Do they talk to people like that in a free country?

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

JFK

Far, far worse than Watergate

Richard Nixon’s long shadow

Deliberately prolonging a war just to win an election?

Pretty shocking stuff.

But what if he disapproved of the deal LBJ was trying to force the Vietnamese into accepting, and as a policy matter thought the US could and should do better?

Still illegal, but that difference in motive makes for a different objection, this one to the "arrogance of power" mentality, to Nixon's worries about the US being seen as a "pitiful, helpless giant," as reasons for war, or for continuing for one second longer than necessary the foolish war RN inherited from LBJ, that LBJ should never have got into (nor should Kennedy before him have committed us so far as he did by sending "advisers").

Which was it?

All the same, if Clinton deserved impeachment and should have resigned for his perjury then Nixon deserved far worse, not for Watergate but for ruining LBJ's chance to get us out of Vietnam in 1968, years before Nixon would finally give up.

Even if his intentions were not, as seems all too likely, so starkly selfish as to suit the black heart of some Shakespearean Machiavel.

Pat Buchanan talks sense when, and only when, it doesn’t hurt his party

Come Home, America—and Republicans

That’s more often than nearly anybody, but still.

And even his history is both tendentious and mendacious.

Why, after all, didn’t Eisenhower do it himself instead of telling JFK to get out of Europe?

Talk is cheap, they say.

And it’s really easy.

And what are we to think of PB’s citing MacArthur, the man who wanted to invade China and whom Truman could not control or trust and so had to fire, as a dove to JFK’s hawk?

Really, now.

Liberals are liars and hypocrites, too

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup at KOS

Says Meteor Blades, Danny Goldberg at Alternet explains why criticizing Zero Dark Thirty is not an assault on free expression.

But, of course, no one said it was and criticizing Zero Dark Thirty is not the issue.

Why Criticizing 'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Not an Assault on Free Expression

As a long-time defender of the rights of artists -- including controversial ones -- I find it intellectually dishonest for champions of Zero Dark Thirty to pretend that serious criticism of the film amounts to an assault on free expression.

Responding to public statements by actors Ed Asner, Martin Sheen and David Clennon urging Academy members to refrain from voting for Zero Dark Thirty, Columbia Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal said "to punish an artist's right of expression is abhorrent."

Talk about egregious and bold intellectual dishonesty.

And what would DG say about a conservative effort to deny a movie any awards because it endorsed homosexuality and condemned Christianity?

Or because, like Reds, it was a full-length hymn of praise for Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution?

Or because, like JFK, it was such a shocking heap of malevolent lies?

What would he say about efforts to deny awards to Piss Christ or various other “works of art” to which conservatives in general and Christians in particular volubly protest?

Well, what have liberals said about such efforts?

Per DG, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen and David Clennon (Who?) have urged the academy members not to vote for Zero Dark Thirty, apparently for any of the various awards the academy can bestow upon a film.

The point, I suppose, is to enlist Hollywood whether it will or no in damning torture, to erect the lie that torture never obtains useful information into a dogma for which support on every occasion is mandatory, and to visit exemplary punishment on all those associated with the film for not clearly and unmistakably damning torture and supporting that dogma.

It is the usual liberal effort to punish non-PC-compliant expression that liberals always insist doesn’t count as censorship though similar conservative efforts to punish blasphemy, for example, most certainly do.

For DG and, I suppose, for MB, the central issue is how this film affects popular opinion about the use of torture and the film deserves to be criticized for – according to him and, so far as I know, every liberal who has checked in with an opinion – either giving the false impression torture was in fact or at least may have been useful in getting OBL or supporting the false opinion that it is a necessary tool of national security.

For him, that makes such punitive efforts as those of Asner and Sheen perfectly legitimate.

And for Asner, Sheen, Clennon (Who?), and also Meteor Blades.

So they deny it is what it is - an attack on freedom of expression in Hollywood - and pretend it is what it is not - "serious criticism."

JR discovers fire

Oliver Stone’s Untold History

He discovers Ollie is a red, at least metaphorically.

JFK wasn't enough to convince him.

Or anything else in Stone's entire career, up to now.

Gee.

And what nonsense JR writes about Spain!

You would think he was writing for the Falange, or at least for Franco's Nationalists.

And what claptrap about the World Wars!

Am I the only anti-warrior able and willing to admit we could and should have stayed out of our wars though we were, in fact, and from time to time, on the right side?

And that, in those cases, this fact was and is clear as day?

JR and his paleocon, libertarian, and neo-Confederate friends find that sort of thing much too hard on the brain, apparently, so beginning with the Civil War when they argue a war is one we should have stayed out of they argue, too, that we were on the wrong side - perhaps a valid point when you are talking about stealing Canada or half of Mexico.

Or at least that we fought with shocking and unacceptable means, though ordinarily they combine that accusation with the other.

Was JFK the lesser evil in 1960?

Leave aside that, per persistent rumor, the Democrats stole that election from Nixon.

At that point the conservative movement was not in control of the GOP and Nixon was not then or ever a part of it.

And the Democrats were far from the party of civil rights they would later be.

Given they had built American Apartheid in the South and elsewhere, to begin with, if anything they had less claim to be the party of racial justice than the Republicans.

It was Ike who, urged by Nixon, sent troops to Little Rock.

Stevenson, who lost the nomination to Kennedy, was by far the more liberal of the two Democrats.

Kennedy was a globo-cold warrior, big time, and he used lies about a “missile gap” and fear of the reds in his campaign against Nixon.

Kennedy ran, in fact, as the nuttiest cold warrior on the ballot.

Once in office, instead of cancelling he merely botched the Bay of Pigs operation, inherited from Ike, himself in large measure thus provoking a missile crisis that would take us close to nuclear war and “resolving” it only by promising immunity forever to communism in Cuba.

Of course, he committed America more deeply to stop communism in Vietnam.

If you were going to worry about dominoes, Cuba and Latin America were a much better place to worry than Southeast Asia.

That seems to have been Eisenhower’s view and despite their personal relations Nixon was more an Eisenhower Republican all his life than any other kind.

Was Kennedy really the lesser evil of his day or only the less competent man?

Apart from Chicago and West Virginia, he won because of the cosmetics of TV debates, after all.

Nixon had a heavier beard and sweated under the lights.