Tough Decisions

All our presidents have faced making difficult decisions. Here might be the toughest tests for our last 14 presidents:

FDR - Declaring war on Japan AND Germany

Truman - Dropping the atomic bomb on Japan

Ike - Agreeing to an armistice in Korea

JFK - Embargo on Cuba during the missile crisis

LBJ - Handling the Vietnam war protests

Nixon - Watergate and his eventual resigning

Ford - Pardoning Nixon

Carter - Trying to rescue our Iran hostages

Reagan - Walking away from Helsinki meeting with Gorbachev

Bush 41 - Desert Storm war

Bill Clinton - Impeachment and fessing up to Monica Lewinsky affair

Bush 43 - America’s response to 9/11

Obama - Osama Ben Laden raid

Trump - Restarting the economy after the coronavirus shutdown

Abuse of Power

There have been very few periods in recent American history when the party in power has not grievously abused that power. ... FDR, LBJ, RMN, WJC, GWB, BHO.  At the moment, likely because he has been distracted by his attempts to reverse the previous administration’s carry-over despotism, we are enjoying a relative autocratic lull. The real measure of his presidency will be how well Trump behaves once he has effectively drained the swamp that has been, until now, tirelessly working to take him down.

Inflection Point

Martin Luther King Jr. was a bit of a bounder. There are numerous salacious stories of his behavior off the pulpit. So why do we celebrate this man today? Simple ... his "I have a dream" speech was an inflection point between when this country was majority racist against blacks and when we weren't. Yes I agree that racism did not and will not totally disappear from America ... just that the tide had changed against this societal poison -- prejudice against blacks. The proof being that we have since elected an African-American twice to our highest office.

This forgiveness of past bad behavior by Americans is not unique to MLK Jr. We have often looked past dalliances by other of our heroes -- JFK, LBJ, FDR, Thomas Jefferson, DDE and many, if not most, of our past leaders ... except lusting onl in his mind ... Jimmy Carter. The reason for such myopia is that the sum total of the good that these men did far outweighed their misconduct.

There, of course is one major exception. Much of America refuses to recognize any of the positive results from our current president's short tenure. Instead there is a fixation in the media about his negatives -- two scoops of ice cream, Stormy Daniels, his exaggerations, long neckties, etc. Will Trump ever be given the same latitude as many of our past less-than-perfect leaders, like the man whose birthday we celebrate today? He clearly is striving mightily to create an inflection point between the decline of America and a return to our historic greatness ... with large portions of this country undermining these efforts at every step.

History will tell ... but it will be a serious number of years hence.

Punishing Good Deeds

"No good deed goes unpunished."

Started watching the last episode of "The Vietnam War" last night ... but turned it off after five minutes and went to bed. Why you ask? Because it started rehashing Nixon's disgrace and  downfall, Watergate. I said to my wife, "What does this have to do with Vietnam?" and hit the clicker.

Actually, I suspect I know why Ken Burns and Lynn Novick needed to sully Nixon further. They had tried this in the previous episode and didn't quite pull it off. Matter of fact, this penultimate program left me with a new respect for Nixon. Yes, he was tricky and duplicitous, but he and Henry Kissinger had done the impossible. They had ended the Vietnam war, brought our soldiers and POWs home, and left South Vietnam with at least a hope of remaining out of the clutches of the North. All basically within his first four years in office.

And he had done this Herculean task, a task that neither JFK or LBJ had the slightest clue how to accomplish ... they  kept making things worse ... despite scant support from the media and the massive resistance from America's counterculture. And he had also gotten overwhelmingly reflected in the process. He had done what he had promised when he had first gotten elected ... and the rabid liberals could not forgive him for this miracle.

Nixon had given the Left what they wanted and they needed to punish him for it. So, as his reward, they pounced on one of his foibles .... his paranoia about his opposition. (Actually, by now, quite a justified paranoia.) Last night I didn't need again to see how this downfall was orchestrated by his enemies ... for I once had been one of these enemies ... and now, being more of a realist, I am feeling remorse ... for how I was led by the nose into reviling and disgracing Richard M. Nixon for his heroic deed of ending our foolish war in Nam. History was now to say that JFK and even LBJ were the innocent victims and RMN was to be the goat. Bullshit!

Changing the Game

I wrote earlier today about the secret society of lefty journalists called Gamechanger Salon (somewhat pretentious name, no? … see: Fletcher's Castoria Blog.) This has got me ruminating on what is occurring in news reporting in general. As I understand it, reporters are meant to provide their audience the essence … the who, what, when, where and how of a news story … preferably early on … but not necessarily the why. Now, often the lede of a news story is the imagined why and one has to sift through many filler paragraphs to find these other facts … if they are there at all. Too often reporters tend to squash other essential and needed facts for the sake of political correctness.

I recall reading a while back a survey done on the entering students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism … and the primary motivation of these tyros was to change society for the better (obviously “better” being a relative term.) In other words, rather than reliably and truthfully reporting the facts of what was occurring in the world, they wanted to change the game. And it appears that Columbia University ... and many other such schools ... do little to change this misguided ambition. I believe that this is a noxious notion of what reporting is supposed to be … and has grown mainly from Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate news reporting which brought down President Nixon.

Every cub reporter now wants to emulate this dynamic duo … and lead our society out of the sewer and into his/her own version of utopia. Such scooping of the world will result in a Pulitzer Prize and then fame and riches beyond imagination. This is a little like a grandstanding playground basketball player imagining himself as the next LeBron James. Instead of pursuing a respectable career within ethical and professional boundaries, many reporters are now trying to become another Walter Cronkite and “making a difference” like this CBS News anchorman did by humiliating LBJ. And so they join the Gamechangers Salon.

Opinion journalists may do this ... but not reporters. There should be an enormous gulf between the two ... which has now been conveniently blurred. And, journalists of any stripe should not be forming cabals.

(I think that H.L. Mencken also said that any newsman who has more than just a handful of mourners at his funeral was not a good journalist.)

Down We Go

Nixon had the good sense not to contest the 1960 election when it was pretty clear that Texas and Illinois  had been stolen for J.F.K. by L.B.J. and Mayor Daley (in Chicago).  He thought that it would besmirch the election process and this would create future problems.  Al Gore was not so patriotic when, in 2000, he lost in Florida and fought tooth and nail to overturn the results there.  Whether or not you believe that the Supreme Court gave this election to Bush 43, it seems clear that there were sufficient shenanigans on the part of Democrats to suggest that they had tried mightily to subvert the election process.  (It is suspected by many that punch-card ballots were gang-punched for Gore by Democrat inside operatives ... and this is how the hanging chads occurred at the bottom of each stack of punch cards.  Funny how none of the Bush 43 ballots had these same hanging chads?)

I think the resentment rising out of this Supreme Court decision has created a mindset among many Democrats that it is OK to take any questionable measure to insure that your candidate wins.  Witness how it has been recently revealed that one of the major duties of the "community organizers,"  ACORN, was election malfeasance.  I also suggest that Harry Reid's last victory in Nevada and Al Franken's drawn-out dog fight win in Minnesota might well be specific examples of voter fraud.  Now, we see that our Attorney General, Eric Holder, appears to be steering the ship of state into this maelstrom to try to insure a victory for The Barry next year.  See the details of his questionable actions here and here.

To me, it is very disturbing that there are people (mostly Liberals) who believe that a voter does not have to prove his/her identity in order to cast a ballot ... while they are required to do so for something as simple as buying a six-pack of beer.  And the accelerating trend toward motor-voter registrations and massive absentee ballot casting, again IMHO, may cause the election process in this country to become as corrupt as it was in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and how it currently seems to be in Russia.  I think I can hear a number of our august founding fathers gyrating in their sepulchers.