drafted and be cannon fodder. Both my father and FIL will tell you this, and they both went there as pilots (one of them, not gonna tell you which one, is a world famous fighter pilot whose plan before Vietnam was to get a degree and work the family farm) because, as my father says, he sure as shit wasn’t willing to get his balls shot off while wading through a rice paddy, and since he was going to HAVE to go, he might as well do it on the best terms he could negotiate. The guys who weren’t proactive about it or thought it could never happen to them were the ones who got drafted. And a lot of them died. For nothing.
JaneE
@srv: I remember that line “In your heart you know he’s right”. To which the standard response was “far, far right”, usually delivered with horror and/or an eyeroll.
liberal
@Kylroy: I’m no fan of Hoover, but let’s be honest: no one really understood macroeconomics in those days. Even FDR f*cked up and tightened at one point (1937?).
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
My high school was fortunate enough to be able to hire draft counselors (not recruitment officers) on staff.
Roger Moore
@liberal:
An important thing to remember about “The Vietnam War” is that it’s our way of seeing things. To the Vietnamese, it was just one part of a whole series of wars- against France, between North and South both with and without external forces involved, against Cambodia, and against China. Yes, we were involved, but it wasn’t a singular thing to them the way it was to us. They’re willing to bury the hatchet with us both because of that and because they are justifiably worried about China, which is right on their border, has invaded within living memory, and is increasingly aggressive in its behavior in the area.
jl
@trollhattan: I guess we can watch Cruz, Kasich and Rubio (if he is still in the race) for Jeb!-isms. “Aw c’mon… gimme a break, huh!” And shrugs.
Chris
@Peale:
The problem with capitalism and, once upon a time, socialism, is that the people who take these things to their most absurdist extremes (“government must control EVERYTHING” or “government must control NOTHING”) tend to patent them as their exclusive property and anything else as Not True [whatever]. Which is why we now have Republicans unironically arguing, for example, that even running the Post Office our constitution allows is anti-free-market and therefore not really capitalism, or in the old days, communist puritans claiming that any free market/profit at all at any level and by anybody was a corruption of socialist utopia.
ETA: same problem every religion has with its fundamentalist branch, really.
Matt McIrvin
@liberal: The politicized religious right was a creation of the 1970s that really came into its own during the Reagan era. The spark is often claimed to be Roe v. Wade (which actually was welcomed by many Protestant evangelicals at the time–opposition to abortion was a Catholic thing). But it really seems to have been a 1970 court decision that denied tax-exempt status to racially segregated “Christian academies”.
Iowa Old Lady
There appears to be another Democratic debate tonight. I don’t think I can do it.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Also pushback against Griswold v. Connecticut (1963) and its successor Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) which specified that unmarried people could not be denied contraceptives or prosecuted for use of same.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Another one:
Ohio and Pennsylvania and whatever other state he is claiming (Michigan? New Jersey? Florida?) would have to be a real departure from national polls, and specific to those states. If it’s 51 to 38 nationally is he likely to win Ohio or Pennsylvania based solely on older, blue collar white voters? It could happen I guess but that would be really unusual. It seems like giving them way more power than they have, even assuming they vote as a block that traverses states.
Patricia Kayden
Cannot believe that at one point I was gullible enough to believe that Rubio was an actual threat to the eventual Democratic Presidential candidate. How the mighty have fallen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/09/marco-rubios-campaign-is-basically-over/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_rubio-fix-1115am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: And probably Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 decision that outlawed institutionally led school prayer.
The first presidential election after the Bryan movement where evangelicals really showed up as a political force was 1976: they supported Jimmy Carter, and it was seen as strange and novel. There were puzzled newspaper articles asking “What is a born-again Christian?”, etc. By 1980 they had gone over to supporting Reagan.
Patricia Kayden
@trollhattan: And how did things work out in the end for Mrs. Palin? If Trump wants to play the Nazi/Fascist/Bigot in the general election, our side will be golden. Again, his bigotry may play well to a White audience but is not going over well with the general electorate as evidenced by polls showing that his behind is about to get whooped by Secretary Clinton.
NotMax
@NotMax
That could have been put more clearly.
Also pushback against Griswold v. Connecticut (1963) and its successor Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) the latter specifying that unmarried people could not be denied contraceptives or prosecuted for use of same.
Ruckus
@joel hanes:
Most of my fellow sailors joined because of the draft and for the same reasons. The extra time seemed to more than make up for it. And we didn’t get any choice of MOS or duty stations.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: It may just be stale polls. There hasn’t really been a lot of state-level general-election polling yet; it’s too early and most firms are concentrating on the primaries.
It does seem like the national head-to-head numbers for Trump v. Clinton have turned more against Trump in the past couple of weeks. At first it looked to me like it was just that Ipsos/Reuters had gotten in with a lot of new polls, and they seem to have a house effect that is biased toward Clinton relative to the others. But some other firms are showing the effect now.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Yes indeedy.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Blue Laws were widely in effect as well.
jl
@Patricia Kayden: I think you meant Rubio could be the GOP candidate. (Edit: sorry didn’t read your comment carefully enough, you typed ‘threat’ to the Democratic candidate).
I’ve read several places that Rubio is basically Walker with more persistent and patient big money backing. From what I’ve read, Rubio’s campaign has consisted mostly of cultivating big donor big money support and buying ads. Detail stuff of electoral politics like building actual political organizations, GOTV infrastructure and activity, and mingling and talking with voters is not part of the Rubio political skill or interest set.
There never was a real Rubio campaign in the sense of HRC, Sanders or Cruz (and I am putting those three together only in terms of three candidates who are willing to do the boring work of actual real electoral retail politics).
That is why I have been mean recently and called Rubio the rich man’s pet candidate.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
If you think teachers are underpaid, what the fuck are you doing at a Republican rally in the first place?
goblue72
@liberal: I wouldn’t be surprised, at least generally. Memories tend to merge – but when you look at the coverage and public response – prior to 1968 (Tet), the public response to media coverage of the war was generally supportive of the war. It turned after Tet.
Put another way – median coverage of the war didn’t turn the public critical of Vietnam based on perceptions of the carnage of war. It turned when the perceptions changed to one that “we” were losing the war.
Kind of like how a fanbase sours on its team when it starts losing too much.
Matt McIrvin
…But basically the key scary states this year are the same as in 2012: Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. If Trump wins all three of those, with the rest of the country following the 2012 Obama map, he wins. If Clinton gets just one of them, it’s harder.
If he wins Ohio, PA and Michigan, he can still win if he gets one more medium-sized state, say Wisconsin or Colorado. OH+PA+MI+CO actually gets him to a 269-269 electoral tie and a House of Representatives decision, which would be interesting in a horrifying way. OH+FL+MI is another tie.
Pennsylvania had seemed like it was trending bluer and bluer over the past few cycles, but there was some polling in the fall that seemed to indicate that Trump was leading Clinton there. Nothing really recent, though.
jl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: A governor personally responsible for underpaying them would know, wouldn’t he? I am sure Kasich came off as very earnest and concerned about the sad situation. That is how he gets the media to label him a moderate.
Gin & Tonic
@liberal: This was common knowledge to anyone who was of age at the time, or damn close, as I was. Ask anyone and they’ll remember their lottery number, too.
Ruckus
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Nobody willingly signed up to go fight in Vietnam
Have to disagree with this. Guys did sign up for this. They were nuts. But people do sigh up to fight wars, they did then, they still do. Patriotic duty, ramboism, fucking crazy, nothing else going on/no future anyway, whatever. Know of one fellow, 30is, 3 kids, joined for the free dental care for him and his family. Fellow I know was his his platoon leader and couldn’t believe it.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Put very crudely, Pennsylvania consists of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Alabama. The sheer weight of the first two favor a Dem victory.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: So, in other words, “born-again” evangelicals were politically quiet as long as state and local governments were allowed to endorse religion and enforce conservative sexual morality in various ways, and there were workarounds that allowed the effective subsidy of tax exemption for racially segregated education (if not segregated public education). Take all that away, and Southern white evangelicals felt really threatened and started talking about “getting government off your back”.
trollhattan
@Patricia Kayden:
From your lips to God’s ears. I feel this year’s edition Hillary can take this thing; I’m just chastened by how poorly I handicapped Trump’s odds. It (again) goes to show the non-existence of the Republican’s cellar. Shovels for everybody, let’s keep digging!
goblue72
@joel hanes: The plural of anecdote is not anecdata.
Matt McIrvin
@liberal: I have trouble advocating a return of the draft unless there is at the very least some risk that I’d get drafted, and not just a bunch of 18-year-old kids. And even then, it’s unlikely they’d put my rapidly aging body on the front lines.
goblue72
@Kay: As you likely also know (and I think are suggesting in your comment) – the winner of the popular vote generally wins the electoral college. It is quite RARE for a candidate to win one and lose the other. Bush v Gore was memorable because it was such an outlier.
And the bigger the popular vote gap and even more unlikely it is for a candidate to lose by that large a margin in popular vote and then win the electoral college.
goblue72
@gwangung: As I’ve noted here before, the majority of those I piss on are arm chair political junkies. I could care less. I’m pretty secure in my progressive bona-fides and fairly confident I am more actively engaged (in terms of time I spend in the meatspace) in local and state Democratic politics (as well as progressive causes) than most of the commenters here – both in terms of my personal time and professionally as well.
Now, if by hippie, you are narrowly talking about a certain subset of the Boomer Generation who were Flower Children – then now, I do not regularly interact with the burnouts on Haight Street on the other side of town. (Though these days the Flower Children have long since bough a home in Marin County now worth $1 million and the burnouts in Haight-Ashbury are mostly 20-something runaways)
Kay
@goblue72:
Right, and this would be centered and specific to the strip of states along the Great Lakes. I just don’t think those states diverge that much from the rest of the country. Trump is able to swing 10 points in Pennsylvania based just on Reagan Democrats and also diverging from the rest of the country? Hmmm :)
Wrb
@joel hanes: I certainly knew people who signed up for Officer Candidate School because they feared the draft, and maneuvered themselves into quite comfortable gigs. Like some who spent their term floating around the Mediterranean, doing theirs as part of the scary visage directed toward the Soviets, while sunbathing and drinking.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
But Ohio (for example) is more like national polling than other states, not less so. If the Democrat is ahead nationally Ohio generally reflects that, within a narrow range. That’s why it’s a swing state.
Elie
Some data on the Michigan Democratic Primary results from the Detroit News:
“The polls had the wrong turnout,” he said.
Exit polls conducted by Edison Research showed 69 percent of voters in Tuesday’s Democratic primary identified as Democrats, while 28 percent labeled themselves independents.
Another 3 percent of the Democratic electorate was comprised of Republicans who crossed over to vote in the Clinton-Sanders race, according to the exit polling.
“Bernie won Michigan due to crossover from Republican and independents,” he said. “Sanders’ trade message resonated especially with men and rural voters and Hillary needs to take several pages out of that playbook and run with it.”
Steve in the ATL
@goblue72:
People love to say this, but is data not a collection of individual anecdotes? The question really is how many anecdotes are required to become data rather than cocktail party chatter.
raven
@goblue72: You are an insufferable asshole. . . always.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Pretty much.
Instructing institutions of long standing and comfortable entrenchment “Your gospel is your own, not necessarily applicable to nor enforceable upon everyone” was jarring, to say the least, if not a seismic cultural shift.
Nate Dawg
@goblue72:
Or moved to the Pacific Northwest and peppered their lawn and car with Bernie signage.
Miss Bianca
@LAO:
‘Ryan Bundy intends to go pro se. ‘
Dare I presume this means he’s going to try to defend himself? (based purely on my faulty knowledge of Latin, as opposed to my faulty knowledge of the law).
The derp…it burns…
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
So in 2012 Obama was ahead 3.9 in national polls (average) and he won Ohio by 2. If Trump does poorly in national polls Ohio (and Pennsylvania- whatever he’s claiming) would have to become outliers, and they’ve never been that. Really blue and really red states are the outliers to national polling.
Roger Moore
@Steve in the ATL:
Data is a collection of individual anecdotes, but that doesn’t mean that any large collection of anecdotes becomes useful data. You have to make sure that you’re collecting a representative sampling of data points rather than cherry picking the ones that agree with your existing ideas.
goblue72
@Kay: I share your skepticism about a Great Trumpen-ing in PA, OH, etc.
I have no doubt that he could pull more disaffected working class / lower middle class whites than say a R-Money did. But I also doubt that it would be enough. And likely at least partially cancelled out by the non-whites and youth (any race) that Trump would pull out to vote AGAINST Trump.
goblue72
@Roger Moore: Precisely. I’m not saying its impossible that there were enlistees who enlistees who were worried they’d get drafted and assigned to worse positions.
Just that you can’t pull some anecdotes and think that’s proof of anything – absent being able to at least minimally point to some actual dataset, statistically material polling, surveys or some other set of data.
Kay
@Elie:
I don’t have a thing to base it on other than spending a lot of time in rural Michigan, and the Sanders supporters will get mad me, but those people love guns. Love. They’re not all “gun nuts” it’s not that insanity with fondling assault weapons, but they have a lot of shooting and gun-related outdoor activities and hunting and the whole lifestyle. I bet Clinton’s attacks on Sanders on guns didn’t hurt Bernie a bit and they may have helped him.
Steve in the ATL
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, that’s how it’s SUPPOSED to work!
Elie
@Kay:
I could see that…. Still without the crossovers, maybe not? (I do not know that much about MI)
Kay
@goblue72:
If his national polling stays bad it should be interesting what happens, what Trump does, when it starts to get mentioned because it will and he’s not going to take that well.
Ultimately I think “establishment” Republicans want to win and that’s why they’re anti-Trumping. It’s noble and great for Trump supporters to think it’s because they’re protecting the status quo and it’s nice for the anti-Trump Republicans to stand on “decency” and “patriotism” but I think establishment Republicans believe he will lose and they don’t want to lose.
Technocrat
@NotMax:
Damn, that’s one of the best descriptions I’ve heard.
goblue72
@liberal: Yes it was 1937. Drove the country into a recession and back into the Depression. The Federal Reserve tightened the money supply at the time (stupidly) over phantom fears of inflation and FDR cuts back on New Deal spending (stupidly) over phantom fears of the Federal deficit getting too large.
Sound familiar?
goblue72
@Kay: Pretty much. My understanding from your past comments is you are pretty actively engaged in Ohio politics (whether personally or professionally or both).
As you know, the only thing an incumbent fears more than having an election is losing one.
Elie
BTW, MI had a closed democratic caucus historically… This was first year it was a primary and on the same day as the Repub primary. No point to be made. just thought interesting…
Kay
@Elie:
I think Democrats are weaker in the Great Lakes states than people believe. They lost the whole region at the state level with the exception of Minnesota. They regained Pennsylvania but only because the R was an unmitigated disaster. Losing every state in the Great Lakes means something. They should have paid attention, instead of complaining about low turnout in out years and blaming the whole debacle on that.
They’re weaker than they were in the Great Lakes states. There’s a reason Republicans have been focused on flipping those states for the last 2 cycles.
Gin & Tonic
@goblue72: You want data, here you go. While the paper primarily concerns itself with racial characteristics, it is interesting reading. I’m not going to re-type the conclusions, and it’s an old paper, so I can’t extract text from the PDF, but it specifically touches on what was referenced numerous times above, draft-lottery-motivated enlistment.
goblue72
@Kay: Doesn’t make me mad. Like a lot of things, the gun issue is complicated. There’s a big part that about the gun manufacturing industry and their lobbying arm (NRA) and the role of money in politics. And a part about the gun fetish folks with the hard-ons for penis substitutes.
But there’s also a part of about folks living in more rural parts of the country where hunting and gun sports are common – attacks on which feel to them like attacks on them personally and their values. And I get why a guy who is Senator from one of the most rural states in the country doesn’t have a history of “IMMA GONNNA GET YA GUNZ!”
Policy at end of day needs to intersect with electoral strategies and figure out where the best leverage is.
Elie
@Kay:
Very astute observation. Any insights on why we are so weak? Are the policies that the Rs are adopting so popular in rust belt states with stressed economies? What happened to make them so vulnerable to the R message?
Wrb
@Kay: They are weaker than they could be in many working class and rural regions, but those whose antidotal evidence does not include antidotes from such places and people tend to sneer at those who try to explain the reasons for the loss of support.
Nate Dawg
@goblue72:
Really nice summation of the Obot pragmatist camp. Go Hillary!
Elie
@Wrb:
My own observation is that next to the deep south, the old rust belt states have a history of some of the most racist whites in the US. This was where neighborhood integration was followed by wholesale moving out of white families and where busing just did not work at all. Unions were not welcoming to black people either… so I can see the shift to Rs happening
W. Kiernan
“I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups, come out in favor of the candidate of my party… either they’re not Republicans or I’m not.” You youths today don’t read that the way us old, old people do. When I was a kid, Republicans were the party of Lincoln; that’s precisely why all the Southerners hated them. Nowadays, David Duke can endorse Donald Drumpf, and Drumpf can take his good old time “disavowing” (i.e. not disavowing) that endorsement, and no one blinks an eye; everyone takes it for granted that the Republicans have all the hardcore racist votes securely in their corner.
goblue72
@Gin & Tonic: Again, I did not deny that it happened in part. I was challenging the claim that Vietnam was “first colonial war fought largely by draftees” which was patently wrong (also cutely circumscribed with that “colonial war” bit). And that therefore, somehow, THIS war is DIFFERENT. And SPECIAL.
I will take a look at the linked study. (Appears to be kinda old and old school scanned PDF)
Though I did Google the paper title and came across this – http://www.columbia.edu/~rse14/vietnam_rev_Feb2010.pdf
Interesting point in that is change in draft policy with the lottery in 1969 – and its material affect on the composition of who enlisted. (I note in my start skim of your linked paper that their dataset is from 1970-71 enlistees as they didn’t have access to complete info from enlistment data prior to that) – so the cohort is from a slice in time of the war occurring at its tail end and after a major change to the draft.
EthylEster
@srv: Raymond Massey was born in Canada. So he’s a naturalized Real American.
Wrb
@Elie: I disagree on you emphasis here, Elie ( while acknowledging that if I go back years both you and Kay have been among the commenters with with whom I’ve most agreed). At least in my neck of the woods, race just isn’t a factor. It is crushing poverty that is, loss of dreams, bright kids not able to achieve anything close to what they could. What matters here is NAFTA, the effects of the Commodities Moderinazation Act, Glass Stegal, The influence of the likes of Goldman and Lehman, and- yes- illegal immigrants who have destroyed all the protections hard won by labor. Hire them, you escape paying payroll deductions, workmanship comp, and can ignore OSHA standards, since they can’t sue you. So you’ve got both Main Street business owners and workers thinking that they have been sold out by Clinton-era Democrats. It is fixable, but too many are focused on condescention and denial.
joel hanes
@goblue72:
In the three years controlled by the draft lottery (the final three years of the Viet Nam era draft), actual induction notices were sent to between 20% and 30% of all 19-year old males who were 1A status. The levy was actually higher in earlier years, before the lottery.
You should learn to recognize when you’re wrong, and learn to back down.
Kay
@Elie:
I think to a certain extent they were abandoned and that’s true in AA-majority cities and white rural areas in the rustbelt. Flint is something like 60% AA, but that also means it’s 40% white. It wasn’t only trade deals, but trade deals didn’t help and there was no effort to help them transition. They were just kind of sacrificed- the things they were good at were no longer valued and they were ordered to “retrain” but there’s only so many places they can work- there’s only so much health care people can deliver.
My daughter lives in Pittsburgh. Middle class jobs there are health care too. There’s just not a lot they can do, even if they “retrain”. My middle son is skilled trades and he and 3 other people ran an entire facility that makes pop bottles. They’re skilled. They have specific skills to maintain and fix the (French-made) machines that make the bottles and he can (and did) take that skill set elsewhere, but it’s 4 jobs where there used to be 400. He’s in demand – he gets jobs offers and he’s already working- but they just don’t need millions more like him.
As you know, people don’t need work just to live. They need work to feel useful and like they’re taking care of their families. When that goes their communities just collapse. There was no real political or government response to that. Instead they got op eds from Tom Friedman and the earned income tax credit.
Elie
@Wrb:
We can agree that it is multi-factoral. That said, not sure how voting Republican fixes any of this — indeed, its made things much worse — example the dismantling of the WI excellent university system by the now R Governor
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I though Lindsey Graham had a very sensible take on opposition to Trump. He obviously doesn’t want Trump to win, but thinks that the party has to accept him if he does win. The basic point is that it isn’t worth risking splitting the party over one election. Parties don’t like to lose, but they can bounce back from an electoral defeat much more easily than they can from an actual split.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Some of the other head-to-head polls are weird. Clinton vs. Cruz had gotten scarily close around early February and then Cruz’s numbers fell off a cliff just in the past couple of weeks.
Clinton vs. Rubio is bimodal, but I think it’s because of one firm. Most of the national head-to-head polls actually show Rubio beating Clinton (he may still function as “Generic Republican” to a lot of people), but this one company Morning Consult always has her beating him by big margins. It adds to my suspicion that there’s something fishy about them and they’re basically pumping Donald Trump. Rubio is getting crushed in the primaries anyway so electability doesn’t seem to be people’s prime concern.
Wrb
@Elie: With that I agree, strongly. But I do think a very basic failure to prioritize making lives better for those who have so demonstrably been losing, has them looking for extreme alternatives. Thus the rise of Trump and Rubio. I know that many here will disagree, but I suspect that Sanders could direct much of the desperate energy I see in such places toward a positive direction, but fear that Hillary will cause it to boil over. She just doesn’t seem aware of how accepting millions from the enemy- Goldman, etc. – appears to such hurting people. There is a strange obliviousness and sense of entitlement there, in my opinion.
Elie
@Kay:
Beautifully stated, Kay… I dunno what to say… there is a gap between our political system and the heart of the people… somehow it has to be reconnected — While I know that Trump is not the path, his candidacy is the sentinel event of how broken we are and how our political system no longer works. We have to find the energy and the new leaders to work to reconnect… we seem to have no dreams anymore.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I just think it’s interesting that Trump is declining in national polls while racking up wins in the GOP primary.
Clinton was asked about a poll that had her and Trump neck and neck at a debate. They couldn’t wait to ask her, because they love the Reagan Democrat thing.
Let’s see if Trump is asked about two big marquee media polls that have him behind Clinton, and quite far behind.
I don’t worry that much about the narrative because the one thing horserace coverage does is follow the horserace. Trump can bulllshit for a while but if his national numbers don’t look better that will be discussed, whether he likes it or not.
Chris
@Elie:
My impression from Kay and others is that while voting Republican isn’t fixing anything, voting Democrat isn’t considered to be fixing anything either, at least not since the age of NAFTA and Third Wayism. Hence, whites with racial hangups who might previously have voted Democrat or been reachable no longer feel a reason to, and go with the culture war stuff alone. Others, whether or not they have racial hangups, just become apathetic and stop voting.
Chris
@Kay:
It’s consistent with what we know of political trends in the last decade or so, isn’t it? The conservatives are getting more conservative, the rest of the country less so, so what appeals to one increasingly doesn’t appeal to the other.
Wrb
@Chris: or they go on the economic / class war stuff alone. Trump is making a play for being better for the working class. It needn’t be about race.
Elie
@Chris:
There is too much noise to make such conclusions. Few of the primaries have been closed. There has been voting across parties etc and no one knows how much and for what reasons. Trump has gotten enormous benefit of the doubt and cruised along for a long time with little opposition from the media or the Rs. I see him as starting to wobble after early easy sailing but with little real strategic planning on his part. Where does he go and how does he manage the remainder of the primaries? The general election is a whole other campaign that will require a different logic. He has to keep up his energy and keep his message “fresh” as it will grow stale with time. Meantime, he gets to face another opponent with less easy target than presented by some of the R numbskulls. We’ll see
Chris
@Wrb:
Yeah, that too. I was reacting to the more general “voting Republican won’t help,” which predates Trump (things like Scott Walker’s election, etc). But for sure I could see Trump making inroads there beyond what they’ve already built.
Chris
@Elie:
True.
That is, at the end of the day, probably the sanest thing to say about any election, but especially this one.
Paul in KY
@Iowa Old Lady: Nixonland touches on the subject.
Paul in KY
@Chris: To the dumbasses, yeah. I have a degree in Political Science (woohoo), so I haz been immersed in the dialectic.
Paul in KY
@? Martin: Now Martin, that was a low blow.
Paul in KY
@joel hanes: Him too!
Paul in KY
@liberal: LBJ could have avoided being sucked in. The only reason he escalated was he was already thinking about re-election & he was afraid the Repub nominee would paint him as ‘soft on Communism’ and enabling the Domino Theory.
Paul in KY
@liberal: No it does not. Socialism is basically much more governmental oversight of industry, regulating in ways that would give American Industrialists massive coronaries. Some service industries (like healthcare & public transportation) may be owned by government, but in general the industries will be owned by some non-government entity, just that entity will not be free to run the business with the latitude they get over here.
‘Ownership of the means of production’ by the state (that means all industrial concerns) is Communism, IMO.
Paul in KY
@Peale: ‘Neo-Liberalism’ means ‘assholes who say they used to be Liberal & are now right wing douchewads’.
Paul in KY
@Ruckus: I’ve met a couple of psychos who liked it in Vietnam. Enjoyed operating with almost no rules.