My goodness, people, if you are into drama that makes the TV drama “Game of Thrones” seem pedestrian by comparison, and hey, let us face, people, we’re all adults, afterall, we all are, what a time it is to be alive!
These times we are in right now, with earth-shaking events occurring pretty much 24/7 now with the cable news cycle, make the 60s look positively dull and boring by comparison, and so they should when you think about it, since that was in a whole different century, before RAP and HIP-HOP, when all there was, was the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean and Linda Ronstadt and surf’s up and the little old ladies of Pasadena ripping around all over town in Dodge Hemi-Chargers and all that kind of stuff that was popular back then, because, let’s face it again, people just did not know any better.
It took Duane Eddy and his rocking guitar to break us out of our funk back then and now, wow, the future is here, and what never-ending drama it has brought us.
People out in what used to be sunny California are getting drenched with sewage-laden floodwaters, which is pretty icky, when you think about it.
Texas, meanwhile, is getting overrun with feral hogs according to the CBS NEWS article “Fearing “feral hog apocalypse,” Texas approves drastic measures” on 22 February 2017 where Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller announced the “feral hog apocalypse” in Texas where an estimated 2.5 million feral hogs in Texas are doing untold damage to suburban yards, God forbid with the cost of good landscaping and lawn maintenance services in America today.
Meanwhile, Chicago is plagued by some kind of bugs in their subway system, and hang on to your hats, folks, for “Flip or Flop” reality TV star Christina El Moussa is back on the market, having split with contractor Gary Anderson, her boyfriend of several months.
And then reappearing after a long absence, Lindsey Lohan has found religion and as a consequence was mistaken in an English airport for a Muslim terrorist because she was wearing a headscarf and had just been in Turkey where she just had had an audience with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
And SNOOKY of “Jersey Shore” fame has gone completely off the radar and seems to be nowhere to be found.
And how about that Mariah Carey, people!
If you can believe it, she is still bitter about the way her 2017 kicked off with that disastrous New Year’s Eve performance in Times Square and as a result, according to cable news, she’s already parted ways with her longtime creative director, dancer and tour choreographer Anthony Burrell over the live disaster, and now the diva is blaming “everybody” from the production crew to the backup dancers in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
“It’s just something where if I can’t explain it to the entire world, then they’re not going to understand it, because it’s not what they do,” Carey said, “Just like I wouldn’t understand somebody who had a desk job and how to do that.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I literally am incapable of being in the real world and surviving.”
end quotes
And if that is not enough drama for you, people, we have America’s most favorite politician Hillary Rodham Clinton ✔ @HillaryClinton, TWEETING her little heart out, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the…Congress,” at 3:54 PM on 22 Feb. 2017 while taunting Republicans on Twitter Wednesday for dodging town hall events amid the growing protests from liberal activists infuriated by President Trump’s agenda, according to an article in THE HILL entitled “Clinton taunts GOP lawmakers for dodging town halls” by Jonathan Easley on 22 February 2017 where we were informed as follows:
The former Democratic presidential nominee, who has kept a low profile since losing to Trump in the November election, linked to an editorial in the Kansas City Star called, “Cowardly members of Congress should show up and face the public at town hall meetings.”
end quotes
WAHOO, people, talk about tough talk, alright, that is showing them Republicans something, alright!
And that is after being quoted in an earlier article in THE HILL entitled “Clinton: ‘This is not who we are’” by Brooke Seipel on 29 January 2017, where we were told as follows:
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Saturday tweeted in support of numerous protests that sprang up Saturday over President Trump’s executive order banning many refugees and others from predominantly Muslim nations.
“I stand with the people gathered across the country tonight defending our values & our Constitution.”
“This is not who we are,” Clinton tweeted.
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And that brings us to the title of this thread above – if that is not who we are, and I am not even sure at this point as to exactly which “that” we are even talking about, then who are we instead?
Since it was such an important American political icon as Hillary Clinton who has posed that question to us, I think it is incumbent upon all of us here in the United States of America who take our citizenship responsibilities seriously to pause and reflect on that question for the moment, and since it was Hillary who brought that question up for us to have to ponder today, I thought it would be informative to go back to the 1960s, specifically, 1969, when I was off in VEET NAM fighting GLOBAL COMMIE-NISM to keep it from spreading over to here, and at the same time, Hillary Clinton was at Wellseley College giving a commencement address that went a long way towards defining who Hillary thought we were then, anyway, on the theory that if you don’t know where you started, any direction is as good as any other, since if you don’t know where you started, you don’t then know where you are, which seems to describe us in this country today.
As to that address, we were informed in the April 13, 2015 Counterpunch article “From Nixon Girl to Watergate – The Making of Hillary Clinton” by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair as follows:
What first set Hillary in the national spotlight was her commencement address at Wellesley, the first time any student had been given this opportunity.
Dean Acheson’s granddaughter insisted to the president of Wellesley that youth be given its say, and the president picked Hillary as youth’s tribune.
Her somewhat incoherent speech included some flicks at the official commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, the black Massachusetts senator, for failing to mention the Civil Rights movement or the war.
Wellesley’s president, still fuming at this discourtesy, saw Hillary skinny-dipping in Lake Waban that evening and told a security guard to steal her clothes.
end quotes
Now, that is real drama, people!
As to Hillary’s political views back then, according to the Counterpunch article, while I was out near the Cambodian border in VEET NAM fighting off the Commie hoardes, the militant summer of 1969 saw Hillary cleaning fish in Valdez, Alaska, and in the fall she was at Yale being stalked by Bill Clinton in the library.
For Hillary, and this is back then, of course, when many of us still had an idea of who we were, especially those of us fighting off the Commies in VEET NAM to keep Hillary safe back here, the first real anti-war protests for Hillary at Yale came with the shooting of the students at Kent State, and this is of interest to us today, as we watch all these riots and demonstrations and mass shouting matches and group chanting that Hillary seems very much to be encouraging, back then Hillary saw the ensuing national student upheaval as a culpable failure to work within the system.
end quotes
Culpable failure to work within the system, people!
Said Hillary back then: “I advocated engagement, not disruption.”
But, of course, that was back then when we still knew who we were.
So really, people, who are we then today?
And more importantly, will Hillary ever deign to tell us?
Or will she leave us on our own to have to figure it out for ourselves?
Stay tuned!
Paul Plante says
So who really is Hillary Rodham Clinton to be telling us who we are, and who we aren’t, as if only she could know, and the rest of us could never know, this in the light of Hillary telling us in the article “Hillary Clinton rallies DNC members in video message” by Max Greenwood in THE HILL on 25 FEBRUARY 2017 as follows:
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Friday showered praise on the wave of protests sweeping the country and urged party faithful to set their sights on elections to come.
“After the primaries we came together as a party to write the most progressive platform in history,” she said in a video message posted on the Democratic Party’s Twitter account.
end quotes
I ask that question from the perspective of someone who is older than Hillary Clinton, and from the perspective of a grandfather with granddaughters – who is Hillary Clinton to be telling any of us what it means to be an American citizen?
How came she to be the only one in this country gifted with that special knowledge?
As we consider Hillary’s claims in The Hill about the 2016 Democrat Party Platform being the “most progressive platform in history,” and Hillary’s claims to “progressivism,” which is defined as a philosophy based on the idea of progress, which asserts that advancement in science, technology, economic development, and social organization are vital to improve the human condition, in the April 13, 2015 Counterpunch article “From Nixon Girl to Watergate – The Making of Hillary Clinton” by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, we are told as follows with respect to Hillary’s beginnings as a political and cultural icon in this country, to wit:
Hillary Clinton has always been an old-style Midwestern Republican in the Illinois style; one severely infected with Methodism, unlike the more populist variants from Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa.
Her first known political enterprise was in the 1960 presidential election, the squeaker where the state of Illinois notoriously put Kennedy over the top, courtesy of Mayor Daley, Sam Giancana and Judith Exner.
Hillary was a Nixon supporter.
end quotes
Having been around back then, I do not recall anyone ever pinning the label of “progressivism” on Richard Milhaus “TRICKY DICK” Nixon, but hey, a future American cultural and political icon has to start somewhere, and so that is where it was for our dear Hillary.
Moving forward in time as we continue to explore Hillary’s claim to “progressivism” and her claim to know who we are from who we are not, the Counterpunch article continues as follows:
Her public persona was that of a Goldwater Girl.
She battled for Goldwater through the 1964 debacle and arrived at Wellesley in the fall of 1965 with enough Goldwaterite ambition to become president of the Young Republicans as a freshman.
end quotes
As I remember it still, Barry Goldwater, Hillary’s chosen presidential candidate in 1964, scared the hell out of people in America back then; they thought he was a belligerent, bellicose “warhawk” extremist who was going to get us into a nu-q-lar war with the Soviet Union, just to see how big a bang a hydrogen bomb can really make.
For those who don’t remember the man or the times, the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964 began when United States Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona elected to seek the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States to challenge incumbent Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Early on, according to Wikipedia, before officially announcing his candidacy for the presidency, Goldwater was accused by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller of attempting to galvanize southern and western Republican support while neglecting the industrial northern states, eventually becoming one of Goldwater’s primary opponents in the race for the Republican Party’s nomination in 1964.
Following a battle with moderate and liberal Republicans in the Republican primary, such as Nelson Rockefeller and with moderate conservatives such as William Scranton among others, Goldwater won the party’s nomination for president.
From the beginning of his campaign, Goldwater fought an uphill battle to unseat an incumbent president under favorable economic circumstances, and he consistently refused to moderate his views, which may well have galvanized the support of Hillary Clinton, but which alienated a significant portion of the more moderate wing of the Republican party from his campaign, so that with the assistance of the media, who in large part also had an unfavorable opinion of Goldwater, President Johnson used this fissure in the party to portray him as an extremist.
In the general election, Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, carrying only six states to Johnson’s 44 and 38% of the popular vote to Johnson’s 61%.
While Hillary’s candidate Barry Goldwater enjoyed enthusiastic support from the conservative movement, he was opposed by liberals and moderates in the party, particularly New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who cast Goldwater as an opponent of civil rights and an isolationist that wanted to withdraw from the United Nations.
Goldwater was the perceived leader of a grassroots movement in the American southern, southwestern, and western states staged by the more conservative wing of the party, while Rockefeller, on the other hand, disagreed with most of the fiscal and social positions held by Goldwater, advocating a more progressive, mainstream approach to government for the Republican platform.
In July 1963, Rockefeller took aim at what he viewed as “extremist groups,” targeting Goldwater specifically, and Goldwater responded by accusing Rockefeller of blurring the line separating the Republican and Democratic parties.
In attacking Goldwater’s politics and advocating his own, more progressive agenda, Rockefeller said to voters “Americans will not and should not respond to a political creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present.”
With respect to Hillary’s claims today of “progressivism,” shortly after the assassination of President John Kennedy in November of 1963, an event I still remember quite well, Lyndon Johnson defined the goal of his administration as continuing those of the Kennedy administration in front of Congress, which included the proposal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Hillary’s candidate Goldwater supported civil rights to varying degrees, but opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, reasoning that it undermined the sovereignty of the states to govern themselves.
Goldwater’s opposition to federal civil rights legislation and advocacy for state sovereignty led to a rise in popularity in the southern states, support that would prove to be indispensable in both Goldwater’s pursuit of the Republican nomination and general election campaign.
On Friday, January 20, 1964, at the planned press conference from the patio of his home in Phoenix, Goldwater officially announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination for the office of President of the United States, justifying his candidacy by stating that he had “not heard from any announced Republican candidate a declaration of conscience or of political position that could possibly offer to the American people a clear choice in the next presidential election.”
With respect to who Hillary Clinton was back then, before she became the “progressive Democrat” she claims to be today, Barry Goldwater in 1964 emphasized the need for a federal government that is “limited and balanced and against the ever increasing concentrations of authority in Washington” that encourages personal responsibility among American citizens while pledging his candidacy to “victory for principle and to presenting an opportunity for the American people to choose.”
Goldwater promised “a choice, not an echo” in the election, and positioned himself to the right of Nelson Rockefeller.
Two days after the announcement, Goldwater appeared on Meet the Press, and afterwards, critics Rowland Evans and Robert Novak noted that even Goldwater supporters deemed the interview a “flop”.
After that, Goldwater left for New Hampshire, beginning a 19-day campaign swing, and at every stop, including his first major campaign speech at St. Anselm College, Goldwater criticized President Johnson for his liberal policies and expansion of the federal government, asserting that Johnson was trying to appeal to Washington insiders as a New Deal liberal, while hoping to present himself to the public as a conservative.
In early February, Goldwater embarked on a campaign tour of Minnesota and during a stop in Minneapolis, he leveled what the Associated Press labeled his “toughest campaign attack on Johnson’s foreign policy,” accusing the administration of failing in Vietnam and Panama and arguing that Johnson was “off making promises to buy votes at home while the world smolders and burns.”
Afterwards, Goldwater arrived in Chicago for a fundraiser and announced his support for a tougher blockade against Cuba, and he continued his dialogue on the Cold War during a stop in San Francisco, he argued that the U.S. had no policy on the issue.
He proposed an outline to maintain peace that included the encouragement of Communist “eviction from positions of control” in the world, and maintenance of American strength to keep the Soviet Union in check.
As the New Hampshire primary neared, Rockefeller began to attack Goldwater, claiming he supported a voluntary social security plan that would bankrupt the nation.
Voters grew wary of Goldwater’s stances on social security, Cuba, the military and the role of the Federal government, and as a result, the electorate sought out other candidates.
After his primary loss in New Hampshire, Goldwater focused his efforts on California, remarking that it was “the only primary [he was] interested in.”
Goldwater won the backing of the party at the convention, increasing the number of volunteers to his California campaign, so that Rockefeller was angered by the result and declared that the convention had been overrun by radicals.
At the end of March, Goldwater traveled to Detroit and continued to criticize defense secretary McNamara, calling him an “all-time loser.”
Ahead of the Illinois Primary, Goldwater traveled to Chicago and announced that he would change the campaign’s media policy to avoid overexposure to the press, which he believed was reporting negatively on his campaign.
With respect to scaring the hell out of people back then, at the end of May, at a rally planned at the Phoenix Municipal Stadium, Goldwater came under fire for mentioning that low grade Atomic bombs could be used to expose the supply of Communists in Vietnam.
Michigan Governor George W. Romney mustered a veiled attack on Goldwater, proposing to add an amendment to the Republican platform, excluding “extremists of the right” from the party.
Back then Lyndon Baines Johnson was known for his ability to manipulate the press in order to provide favorable coverage of his own campaign, so that Johnson, along with the media, portrayed Goldwater as a political extremist, with Johnson using Goldwater’s speeches to imply that Goldwater would willingly wage a nuclear war, quoting Goldwater: “by one impulse act you could press a button and wipe out 300 million people before sun down.”
While Johnson campaigned on a platform of limited involvement in Vietnam and continuation of funding for social programs, Goldwater called for substantial cuts in social programs, suggesting that Social Security become optional, and suggested the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam if necessary.
Goldwater believed that the Tennessee Valley Authority should be sold into the private sector, and on foreign policy, Goldwater’s beliefs differed sharply from those of his opponent, who advocated limited involvement in Vietnam, maintaining that he would not send “American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
For his part, Goldwater then accused Johnson and the Democratic party of having given in on the issue of Communist aggression.
In reference to Goldwater’s policies regarding the use of nuclear weaponry, the Johnson campaign launched a television ad that would come to be known as the “daisy ad” in which a young girl pulls the petals off a flower until the screen is overtaken by an exploding mushroom cloud.
After Johnson accused Goldwater of being willing to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam after stating the United States should do whatever was necessary for victory, Goldwater clarified that he was not an outright advocate of using nuclear weapons there, bet despite that, the Johnson campaign continued to portray Goldwater as a warmonger.
According to Wikipedia, the negative media attention to the Goldwater campaign continued with the publication of an article by Fact Magazine in which the publication claimed to have sent questionnaires to 12,000 psychologists asking them to assess whether or not Goldwater “was psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States,” and among the 1,800 replies, there were claimed to be assessments by some psychologists classifying Goldwater as unfit for office, for which Goldwater was eventually compensated $75,000 in a libel suit after the election.
Throughout much of the campaign, Goldwater was on the defensive, using television commercials to respond to accusations from Johnson and clarify statements that he had made previously, and in turn, Goldwater attempted to launch a counterattack against Johnson via television, featuring a commercial showing Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev shouting “We will bury you!” over children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
In response to Goldwater’s attacks, Johnson began reversing Goldwater’s campaign slogan “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right” to slogans such as “In Your Head You Know He’s Wrong” and “In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts.”
Johnson’s campaign also broadcast an advertisement, Confessions of a Republican, in which the actor William Bogert, a genuine Republican, expressed his concerns over Goldwater.
On October 27, actor Ronald Reagan, who had not yet entered politics, gave his official endorsement to Goldwater in what would come to be known as the “A Time for Choosing” speech, in the speech, emphasizing issues such as the spread of Communism, taxes and the national debt and advocating limited government, aggressive tactics against the Soviet Union and laissez-faire capitalism.
That speech was Reagan’s “unofficial entrance to politics” and played a crucial role in his election as Governor of California in 1966.
Throughout October, the media emphasized the lead Johnson had over Goldwater, stating that Goldwater had little chance of winning the election, which negative coverage of the campaign caused many independent voters, who were not strong supporters of either candidate, not to vote, for they believed the result of the election had been already determined.
On Election Day, Goldwater lost the election to Johnson by what was then the largest margin in history, with Goldwater accumulating 52 electoral votes to Johnson’s 486 and 38.5% of the popular vote (27,178,188) to Johnson’s 61.1% (43,129,566).
Goldwater’s strong showing in the south was largely due to his support of the white southern view on civil rights: that states should be able to control their own laws without federal intervention.
Goldwater lost the popular vote in both the male and female electorate with 40% and 38%, respectively.
Goldwater’s most narrow regional loss was in the South, with 48% of the popular vote, but he lost by greater margins in the East, Midwest and West with 32%, 39% and 40% of the popular vote, respectively.
Johnson was heavily favored over Goldwater among Catholics (76% to 24%), and by a smaller margin among Protestants (55% to 45%).
Goldwater lost the Independent vote to Johnson (56% to 44%).
Johnson won the white vote over Goldwater (59% to 41%) and was heavily favored by the nonwhite electorate (94% to 6%).
Goldwater lost the college-educated, high school-educated and grade school-educated population to Johnson (52% to 48%, 62% to 38% and 66% to 34%, respectively).
So there, people, is a capsule summary of Hillary Clinton’s entrance into the high-stakes world of American presidential politics, and an inauspicious entrance it certainly seemed to be, with our dear Hillary backing one of the biggest losers in American political history.
But our Hillary is a true political phoenix, rising again out of the ashes of her own political destruction, so stay tuned, people, and we shall see where Hillary goes next from here on her road to becoming the one person in America who knows who we are, and more importantly, who we are not, and thank you for your attention to this matter of interest and concern to us all in this nation today.
KenMac55 says
Wow, don’t normally expected to see Linda Ronstadt (b. 1946) cited in same sentence with the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean … and Duane Eddy. Any particular reason? I know she was on the LA scene while a teen, but …
Paul Plante says
I would have to chalk it up to a cosmic confluence of historic events, to be truthful.
Certainly, Linda was around on the scene back then.
According to Wikipedia, and my memory of those times, as confused and chaotic and hectic as those times once seemed, and perhaps even were, Linda Ronstadt
established her professional career in the mid-1960s at the forefront of California’s emerging folk rock and country rock movements – genres which defined post-1960s rock music – joining forces with Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards and becoming the lead singer of a folk-rock trio, the Stone Poneys.
Later, as a solo artist, she released “Hand Sown … Home Grown” in 1969, the year I was fighting off the COMMIE hoardes in VEET NAM to keep Hillary Clinton safe to skinney-dip at Wellesley, which album has been described as the first alternative country record by a female recording artist.
Although fame eluded her during these years, Ronstadt actively toured with the Doors, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and others, appeared numerous times on television shows, and began to contribute her singing to albums by other artists.
There is how she came to be on the scene and on the list, along with the fact that she reprised “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” by Dusty Springfield.
Ah, American history!
Don’t you just love it?
Paul Plante says
In terms of getting a sound political education for a future American political superstar with rock star appeal such as Hillary Clinton has, a political education aimed at helping Hillary gain freedom from what she called in her famous commencement address of 1969 the “burden of an inauthentic reality” that holds so many others here in the United States of America so firmly in its grip, being so heavily involved in the Goldwater campaign as a Goldwater Girl as Hillary was, was a veritable Ph.D. in how high-stakes presidential contests are really decided.
But for Hillary, and for the nation that loves her so, and cherishes her presence among us mere mortals, that was only the beginning, as we can see from this following from the April 13, 2015 Counterpunch article “From Nixon Girl to Watergate – The Making of Hillary Clinton” by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, to wit:
The setting of Hillary’s political compass came in the late Sixties.
The fraught year of 1968 saw the Goldwater girl getting a high-level internship in the House Republican Conference with Gerald Ford and Melvin Laird, without an ounce of the Goldwater libertarian pizzazz.
end quote
So, as of 1968, our precious Hillary was still a Republican.
Getting back to the Counterpunch article:
Hillary says the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, plus the war in Vietnam, hit her hard.
The impact was not of the intensity that prompted many of her generation to become radicals.
She left the suburb of Park Ridge and rushed to Miami to the Republican Convention where she fulfilled a lifelong dream of meeting Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and devoted her energies to saving the Party from her former icon, Nixon, by working for Nelson Rockefeller.
Nixon triumphed, and Hillary returned to Chicago in time for the Democratic Convention where she paid an afternoon’s visit to Grant Park.
By now a proclaimed supporter of Gene McCarthy, she was appalled, not by the spectacle of McCarthy’s young supporters being beaten senseless by Daley’s cops, but by the protesters’ tactics, which she concluded were not viable.
Like her future husband, Hillary was always concerned with maintaining viability within the system.
end quotes
In 1968, when Hillary, now a proclaimed supporter of Gene McCarthy, was appalled, not by the spectacle of McCarthy’s young supporters being beaten senseless by Daley’s cops, but by the protesters’ tactics, which she concluded were not viable, I was an enlistee in the United States Army in training to go to Viet Nam to keep Hillary safe from the RED MENACE and the falling dominoes, and to this day, I well remember seeing the spectacle from Mayor Daley’s Chicago of those protesters rioting in the streets being broadcast on the evening news on TV.
What a time in America that was, alright!
For those too young to have been around back then in what can rightly be considered Hillary Clinton’s political coming of age, where she went from being a Republican to being a Democrat literally overnight, the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign of 1968 which drew in our Hillary as a fervid supporter was launched by Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota in the latter part of 1967 to vie for the 1968 Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States.
As Wikipedia informs us, and as I well remember it, having been there while it was all “going down,” the focus of McCarthy’s campaign was his support for a swift end to the Vietnam War through a withdrawal of American forces.
His campaign appealed to youths like Hillary Clinton who were tired of the establishment and dissatisfied with government.
Early on, McCarthy was vocal in his intent to unseat the incumbent Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, which is an interesting perspective, given Hillary Clinton’s switch from the Republican party to the Democrat party so that Hillary could be a McCarthy supporter, in that by being for McCarthy, Hillary in turn would have been against LBJ and his civil rights programs which Hillary claims to be a staunch champion of today, because it is politically expedient today for her to do so.
As history tells us, following McCarthy’s 42% showing in New Hampshire, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) entered the race, which then forced President Johnson to withdraw.
After Johnson’s withdrawal, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey then entered the contest but avoided the primaries, while Bobby Kennedy fought it out with McCarthy in the primaries, as Humphrey used favorite son stand-ins to help him win delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
Hillary’s support for McCarthy over Bobby Kennedy in that contest is of interest given that in Hillary Clinton’s speech to the American Legion touting “American Exceptionalism” on Sept. 1, 2016, Hillary told the American Legion members, of whom I am one, as follows:
If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this.
The United States is an exceptional nation.
I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth.
We’re still Reagan’s shining city on a hill.
We’re still Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country.
end quotes
If in 2016, we were still Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country, one has to wonder why Hillary did not support him for president in 1968, as opposed to Eugene McCarthy, but in any event, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, leaving Humphrey as McCarthy’s main challenger.
But as it was to be, Humphrey’s organization was simply too strong for McCarthy to overcome, despite the support of a political powerhouse like Hillary Clinton, and his anti-war campaign was split after the late entrance of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota just ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
Despite winning the popular vote, McCarthy lost to Humphrey at the convention amidst the protests and riots which Hillary Clinton concluded back then were simply not viable political tactics, if, like Hillary, one was always concerned with maintaining viability within “the system” that in our times today, Hillary Clinton has become such a symbol of, to the point of where people in this nation think Hillary should be president because she is entitled to be.
As to Eugene McCarthy, Hillary’s choice for United States president in 1968, he was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1948 as a member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party and he served five terms before winning a seat in the United States Senate in 1958.
As Wikipedia tells us, McCarthy’s speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in support of Adlai Stevenson placed him on the national stage and President Johnson considered selecting him as his running mate in 1964, but instead chose fellow Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota.
As was stated above, McCarthy vehemently opposed the Vietnam War, and months prior to his announcement, McCarthy hinted that he would challenge President Johnson for the Democratic nomination due to his contrasting views with the president on the Vietnam War.
The Americans for Democratic Action announced that they would support McCarthy’s campaign if he decided to run and Lyndon Johnson took these mentions seriously, privately confiding to Democratic congressional leaders that McCarthy could gain the support of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dr. Benjamin Spock, splintering the party.
McCarthy is said to have privately explained his intentions to Vice President Hubert Humphrey with whom he had served Minnesota in the Senate for nearly two decades, commenting that he did not believe he could win, but that he had “lost interest” in the Senate and felt “very strongly about the war,” believing that the best way to express himself was to “go on out and enter the primaries.”
In turn, Humphrey stated that McCarthy was “more vain and arrogant than his supporters wanted to admit.”
In an announcement those of us around back then still remember for its stirring and soaring rhetoric, McCarthy said:
“I run because this country is now involved in a deep crisis of leadership, a crisis of national purpose – and a crisis of American ideals.”
“It is time to substitute a leadership of hope for a leadership of fear.”
“This is not simply what I want, or what most of us want.”
“It is, I believe, the deepest hunger of the American soul.”
Citing the importance of preventing President Johnson’s nomination, and the continuation of the war in Vietnam, McCarthy entered his name into four Democratic presidential primaries on November 30, 1967, and upon his entrance, the Senator articulated that he believed there was a “deepening moral crisis” in America with the rejection of the political system by citizens, and a helplessness he hoped to alleviate as president.
A few days later, the Johnson administration made an announcement on the war in Vietnam that, according to McCarthy, was akin to an escalation which he believed would only strengthen his own campaign.
McCarthy began January by making no promises about a potential challenge of the president on the Florida primary ballot, but reaffirmed his goal to defeat the president in New Hampshire, and the next day, he appeared as the first guest of the half-hour ABC news series Issues and Answers, and discussed his views on pertinent campaign issues.
McCarthy claimed the North Vietnamese government was willing to negotiate, and that any further bombing should be halted to forge an end to the hostilities.
Later in the month, McCarthy delivered a speech in front of 6,500 students at University Park, Pennsylvania wherein he criticized the Johnson administration for being “afraid to negotiate” with the North Vietnamese.
Near the end of January, McCarthy campaigned in St. Louis, where he continued his anti-war rhetoric, describing the Vietnam War as against “American tradition” and declaring that “no nation has a right” to “destroy a nation” with the rationale of “nation building.”
Keep that th9ught in mind, people, as we consider the tragedy in Syria today and the role Hillary Clinton played in creating that huge humanitarian crisis in the name of “nation building.”
Getting back to McCarthy, he then discussed his support for normalized relations with Cuba, but after seven weeks of campaigning, McCarthy concluded that his speeches were coming across more as poetry than substantive campaign messages.
As he traveled through California, a stop in Stanford was greeted by newspaper headlines that asked the candidate whether he “wanted to make righteous speeches…or end the Viet Nam War.”
With respect to the continuing political education of Hillary Clinton and the power politics Hillary came to represent here in the United States of America in her most recent failed bid for the White House, as her then-candidate McCarthy planned to visit Miami, Florida, Democratic bigwigs decided to stage their own rally in the state, diversionary tactics that were used to take away attention from a McCarthy appearance when establishment Democrats scheduled a meeting of their own on the same days in Tallahassee.
The purpose of McCarthy’s visit was to campaign and begin discussion about the presidential nominating slate for the May 28 Florida primary.
During that trip, McCarthy discussed civil rights, remarking that “it would take 30 to 50 years of constant action and concern to carry out all promises to the emancipated Negro who has been treated as a colonial people in America.”
Following the speech, the Conference of Concerned Democrats unanimously decided to award him pledged delegates from the state of Florida.
The month of March kicked off with charges from the media that McCarthy’s campaign was just dragging along.
However, three precincts in Minnesota elected McCarthy supported delegates to caucuses, to the detriment of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, and President Johnson decided to abandon Massachusetts, giving 72 delegates to McCarthy, who described the news as “encouraging.”
McCarthy spent a large amount of time campaigning in New Hampshire, hoping to improve his standing before the state’s critical primary, while that master politician President Johnson’s campaign circulated the slogan that “the communists in Vietnam are watching the New Hampshire primary…don’t vote for fuzzy thinking and surrender.”
Although opinion polls prior to the New Hampshire primary showed that McCarthy’s support stood at only 10 to 20 percent, he stunned spectators of the race by winning a surprising 42.2 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49.4 percent, which media outlets described the results as a “moral victory” for McCarthy, which in turn influenced Robert Kennedy’s decision to enter the race on March 16.
Kennedy’s announcement did not affect McCarthy’s campaign and McCarthy remained committed to the “young people” like Hillary Clinton who had supported his campaign all along, remarking that he was “better qualified to run for the presidency” than Kennedy.
McCarthy set his sights on Wisconsin and began to prepare for the state’s April primary, running advertisements in newspapers throughout the state and including his platform wherein he called for “more federal aid for education,” collective bargaining rights for farmers, “a guaranteed minimum livable income for all Americans,” the construction of “at least one million new housing units each year, and more “federal funds to stop pollution.”
While in Wisconsin, he criticized the government of South Vietnam, saying that it would be “too kind” to label the entity as corrupt and a dictatorship, referring specifically to Nguyen Van Thieu who had been the Leadership Committee Chairman in Viet Nam between 1965-1967 and President of the Republic of Vietnam between 1967-1975, who in 1963 had joined a military coup to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated in that U.S.-backed military coup.
As history informs us, during his years as president, Thieu was accused of indulging in corruption and his struggle for power with vice-president Nguyen Cao Ky led to the choosing of Thieu loyalists instead of decent commanders to lead the Army of Public of Vietnam (APVN) forces.
McCarthy traveled to Pennsylvania later in the month, to prepare for the state’s primary in late April and while there, he discussed North Korea’s seizing of the USS Pueblo, stating that the United States should “expect once in awhile to pay ransom…if you have ships adjacent to countries that don’t respect international law.”
The next month, McCarthy took advantage of Robert Kennedy’s decline in the polls, trailing the former frontrunner by two points for second place in the race behind Vice President Humphrey, and at the time, polls suggested that McCarthy was more likely than his Democratic rivals to defeat Republican frontrunner Richard Nixon in a head to head matchup, leading 40 to 37 percent in a Harris poll.
While campaigning in South Bend, Indiana prior to the state’s primary, McCarthy criticized the approach of his two closest Democratic rivals, stating that there were three kinds of national unity; Humphrey’s approach of “running things together indiscriminately,” Kennedy’s approach of a “combination of separate interests…or groups,” and his own approach of “calling upon everyone…to be as fully responsible as they can be,” which the candidate labeled as the approach for 1968.
Four days later, McCarthy received the most votes in Time Magazine’s national presidential primary, which poll counted votes of over 1 million students in more than 1,200 campuses.
McCarthy ended the month by defeating Kennedy in the Oregon primary by a margin of 45 to 39 percent, a victory which allowed the media to observe that McCarthy was “back in the race as a major contender,” and forced an attention shift to the looming primaries in South Dakota and California, scheduled for the next month.
McCarthy and Kennedy vigorously campaigned throughout California in the beginning of June, and the two candidates each appeared in televised forums, which McCarthy criticized for not being in a debate format.
Then on June 5, Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles after winning both the California and South Dakota primaries and died the next day, shifting a large number of his delegates to Humphrey while popular opinion seemed to shift to McCarthy.
With the primaries wrapped up, McCarthy spent July attempting to woo uncommitted delegates and clarify his positions on the issues, continuing a strong anti-war sentiment and mentioning that he might travel to Paris, France to discuss peace with the North Vietnamese, which chief negotiators called a mistake, stating that the talks were too important “to interject partisan politics.”
After that, Hillary’s candidate McCarthy was cited by the emergency committee for gun control chair John Glenn as being one of five presidential candidates who endorsed the group’s movement to control firearms, with McCarthy arguing for a national registration of handguns, and the development of a system to sell mail order guns only to qualified individuals while also arguing that the sale of shotguns and rifles should be left to the discretion of individual states.
The following week, McCarthy proposed a “war on hunger” to help the millions of Americans he claimed were starving, commenting that “our first concern is the health of each hungry individual,” but the Department of Agriculture disputed his claims on the matter.
McCarthy challenged Humphrey to a series of debates on an assortment of issues, which the Vice-President accepted, but he in turn modified the proposal by requesting there be only one debate prior to the Democratic National Convention.
As the month ended, and with the Democratic Convention speedily approaching, McCarthy tried to change a few rules of the convention, focusing a great deal on “unit voting” rule, which gave party bosses more control, tactics which were meant to compensate for Humphrey’s delegate lead, and which were previously used by Dwight Eisenhower in his successful 1952 campaign, while battling Robert A. Taft for the Republican nomination.
McCarthy’s plan to gain more delegates was complicated when Senator George McGovern of South Dakota entered the race as the successor to the legacy of Robert Kennedy, an entrance which had the effect of splitting the anti-Humphrey vote.
With shades of the more recent Wasserman-Schultz scandal in the contest between Hillary and Bernie Sanders for the Democrat nominatio9n in this last presidential race, back then, the McCarthy campaign alleged that Democratic National Chairman John Bailey was giving preferential treatment to Humphrey, to the detriment of McCarthy.
The McCarthy campaign, and presumably Hillary as one of his supporters, asked for the chairman’s resignation, but he rejected the claims and argued that the two candidates were receiving “exactly the same treatment in hotel space, amphitheatre space, telephone service, tickets, transportation and every other phase of convention activity.”
As the eve of the convention dawned, Humphrey appeared to hold a lead over McCarthy among the delegates with McGovern in a distant third, but with many delegates still uncommitted, the three men battled it out.
Meanwhile, on the streets of Chicago, anti-war protests raged as 6,000 federal troops and 18,000 Illinois National Guard defended the premises of the convention.
Humphrey won the nomination on the first ballot, despite the fact that McCarthy had won a plurality of the primary vote.
Riots intensified, and supporters of McCarthy urged the candidate to run a fourth party campaign against Nixon, Humphrey and George Wallace.
Announcing that he would not run such a campaign, McCarthy stepped down while denying an endorsement to Humphrey, and at the end of his campaign, McCarthy stated that he “set out to prove…that the people of this country could be educated and make a decent judgment…but evidently this is something the politicians were afraid to face up to.”
McCarthy’s refusal to endorse Humphrey wavered somewhat by October, as the former candidate laid out conditions for the Democratic nominee including a shift in his stance on the Vietnam War, a change of the military draft, and a reform of the Democratic machine politics, all of which were rejected by Humphrey, who responded that he was “not prone to start meeting conditions.”
Nixon, who Hillary had previously tried to keep out of the White House, after being for him before that, eventually won the election, and McCarthy received 20,721 write-in votes in California, and 2,751 in Arizona, where he was listed as the nominee of the anti-war New Party.
During the 1980s, McCarthy was a supporter of the Reagan administration.
So that, people, is another and further look at who Hillary Clinton was in 1968, a very pivotal year in American presidential politics.
From it, do we glean any insights into who Hillary Clinton really was herself?
Did she support Eugene McCarthy because she was passionate about his cause?
Or did she support Eugene McCarthy because she was passionate about her own cause, and McCarthy was just a stepping stone on Hillary’s own road to the Washington White House?
Stay tuned, more is yet to come!
Paul Plante says
And as we continue our search in here for clues as to what it is that we are not, at least according to Hillary Clinton, who has appointed herself the voice for all Americans when it comes to who we are and who we are not, what a year 1969 was to be, not only for Hillary Rodham Clinton, but for the United States of America, and the world itself, as well, what with Woodstock, and Country Joe and the Fish and their “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag (Take 1)” with its famous military recruitment message to the patriotic youth of America at that time, “Well, come on all of you big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again, yeah, he’s got himself in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam, so put down your books and pick up a gun, gonna have a whole lotta fun,” and who can forget the 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z-28, and topping all of that off, up at the very pinnacle of earth-shaking events that year, was Hillary’s famous Wellesley College commencement speech, which speech made Hillary nationally famous as the orator and rhetorician on our times, bar none, as well as the American political icon and superstar politician that she is in our present age, and wherein she so passionately stated on behalf of the youth of America at that time the dreams of the youth of America at that time, as follows:
“We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty.”
“But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us.”
“We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”
“And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue.”
end quotes
Those words above about “searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living,” and “our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue,” were uttered by Hillary Clinton, then just plain Hillary Rodham, before she formed her power duo with Bill Clinton, on May 31, 1969.
As to the immediate prelude to those times in 1969 which gave rise to all those questions Hillary and hers had about “our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government,” at p.37 of his excellent history “Dereliction of Duty – Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that led to Viet Nam,” H.R. McMaster captured them thusly:
Although U.S. advisors were fighting with South Vietnamese units and U.S. pilots were flying combat missions in South Vietnam, Kennedy denied that Americans were involved in combat, and Vietnam attracted little public or congressional attention.
Vietnam was far from front-page news and Americans still believed that their government told them the truth.
end quotes
Yes, people, that was true – there actually was a time in this country when Americans like me believed what is supposed to be our government told us the truth, but by 1969, we all know it lied, instead, and hence, the questions Hillary and hers had about “our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government” in 1969, and rightfully so.
As for me, about two weeks after Hillary made that earth-shaking speech of hers to the world, wherein she voiced these now famous lines, “Every protest, every dissent, whether it’s an individual academic paper or Founder’s parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age,” and “that attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness,” and “within the context of a society that we perceive—now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see—but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men’s needs,” on 13 June 1969, on the other side of the world, I was confronting authentic reality as opposed to inauthentic reality, as I got my second Purple Heart getting wounded in the face after flying into a firefight on a Huey helicopter to evacuate some wounded.
While Hillary and her crowd, and God bless them for it, as Americans they are entitled to it, were searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living, as a combat infantryman in Viet Nam holding off the Commie hoardes over there so Hillary and her people could in fact search for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living over here, over there, I was pretty much focused on simply staying alive, so I must confess I missed out completely on Hillary’s search for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living, and I’ll probably always be a lesser person than Hillary because of that, but to my credit, I did at least take the mental time to meditate quite a bit while in Viet Nam on the absolutely surreal nature of hearing the Fifth Dimension singing about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, “When the moon is in the Seventh House And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars,” when I was coming back from flying aerial sniper missions out near the Cambodian border, so my mind was not completely wasted, anyway.
Getting back to the pending unanswered question of who it is that we are not, and perhaps who we never have been in the first place outside of the fertile imagination of Hillary Clinton that wants an America that’s “hopeful, inclusive and big-hearted,” we need to search for those answers, if there even are any, against the backdrop of the turbulent 1960s, the time in America when Hillary Clinton politically came of age, a time in American where in 1968, on the streets of Chicago, anti-war protests raged as 6,000 federal troops and 18,000 Illinois National Guard defended the premises of the Democrat National Convention, which serves to define who we were, at least that once in our history as a nation.
Think about that, people – 6,000 federal troops on the streets of Chicago along with 18,000 Illinois National Guard to defend the premises of the Democrat National Convention in that city in 1968!
I was in the military then, and I can state that there were many discussions at that time as to what people would do if deployed to face down rioting Americans at a political convention such as was the case there in Chicago.
People in America today forget these things, or never knew they happened in the first place, and so they make a huge thing out of what is happening in America today, such as Trump’s travel ban, as if these things had never happened in America before, and up until Trump, all has been political peace and quiet in this country, which is a crock.
In that vein of who we were as a nation and a people back in Hillary’s formative years as the politician she has become today, the first time a friend of mine deployed on a combat mission with the 82d Airborne Division with live ammo and “shoot to kill” orders was in July of 1967 when he was sent, not to Viet Nam to fight the Commie hoardes who were trying to make the dominos fall, but to Detroit, Michigan, to put down what was then called a “civil disturbance”, or as the 1969 Wellesley commencement speaker who preceded Hillary that day, U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke, a Republican moderate and World War II combat veteran who was also the first African-American popularly elected to the United States Senate, was to call it, “coercive protest,” to wit:
“When all is said and done, (quoted in the Fitchburg Sentinel of June 2, 1969), I believe the overwhelming majority of Americans will stand firm on one principle: coercive protest is wrong, and one reason that it is wrong is that it is unnecessary.”
end quote
“Coercive protest,” people, keep those words from 1969 in mind today as you ponder the political demonstrations Hillary today is a champion of, where the goal is deny Republican members of Congress a voice in their own home districts, which in turn gives Hillary a platform to launch political attacks from, such as her recent link to an editorial in the Kansas City Star called, “Cowardly members of Congress should show up and face the public at town hall meetings.”
As to that 1967 Detroit “civil disturbance,” the result was 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed and the scale of the riot was surpassed in the United States only by the 1863 New York City draft riots during the U.S. Civil War, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
The Detroit riot was prominently featured in the news media, with live television coverage, extensive newspaper reporting, and extensive stories in Time and Life magazines and the staff of the Detroit Free Press won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting for its coverage.
While it may not be who we are anymore, people, and that is highly questionable, that is who we most definitely were in this country, once upon a time – a violent people, indeed.
And this theme of “coercive protest” that was very much with us as a people back in the 1960s, both on the Wellesley College campus where Hillary was safely ensconced, and in the nation, remains with us all these years later as we read in the article in THE HILL entitled “Clinton: ‘This is not who we are’” by Brooke Seipel on 29 January 2017:
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Saturday tweeted in support of numerous protests that sprang up Saturday over President Trump’s executive order banning many refugees and others from predominantly Muslim nations.
“I stand with the people gathered across the country tonight defending our values & our Constitution.”
“This is not who we are,” Clinton tweeted.
end quotes
When Hillary says on 29 January 2017 “I stand with the people gathered across the country tonight defending our values & our Constitution,” what “values” is she really talking about, and whose “values” are they, really?
Are they “American” values that Hillary is promoting?
Or are they “Hillary” values?
And if they are “American” values, from whence do they come then, given that even a cursory reading of American history from the time of this nation’s founding, that being taken as 1776 for the sake of this discussion, demonstrates a concern with “national security,” which in turn implicates the supposed “rights” of people not born in this country subsequent to its establishment as a nation to freely cross its borders.
Take Peletiah Webster, for example, writing “The Weakness of Brutus Exposed” as “A Citizen of Philadelphia” in January 1787 in support of the proposed United States Constitution which Hillary Clinton claims to be supporting along with her domonstrators intent on shutting down our national government today because they don’t like the direction it is going in:
“There can be no doubt that each State will receive from the union great support and protection against the invasions and inroads of foreign enemies, as well as against riots and insurrections of their own citizens; and of consequence, the course of their internal administration will be secured by this means against any interruption or embarrassment from either of these causes.”
end quotes
“Protection against the invasions and inroads of foreign enemies, as well as against riots and insurrections of their own citizens ….”
HMMMMM, ain’t it, people?
“Inroads of foreign enemies …”
So, are those “un-American” thoughts expressed above here by Peletiah Webster?
Was he wrong to express such sentiments?
And who is Peletiah Webster in the first place to be telling us anything about what it might mean to be an American citizen?
What does he know about it?
And where on earth does he get off having a contradictory opinion on American “values” from the opinion Hillary Clinton and her followers have as to who we are, or who we ought to be?
As to who Peletiah Webster is, in the essay “Our Republic’s First Economist” by Percy L. Greaves, Jr. on July 4, 1951, we were told as follows about the man:
Pelatiah Webster (Nov. 24, 1726–Sept. 4, 1795) was not only America’s first economist, an American Patriot, and “Forgotten” Founding Father,” but he was officially recognized by the U.S. Senate as “The Architect of Our Federal Constitution” on May 4, 1908!
On the fourth of July we pay homage to our Founding Fathers—the men who gave us our freedom.
One of the greatest of these 18th century “giants” was our Nation’s first economist, Pelatiah Webster.
end quotes
Hmmmmmmm.
Does that put him on a par with a modern political luminary like Hillary Rodham Clinton, I wonder?
Does that make his judgment as to what it means to be an American as sound as any judgment Hillary Clinton might have on the subject?
Something to think about, anyway, people.
Getting back to Pelatiah Webster, that essay continues as follows:
Webster was more than an economist.
He was also an ordained minister, a preacher, a teacher, a merchant, and statesman.
He understood, more than most men of his day and most men since, the interrelationship of moral and economic law.
Webster, was among the first, if not the first, to see the need for our present Constitution.
His early writings, setting forth many principles later adopted, led his admirers to call him the father of that document.
When the Declaration of Independence was signed, Webster was a mature man of fifty and a keen observer of the Continental Congress.
In April, 1777, while en route to Boston with a cargo of flour and iron, he and his ship were seized by the British.
He was held prisoner for several weeks in Newport, Rhode Island, before being permitted to return to Philadelphia.
One night in February, 1778, he was again arrested by the British “on account of his order in the patriotic cause.”
He was imprisoned for four months and a large part of his property was confiscated for the King’s stores. His only son served in the Continental Army.
The war so destroyed his business that he found himself with considerable leisure.
He devoted most of the war years to studying “the original, natural principles” of economics and “to suffer my mind to be drawn on without bias or any incidental prejudice, to such conclusions as those original principles would naturally lead, and demonstrate.”
He saw that the war created “new problems which America had never seen before and, of course, knew not how either to obviate or solve them.”
The Madison Papers, published in 1841, cite Pelatiah Webster as the author of the 1781 pamphlet, which suggested that “The authority of Congress at present is very inadequate to perform their duties, and this indicates the necessity of calling a Continental Convention for the express purpose of ascertaining, defining, enlarging, and limiting the duties and powers of their Constitution.”
In February 1783, Webster published his most famous pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Political Union and Constitution of the Thirteen United States of North America, Which is necessary to their Preservation and Happiness; humbly offered to the Public.
This pamphlet, written four years before the Constitutional Convention, proposed a new Constitution to provide three separate and distinct departments, a legislature of two chambers, and a judicial system based on the supremacy of Federal law.
The new Federal Government was to be one of delegated powers with the residuum remaining in the States.
A Yale biographer of Webster reports that “It is a matter of tradition that Members of Congress, especially the Connecticut delegates, were in the habit of passing evenings with him, to consult him on financial and political concerns.”
Among his friends in the Continental Congress were such youngsters as Madison, Pinckney, Randolph and Hamilton—the men who were later to write his ideas into our Constitution.
In editing a collection of his pamphlets in 1791, Webster wrote, “It is probable that politicians and statesmen who may be involved in these inquires, might find benefit in an attention to American experience….”
“We have an opportunity of learning wisdom from it….”
“Most people at the time were wrought up to such a passionate attachment to the American cause, that they had no patience to examine and consider coldly the means necessary to support it.”
Those who lived through our Revolutionary era profited from their experience.
They read and understood the facts and fallacies exposed by Webster, the Republic’s first great economist.
Our own generation might well profit by the many wise words of Pelatiah Webster.
But as he said: “The great Creator has not given to all men equal discernment; some politicians are short-sighted, and cannot see the distant ill consequences of measures which yield a present advantage, but he must be a stupid blockhead who cannot see such effects when they stare him in the face, and stand in full fact before his eyes.”
end quotes
And on that note, here for the moment I will end.
Paul Plante says
As we ponder the existential question of who we are and who we are not in this country, and whether or not we in the United States of America, and yes, the candid world, as well, since the internet has made us all essentially one today, have an opportunity of learning wisdom from the experiences of those called the “founding fathers” of this country, that in the light of the admonishment of Virginia’s own James “Jemmy” Madison, an American president known as the “father of the United States Constitution, of which he was the original strict constructionist, to not separate text from historical background, because if we do, and let us face it, we have, we will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in the distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government we seem to have in dysfunctional Washington, D.C. today, I would like to reach out at this juncture to anyone just stopping by here for the first time who might be wondering what the heck all the history is about, and why I am quoting all these old dead dudes from some other century when there are so many people alive today who are begging to be quoted from, to explain that all of this discussion stems directly from this following sentence from an article in THE HILL entitled “Clinton taunts GOP lawmakers for dodging town halls” by Jonathan Easley on 22 February 2017, which informed us as follows:
The former Democratic presidential nominee, who has kept a low profile since losing to Trump in the November election, linked to an editorial in the Kansas City Star called, “Cowardly members of Congress should show up and face the public at town hall meetings.”
end quote
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Constitution Hillary says she and her supporters are supporting has in it this clause from Article I of the U.S. Constitution
Section 6.
The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States.
They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
end quotes
According to the section on “Privilege of Speech or Debate” in the ANNOTATIONS TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION:
This clause represents ”the culmination of a long struggle for parliamentary supremacy.”
“Behind these simple phrases lies a history of conflict between the Commons and the Tudor and Stuart monarchs during which successive monarchs utilized the criminal and civil law to suppress and intimidate critical legislators.”
“Since the Glorious Revolution in Britain, and throughout United States history, the privilege has been recognized as an important protection of the independence and integrity of the legislature.”
So Justice Harlan explained the significance of the speech-and-debate clause, the ancestry of which traces back to a clause in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the history of which traces back almost to the beginning of the development of Parliament as an independent force.
”In the American governmental structure the clause serves the additional function of reinforcing the separation of powers so deliberately established by the Founders.”
”The immunities of the Speech or Debate Clause were not written into the Constitution simply for the personal or private benefit of Members of Congress, but to protect the integrity of the legislative process by insuring the independence of individual legislators.”
The protection of this clause is not limited to words spoken in debate.
”Committee reports, resolutions, and the act of voting are equally covered, as are ‘things generally done in a session of the House by one of its members in relation to the business before it.”’
Thus, so long as legislators are ”acting in the sphere of legitimate legislative activity,” they are ”protected not only from the consequence of litigation’s results but also from the burden of defending themselves.”
end quotes
How encouraging the shouting down Republican legislators at town hall meetings by Hillary Clinton translates into supporting the Constitution frankly eludes me, but then, I am not a lawyer like Hillary, so it is more than likely that the nuanced language of that clause is simply beyond my ability to comprehend.
Getting back to authentic reality in here, that mocking of the Republican Congress people by Hillary was then followed up in THE HILL in the article “Hillary Clinton rallies DNC members in video message” by Max Greenwood on 25 February 2017, as follows:
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Friday showered praise on the wave of protests sweeping the country and urged party faithful to set their sights on elections to come.
“We as Democrats must move forward with courage, confidence and optimism, and stay focused on the elections we must win this year and next,” she said.
“Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country.”
Clinton’s loss in November was a stunning political upset for a candidate who many considered all but certain to win.
President Trump emerged victorious in the Electoral College, while Clinton took the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.
Since then, the former secretary of State has kept a relatively low profile, scarcely making public appearances or chiming into political debates.
end quotes
“Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country.”
Now, people, there is a sound bite, alright, and how radical that sounds, as if it were taken from the “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky, who was the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis in 1969, while a senior at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Alinsky states as follows:
In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace…. “Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’ This means revolution.” p.3
“Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing.” p.6
“A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage — the political paradise of communism.” p.10
“An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth — truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing…. To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations….” pp.10-11
end quotes
So where was Hillary?
And why is it that she is surfacing now, with all of these protests now going on?
I ask those questions rhetorically in here even though I don’t ever expect to see them actually answered by Hillary Clinton because it is those questions which form the underlying basis for this discussion and all this political history, and all these quotes by all these admittedly dead people.
Which takes us back to this quote from long-since-dead Peletiah Webster writing “The Weakness of Brutus Exposed” as “A Citizen of Philadelphia” in January 1787 in support of the proposed United States Constitution which Hillary Clinton claims to be supporting along with her demonstrators intent on shutting down our national government today because they don’t like the direction it is going in:
“There can be no doubt that each State will receive from the union great support and protection against the invasions and inroads of foreign enemies, as well as against riots and insurrections of their own citizens; and of consequence, the course of their internal administration will be secured by this means against any interruption or embarrassment from either of these causes.”
end quotes
“There can be no doubt that each State will receive from the union great support and protection against riots and insurrections of their own citizens; and of consequence, the course of their internal administration will be secured by this means against any interruption or embarrassment from these causes.”
Riots and insurrections, people, where insurrections are defined as “a violent uprising against an authority or government.”
Indeed, in FEDERALIST No. 6, entitled “Concerning Dangers from Dissensions Between the States” for the Independent Journal to the People of the State of New York in 1787 by Alexander Hamilton writing as Publius Valerius Publicola, wrote of one of our more famous ones, this just the other side of the mountains from where I am, as follows:
THE three last numbers of this paper have been dedicated to an enumeration of the dangers to which we should be exposed, in a state of disunion, from the arms and arts of foreign nations.
I shall now proceed to delineate dangers of a different and, perhaps, still more alarming kind—those which will in all probability flow from dissensions between the States themselves, and from domestic factions and convulsions.
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.
To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.
To multiply examples of the agency of personal considerations in the production of great national events, either foreign or domestic, according to their direction, would be an unnecessary waste of time.
Those who have but a superficial acquaintance with the sources from which they are to be drawn, will themselves recollect a variety of instances; and those who have a tolerable knowledge of human nature will not stand in need of such lights to form their opinion either of the reality or extent of that agency.
Perhaps, however, a reference, tending to illustrate the general principle, may with propriety be made to a case which has lately happened among ourselves.
If Shays had not been a DESPERATE DEBTOR, it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.
end quotes
Shay’s Rebellion, people, and civil war in Massachusetts long before our great civil war in the 1860s.
And there was the Whiskey Rebellion, which was put down by federal troops, and the John Fries Rebellion, also called Fries’s Rebellion, the House Tax Rebellion, the Home Tax Rebellion, which was an armed tax revolt among Pennsylvania Dutch farmers between 1799 and 1800, the third of three tax-related rebellions in the 18th century United States, the earlier two being Shays’ Rebellion (central and western Massachusetts, 1786–87) and the Whiskey Rebellion (western Pennsylvania, 1794).
In Fries Rebellion, thirty men went on trial in Federal court, and Fries and two others were tried for treason and, with Federalists stirring up a frenzy, were sentenced to be hanged, although President John Adams pardoned Fries and others convicted of treason, by a narrower constitutional definition of treason, and he later added that the rebels were “as ignorant of our language as they were of our laws” and were being used by “great men” in the opposition party.
“Great men” in the opposition party, people, today, that is Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
And with respect to the existential question of who are we really as the “American” people, today, this in light of the statements in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL. in the section “Fixing our Broken Immigration System” that “The United States was founded as, and continues to be, a country of immigrants from throughout the world,” and “It is no coincidence that the Statue of Liberty is one of our most profound national symbols,” at the time of Fries Rebellion, Congress had recently passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, criminalizing dissent and increasing the power of the executive branch under John Adams.
For those unfamiliar with them, the Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed by the Federalist-dominated 5th United States Congress and signed into law by President John Adams in 1798.
They made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen (Naturalization Act), allowed the president to imprison and deport non-citizens who were deemed dangerous (Alien Friends Act of 1798) or who were from a hostile nation (Alien Enemy Act of 1798), and criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government (Sedition Act of 1798).
The Federalists argued that the bills strengthened national security during an undeclared naval war with France.
Three of the acts were repealed after the Democratic-Republican party of Thomas Jefferson came to power but the Alien Enemies Act remained in effect, was revised and codified in 1918 for use in World War I, and was used by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to imprison Japanese, German, and Italian aliens during World War II.
Following cessation of hostilities, the act was used by President Harry S. Truman to continue to imprison, then deport, aliens of the formerly hostile nations.
In 1948 the Supreme Court determined that presidential powers under the acts continued after cessation of hostilities until there was a peace treaty with the hostile nation.
The revised Alien Enemies Act remains in effect today.
The Alien Friends Act allowed the president to imprison or deport aliens considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” at any time, while the Alien Enemies Act authorized the president to do the same to any male citizen of a hostile nation above the age of fourteen during times of war.
The Alien Enemies Act, however, remains in effect as Sections 21–24 of Title 50 of the United States Code.
Now, how any of that authentic reality from our own American history squares with what is the decidedly inauthentic reality of the 2016 Democrat Party Platform that Hillary Clinton proclaims as “the most progressive platform in history” in a video message posted on the Democratic Party’s Twitter account eludes me, but the fact is and remains, Hillary and the Democrat National Committee are both dead wrong when they mouth the specious sentiment that “The United States was founded as, and continues to be, a country of immigrants from throughout the world.”
The “united” States was founded as a “nation” in a time of war.
As Peletiah Webster, writing “The Weakness of Brutus Exposed” as “A Citizen of Philadelphia” in January 1787, informed us:
“Most people at the time (of the American War of Independence) were wrought up to such a passionate attachment to the American cause, that they had no patience to examine and consider coldly the means necessary to support it.”
end quotes
That is what we were given to do, people, by virtue of having been born CITIZENS of this nation, and that in light of these following words of Peletiah Webster, writing “The Weakness of Brutus Exposed” as “A Citizen of Philadelphia” in January 1787, to wit:
Another benefit they (the states) will receive from the controul of the supreme power of the union is this, viz. they will be restrained from making angry, oppressive and destructive laws, from declaring ruinous wars with their neighbours, from fomenting quarrels and controversies, &c. all which ever weaken a state, tend to its fatal disorder, and often end in its dissolution.
Righteousness exalts, and strengthens a nation; but sin is a reproach and weakening of any people.
They will indeed have the privilege of oppressing their own citizens by bad laws or bad administration; but the moment the mischief extends beyond their own State, and begins to affect the citizens of other States strangers, or the national welfare, – the salutary control of the supreme power will check the evil, and restore strength and security, as well as honesty and right, to the offending state.
It appears then very plain, that the natural effect and tendency of the supreme powers of the union is to give strength, establishment, and permanency to the internal police and jurisdiction of each of the particular States; not to melt down and destroy, but to support and confirm them all.
end quotes
That, people, is the historical background “Jemmy” Madison, the “father of the United States Constitution, admonished us to not separate text from, because if we did, and let us face it, we have, we will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which has led to the distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government we have in dysfunctional Washington, D.C. today.
This thread asks the question of why is Hillary Clinton then spinning an alternative version of American history now that she has emerged once again from wherever it was that she was hiding in seclusion after her stunning loss to Donald Trump as American president.
On that note, I will end with these following two definitions which seem very relevant to our times, and the role Hillary Clinton has chosen to play in sowing the seeds of disruption and dissension in this country with her divisive rhetoric:
SEDITION: conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state.
SUBVERSION: the undermining of the power and authority of an established system or institution.
Hillary, what game is it that you are at here?
The candid world would truly like to know!
Paul Plante says
Being a student of cosmic confluences such as I am, cosmic confluences such as the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the little old ladies of Pasadena, Dodge Hemi-Chargers, Duane Eddy, twangy guitars, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap and Linda Ronstadt all existing on the planet at the same time, and what are the odds of that, I ask, besides astronomical, like the odds of James Madison, Tommy Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Mozart all co-existing, or Julius Caesar, Pompey Magnus, Cicero and Cleopatra VII Philopator, I must admit that there is more than a bit of surreal irony in here, at least for me as a VEET NAM veteran, anyway, that at the same time the executive branch of the United States government is seemingly saturated root and branch, lock, stock and barrel with COMMIE DUPES, stooges of Putin and his KGB if I understand United States Senator Charley “CHUCK” Schumer of New York correctly this morning in the Albany, New York Times Union, the name of Saul David Alinsky, an American community organizer and writer generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing who is often noted for his 1971 book Rules for Radicals should be entering into this discussion of who Hillary Clinton is, and how it is that she knows who we are as Americans, but the rest of us don’t, and apparently cannot know, without Hillary to tell us.
As to the name Saul Alinsky, whose ideas were adapted in the 1960s by some U.S. college students and other young counterculture-era organizers, who used them as part of their strategies for organizing on campus and beyond, and of whom Time magazine wrote in 1970 that “It is not too much to argue that American democracy is being altered by Alinsky’s ideas,” and what possible connection he might have to this discussion, we return to the April 13, 2015 Counterpunch article “From Nixon Girl to Watergate – The Making of Hillary Clinton” by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, where we find as follows:
After the (1968 Democrat) convention Hillary embarked on her yearlong senior thesis, on the topic of the Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky.
She has successfully persuaded Wellesley to keep this under lock and key, but Gerth and Van Natta got hold of a copy.
end quotes
So there is Saul Alinsky coming into the picture back in 1969, when I was off in VEET NAM, fighting off all the COMMIE hoardes that wanted to come over here in the name of the international COMMIE-nism that Saul Alinsky was said to be an adherent of, in this country.
In Rules for Radicals (his final work, published in 1971 one year before his death), Alinsky wrote at the end of his personal acknowledgements:
Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.
In the book, he addressed the 1960s generation of radicals, outlining his views on organizing for mass power.
In the opening paragraph Alinsky writes:
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.
The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power.
Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
end quotes
At about that same time, by coincidence, if not cosmic confluence, in the Soldier’s Handbook I was issued by the United States Army in 1968, on page 4, there is this interesting message to us soldiers as to why it was we were serving in uniform in a time of war:
Today, communism is the major threat to our nation.
This threat is the primary reason for the Army to constantly train men as part of the U.S. fighting force.
Your training and eventual performance of duty with a unit is a vital part of this Nation’s defense.
end quote
The way Washington, D.C. is now overrun with Russians, who seem to be in control of the White House, and that is without having had to fire a shot, is a clear testament to the fact that we failed that mission given to us so long ago by the American people, who at that time wanted to keep the COMMIES out, not put them in charge of our federal government.
But I digress.
Getting back to Hillary Clinton and her connection to Saul Alinsky, in the Washington Post (Democracy Dies In Darkness) article “Hillary Clinton’s breakout moment at Wellesley College” by Frances Stead Sellers and Marilyn W. Thompson on August 14, 2016, we have this background on Hillary and her famous commencement speech, background that leads us directly to Saul Alinsky, to wit:
Hillary Clinton’s moment of glory at Wellesley College came when she mounted the stage at her commencement ceremony and took on a powerful Republican U.S. senator, culminating four years of what her campaign now describes as “social-justice activism” on the burning issues of the time.
end quotes
“Social-justice activism” on the burning issues of the time, people, that is what our Hillary was doing while young Americans were fighting and dying in VEET NAM so Hillary would have the freedom to be able to do her “social-justice activism” on the burning issues of the time, chief of which was VEET NAM and the use of NAPE, or napalm in VEET NAM.
With respect to “social-justice activism” on the burning issues of the time and napalm, which I saw used in “combat” on many occasions, on October 18, 1967, what came to be known as the Dow Riot took place in Madison, Wisconsin.
The so-called Dow Riot was a response to a series of student protests against the Vietnam War at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Days before the event, UW students protested against the makers of the weapon napalm, Dow Chemical Company, who were recruiting at the Madison campus.
The University Chancellor called for police to disperse the students, and the police used tear gas to clear the protesters, an action that spurred several confrontations between the students and the protest.
The belief that the police and administration were attempting to silence their voices radicalized many formerly apolitical students and as a result, even more students came out for a general student rally on Bascom Hill on October 18th.
The three thousand students clashed with police and counter-protesters.
The Dow Riot was part of an anti-Dow protest that had begun months before the company’s representatives arrived on campus.
During the 1960s, the University of Wisconsin-Madison had gained a reputation as one of the nation’s most radical campuses, and in response to the escalation of the Vietnam War, students and professors began to organize teach-ins on the war in 1965.
These teach-ins were large forums for discussion between students and faculty about the history of Vietnam, its people, and the war, and within a year, opposition to the war grew throughout the university and nation.
Students at Wisconsin became among the first to organize marches that protested America’s actions in the Vietnam War and by 1967, student protests included the burning of draft cards and direct confrontation of military recruiters.
end quotes
Now that does not answer the question as to who it is that we are not today, but believe me, that is who we were back then, and none of it was pretty, especially from the perspective of someone like me who had actually enlisted in the Army, an establishment so many young people in America were quite hostile to, which I was to have direct experience of as a soldier.
Getting back to the Washington Post (Democracy Dies In Darkness) article “Hillary Clinton’s breakout moment at Wellesley College” by Frances Stead Sellers and Marilyn W. Thompson on August 14, 2016, we have:
On graduation day, the onetime Goldwater Girl reinvented herself as a provocative voice speaking for her angry generation.
end quotes
An “angry generation,” people.
If you were alive and aware back then, you would call that understatement.
The Washington Post article then continues as follows:
With the national media closely following campus upheaval that spring, Clinton stole the spotlight by rebuking a Washington symbol she had helped elect.
Her performance surprised everyone, even her close friends.
“We’re not interested in social reconstruction,” she corrected the speaker, Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts.
“It’s human reconstruction.”
end quotes
Human reconstruction, people, ponder on that concept for a moment if you will, to see if it gives you a warm and squishy feeling inside.
And that Washington symbol Hillary rebuked as being “pusillanimous,” i.e., showing a lack of courage or determination or being timid with respect to civil rights issues in Hillary’s estimation, that according to an eye-witness account by her poetry professor at Wellseley, was the featured Wellesley Commencement speaker for 1969, U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke, a Republican moderate and World War II combat veteran who was also the first African-American popularly elected to the United States Senate, who addressed the assembly as follows:
“When all is said and done, (quoted in the Fitchburg Sentinel of June 2, 1969), I believe the overwhelming majority of Americans will stand firm on one principle: coercive protest is wrong, and one reason that it is wrong is that it is unnecessary.”
end quotes
“Coercive protest,” of course, was a reference to among other things, the Dow Riots.
Getting back to the Washington Post article:
Clinton’s remarks transformed her, virtually overnight, into a national symbol of student activism.
Wire services blasted out her remarks, and Life magazine featured a photo of her, dressed in bold striped bell-bottoms.
end quotes
By pointing her finger at that U.S. Senator on May 31, 1969, and essentially calling him a coward in front of some 2,000 people plus the assembled news media, Hillary Clinton, the superstar American politician who today is calling Republican Congressmen cowards, was born.
Two weeks later, on the other side of the world, on June 13, 1969, in an event which would receive no press coverage, I was to earn my second Purple Heart getting wounded in the face after flying in on a Huey helicopter to rescue some wounded in a fire fight which also did not get any press coverage, although I think there might be mention of it in the book “The Tunnels of Cu Chi.”
Anyway, getting back to Saul Alinsky, since nobody really gives a damn about VEET NAM, anymore, the Washington Post article continued as follows:
As senior year began, Clinton had concluded that the Republican Party was drifting too far to the right.
She marched into (thesis advisor Alan) Schechter’s office and announced her intention to devote herself to social equality.
Schechter said she was “the most passionate I’ve ever seen her.”
Schechter helped her shape a thesis comparing the effectiveness of intervention models — the grass-roots approach espoused by Saul Alinsky vs. top-down government support.
Clinton said later that she had a “fundamental disagreement” with Alinsky’s theory that change could come only from outside the system.
Clinton interviewed Alinsky twice to produce her thesis, “There Is Only the Fight.”
Schechter gave the paper an A, and Clinton noted in her paper that Alinsky offered her a job working at his Chicago foundation, which she declined, to go to law school.
But Clinton’s focus on the social activist later proved controversial.
In the early 1990s, Schechter was camping in Montana when the White House contacted him and asked him to help keep the first lady’s early academic work under wraps.
Schechter viewed the move as a mistake.
“If you hide it people will use it against you,” he said he argued to the staffer.
Ever since, the thesis has been cast by Clinton’s critics — including Ben Carson at the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland — as evidence of her early association with radicals.
end quotes
Yes, people, Hillary Clinton is an enigma, and to be truthful, at least to me, so is her vision for us as the American people.
Who is it that Hillary really wants us to be?
And more to the point, are we even capable of living up to her expectations?
And if we are not, what then – human reconstruction?
But what is that?
Stay tuned and we will try and see.
And in the meantime, does anyone have a clue as to why the White House wanted her thesis on Saul Alinsky buried?
Now there is a question for our times, alright, and again, thank you for your interest and citizenship.
Marita Patterson says
Has anyone – besides Paul Plante himself – made it past the first paragraph of the original article?
Paul Plante says
Can we assume from your comment, Marita, that you get all your news and political views via TWITTER TWEETS, which only tax the mind with 140 simple characters, as opposed to a lot of actual words such as I use in here?
In a letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, 13 Aug. 1786, old Tom stated as follows:
“I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.”
“Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people.”
In a letter from Thomas Jefferson to St. John de Crèvcoeur, 15 Jan. 1787, he stated, “ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.”
And in an extract from Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Dec. 1778, it was stated “experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large …”
Pardon me, Marita, for taking all of that seriously, but when I was young, my teachers were all women, and they made it real clear to me starting the first day of kindergarten that in this country, I had no right be remain an ignorant dolt, and for the betterment of society, I had a duty to educate myself, and being a great respecter of women, especially my earliest teachers, I took them at their word, as is reflected in the words on these pages that are so taxing your mind right now.
Perhaps if you had had the same teachers, you wouldn’t find these words so hard to read, assimilate and comprehend.
But alas.
Can a nation full of ignorant people incapable of understanding what is supposed to be the common language of the nation remain a nation, do you think, Marita?
That may well be one of the most pressing questions of our time, when you come to think about it, presuming an ability to think.
And let me apologize in advance for using so many words in this response to you for it was not my intention to further overburden you with more words than you can handle at one time.
Mike says
I can’t believe how prolific this guy is….I dwell on things but this guy takes it to a new level…but God bless America. I made it to the third paragraph after two weeks.
Paul Plante says
Did I say that you were a cool dude, Mike?
And, Mike, I have to say that I never realized how much of a real conundrum for younger people the opening three paragraphs of this thread were going to be.
I mean, I was actually there, I saw much of this stuff happen, either live, or on TV, and so I take a lot of it for granted.
It’s the juxtaposition of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean and Linda Ronstadt and surf’s up and the little old ladies of Pasadena ripping around all over town in Dodge Hemi-Chargers and Duane Eddy and his rocking guitar breaking us out of our funk back then that is causing so much confusion.
My faux pas, Mike, making a blanket assumption (see, you are right, Mike, a lot of time it is not so good to make those kind of blanket assumptions) that when I said “break us out of our funk back then,” it would carry the same meaning for younger people that it does for me, but how could that possibly be, Mike?
You know as well as I that a true funk can never really be described to someone who wasn’t there themselves to experience, so I should have thought of that when I was writing those words.
“Forty Miles of Bad Road,” Mike.
Do you remember that?
That is a classic of Duane Eddy’s, and you know what, Mike, it sure did take us out of our rooms where the Beach Boys had us with their crooning in “In My Room” written by Brian Wilson and Gary Usher and released on their 1963 album Surfer Girl, as well as the B-side of the “Be True to Your School” single:
There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
In my room, in my room
In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears
In my room, in my room
Do my dreaming and my scheming
Lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing
Laugh at yesterday
Now it’s dark and I’m alone
But I won’t be afraid
In my room, in my room
end quote
Now, look at those lines “Now it’s dark and I’m alone, But I won’t be afraid, In my room,” and I think you’ll see where I am going here, Mike, even if the actual events took place before your time.
You know how it is, Mike, as you talk about rapping when you are ninety, and I wish you the longevity to get there and be able to do that, you hear a song by a popular group like the Beach Boys, who were a big thing back then, because they were from California, a place we country kids had heard about, much like Wonderland or Oz, but never had a thought of getting to, because it was so far away, and you start singing along, not really thinking about the words at first, but then, after a couple of times, they begin to sink in and you say, “wait a minute!”
First, you don’t have a room that is yours, and more to the point, you have work you have to do to help keep your family alive, so when do you have time to be hiding in this room, like in the song?
And as to being scared when it is dark, get real!
I had to go to the barn to get firewood for my mother before school, and it was always dark when I had to do that, to the light of an old railroad kerosene lantern.
So there began a sort of rebellion, Mike, against the Beach Boys by people like me out in the countryside, and maybe that is where some of this division in America plaguing us today harkens back to.
There were some in America lucky enough and privileged enough to have their own rooms as a place to go be scared of when it was dark, and then, there were the rest of us.
So when the album “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy came out with “Ramrod” and “Cannon ball” and “Yep” and “I Almost Lost My Mind” and “Because They’re Young” and “Forty Miles Of Bad Road,” it was like a cosmic dam had broken somewhere, and listening to that twangy guitar, you knew it was alright to not have your own room all to yourself, and your own Woody, and your own Corvette, and it was alright to not be scared of the dark, and suddenly, Mike, in some way we were made free by that, since the Beach Boys represented convention, and Duane Eddy didn’t.
But if you weren’t there, Mike, and let’s face it, it was in a different century and a long time ago now, so most people weren’t, then it just would not be so obvious as to what I was saying, which is what made it so hard to get past those first couple of paragraphs.
So my apologies for making it so confusing.
Coincidentally, in one of those cosmic connections you have to accept but might not understand, Linda Ronstadt, who we all do love, recorded “In My Room” in 1996.
Paul Plante says
So who is it that we are not, people?
Where does the answer to that existential question lie?
With what system of logic can that answer be found?
To which I would respond, to understand the present, it is vital to understand the past, as while those who use a mirror of brass can see to set their caps, it is those who use the mirror of antiquity who can predict the rise and fall of nations, and so, position themselves accordingly.
It is not by accident that the authors of America’s The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, evoked some powerful ancient symbolism by using the pseudonym “Publius” in honor of Publius Valerius Poplicola or Publicola (d. 503 BC) who was one of four Roman aristocrats who led the overthrow of the Tarquin monarchy in Rome, and became a Roman consul, the colleague of Lucius Junius Brutus in 509 BC, traditionally considered the first year of the Roman Republic.
In 509 BC, Valerius was one of the leaders of the Roman revolution, together with Lucius Junius Brutus, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, and Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus.
Winning over public opinion while the king was campaigning away from the city, they deposed and banished Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last King of Rome.
In place of the monarchy, they established a republic, together with the office of consul.
Brutus and Collatinus were elected the first consuls.
The so-called founding fathers had a great knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome, as did many of the so-called common people in America at that time, and as such, they had great knowledge of human nature and human government.
They were very well aware, based on that knowledge of antiquity, that how you start determines the path you then must take, and so it is with us in the highly divided nation today.
With respect to that knowledge, and who we are today based on our own unique national history, a newly surfaced letter from Thomas Jefferson, penned on June 20, 1816, was sent to a Jefferson contemporary who was a confidante of three U.S. presidents and was penned a decade after Hamilton was killed in a duel with his life-long rival, Aaron Burr.
In the letter, Jefferson writes that Hamilton’s mind “was really powerful, but chained by native partialities to every thing English; who… sincerely believed it for the good of this country to make them their model in every thing; without considering that what might be wise and good for a nation essentially commercial, and entangled in complicated intercourse with numerous and powerful neighbors, might not be so for one essentially agricultural, and insulated by nature from the abusive governments of the old world…”
“You have fairly stated the alternatives between which we are to choose: 1. licentious commerce and gambling speculations for a few, with eternal war for the many; or, 2. restricted commerce, peace, and steady occupations for all,” Jefferson writes to his confidante.
end quotes
Regardless of how Hillary Clinton and her crowd might see it, there are the two choices this country faced at its beginning, or more properly, there are the two roads it could have taken.
As it was to turn out, the nation chose, or perhaps had imposed upon it, licentious commerce and gambling speculations for a few, with eternal war for the many over the alternative of restricted commerce, peace, and steady occupations for all, which may never have been more than a utopian dream of Thomas Jefferson.
Having made that choice at this nation’s beginning, a die was cast, and the casting of that die, like Caesar crossing the Rubicon, created ramifications the like of which we still experience today in this nation on the heels of the so-called Great Recession.
In her speech to the American Legion, of which I am a life member, as reported in the TIME article “Hillary Clinton’s Speech Touting ‘American Exceptionalism’” on Sept. 1, 2016, Hillary stated as follows:
If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this.
The United States is an exceptional nation.
I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth.
We’re still Reagan’s shining city on a hill.
We’re still Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country.
end quotes
But those are slogans, people, the stuff of soundbites.
Reagan’s “Shining City On a Hill” speech was his farewell speech given to the nation in 1989.
In that speech, he started out by saying:
We’ve been together 8 years now, and soon it’ll be time for me to go.
But before I do, I wanted to share some thoughts, some of which I’ve been saving for a long time.
end quotes
From there, he went, not surprisingly, into some presidential back-slapping as follows:
The way I see it, there were two great triumphs, two things that I’m proudest of.
One is the economic recovery, in which the people of America created — and filled — 19 million new jobs.
The other is the recovery of our morale.
America is respected again in the world and looked to for leadership.
end quotes
Doesn’t that all sound so familiar in our own age today?
With respect to who Reagan thought we were in his “Shining City On a Hill” speech in 1989, we have this:
Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’
‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us.
‘We the People’ are the driver; the government is the car.
And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.
Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are.
Our Constitution is a document in which ‘We the People’ tell the government what it is allowed to do.
‘We the People’ are free.
This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I’ve tried to do these past 8 years.
But back in the 1960’s, when I began, it seemed to me that we’d begun reversing the order of things — that through more and more rules and regulations and confiscatory taxes, the government was taking more of our money, more of our options, and more of our freedom.
I went into politics in part to put up my hand and say, ‘Stop.’
I was a citizen politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do.
end quotes
That is who Ronald Reagan as president thought we were as a nation in 1989.
With respect to Russia, in that speech in 1989, Reagan stated as follows:
Nothing is less free than pure communism — and yet we have, the past few years, forged a satisfying new closeness with the Soviet Union.
I’ve been asked if this isn’t a gamble, and my answer is no because we’re basing our actions not on words but deeds.
The detente of the 1970’s was based not on actions but promises.
They’d promise to treat their own people and the people of the world better.
But the gulag was still the gulag, and the state was still expansionist, and they still waged proxy wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Well, this time, so far, it’s different.
President Gorbachev has brought about some internal democratic reforms and begun the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He has also freed prisoners whose names I’ve given him every time we’ve met.
end quote
Contrast that with our relationship with Russia today.
And then we get to the heart of Reagan’s speech, as it applies to this discussion we are having in here with respect to who it is that we are not as a nation, to wit:
Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that’s been on my mind for some time.
But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism.
end quotes
Now, in my mind as one of this nation’s many veterans, Hillary cannot call up Reagan’s “Shining City On a Hill” speech in her speech to the American Legion on what she calls “American exceptionalism” without calling up that “resurgence of national pride” Reagan called “the new patriotism,” and yet, we never hear that word “patriotism” from Hillary at all.
How come one wonders.
Is it because the word “patriotism” was anathema to Hillary the anti-war protester in the VEET NAM times, and remains so today?
Getting back to the speech:
This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.
end quotes
Think about those words “grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge,” if you will, for a moment.
Getting back to the speech:
An informed patriotism is what we want.
And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?
end quotes
There actually is a question underlying this discussion – what kind of American history are people in this country being taught?
Getting back to Reagan’s speech, we have:
Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America.
We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American.
And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.
If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio.
Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school.
And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture.
The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special.
TV was like that, too, through the mid-60s.
But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed.
Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children.
And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style.
Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it.
We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise.
And freedom is special and rare.
It’s fragile; it needs protection.
So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important — why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant.
end quotes
To teach what any of that means, or meant, we first have to know that those things even happened, which in too many cases, we don’t, and then, we really do have to think seriously on whether any of that old stuff means anything to us in the 21st century, and those are discussions that are not happening in this nation today, so the past is lost, and whatever lessons might have been learned from it are lost, as well.
Reagan then continued as follows:
If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are.
end quotes
How true those words are, if only we could realize that.
Getting back to the speech:
I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.
Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.
And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table.
So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins.
And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it.
That would be a very American thing to do.
And that’s about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing.
The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’
The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined.
What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man.
He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.
But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.
And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.
That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
And how stands the city on this winter night?
More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago.
But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm.
And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.
We’ve done our part.
And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for eight years did the work that brought America back.
My friends: We did it.
We weren’t just marking time.
We made a difference.
We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands.
All in all, not bad, not bad at all.
And so, goodbye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
end quote
There is the “Shining City On the Hill,” people – it is a vision, it is a dream, and yes, it is a goal, but it is not an actuality as Hillary the utopian would have it be.
And let us face it, that was a self-serving, back-slapping political speech touting Reagan’s perceived achievements as an American president, just as Hillary’s speech to the American Legion invoking that Reagan speech was itself just another political speech touting Hillary as a presidential contender.
So we are not Reagan’s “Shining City On the Hill,” people, because outside of our imaginations, it does not exist.
So who are we then today, Hillary?
The candid world would really like to know!
Paul Plante says
And as we continue to ponder who it is that we are not as a people, and as a nation, one has to wonder, or at least I do as a disabled Viet Nam combat veteran who is a life member of the American Legion, who exactly Hillary Clinton thought it was she was speaking to when she appeared before the American Legion at its convention as a presidential candidate, a candidate to be this nation’s next military commander-in-chief, and in her speech, as reported in the TIME article “Hillary Clinton’s Speech Touting ‘American Exceptionalism’” on Sept. 1, 2016, told the assembled members and the media and press as follows:
“If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this.”
“The United States is an exceptional nation.”
“We’re still Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country.”
end quotes
A core belief?
And Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country, people!
That is who we are, because Hillary Clinton has said so, which makes it so.
So who is it that we are not then?
And incidentally, the use of that slogan “Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country” by Hillary Clinton at the American Legion convention on September 1, 2016 reminded me of something U.S. secretary of state and failed Democrat presidential contender John “JACK” Kerry said on September 27, 2010, to wit:
We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or truth or what’s happening.
end quote
Amen, John, right on, dude!
And with regard to our being “exceptional,” that is the same John “JACK” Kerry who in testimony before subcommittees of the U.S. Senate in April, 1971 told it as to exactly how it was that we were “exceptional” back then, as follows:
There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones.
I conducted harassment and interdiction fire.
I used 50-caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people.
I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages.
All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down.
And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant [William] Calley, are war criminals.
end quote
Yes, I know, people, strong stuff, but then, it would have to be, wouldn’t it, since we are so exceptional in Hillary Clinton’s star-filled eyes?
Did Hillary think that she was inspiring us, then, with her soaring rhetoric about being “exceptional,” based on what her political stable-mate John “JACK” Kerry had said about us before subcommittees of the U.S. Senate in April, 1971, which political rhetoric of Hillary in 2016 was in turn based on the soaring rhetoric of Bobby Kennedy in his “Remarks at the University of Kansas,” March 18, 1968, which was yet another self-serving political speech by an American presidential candidate?
By telling us that we were exceptional, was Hillary Clinton telling us who we really are?
Or did she think we were in fact a bunch of ignorant dolts who simply would not know the difference and would blindly accept that we were exceptional because Hillary said it was so?
As to the Bobby Kennedy speech in question, according to a transcript of the Kennedy speech, which Hillary informed the American Legion members was proof that we were exceptional, transcribed from the original recording by the Kennedy Library of Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968, that soaring rhetoric of Bobby Kennedy which leads us to Robert Kennedy’s “great, unselfish, compassionate country” begins humbly but compassionately as follows:
Thank you very much.
Chancellor, Governor and Mrs. Docking, Senator and Mrs. Pierson, ladies and gentlemen and my friends, I’m very pleased to be here.
I’m really not here to make a speech.
I’ve come because I came from Kansas State and they want to send their love to all of you.
They did.
That’s all they talk about over there, how much they love you.
Actually, I want to establish the fact that I am not an alumnus of Villanova.
end quote
Love, people, keeping in mind that we are back in the sixties, there, when as the Beatles told us all, all the world needed was love, love, love.
And in a political speech, people, it is important to capture your audience’s attention right away, and in this speech, Bobby Kennedy showed himself to be a master at that, which is perhaps where Hillary got the art from, although there are many who say she was born for greatness as was Cleopatra VII Philopator, and seeing that both achieved greatness who can argue with that?
Getting back to the Kennedy speech, we have as to who we once were as follows:
In 1824, when Thomas Hart Benton was urging in Congress the development of Iowa and other western territories, he was opposed by Daniel Webster, the Senator from Massachusetts.
“What,” asked Webster, “what do we want with this vast and worthless area?”
” This region of savages and wild beasts.”
” Of deserts of shifting sands and of whirlwinds.”
” Of dust, and of cactus and of prairie dogs.”
“To what use,” he said, “could we ever hope to put these great deserts?”
“I will never vote for one-cent from the public treasury, to place the west one inch closer to Boston, than it is now.”
And that is why, I am here today, instead of my brother Edward.
I’m glad to come here to the home of the man who publicly wrote: “If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges.”
” The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.”
And despite all the accusations against me, those words were not written by me, they were written by that notorious seditionist, William Allen White.
And I know what great affection this university has for him.
He is an honored man today, here on your campus and around the rest of the nation.
But when he lived and wrote, he was reviled as an extremist and worse.
For he spoke, he spoke as he believed.
He did not conceal his concern in comforting words.
He did not delude his readers or himself with false hopes and with illusions.
This spirit of honest confrontation is what America needs today.
It has been missing all too often in the recent years and it is one of the reasons that I run for President of the United States.
For we as a people, we as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand.
This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States.
end quotes
Now, how about that for soaring rhetoric, people?
This is the brother of the man who said to me and many young Americans, “ask not what the country can do for you; ask instead what you can do for the country!”
It was those exact words which had me enlist in the U.S. Army in 1967 when the **** was really hitting the fan over in VEET NAM and it became clear that despite projections to the contrary, there was no light at the end of the tunnel, and the dominoes were falling as the U.S. searched for COSVN in the jungles of VEET NAM in vain.
Getting back to Bobby Kennedy in 1968:
But I don’t want to run for the presidency – I don’t want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth.
I don’t want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions.
I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead.
And I also want us to know and examine where we’ve gone wrong.
And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.
end quotes
Examine where we’ve gone wrong, people!
Have we ever heard Hillary Clinton call for such an examination today?
Is it because we no longer need one?
Getting back to Bobby Kennedy:
This morning I spoke about the war in Vietnam, and I will speak briefly about it in a few moments.
But there is much more to this critical election year than the war in Vietnam.
It is, at a root, the root of all of it, the national soul of the United States.
The President calls it “restlessness.”
Our cabinet officers, such as John Gardiner and others tell us that America is deep in a malaise of spirit: discouraging initiative, paralyzing will and action, and dividing Americans from one another, by their age, their views and by the color of their skin and I don’t think we have to accept that here in the United States of America.
end quote
There is who we were, people!
I know, because I was there.
And how much like today this sounds:
Demonstrators shout down government officials and the government answers by drafting demonstrators.
Anarchists threaten to burn the country down and some have begun to try, while tanks have patrolled American streets and machine guns have fired at American children.
I don’t think this a satisfying situation for the United States of America.
end quote
Noor did I, to be truthful, nor do I today.
Getting back to Bobby Kennedy:
Our young people – the best educated, and the best comforted in our history, turn from the Peace Corps and public commitment of a few years ago – to lives of disengagement and despair – many of them turned on with drugs and turned off on America – none of them here, of course, at Kansas – right?
All around us, all around us, – not just on the question of Vietnam, not just on the question of the cities, not just the question of poverty, not just on the problems of race relations – but all around us, and why you are so concerned and why you are so disturbed – the fact is, that men have lost confidence in themselves, in each other, it is confidence which has sustained us so much in the past – rather than answer the cries of deprivation and despair – cries which the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders tells us could split our nation finally asunder – rather than answer these desperate cries, hundreds of communities and millions of citizens are looking for their answers, to force and repression and private gun stocks – so that we confront our fellow citizen across impossible barriers of hostility and mistrust and again, I don’t believe that we have to accept that.
I don’t believe that it’s necessary in the United States of America.
I think that we can work together – I don’t think that we have to shoot at each other, to beat each other, to curse each other and criticize each other, I think that we can do better in this country.
And that is why I run for President of the United States.
end quotes
Has anything changed in America between then and now?
Getting back to Bobby:
If young boys and girls are so filled with despair when they are going to high school and feel that their lives are so hopeless and that nobody’s going to care for them, nobody’s going to be involved with them, and nobody’s going to bother with them, that they either hang themselves, shoot themselves or kill themselves – I don’t think that’s acceptable and I think the United States of America – I think the American people, I think we can do much, much better.
And I run for the presidency because of that, I run for the presidency because I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity, but they cannot, for the mines are closed and their jobs are gone and no one – neither industry, nor labor, nor government – has cared enough to help.
I think we here in this country, with the unselfish spirit that exists in the United States of America, I think we can do better here also.
If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us.
We must begin to end the disgrace of this other America.
And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year.
But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.
Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.
It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.
It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.
It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.
It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.
From the beginning our proudest boast has been the promise of Jefferson, that we, here in this country would be the best hope of mankind.
And now, as we look at the war in Vietnam, we wonder if we still hold a decent respect for the opinions of mankind and whether the opinion maintained a descent respect for us or whether like Athens of old, we will forfeit sympathy and support, and ultimately our very security, in the single-minded pursuit of our own goals and our own objectives.
I do not want, and I do believe that most Americans do not want, to sell out America’s interest to simply withdraw – to raise the white flag of surrender in Vietnam – that would be unacceptable to us as a people, and unacceptable to us as a country.
But I am concerned about the course of action that we are presently following in South Vietnam.
I am concerned, I am concerned about the fact that this has been made America’s War.
It was said, a number of years ago that this is “their war” “this is the war of the South Vietnamese” that “we can help them, but we can’t win it for them” but over the period of the last three years we have made the war and the struggle in South Vietnam our war, and I think that’s unacceptable.
I don’t accept the idea that this is just a military action, that this is just a military effort, and every time we have had difficulties in South Vietnam and Southeast Asia we have had only one response, we have had only one way to deal with it – month after month – year after year we have dealt with it in only on way and that’s to send more military men and increase our military power and I don’t think that’s what the kind of a struggle that it is in Southeast Asia.
I think that this is a question of the people of South Vietnam, I think its a question of the people of South Vietnam feeling its worth their efforts – that they’re going to make the sacrifice – that they feel that their country and their government is worth fighting for and I think the development of the last several years have shown, have demonstrated that the people of South Vietnam feel no association and no affiliation for the government of Saigon and I don’t think it’s up to us here in the United States, I don’t think it’s up to us here in the United States, to say that we’re going to destroy all of South Vietnam because we have a commitment there.
The commander of the American forces at Ben Tre said we had to destroy that city in order to save it.
So 38,000 people were wiped out or made refugees.
We here in the United States – not just the United States government, not just the commanders of and forces in South Vietnam, the United States government and every human being that’s in this room – we are part of that decision and I don’t think that we need do that any longer and I think we should change our policy.
I don’t want to be part of a government, I don’t want to be part of the United States, I don’t want to be part of the American people, and have them write of us as they wrote of Rome: “They made a desert and they called it peace.”
I think that we should go to the negotiating table, and I think we should take the steps to go to the negotiating table.
And I’ve said it over the period of the last two years, I think that we have a chance to have negotiations, and the possibility of meaningful negotiations, but last February, a year ago, when the greatest opportunity existed for negotiations the Administration and the President of the United States felt that the military victory was right around the corner and we sent a message to Ho Chi Minh, in February 8th of 1967 virtually asking for their unconditional surrender, we are not going to obtain the unconditional surrender of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong anymore than they’re going to obtain the unconditional surrender of the United States of America.
We’re going to have to negotiate, we’re going to have to make compromises, we’re going to have to negotiate with the National Liberation Front.
But people can argue, “That’s unfortunate that we have to negotiate with the National Liberation Front,” but that is a fact of life.
We have three choices: We can either pull out of South Vietnam unilaterally and raise the white flag – I think that’s unacceptable.
Second, we can continue to escalate, we can continue to send more men there, until we have millions and millions of more men and we can continue to bomb North Vietnam, and in my judgment we will be no nearer success, we will be no nearer victory than we are now in February of 1968.
And the third step that we can take is to go to the negotiating table.
We can go to the negotiating table and not achieve everything that we wish.
One of the things that we’re going to have to accept as American people, but the other, the other alternative is so unacceptable.
One of the things that we’re going to have to accept as American people and that the United States government must accept, is that the National Liberation Front is going to play a role in the future political process of South Vietnam.
And we’re going to have to negotiate with them.
That they are going to play some role in the future political process of South Vietnam, that there are going to be elections and the people of South Vietnam, are ultimately going to determine and decide their own future.
That is the course of action, that is the course of action that I would like to see.
I would like to see the United States government to make it clear to the government of Saigon that we are not going to tolerate the corruption and the dishonesty.
I think that we should make it clear to the government of Saigon that if we’re going to draft young men, 18 years of age here in the United States, if we’re going to draft young men who are 19 years-old here in the United States, and we’re going to send them to fight and die in Khe Sanh, that we want the government of South Vietnam to draft their 18-year-olds and their 19-year-olds.
And I want to make it clear that if the government of Saigon, feels Khe Sanh or Que Son and the area in the demilitarized zone are so important, if Khe San is so important to the government of Saigon, I want to see those American marines out of there and South Vietnamese troops in there.
I want to have an explanation as to why American boys killed, two weeks ago, in South Vietnam, were three times as many – more than three times as many, as the soldiers of South Vietnam.
I want to understand why the casualties and the deaths, over the period of the last two weeks, at the height of the fighting, should be so heavily American casualties, as compared to the South Vietnamese.
This is their war.
I think we have to make the effort to help them, I think that we have to make the effort to fight, but I don’t think that we should have to carry the whole burden of that war, I think the South Vietnamese should.
And if I am elected President of the United States, with help, with your help, these are the kinds of policies that I’m going to put into operation.
We can do better here in the United States, we can do better.
We can do better in our relationships to other countries around the rest of the globe.
President Kennedy, when he campaigned in 1960, he talked about the loss of prestige that the United States had suffered around the rest of the globe, but look at what our condition is at the present time.
The President of the United States goes to a meeting of the OAS at Montevideo- can he go into the city of Montevideo?
Or can he travel through the cities of Latin America where there was such deep love and deep respect?
He has to stay in a military base at Montevideo, with American ships out at sea and American helicopters overhead in order to ensure that he’s protected, I don’t think that that’s acceptable.
I think that we should have conditions here in the United States, and support enough for our policies, so that the President of the United States can travel freely and clearly across all the cities of this country, and not just to military bases.
I think there’s more that we can do internally here, I think there’s more that we can do in South Vietnam.
I don’t think we have to accept the situation, as we have it at the moment.
I think that we can do better, and I think the American people think that we can do better.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Some people see things as they are and say why?”
” I dream things that never were and say, why not?”
So I come here to Kansas to ask for your help.
In the difficult five months ahead, before the convention in Chicago, I ask for your help and for your assistance.
If you believe that the United States can do better.
If you believe that we should change our course of action.
If you believe that the United States stands for something here internally as well as elsewhere around the globe, I ask for your help and your assistance and your hand over the period of the next five months.
And when we win in November, and when we win in November, and we begin a new period of time for the United States of America – I want the next generation of Americans to look back upon this period and say as they said of Plato: “Joy was in those days, but to live.”
Thank you very much.
end quotes
And there it is, people – that is who we were in 1968!
So who is it, then, that we are today?
And who is it that we are not?
Paul Plante says
March 18, 1968, people.
Just two months later, in June of 1968, Bobby Kennedy was going to be shot dead, and to this day, I wonder if his calling for negotiations with the National Liberation Front in Viet Nam had anything to do with that, but that is something we just will never know.
In the meantime, Hillary Clinton, then Hillary Rodham, was safely ensconced and cloistered inside the protective walls of elite Wellesley College in the neat and proper New England town of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
As the Washington Post article “Hillary Clinton’s breakout moment at Wellesley College” by Frances Stead Sellers and Marilyn W. Thompson, August 14, 2016 tells us:
Clinton’s parents — she was known then as Hillary Rodham — dropped her off at tranquil Wellesley College in the fall of 1965.
Hugh and Dorothy Rodham from placid Park Ridge, Ill., saw the campus — with its weekend curfews and restrictions on male visitors — as “a place where we would be safe,” recalled Clinton’s friend Constance Hoenk Shapiro.
end quote
“A place where we would be safe,” people.
Now, isn’t that an American dream, people – a place to be safe in?
In fact, isn’t that why there was a “United” States of America formed in the first place, to give we, the people, the citizens of this nation, a place safe from the machinations and intrigues and threats from the nations of the world around us?
As for me, in 1965, I was a student at a local community college studying construction technology so that I could be a functioning part of the society around me, as opposed to being a burden on that society, which was an American value to me, anyway – if you want something, get off your *** and work towards it, and maybe, just maybe, ,with hard work and some effort, you will achieve your goal, and four years later in 1969, there I would be in Viet Nam, defending what were then called this nation’s “values,” which may or may not be its values anymore, but who can really tell?
Getting back to Hillary, who was destined for greatness from the time she was born, the Washington Post article tells us:
Clinton thrived in the women-only setting.
She became active in the Young Republicans and urged students to help Brooke (the African-American Senator she later accused of cowardice at the Wellesley graduation on May 31, 1989) become the first African American elected to the Senate since Reconstruction.
“The girl who doesn’t want to go out and shake hands can type letters or do general office work,” she told the Wellesley newspaper.
Clinton held up Barry Goldwater, the senator from Arizona who lost the 1964 presidential race, as an icon.
end quotes
And yes, Barry Goldwater was an icon – as the Lyndon Johnson campaign put it, “In your guts, you know he nuts!”
What drew the young Hillary to Barry Goldwater remains a mystery to this day.
But we are talking about March 18, 1968, and Barry Goldwater is now long since gone from the American political scene, to be replaced in Hillary’s political world with Senator Eugene McCarthy, of whom then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s campaign circulated the slogan that “the communists in Vietnam are watching the New Hampshire primary…don’t vote for fuzzy thinking and surrender,” which was a direct reference to Eugene McCarthy, Hillary’s chosen presidential contender that year to replace Goldwater as her icon.
Despite that slogan, McCarthy stunned spectators of the race by winning a surprising 42.2 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49.4 percent, which media outlets described the results as a “moral victory” for McCarthy, which in turn influenced Robert Kennedy’s decision to enter the race on March 16.
Two days later, as we see in his “Remarks at the University of Kansas” above on March 18, 1968, Bobby Kennedy said these words to the American people:
I’m glad to come here to the home of the man who publicly wrote: “If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges.”
”The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.”
end quotes
The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow, people.
Does that sound at all rational or sane?
And as we have all this kerfuffle today about what role the attorney general plays in our lives in terms of “law enforcement,” keep in mind that when Bobby Kennedy was speaking those words on March 18, 1968 about the more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow, which happens to be the world we are living in right now today, a world that came to us from those times, Bobby had been the 64th U.S. Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, serving under his older brother President John F. Kennedy and his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson.
So what is up with that, people?
What is up with a former United States attorney general and a Democrat presidential contender telling us that he was glad to come to the home of the man who publicly wrote if our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, then there is something wrong with our colleges?
As we have this discussion in here of American values and who it is that we are, and who it is that we are not, at least according to Hillary Clinton, what message comes across from that, given that on May 31, 1989, a year and a couple of months after Bobby Kennedy spoke those words, according to the Washington Post, Hillary, the onetime Goldwater Girl, reinvented herself as a provocative voice speaking for her angry generation, and eight months after that, in January of 1970, that angry generation Hillary Clinton had become the provocative voice of was waiting for me and other returning Viet Nam veterans at the airport in San Francisco, California, the city of Haight-Ashbury, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and above all else in 1970, LOVE, to howl at us and yowl at us and holler and chant and spit at us, which is treatment worse than that afforded immigrants to this country by that same angry generation?
What lessons on American values emerge from that, I wonder, and exactly whose values are they, anyway, besides Hillary Clinton’s?
As to Hillary, who was born for greatness, as was Cleopatra VII Philopator before her, it was simply her time to shine back then when American college campuses were erupting in riots and demonstrations, even at Wellesley College where Hillary was, as the Washington Post tells us:
The campus was alive with student protests, reflecting the growing unrest of the times.
There was a string of student petitions demanding greater racial diversity in enrollment and faculty hiring, notices for meetings of national student protest groups, and mounting local opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War.
end quotes
The Viet Nam war, and those who fought in it, as if we were the enemies of the American people.
Hillary’s moment had come.
As she was to say in her famous May 31, 1989 Wellesley College graduation speech:
Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything.
We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible.
And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.
The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago.
We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible.
Consequently, we expected a lot.
Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade—years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program—so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities.
But it wasn’t a discouraging gap and it didn’t turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18.
It just inspired us to do something about that gap.
What we did is often difficult for some people to understand.
Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education.
Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder’s parking lot.
We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement.
We worked for a pass-fail system.
We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making.
And luckily we were at a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning.
So we have made progress.
We have achieved some of the things that we initially saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality.
Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know.
We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that were coming to Wellesley, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here.
We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.
Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House.
We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world.
end quotes
The outer world, people, that is where I was back then with respect to Hillary Clinton, as were most Americans, and truthfully, it still remains that way.
And that brings me back to “A Citizen of Philadelphia,” that being Peletiah Webster in
Philadelphia January 1787 in “The Weakness of Brutus Exposed,” where he informed us as follows:
The Romans rose, from small beginnings, to a very great extent of territory, population, and wisdom; I don’t think their constitution of government, was near so good as the one proposed to us, yet we find their power, strength, and establishment, were raised to their utmost height, under a republican form of government.
The Carthagenians acquired an amazing degree of strength, wealth, and extent of dominion, under a republican form of government.
Neither they or the Romans, owed their dissolation to any causes arising from that kind of government: ’twas the party rage, animosity, and violence of their citizens, which destroyed them both; it weakened them, ’till the one fell under the power of their enemy, and was thereby reduced to ruin; the other changed their form of government, to a monarchy, which proved in the end, equally fatal to them.
end quotes
Ttwas the party rage, animosity, and violence of their citizens, which destroyed them both, people!
Just as party rage, animosity, and violence of our citizens may well destroy us today.
Webster continued as follows:
The same causes, if they can’t be restrained, will weaken or destroy any nation on earth, let their form of government be what it will; witness the division and dissolution of the Roman empire; the late dismemberment of Poland; the intestine divisions, rage, and wars of Italy, of France, of Spain, and of England.
No form of government can preserve a nation which can’t control the party rage of its own citizens; when any one citizen can rise above the control of the laws, ruin draws near.
end quotes
Is he talking about us today?
Getting back to Webster:
’Tis not possible for any nation on earth, to hold their strength and establishment, when the dignity of their government is lost, and this dignity will forever depend on the wisdom and firmness of the officers of government, aided and supported by the virtue and patriotism of their citizens.
But after all, the grand secret of forming a good government, is, to put good men into the administration: for wild, vicious, or idle men, will ever make a bad government, let its principles be ever so good; but grave, wise, and faithful men, acting under a good constitution, will afford the best chance of security, peace, and prosperity, to the citizens, which can be derived from civil police, under the present disorders, and uncertainty of all earthly things.
end quotes
Are there any American values hidden away in those words, I wonder?
A question for our times.
Paul Plante says
As we continue to ponder American values in our quest to determine who it is that we are and who it is that we are not, and by the way, Happy Women’s Day to all the women out there, you are very much appreciated by this writer, anyway, it is both interesting and informative to go back to March 18, 1968 to Kansas and the speech of Bobby Kennedy that Hillary Clinton made reference to as “Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country” at the American Legion convention on September 1, 2016 and examine it in closer detail, to see what relevance it might have to this discussion we are having today.
To begin, we have this, to wit, keeping in mind that these are words that were being spoken in 1968:
Our young people – the best educated, and the best comforted in our history, turn from the Peace Corps and public commitment of a few years ago – to lives of disengagement and despair – many of them turned on with drugs and turned off on America – none of them here, of course, at Kansas – right?
end quotes
Our young people, the best educated, and the best comforted in our history, turn from the public commitment of a few years ago to lives of disengagement and despair, many of them turned on with drugs and turned off on America.
Our young people, the best comforted in our history!
Who is it that Bobby Kennedy is talking about there, when he talks about young people here in the United States of America who were the best comforted in our history?
Who were they, and where are they now, for they certainly were not all of us, as my own young life experiences as a poor person out in the countryside attest?
I was not comforted in this country as a young person, nor did I seek comforting!
Being alive and in good health was comfort enough, and the rest was up to me.
And who was it that was giving these young people in America this comfort?
And given all of that comfort, why then were they turning to lives of disengagement and despair, with many of them turned on with drugs and turned off on America?
Now, there is a question to ponder, alright, as we consider the heroin and opioid epidemic gripping this nation’s comforted youth today.
Or was that just some hyperbole from a self-serving political speech by a U.S. presidential candidate?
Getting back to Bobby Kennedy:
All around us, all around us, – not just on the question of Vietnam, not just on the question of the cities, not just the question of poverty, not just on the problems of race relations – but all around us, and why you are so concerned and why you are so disturbed – the fact is, that men have lost confidence in themselves, in each other, it is confidence which has sustained us so much in the past – rather than answer the cries of deprivation and despair – cries which the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders tells us could split our nation finally asunder – rather than answer these desperate cries, hundreds of communities and millions of citizens are looking for their answers, to force and repression and private gun stocks – so that we confront our fellow citizen across impossible barriers of hostility and mistrust and again, I don’t believe that we have to accept that.
end quote
But since we still have those seemingly impossible barriers of hostility and mistrust, or perhaps have them all over again, do we have to accept that?
And if not, what is the answer?
As to Hillary’s answer, it was expressed quite well in her famous Wellesley College commencement address on May 31, 1969 as reported in the Washington Post article “Hillary Clinton’s breakout moment at Wellesley College” by Frances Stead Sellers and Marilyn W. Thompson on August 14, 2016 as follows:
With the national media closely following campus upheaval that spring, Clinton stole the spotlight by rebuking a Washington symbol she had helped elect.
Her performance surprised everyone, even her close friends.
“We’re not interested in social reconstruction,” she corrected the speaker, Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts.
“It’s human reconstruction.”
end quotes
But really, people, there are over 300 million souls in this country now, so who is going to do all of that human reconstruction, and more to the point, how?
What is human reconstruction, anyway?
Does it hurt?
Is it painful?
Will it leave permanent scars?
As of this date, no answers from Hillary on that subject have been forthcoming, and truthfully people, does that sound at all like a viable solution to what ails this nation today, or is that just pie-in-the-sky utopian thinking, believing that all of mankind’s woes can be cured by reconstructing human beings into Hillary Clinton’s image?
In 1968, Bobby Kennedy, who had been the 64th Attorney General of the United States from January 1961 to September 1964, serving under his older brother President John F. Kennedy and his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, told us that “men have lost confidence in themselves, in each other, it is confidence which has sustained us so much in the past ,,,”
Consider that, people, “men have lost confidence in each other,” as we read in the Los Angeles Times article “Violence breaks out at pro-Trump rally in Berkeley” by Peter H. King and Ruben Vives on 6 March 2017 as follows:
For the second time in a month, Berkeley was the scene of violent demonstrations as supporters of President Trump clashed with counter-protesters Saturday on the streets of the city.
At least 10 people were arrested and seven others were injured as a series of disturbances marred what was supposed to be a pro-Trump rally in the famously liberal community.
The unrest underscores the heightened political tensions that have taken hold since Trump took office in January.
Saturday’s “March 4 Trump” rally, one of several held across the country, began at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park about 2 p.m.
The Trump supporters marched several blocks but were met by a group of counter-demonstrators, and fights began breaking out, according to Matthai Chakko, a spokesman for the city of Berkeley.
Videos and photos posted on Twitter showed people punching each other and pulling their hair, with one man using an unidentified object to beat another person.
At least two people, with their faces covered up, could be seen on video trying to set fire to an American flag, while a photo on Twitter showed the bloody face of a man who wore a T-shirt that said “Trump is My President.”
Amy Leona Masker, a 23-year-old student from Las Positas College in Livermore who was on crutches, was among the counter-demonstrators.
She and a fellow student were standing together when they saw the fighting break out.
“These crutches came in handy when people started shoving,” Masker said.
Masker said she came out to “support what really is our country.”
end quotes
She came out to “support what really is our country,” but what really is our country?
Still no answers on that forthcoming.
Getting back to the LA Times article on who it is that we seem to be today, more and more, and men losing confidence in each other, we have:
Chakko said among the other items police confiscated at the rally were metal pipes, bats and two-by-fours.
“A group of people carrying bricks were detained and the bricks were confiscated,” he said.
end quotes
Really, people, what is up with that?
Do you bring bricks and metal pipes and bats and two-by-fours to what is going to be a peaceful demonstration or counter-demonstration?
Or do you bring those things because you intend to bust some heads?
Getting back to the LA Times:
Berkeley was not the only city that reported clashes between demonstrators.
Six people protesting a Trump rally in St. Paul, Minn., were arrested on felony riot charges after they lit fireworks inside the Minnesota State Capitol and fled, police told the Associated Press.
In Nashville, two people were arrested as protesters clashed with Trump supporters at the Tennessee Capitol.
The groups at times cursed at each other and made physical contact, which state troopers broke up, NPR affiliate WPLN reported.
At least some of the counter-protesters appeared to be members of the so-called black bloc, a group that UC Berkeley officials blamed for many of the problems on campus last month.
The self-described anarchists or anti-fascists have left school and law enforcement officials struggling to cope with their tactics.
The term “black bloc” was used to describe the tight wedges of black-clad protesters in helmets and masks who appeared in street demonstrations in Germany in the 1970s, confounding efforts to single out, identify and prosecute individuals.
end quotes
When I read about these “black bloc” counter protesters, presumably among the ones Hillary Clinton is cheering on with her TWITTER TWEETS, and their resemblance to the tight wedges of black-clad protesters in helmets and masks who appeared in street demonstrations in Germany in the 1970s, confounding efforts to single out, identify and prosecute individuals, I am brought back to these words from p.170 of “World Wars And Revolutions” by Walter Phelps Hall, PhD, of Princeton, copyrighted 1943, in the section “THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NAZIS,” as follows:
The chancellor was Bruning, a Centrist.
Neither politically nor financially was the republic to be aided in her death struggle.
The very liberalism of the Weimar Republic was telling now against it.
For years the Nationalists and the Nazis had been organizing and drilling informal private armies of their own, the former the Steel Helmets, the latter the Sturmabteilung (Brown Shirts).
Even the peaceful Social Democrats had done likewise with the Reichsbanner corps.
Germany was seething with violent disorder.
Armed bands were attacking Jews and Communists, the former not retaliating, the latter fighting back.
Between the accession of Bruning in March, 1930, and the burning of the Reichstag building in February, 1933, which threw Germany into Hitler’s power, the utmost confusion reigned.
Plot and counterplot followed.
There were two presidential and two Reichstag elections; there were innumerable street riots and many murders; and the political balance swayed backward and forward between the defenders of Weimar and the Nationalists, the Nazis, and the Communists who hated the republic.
Much is still obscure concerning these three hectic years during which the Nazis and the Nationalists, wearing their private uniforms, marched out of the Reichstag and into it again, during which Bruning, a confirmed moderate and well-wisher of the republic, was compelled to rule largely by decree until he lost the support of the President, during which also the Junker aristocracy played constantly with fire (Adolph Hitler), only in the end to be badly scorched.
end quotes
Germany was seething with violent disorder, then, and today, it is this nation which is seething with violent disorder, with what seem to be private political armies springing up such as this so-called black bloc, the self-described anarchists or anti-fascists who have left school and law enforcement officials struggling to cope with their tactics and the group that UC Berkeley officials blamed for many of the problems on campus last month.
There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear; there’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware; I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down!
Those are words to a VEET NAM era song by the Buffalo Springfield released in 1966.
How appropriate they again seem today.
Or is it all just me?
Paul Plante says
My goodness, people!
Just when you thought that it could not get any more bizarre and surreal than it already is, it gets even more bizarre and surreal, as we read in the BLOOMBERG article “Russian Hackers Said to Seek Hush Money From Liberal U.S. Groups” by Michael Riley on 6 March 2017, as follows:
Russian hackers are targeting U.S. progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations’ emails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms.
At least a dozen groups have faced extortion attempts since the U.S. presidential election, said the people, who provided broad outlines of the campaign.
The ransom demands are accompanied by samples of sensitive data in the hackers’ possession.
In one case, a non-profit group and a prominent liberal donor discussed how to use grant money to cover some costs for anti-Trump protesters.
end quotes
What in the heck is going on here, people?
Is this America?
Or is it really someplace else, and who among us can tell the difference anymore, so strange things seem as the days go by.
Are these U.S. progressive groups allegedly being targeted by these Russian hackers looking for hush money, if we are to believe the news, the ones who are paying the freight to maintain and train this paramilitary anarchist group that calls itself the “black bloc?”
For those of you who do not follow the malicious acts of some dangerous lunatics calling themselves anarchists and so are unfamiliar with this “black bloc,” we can read about them as follows in this report from CBS San Francisco on February 1, 2017, as follows:
BERKELEY, Calif. (CBS SF/AP) — Protesters armed with bricks and fireworks mounted an assault on the building hosting a speech by polarizing Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos Wednesday night, forcing the event’s cancellation.
Hundreds of protesters were observed at Wednesday evening’s event.
Over 2,100 people responded to a Facebook post that they would be attending.
Several student groups had called for protests and pledged to shut down the evening event.
Earlier Wednesday, the university sent a notice to all students that warned of crowds near the student union, where the 500-seat, sold-out event was scheduled.
“We anticipate there will be major protest/demonstration activity leading up to and surrounding this event,” the letter from school officials said.
It did not discourage protests but advised those who didn’t wish to participate to avoid the area.
By 8 p.m., a large crowd of people had moved off the campus and onto Telegraph Avenue.
They smashed ATMs at a Bank of America branch and set several trash fires on Telegraph Avenue.
After marching west on Durant Avenue, the group moved north on Shattuck Avenue, smashing windows and vandalizing a Mechanics Bank branch near the corner of Bancroft Way.
Chase and Wells Fargo branches were also vandalized.
A Starbucks location near campus was vandalized and looted.
Police also received reports that banks were set on fire in the area of Center Street and Shattuck Avenue.
At 9:23 p.m., BART officials announced that trains were not stopping at the Downtown Berkeley station due to a civil disturbance in the area.
end quotes
They smashed and looted a Starbucks, people!
What kind of a desperate lunatic act is that, now?
And did those protesters who showed up armed with bricks and fireworks and crowbars come expecting to take part in a peaceful assembly as the First Amendment of our Constitution guarantees, as is explained in the article “Right To Assemble” by Lisa A. Bancuk as follows:
In the First Amendment to the United States Constitution it states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” ).
The right of a citizen to peacefully 1) parade and gather or 2) demonstrate support or opposition of public policy or 3) express one’s views is guaranteed by the freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble.
Historic Roots
The First Amendment states that Congress can make no law hindering the right of the people to peaceably assemble.
Before the Bill of Rights, the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress declared on October 14, 1774:
The inhabitants of the English colonies in North-America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principals of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following rights: They have a right peaceably to assemble, consider their grievances, and petition the king: and that all prosecutions, prohibitory proclamations, and commitments for the same are illegal.
end quotes
Now, as one of this nation’s many disabled veterans who shed blood to defend our Constitution and to keep Hillary Clinton safe, I will be the first to admit that these anarchists in the paramilitary organization known as the “black bloc” certainly have as much right as anybody on the planet peaceably to assemble, consider their grievances, and petition the government for redress of any possible grievances they might have, but when you are peaceably to assemble, do you really need to bring along your bricks and bats and two-by-fours so you can smash the **** out of a Starbucks in the course of being peaceable?
Think about that for a moment if you will, people, as we read about these liberal groups in America allegedly using some kind of grant money to pay protesters with, which the hackers in Russia have somehow caught wind of and are now seeking hush money to keep quiet about it.
Getting back to the BLOOMBERG article “Russian Hackers Said to Seek Hush Money From Liberal U.S. Groups” by Michael Riley on 6 March 2017, we have:
At least some groups have paid the ransoms even though there is little guarantee the documents won’t be made public anyway.
Demands have ranged from about $30,000 to $150,000, payable in untraceable bitcoins, according to one of the people familiar with the probe.
end quote
Now, that is some serious money, people.
And getting back to BLOOMBERG:
The Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank with strong links to both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and Arabella Advisors, which guides liberal donors who want to invest in progressive causes, have been asked to pay ransoms, according to people familiar with the probes.
“Arabella Advisors was affected by cyber crime,” said Steve Sampson, a spokesman for the firm, which lists 150 employees operating in four offices.
’’All facts indicate this was financially motivated.’’
Allison Preiss, a spokeswoman for the Center for American Progress, said the group had no comment.
The hackers’ targeting of left-leaning groups — and the sifting of emails for sensitive or discrediting information — has set off alarms that the attacks could constitute a fresh wave of Russian government meddling in the U.S. political system.
None of the possible explanations for the attacks are particularly comforting to the victimized groups, few of which are household names but are part of the foundation of liberal politics in the U.S.
end quotes
The foundation of liberal policies in the U.S., people.
But what kind of “liberal policies” can they be if they are somehow associated with brick-wielding and crowbar-wielding anarchist paramilitaries who are out there smashing the **** out of a Starbucks, which is the symbol of liberalism in America and the world if there ever was one.
And interestingly, that brings us back to a curious statement made by then just plain Hillary D. Rodham, before she hooked up with Bill at Yale to form the power duo they are today, in her 1969 Student Commencement Speech at elite Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts on May 31, 1969, as follows:
Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder’s parking lot.
end quotes
“Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations …”
WHOA!
Play the tape back, please!
Now, what exactly was our precious Hillary really saying there when she spoke about “media orchestrated demonstrations,” keeping in mind that this was 1969, a time of massive demonstrations and civil unrest here in America?
Was Hillary actually saying that these demonstrations back then, including the Dow Riots in Madison, Wisconsin and the student riots in Chicago, Illinois during the Democrat National Convention in 1968 were in fact orchestrated by the media?
It certainly seems it, does it not, people?
And if so, what does that tell us about who we are as a people?
Somebody orchestrated those demonstrations back then, because they certainly didn’t happen by accident, given the relatively primitive means of communication among and between the average citizen that existed back then before Al Gore invented the internet and got us all finally hooked together as we are today.
And that brings us to perhaps the weirdest part of this on-going story concerning who it is who might not be paying these paramilitary protesters, which comes to us from the Washington Post – Democracy Dies in Darkness story “How a hoax website about paid protesters came crumbling down live on TV” by Abby Ohlheiser on January 18, 2017, as follows:
The website for an organization calling itself Demand Protest made its mission pretty clear: “When your strategy demands paid protest, we organize and bring it to life.”
Billing itself as a group that generated the “appearance of outrage” on behalf of left-wing causes, the existence of Demand Protest became an attractive story for many right-wing media outlets.
The group, it appeared, was proof that dissent against Trump was manufactured by shady leftist organizations, and could be lucrative: one Backpage.com ad placed in Demand Protest’s name promised a full-time job that paid a $2,500 retainer, plus $50/hr., and benefits.
It was the perfect story to share, if you’re inclined to believe that anti-Trump protesters must be getting paid to be there.
Something to that effect has long been in the canon of largely unsubstantiated rumors circulating on the Trump Internet.
end quotes
It is interesting to read that statement in the Washington Post on January 18, 2017 about “if you’re inclined to believe that anti-Trump protesters must be getting paid to be there” in the light of the BLOOMBERG story above from 6 March 2017 about these liberal groups allegedly being shaken down by these Russian hackers who somehow have the goods on them for something, anyway, like paying for protesters with some kind of grant money.
Getting back to the Washington Post and fake news:
A well-known fake news writer even fabricated an “interview” with a protester who said he was paid $3,500 to protest at a Trump rally – a story that was shared on Twitter by Trump’s then-campaign manager.
And like that made-up story, it also appears that Demand Protest is a made-up group, one that fooled quite a few news sources before being dramatically debunked on-air by Tucker Carlson.
end quotes
WOW, people, can you believe this stuff?
If I was writing it, you would think I had gone plumb loco, and truthfully, so would I, for who can write this stuff without being considered crazy or off the wall?
Getting back to the venerable Washington Post, a fount of truth in American press reporting if there ever was one, we have:
Here’s an incomplete look at how we got here: a few days ago, the Gateway Pundit wrote a piece titled “BREAKING: Far Left Group Is Paying Activists a Monthly Salary to Stop TRUMP,” and cited 4Chan in mentioning a possible link between Demand Protest and George Soros.
InfoWars was a bit more skeptical, hedging their story on Demand Protest as a “report” and writing that “it’s unclear if the DemandProtest.com website is actually legitimate.”
The Washington Times also credulously reported on the Backpage ads.
Breitbart, meanwhile, used the ads as evidence in an article that suggested that fears of pro-Trump inauguration violence was “fake news.”
“The facts tell a different story,” the Breitbart article says.
“The left is gearing up for war, and hiring mercenaries.”
Other sites, like The Federalist Papers, helped to feed the story into the hyperpartisan Facebook ecosystem.
It made it to the Drudge Report.
All this happened with no evidence to support claims that Demand Protest actually did anything it advertised on its website – the existence of a backpage ad, which pretty much anyone can create and place, was it.
end quotes
Ah, okay, if you say so, you are the Washington Post, afterall, but truthfully, people, and you would be the ones to know – is the Facebook ecosystem really hyperpartisan, or is that simply some hyperbole freely injected into a news story about a possibly fake website for dramatic effect?
Getting back to how it is that the Washington Post knows for certain that Demand Protest is a fake website, we have:
And on a Fox News segment Tuesday night, someone claiming to represent the group more or less admitted that the whole thing was a hoax.
Tucker Carlson’s bizarre on-camera interview with a Demand Protest representative who gave his name as “Dom Tullipso” felt like a piece of performance art, something even Carlson himself said out loud in the middle of the interview.
“So, this is a sham, your company isn’t real, your website is fake, the claims you have made are lies, this is a hoax,” Carlson began, before saying that his team couldn’t find a record of a person by the name “Dom Tullipso.”
The supposed-Tullipso responded by correcting Carlson’s pronunciation of Tullipso.
“Tullipso” also claimed, over the course of the interview, that a wave of hate mail from all the media coverage prompted the group to change its mind about a half-hour before the interview, so the group was now pro-Trump.
“It’s pretty darn easy these days to say whatever you want on national TV and have it passed off as truth,” he said.
At the end of the interview, “Tullispso” told Carlson, “God bless you for fact checking, even if you did it while we were on the air.”
end quotes
There we have it, people: it is pretty darn easy these days to say whatever you want on national TV and have it passed off as truth, especially if you happen to be a candidate running for the office of U.S. president.
And that is it, people, and how much more conclusive do we really need it to be, being the mature, rational people that we are – the Washington Post says it all, or at least what needs to be said – Demand Protest doesn’t exist, so it cannot be the one that is paying these protesters to come to demonstrations with bricks and bats and crowbars to smash the **** out of a Starbucks?
So is paying them?
Or are they doing it pro bono out of the goodness of their hearts and a heightened sense of patriotism and civic duty?
Stay tuned, for with this bizarre chapter in our American history, there is much more yet to come.
Paul Plante says
And as we continue to ponder what it is that is happening here, inside the confusion, rancor, division and calumniating that is gripping the United States of America today, so that if it were an animal like a dog, for example, one would expect to see it down on the ground on its side furiously spinning in a thrashing circle with three of its legs crazily pumping while at the same time copiously foaming at the mouth while chewing off its other leg with snarling, snapping teeth, and who it is that we as a people might be in the course of actually ever getting there, assuming that we are a people, and not just a large mass of bodies in somewhat close proximity to each other with no other bonds than that, much as what happens to rats in a maze when you pack too many of them in there and they become anti-social as a result, this as we consider the statement the then just plain Hillary Rodham before she became Hillary Clinton made in her famous commencement address at elite Wellesley College on May 31, 1969 about “Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations,” that in the light of these violent “blac bloc” paramilitaries out in California smashing the **** out of a Starbucks, and that in the light of these most recent revelations about Russian hackers shaking down liberal groups in this country for hush money, apparently to keep them quiet about any connections these liberal groups might have with these violent protesters, we should take just a moment to consider this following about these “blac bloc”dudes from the Los Angeles Times article “UC Berkeley blames violent ‘black bloc’ protesters for ‘unprecedented invasion'” by Veronica Rocha and Peter H. King on February 5, 2017, reporting from BERKELEY:
They dressed “like ninjas” and marched onto UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza like a paramilitary force armed with bats, steel rods, fireworks and Molotov cocktails, officials say.
The scheduled appearance Wednesday of conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was still two hours away, but it was precisely the time that most local television stations were beginning their live 6 p.m. broadcasts.
end quote
HMMMMMM, people.
Precisely the time that most local television stations were beginning their live 6 p.m. broadcasts.
Ah, OK, and that was probably just by coincidence, wasn’t it, people, that these “blac bloc” dudes, and notice the language of the LA Times describing them as “marching onto UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza like a paramilitary force armed with bats, steel rods, fireworks and Molotov cocktails,” the normal run of non-projectile weaponry one normally brings to what is going to be a peaceful demonstration, and all those waiting television cameras just happened to be in the same place at precisely the same time.
That was a coincidence, wasn’t it?
So what happened then?
Well, let’s go back to the LA Times and see:
Within minutes, the group of 100 to 150 agitators had smashed half a dozen windows with barricades, launched fireworks at police and toppled a diesel-powered klieg light, which caused it to burst into flames.
end quotes
OMG, people, and the television cameras just loved it, because let’s face it, people, when you are in show biz like the newsies on TV are, its all about ratings, and dull and boring stuff does not good ratings make.
But a bunch of well-armed ninjas smashing the **** out of stuff right in front of you, live as it happens, and making things burn on live TV?
You betcha – that is the stuff careers in TV news are made out of!
Getting back to the LA Times, we have this surprising news about these “blac bloc” dudes:
“They didn’t come to lock arms and sing ‘Kumbaya,’” said Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor and spokesman for the UC Berkeley.
“They came to [mess stuff] up,” he said, using stronger language.
end quotes
WOW, people, ain’t it?
Who’d a thought that there could be such people right here in the same America that we all are in.
Or are we, really?
Do we share the same reality as these “blac bloc” dudes do?
Are we all at heart in this country really a bunch of closet anarchists, a “basket of deplorables” as Hillary Clinton would have it, secretly salivating for a chance to do what these “blac bloc” dudes have the courage to do, grab a crowbar or tire iron or maybe even a rolling pin, and go out on a rampage with them, smashing everything in sight and turning over things, while laughing maniacally, just for the hell of it, since when you are an anarchist, you are bound by no rules, and thus, nothing you do really has to make any kind of rational sense.
You just smash up a Starbucks, because it is there and it makes you feel all warm and squishy inside to do it.
Or are we in fact, some of us, anyway, “better than that,” as we also hear from the same Hillary Clinton?
Something to think about, anyway.
Getting back to the “blac bloc” and the LA Times:
While so-called black bloc agitators have become a fixture of Bay Area demonstrations in the last decade, their appearance at Berkeley on Wednesday and otherwise peaceful demonstrations threatens to inflame tensions in an already polarized nation.
end quotes
Their appearance at Berkeley and otherwise peaceful demonstrations threatens to inflame tensions in an already polarized nation.
An already polarized nation, people?
Are they talking about us?
Or some hellhole like Syria?
And is that by accident, people, do you think, that these “blac bloc” paramilitaries dressed like ninjas are showing up now, which raises a real serious question as to how somebody is able to take a bunch of supposed anarchists who are anarchists because they don’t follow the rules of others, and mold them into a cohesive fighting force all working together to smash up a Starbucks, along with a college campus, which means somebody is giving orders and the rest are taking them, which is quite uncharacteristic of an anarchist.
That is why anarchy has always failed in the past, because anarchists are individualists, they don’t form collectives.
So how did somebody get them to start working together now?
Getting back to the LA Times:
The self-described anarchists or antifascists have left school and law enforcement agencies struggling to cope with their tactics.
Moving officers into Wednesday night’s melee, would have created “a lethal, horror situation,” said campus Police Chief Margo Bennett.
“We have to do exactly what we did last night: to show tremendous restraint,” she said.
end quotes
Yes, people, you are reading that right – the police were told to stand down and so they stood back and let the violence happen for the TV cameras to capture, out of cringing fear as to what would happen to them if they dared confront these domestic terrorists running rampage in our country, or the country that used to be ours, anyway.
Domestic terrorists, one; police, nothing, in that encounter.
And here comes in the “foreign influence” element:
UC Berkeley officials are now talking with federal and local law enforcement agencies about how to address black bloc tactics, which first appeared in Europe in the 1980s but have grown increasingly common in the United States in recent years.
end quotes
How, people, did these “blac bloc” tactics manage, like some invasive plant species, or pest, to migrate across an ocean that separates us from Europe, to become commonplace over here?
And who was it who then schooled others in the use of these violent tactics over here?
Getting back to the LA Times:
“We have never seen this on the Berkeley campus,” Mogulof said.
“This was an unprecedented invasion.”
end quotes
An unprecedented invasion, people.
How would that go over in Cape Charles, does anyone think?
Or is that something which could never happen here, just elsewhere in somebody else’s backyard?
And what are the possible consequences of this “unprecedented invasion?”
Let’s see what the LA Times has to say about that:
Mogulof said Berkeley administrators are dedicated to protecting the 1st Amendment and free speech, but certain events might need to have a closer look, especially if there is potential for major disruption and destruction on campus.
School officials, he said, are reviewing their policing tactics as well as their policies and protocols for future events featuring controversial speakers.
He said “it’s not about limiting free speech,” but about protecting the students and campus.
end quotes
But of course it is about limiting speech, people, and if anyone bothers to learn the history of this nation, it has been about limiting speech right from the very outset.
Witness the Sedition Act introduced during the reign of second American president John Adams, who some considered literally insane, and The People of the State of New York v. Harry Croswell (3 Johns. Cas. 337 N.Y. 1804), commonly known and cited as People v. Croswell, which was an important case in the evolution of United States defamation law and freedom of speech that was argued by the HIP-HOP star Alexander Hamilton when he was a lawyer in New York.
That was a criminal libel case brought against a Federalist journalist named Harry Croswell for his statements about a number of public officials, including then-President Thomas Jefferson, who wanted Croswell made an example of.
Croswell was initially convicted in Columbia County court, to the south of me, of seditious libel, a very serious offence back then, where the jury was instructed to consider only the question of fact before them, as to whether Croswell had been the one to publish the statements at issue under a pseudonym.
Through Hamilton, Croswell appealed to the Supreme Court of New York, then the state’s highest court, for a new trial on several issues including those instructions and in a famous and lengthy argument on Croswell’s behalf, Alexander Hamilton tried to convince the judges that truthful statements should not be considered defamatory, regardless of what they concerned.
The judges deadlocked and Croswell’s conviction stood, although he was never sentenced or retried, and the following year the issue became legally moot as the New York State Legislature wrote Hamilton’s argument into the state’s libel law, breaking with English precedent under which the truthfulness of the statements alone is not a defense.
Other states and the federal government then followed suit, and since then, it has been a cornerstone of American law on the subject that truthful statements are not actionable.
So how to shut them down then?
Simple!
Every time somebody is going to try to speak, say a Republican congress person, for example, and you don’t want them to have a voice, you just sic a violent mob and them, and that is that.
Speech is really still free; it is just that some free speech can be heard, and well, for the sake of public safety from these violent club-wielding goons at loose in this country now, some other speech that still is free just can’t be heard in public, for the sake of safety.
So the goons and the anti-free-speech people win by default, and by plan.
And curiously, thinking of all this anarchist violence in this country today, coupled with Hamilton defending that libel case involving Tommy Jefferson, reminded me of all the bad press being given to Tommy back then, due to his unwavering support for the French Revolution, including the beheading of the hapless Louis Capet, once Louis XVI of France before the revolution Tommy Jefferson in this country was cheering on, and cries that our Tommy was really a Jacobin, himself.
And when I GOOGLED “Jefferson was a Jacobin,” from something calling itself marxists.org, we have as follows:
Jacobinism
The Jacobins were the leaders of the French bourgeois revolution of 1789-93.
The term is now used to refer to the radical democratic-revolutionary traditions of struggle of the bourgeois democratic movement against tyranny.
Jacobinism was the first international revolutionary movement, having inspired the supporters of American politician, Thomas Jefferson.
His supporters organized “Jacobin Clubs” to support his candidacy for President of the United States in the early 19th Century.
end quotes
So here and there are connected by an unbroken chain, people.
Now, if we could only figure out where here really is, and who it is that we are not, so we can finally figure out who in the heck it is that we are, what a world this could be.
Mike says
I can’t wait for the baby boomers are too old to be in politics, die off, or go live in there little retirement homes. Their generation truly has been the narcissistic and sociopathic generation that took the great gains in science (think moon landing), social and economic equality (civil rights), civic mindedness (investing in education and infrastructure), even environmental protection (think Nixon and the clean air/water acts) all from the generation before the boomers and the boomers squandered it to leave us in the worst place possible where my generation will not ever retire, will not have affordable health care, will not have affordable housing, and will be left with looming environmental and world wide political disasters. Retire already, enjoy the social security and health care plans you created for yourself at our expense, and get out of the way of progress already – and that can go for most anyone from the right and left over 60.
And for gosh sake Boomers, learn how to use a computer and how to create a proper password so your generation will stop handing sensitive information over to every hacker in the world!
Paul Plante says
WOW, old people out there in America, now, there is a dude on a roll, this Mike, and you know what (yes, I am one of his targets, I know that, being over 60 as I am, but I am a COP [Compassionate Old Person] and so, don’t hold it against him, given that he doesn’t have a clue as to what he is on about, and thus, it would be cruel to hold him responsible for uttering gibberish in here), God bless the dude for at least having the guts to come up out of his basement, where too many of his generation hide these days, to make his statement condemning us old people in America, even old veterans like myself who fought and bled for Mike’s First Amendment right to be against old people in America, or maybe it should be consigning us to literal oblivion, and you know what further; perhaps, as he says, and he does sound like a college graduate, psychology, perhaps, or maybe good old tried and true Poly Sci, which produces progressive ideas such as what Mike is peddling here with his plan to put all us old folks into the old age home where we will be out of sight and finally, not only out of mind, but more importantly, out of our possessions and property so people like Mike, undoubtedly an enterprising dude, from the sounds of it, can swoop in and pick them up for a song, and then make a killing flipping them, maybe we actually deserve that kind of treatment, just because we are in fact old, and thus, largely useless, or worse, a burden, the Mike’s generation, which is now coming into possession and power in America.
God bless America, people, land of the brave and home of the free, there, right before your eyes.
Mike, dude, do me a favor, when you have your people coming to take me away to the old age home, would you please have them send a fax to my people, so my people can have me setting out by the curb for the sake of convenience for your people.
And Mike, thank you for your thoughts and solicitude for the old people in America.
They can’t put into words how much comfort they get from your kind thoughts and prayers, and Mike, dude, I know it don’t seem possible, and I would bet you won’t believe it, but trust me, dude, I’m farther down the road than you might ever get with that bad attitude you have towards old people, one day, you too are going to be sixty, if you can lose enough of the pure stupid you are so firmly in possession of to get there, and as you advocate so strongly in here for the forced removal of old people from your society, you better hope when you turn sixty that your plans today for the removal of old people never came to fruition, or you will find them coming for you, and Mike, they won’t be kind – “Your kind aren’t wanted here, pops, now, get in the van or we’ll throw you in there, your choice, old man!”
And Mike, thank you for your patriotism on behalf of a grateful nation that cherishes you so for the promise for the future that you represent.
Mike says
Exactly my point – either fight for the future (a.k.a the youth) or get out of the way. Stop pushing all the problems down the road. I’m no spring chicken either and I will be happy to get out of the way when I’m approaching senility because I will rest well knowing I empowered the people younger than me to think, to fight, to learn, and to serve (not all people serve by joining the army). You rest on laurels for serving your country years ago – well many people smarter and dumber than you did that so why do you keep using that as a crutch to prove something? If I had a penny for the stupid things that generally follow the statement “…well I served in Viet’NAM…” I’d be richer than Trump. A real man of his actions and words doesn’t need to keep saying how he signed a piece a paper when he turned 18 and for the next few months or years was ordered to do x, y, and z. Substance man…I respect and support the fact that you and millions have served the country. I respect your age and wisdom. However, just like my own elders, I reserve the right to take your wisdom with a grain of salt given the fine mess we are in.
Paul Plante says
Mike, before I say anything else, let me say this, and in all sincerity; you are the dude, Mike, with that piece right above here!
You hit a lot of nails on the head with surprisingly few blows, which is a sign of an artist with words.
But, Mike, while you hit many nails square on the head, at the same time, you made it clear that you haven’t a clue as to the significance of Viet Nam, or VEET NAM, as the horse’s-*** from Texas who replaced JFK in the White House called it, not only in my life, but in the life of this nation, as well, every single soul alive then, and after, including your own life, which is a product of the VEET NAM times in America, all those things you are saying my narcissistic and sociopathic generation squandered, the great gains in science (think moon landing), social and economic equality (civil rights), civic mindedness (investing in education and infrastructure), even environmental protection (think Nixon and the clean air/water acts), all of which you say came from the generation before the boomers and the boomers squandered it to leave your generation in the worst place possible where your my generation will not ever retire, will not have affordable health care, will not have affordable housing, and will be left with looming environmental and world wide political disasters.
Well, Mike, it was that same generation before the Boomers that gave us Viet Nam, and everything in this nation which has happened with Viet Nam, probably starting with racial unrest, something you fail to mention in your screed above.
Viet Nam gave us Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mike, and her senior class thesis on the topic of the Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky, entitled, very appropriately, “There Is Only the Fight.”
That was 1969, right at the heart of the Viet Nam war, give or take.
And to this day, Mike, Hillary is still fighting, which means she always needs a new enemy, and when she was secretary of state, like John “JACK” Kerry, another product of Viet Nam who affects your life today, she created those enemies in Ukraine, Libya, and Syria, where we Boomers are squandering your future today, but oh, wait, wasn’t Barack Hussein Obama really of your generation, not mine?
As to Alinsky, Mike, a product, if I recall, of the generation before the Boomers, whose philosophy of change is sprouting up all around your generation as I write these words with paramilitary forces like the “blac bloc” dudes, who are not of my generation, Mike, running around smashing the **** out of things, like Hitler’s SA used to do, he is the author of “Rules for Radicals,” which provides us as follows:
In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace…. “Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’ This means revolution.” p.3
“Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing.” p.6
“A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage — the political paradise of communism.” p.10
“An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth — truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing…. To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations….” pp.10-11
end quotes
Those are words Barack Hussein Obama adhered to, Mike.
And that is what is going on all around us in America today.
As to John “JACK” Kerry, who was in the Navy in Viet Nam and fashioned himself into a modern-day version with his Swiftboat exploits of the WWII naval hero John “JACK” Kennedy, who became a U.S. president because of his famous PT-109, he lost the presidency because of Viet Nam, Mike, and his testimony before subcommittees of the U.S. Senate in April, 1971, as follows:
There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones.
I conducted harassment and interdiction fire.
I used 50-caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people.
I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages.
All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down.
And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant [William] Calley, are war criminals.
end quotes
Those men he was calling war criminals were members of the generation before the Boomers.
And with respect to the impact of Viet Nam on your generation, Mike, and the squandering of your future, in the Preface to the excellent American history “Dereliction of Duty – Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the lies that led to Viet Nam” by H.R. McMaster, copyright 1997, he states as follows with respect to this thread:
Despite scores of books on the subject, the WHY and HOW of direct U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War remains unclear.
The war continues to capture the public interest in part because, looking back, its cost seems exorbitant – and would seem so even if the United States had “won”.
The war took the lives of fifty-eight thousand Americans and well over one million Vietnamese.
It left Vietnam in ruins and consumed billions of American dollars, nearly wrecking the American economy.
end quotes
There went your future, Mike – POOF!
One day, there was a fire.
How is that for stupid is as stupid does, Mike?
I was 23 when that BULL**** was happening, Mike.
I wasn’t giving the orders, they were being given to me, and not by other Boomers.
So when you vent your spleen on those who you think consigned you to hell, make sure you give some of it to the generation where it belongs.
Getting back to McMaster:
Vietnam divided American society and inflicted upon the United States one of the greatest political traumas since the Civil War.
end quotes
There is your legacy, Mike.
Don’t blame it on me.
And back to McMaster:
Indeed, the war’s legacies proved to be as profound as the war was traumatic.
It led Americans to question the integrity of their government as never before.
end quote
That is me, Mike, that is my contribution to your generation and my own grandchildren – I get off my *** to stand up and be counted, as can plainly be seen in this sworn affidavit from 229 AD2d 650 Supreme Court, State of New York – Appellate Division, Third Judicial Department, to wit:
REPLY AFFIDAVIT
Paul R. Plante, N.Y.S.P.E., being duly sworn, deposes and says:
1. I am one of the pro se petitioner/respondents in the above captioned matter, and as such, I am fully familiar with the facts in the matter and the prior proceedings had herein.
2. I make this affidavit in reply to certain averments made under oath in paragraphs 15, 16 and 17 of the April 22, 1996 Answering Affidavit of Poestenkill Town Supervisor John E. Zweig in connection with the above matter (hereinafter “Zweig Affidavit”), a copy of which is annexed hereto as Exhibit A and made a part of for the Court’s convenience, and in response to certain unsworn and scurrilous allegations made in an April 22, 1996 letter of Poestenkill Town Attorney Patrick J. Tomaselli, Esq. annexed to the Zweig Affidavit as Exhibit D.
10. Based upon a review of the facts in connection with the litigation I have been involved in as a pro se litigant, which upon information and belief Mr. Tomaselli is well aware of in his capacity as attorney for the Town of Poestenkill, it can be readily demonstrated to this Court that the above statement of Mr. Tomaselli which Mr. Zweig relies on in paragraph 16 of his April 22, 1996 affidavit is patently false.
11. Annexed hereto as Exhibit C and made a part hereof is a twenty (20) page decision of Honorable Robert C. Williams, J.S.C. in Matter of Lascari, Kaskoun, Mouawad, Plante, Valentine and Powley v. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation et al., Albany Co. Index No. 3943/92, dated May 18, 1993.
12. As the Court will note from a review of the appearances at page two of that decision, I was one of the pro se petitioners therein.
13. At page three, the Court will note that the petitioners in that petition were asking the Court to determine that the DEC’s decision to proceed in issuing a mined land reclamation permit to Mr. Tomaselli’s client R.J. Valente Gravel, Inc. without requiring preparation of an environmental impact statement was unlawful.
14. “Having reviewed the record” says the Court therein, it agreed with the petitioners and accordingly, the permit was annulled.
15. That decision was never appealed from by the State of New York.
16. In that decision at pages 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 18, the Court relied upon factual statements made by this petitioner in sworn affidavits to that Court in annulling the permit at issue in that proceeding.
18. Annexed hereto as Exhibit D and made a part hereof is a February 15, 1994 decision of Honorable Edward O. Spain, J.S.C. in Matter of Paul R. Plante v. Planning Board of Town of Poestenkill, Rensselaer County Index No. 177914.
19. In that decision which was based upon my pro se petition in that proceeding, Hon. Justice Spain annulled a special use permit which the Planning Board of the Town of Poestenkill had improperly issued to R.J. Valente Gravel, Inc. of Troy, New York, Mr. Tomaselli’s client, on June 17, 1992.
20. Now, according to Mr. Tomaselli’s operative theory at page one of his April 22, 1996 letter annexed to Mr. Zweig’s affidavit as Exhibit D, and according to the averments at paragraph 17 of Mr. Zweig’s April 22, 1996 sworn affidavit, I am supposed to have allegedly “targeted” the Poestenkill Planning Board with “untruthful, unwarranted, and downright vicious personal invectives” allegedly “launched” like so many Scud missiles to serve some particular agenda or cause of mine, which in reality is First Amendment redress of grievance, and I am further alleged by Messrs. Zweig and Tomaselli to have ignored or distorted facts and/or law, concentrating instead on “personal insults and name-calling” against the members of the Poestenkill Planning Board in order to induce Judge Spain, a very respected jurist who now sits on this Court, to annul the permit in question and award me costs in that matter, and according to that operative theory, Judge Spain is supposed to have fallen like a ton of bricks for such bunkum and twaddle in annulling the permit.
21. Such a theory by Messrs. Zweig and Tomaselli of course requires this Court to assume that Judge Spain is a fool, and I personally will have no part in such gratuitous “judge-bashing,” which conduct I extremely revolting and repugnant.
22. In applying the Tomaselli/Zweig “theory” of how the law allegedly works in the County of Rensselaer, where according to Mr. Tomaselli, respected Judges like Justice Spain allegedly annul Town of Poestenkill special permits based on nothing more than distorted facts and/or law and personal insults, I would ask this Court to take note of the fact that costs against planning boards in the State of New York are awarded only when the Court has before it evidence that the planning board acted with gross negligence, or in bad faith or with malice in making the decision appealed from, as was the case in that matter.
23. Apparently, according to the Tomaselli/Zweig theory, my alleged distortions of fact and/or law and personal insults and name-calling in that matter before Judge Spain would have “buffaloed” this Court, and so an appeal would not have succeeded, so “silver a tongue” am I alleged to have.
24. Based upon these two decisions alone, it becomes readily apparent that there is no merit whatsoever to the averments of Mr. Zweig based upon the assertions of Mr. Tomaselli that I am a “liar,” and based upon these two decisions alone, the contempt that these two gentlemen have for the judges who serve the public in the County of Rensselaer becomes readily apparent.
25. It does not end there, however, unfortunately.
26. Annexed hereto as Exhibit E and made a part of is a transcript decision of Judge Spain dated March 28, 1994, in Matter of Paul R. Plante v. Poestenkill Town Board, Jay F. Nish, Paul Sieloff, Nelson Armlin, Mark Dunlea and Kristine Legenbauer, Rensselaer County Index No. 179138, wherein Judge Spain annulled a resolution of the Poestenkill Town Board made on November 10, 1992 based upon facts stated under oath by myself in my pro se petition in that matter.
32. Annexed hereto as Exhibit F and made a part hereof is a September 18, 1995 decision of Honorable James B. Canfield in Matter of Byer et al. v. Town of Poestenkill, Rensselaer County Index No. 183977, wherein Judge Canfield annulled a local law passed by the Poestenkill Town Board in July of 1994 because the Town Board failed to comply with the law as it is written in the State of New York.
33. In that decision at pages two and three, this Court will note that I moved the Court below to intervene in that matter and that I was successful in that motion.
36. At pages six and seven, the Court found based upon my affidavit testimony that the Poestenkill Town Board had “completely” failed to comply with the requirements of SEQRA when it passed Local Law No. 2 of 1994.
40. Annexed hereto as Exhibit G and made a part of is an affirmation of Assistant New York State Attorney General Kathleen Liston Morrison dated October 14, 1993, in Matter of the Application of Paul R. Plante v. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Albany County Index No. 4840-93.
41. In that particular matter, Assistant Attorney General Morrison conceded to Judge Robert C. Williams, J.S.C., based upon the averments in my petition alone that in fact, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation was in error when it issued the permit in question.
42. Specifically, in paragraph 2 of Exhibit G, Assistant Attorney General Morrison can be seen stating that based on the averments in my petition in that matter, DEC was in error in part because it had not complied with the New York State Uniform Procedures Act, the New York State Solid Waste Management Act, and SEQRA.
43. Thereafter, in a November 19, 1993 decision annexed hereto as Exhibit H and made a part hereof, Justice Williams annulled that permit, based on nothing more than the averments in my petition in that matter.
44. Matter of Plante v. DEC, Albany County Index No. 4840-93 was never appealed from.
46. At this point, based upon the evidence which I have annexed hereto, I believe that it is readily apparent that Mr. Tomaselli and Mr. Zweig never really had anything of substance to say to this Court concerning my conduct as a licensed professional engineer in the State of New York, and so I will my demonstration of that fact at this juncture.
DATED: April 25, 1996
end quote
That is who I have been in real life, Mike.
And as a real man of his actions and words who doesn’t rest on any laurels associated with signing a piece of paper back when, Mike, I rest real well right now knowing I got off my *** and went and stood on the line separating civilization from chaos and anarchy to empower the people younger than me to think, to fight, to learn, and to serve, starting with my own children.
And thanks for your patriotism, Mike, it is appreciated.
Mike says
Thanks man! Take care…we’ll all right some wrongs.
Stuart Bell says
You would do well to learn respect for your elders….if you have not learned this lesson, I know some ‘Ole Folks’ that would be more than happy to teach you…..they are a generation that did not allow themselves to be de-masculinized, as yours has.
Mike says
You should learn to respect you youths! People who deserve respect don’t get a free pass on something as pointless as age. Um…your generation never was tested. You failed at war after after war after your dads won the World Wars and brought you the strongest military in the world; you drove us into several more recessions after your moms and dads saved us from the great depression; you drove us head long into the commercial and consumerism that wrecked the ma and pa stores, the downtowns, and leave us all watching Kim Kardasian (another creation of the boomer generation – watching more t.v. than any other generation.) I don’t know, I could go on and on. Your generation was mostly bent on trying to roll back the social, economic, environmental progress of those before and after in order to protect your interests.
Anyways, it just further illustrates my point that you think de-masculating us is an insult. That makes you look old fellow. I’m glad not to be the classic male stereotype and, for heavens sake, I support women, LGBTQ, and everyone else. I don’t waste my time and effort worrying about who marries who and what bathroom they use because last time I checked all bathrooms have stalls or doors and more than 50% of straight couples can’t get marriage right (another symptom of boomers elevating divorce and multiple marriages to an all time high).
Stuart Bell says
‘Respect the Youth’…..for what? Being Born? My Generation was never tested? We are tested every day looking at you with hats backwards….you all are not Catchers and the brim keeps the sun out of your eyes. Looking at dirty underwear as you ‘Bust-a-Sag’ trying to look like ignorant rap artist. Watching you all not hold doors for ladies or help your parents carry bags out of a store but reach in them the minute they put them down. We are tested every time you spew disrespect and not slapping the taste from your mouths.
Any time you wish to receive those lessons, please leave a phone number and I will contact you with a time they will begin.
Mike says
lol…that means ‘laughing out loud’. I hear you but also do not wish to go to old and bitterland with you. Here’s to keeping an open mind until I die, singing some classic rap with some of my hommies when I’m 90, and to allowing a woman to decide for herself if she wants someone to get the door for her.
Ray Otton says
I’m 65 and I’ve been telling my kids the same thing Mike said for twenty years or so.
Look around. We haven’t done a good job.
So thank you, Mike, for having the courage to say what others won’t.
However, I’m not ready for the home just yet. In fact, in the words of John Paul Jones – “I have not yet begun to fight!”.
Paul Plante says
And thank you, Ray Otton, for having the courage to come out and express your opinion, and more importantly, to pass along your thoughts to the next generation.
As someone who will be seventy-one in a bit, I would take issue with this one sentence in your reply:
Look around. We haven’t done a good job.
end quote
I have never been a fan, to be truthful, of the all-inclusive “we.”
Said another way, I always dislike being lumped in with the crowd.
For example, our young Mike says that our generation truly has been the narcissistic and sociopathic generation that took the great gains in science (think moon landing), social and economic equality (civil rights), civic mindedness (investing in education and infrastructure), even environmental protection (think Nixon and the clean air/water acts) all from the generation before the boomers and the boomers squandered it to leave us in the worst place possible where my generation will not ever retire, will not have affordable health care, will not have affordable housing, and will be left with looming environmental and world wide political disasters.
Now, really, Ray Otton, does all of that apply to you?
Do you consider yourself to be narcissistic and sociopathic, where a narcissist is a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves, and a sociopath is a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience?
In all seriousness here, Ray Otton, do either of those terms really describe who you personally are as a human being?
I don’t think so, because if they did, you wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn about your own children, or whether they could survive on their own, because as a narcissist, you would have an excessive interest in or admiration of your own self, to the exclusion of all others, including poor victimized Mike above here, and as a sociopath, you would be possessed of a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience that would have you not giving a damn about your own children, or the world that they have to be a part of, whether they like it or not, JUST AS WE HAD TO DO when young.
But you obviously do care a great deal for your children, just as I do for my children and grandchildren, who incidentally will be the generation coming into power when our victimized Mikey is going into his dotage, so it is obvious that you are neither a narcissist nor a sociopath, which would be a strong indication that poor victimized Mike is talking through his hat when he pins the blame for all the troubles in the world around him on every person in this country over sixty, as if we were all engaged in some grand conspiracy to have the whole meal to ourselves, leaving nothing behind for Mike but a grease-smeared plate for his dinner.
As to having a posh retirement home and a fat retirement account, that sure is not me.
My retirement account was stripped from me by the state of New York because I dared to stand up to endemic public corruption in New York state as an engineer to protect the groundwater people like our dear depressed Mike have to rely on for life itself, and in the course of doing so, I danced a jig on the toes of some powerful polluters with plenty of political power who got me removed from my office as an associate public health engineer and reduced me to a state of poverty.
If I had known an ingrate like Mike was going to come along to berate me for being old, maybe I just would have said the hell with it – why should I sacrifice my future for an ingrate like him?
Something to think about, anyway, isn’t it?
Mike says
Thanks man! I’m happy to have you fight with us…because you get it. That other oldster is way to long winded haha.
Mike says
I’m not saying the individuals from the boomers are sociopathic. I like a good many of them even though I don’t agree with them. A good deal more I call friends and coworkers…and maybe lovers after a few beers on a late night when I was back in college. The generation as an aggregate misbehaves and has left a wreck.
Paul Plante says
And while we are on the subject of the universal “we,” or in the case of Mike, the universal “all of you old people,” I would like to pause here in mid-sentence to thank Divine Providence, Wayne Creed and the Cape Charles Mirror for providing us this forum in here to explore this very serious issue of who it is we are as a nation, and who it is that we are not.
And I would especially like to thank Mike for making it patently clear to not only everyone in America, so widely is the Cape Charles Mirror read, but in the candid world as well, since the distribution of the Cape Charles Mirror is not limited to the continental USA (yes, people, this is about as close to a real world stage as there can be) that in the United States of America, we are not one people, at all, so when Hillary Clinton, who was the subject just today of an Associated Press story entitled “Hillary Clinton says she’s ‘ready to come out of the woods'” by MICHAEL RUBINKAM on 18 March 2017 wherein we were told, “Hillary Clinton said Friday she’s ‘ready to come out of the woods’ and help Americans find common ground,” a concept that is actually quite laughable given all the insults Hillary has only recently heaped, indiscriminately, on so many of us for the crime of not believing in her as our MESSIAH or chosen leader, our MAHDI, perhaps, or Taiping, and not drinking her poisonous brand of KOOL-AID, says “that’s not who we are,” Hillary is only speaking for at most 65,844,954 people in America, or 20.647523988% of the population if we use the figure of 318.9 million measured in 2014.
And not only are we not one people, as Mike above here makes so clear, with only 20% being Hillary Clinton believers or acolytes, we are in fact, again as Mike makes so incandescently clear, and yes, God bless him for that valuable contribution to this important discussion which affects us all, regardless of race, color, creed, etc., including even down to what bathroom you identify with, a highly divided and fractured society, with Mike’s generation, whichever that one really is, millennial, or whatever, for I can’t keep them straight, wanting my generation to disappear off the face of the earth, and this religion can’t stand that religion, and the right wing can’t stand the left wing, and the left wing can’t stand the right wing, who they think have BO and bad manners and drink beer and go to NASCAR races and such, besides clinging to their Bibles and guns as everybody knows the right-wingers do, or at least the acolytes and disciples of Barack Hussein Obama do, anyway.
Yes, as both Mike and Ray Otton admit, and yes, I do, too, in my generation, there were and are those who are both narcissistic and sociopathic, where a narcissist is a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves, and a sociopath is a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
That cannot be denied, and in fact, more Americans to the tune of 65,844,954 people just a bit ago in November of 2016 voted for one of them than any other losing presidential candidate in US history, with that being Hillary Clinton.
And people, that brings us back to the Associated Press story entitled “Hillary Clinton says she’s ‘ready to come out of the woods'” by MICHAEL RUBINKAM, 18 MARCH 2017, where we were further informed as follows:
Clinton’s gradual return to the public spotlight following her presidential election loss continued with a St. Patrick’s Day speech in her late father’s Pennsylvania hometown of Scranton.
“I’m like a lot of my friends right now, I have a hard time watching the news,” Clinton told an Irish women’s group.
end quotes
As to who those friends are, we are enlightened as follows by an article about Hillary in New York’s venerable “Gray Lady,” the New York Times by Amy Chozick and Jonathan Martin on 3 SEPTEMBER 2016, as follows:
At a private fund-raiser Tuesday night at a waterfront Hamptons estate, Hillary Clinton danced alongside Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney, and joined in a singalong finale to “Hey Jude.”
In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally.
“It’s the old adage, you go to where the money is,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat.
Mrs. Clinton raised about $143 million in August, the campaign’s best month yet.
At a single event on Tuesday in Sagaponack, N.Y., 10 people paid at least $250,000 to meet her, raising $2.5 million.
If she feels most at ease around millionaires, within the gilded bubble, it is in part because they are some of her most intimate friends.
When financiers complain about the regulations implemented by the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, Mrs. Clinton reaffirms her support for strong Wall Street regulation, but adds that she is open to listening to anyone’s ideas and at times notes that she represented the banking industry as a senator.
end quotes
She represented the banking industry when she was U.S. senator from New York, people, not the common people like myself in the state, as my own experience with her as an engineer can attest to, so when Hillary uses the word, “we,” those are the people she is referring to, while at the same time, disincluding the majority of people in America, who are either something for Hillary to exploit, or something to accuse and berate and belittle and insult.
The Associated Press article then continues as follows:
“I do not believe that we can let political divides harden into personal divides.”
“And we can’t just ignore, or turn a cold shoulder to someone because they disagree with us politically,” she said.
end quotes
HUH?
Do tell, Hillary, after only recently denouncing a majority of the American people who you obviously did not like from the tone of your voice as a “basket of deplorables,” while accusing every white person in this country of being a racist because of some alleged genetic disorder Hillary invented to justify her calling us racists with that blanket smear of hers.
Getting back to the Associated Press:
Friday night’s speech was one of several she is to deliver in the coming months, including a May 26 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
end quotes
And that mention of Wellesley College brings us back in time to the beginning, the Alpha moment, perhaps, of the serious political divide that exists in America today which divide has been fueled in some large part by what I as a grandfather consider to be the hate-filled political rhetoric of Hillary Rodham Clinton, which rhetoric in turn perhaps has affected our Mike above and his outlook on life concerning old people in America like me that Mike has no use for, and wishes gone.
That Alpha moment for Hillary and her followers, which began with Hillary insulting a black U.S. Senator from Massachusetts for being pusillanimous with respect to race issues and which immediately fueled her meteoric rise to national stardom occurred on May 31, 1969, as we were told in the Washington Post story “Hillary Clintonâs breakout moment at Wellesley College” by Frances Stead Sellers and Marilyn W. Thompson on August 14, 2016, where we were told Hillary became a national symbol of student activism and a provocative voice speaking for her angry generation.
There begins the divide, people, that we are experiencing in the United States of America today, with Hillary Clinton becoming a national symbol of student activism and a provocative voice speaking for her angry generation, which again, was not all of us here in the United States of America, at that time, or this time, either.
The divide I talk about can readily be seen in this following excerpted from a Marketwatch article on politics on Feb. 11, 2016, to wit:
Bernie Sanders believes he can do a better job at leadership than President Barack Obama, a statement that drew a quick rebuke from Hillary Clinton’s campaign as she and the Vermont senator ramp up their brawl in the Democratic presidential primary.
Sanders’ words landed like a bomb in Clinton-land, where a spokesman for Obama’s former secretary of state said lecturing the president on leadership was “absurd.”
A South Carolina organizer for Clinton said he’d “had about enough of” the self-labelled democratic socialist doubting Obama’s leadership.
end quote
My goodness, people, here in America, according to the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who tells us that she is now ready to come out of the woods and help Americans find common ground, it is impermissible to doubt the leadership of Barack Hussein Obama, despite the fact that so many people in America, starting with Bernie Sanders, in fact did doubt, and with good cause
What common ground, Hillary, is there in that, and where does Mike’s viewpoint above about old people in America fit into that common ground?
How do you reconcile that, Hillary?
But let’s get back to Wellesley College and the Alpha moment which was Hillary D. Rodham’s 1969 Student Commencement Speech where Ruth M. Adams, ninth president of Wellesley College, introduced Hillary D. Rodham ’69, at the 91st commencement exercises as follows.
She is also cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us and it is a great pleasure to present to this audience Miss Hillary Rodham.
end quotes
Shortly after that introduction, according to the Washington Post story “Hillary Clintonâs breakout moment at Wellesley College” by Frances Stead Sellers and Marilyn W. Thompson on August 14, 2016, Ruth M. Adams, ninth president of Wellesley College, was going to be eating those words and was going to be apologizing to Senator Brooke for Hillary’s rude behavior, to wit:
With the national media closely following campus upheaval that spring, Clinton stole the spotlight by rebuking a Washington symbol she had helped elect.
She undercut Wellesley’s president, once her ally in tamping down campus unrest.
Clinton’s remarks transformed her, virtually overnight, into a national symbol of student activism.
Wire services blasted out her remarks, and Life magazine featured a photo of her, dressed in bold striped bell-bottoms.
Clinton’s speech was an early illustration of political instinct, the ability to sense the moment for a strategic strike.
Her performance surprised everyone, even her close friends.
“We’re not interested in social reconstruction,” she corrected the speaker, Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts.
“It’s human reconstruction.”
Her impromptu attack was over in a flash, and Wellesley President Ruth Adams set out to repair the damage.
Adams fired off a letter to Brooke, then the nation’s highest-ranking black elected official, apologizing for Clinton’s intemperate remarks.
“Courtesy is not one of the stronger virtues of the young,” she wrote Brooke on June 5, 1969, in a letter The Washington Post recently discovered in his archived papers.
“Scoring debater’s points seems, on occasion, to have higher standing.”
How do we harness such “youthful passion,” Adams asked, “without destroying the basic fabric of our democratic society?”
end quotes
Courtesy is not one of the stronger virtues of the young, people, when that particular young one was our very own adored and revered Hillary Clinton who is coming out of the woods to unite us a nation, by force, if necessary.
And more to the point, in the light of Mike’s post above about old people in this country, how is the question posed in that last sentence above resolved?
How do we harness such “youthful passion” as Mike has without destroying the basic fabric of our democratic society?
Or has that fabric become so rent and torn that it is now for all practical purposes destroyed?
Getting back to Hillary’s famous speech:
To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect.
end quote
Ah, yes, people, three important questions, especially in the light of another Associated Press article out today entitled “Young Americans: Most see Trump as illegitimate president” by Laurie Kellman and Emily Swanson, 18 March 2017, where we are informed as follows on the same day we are told Hillary is coming out of the woods where she was spotted taking a walk in the woods around her hometown of Chappaqua, New York, two days after losing the election to Donald Trump, and where she quipped she had wanted to stay in the woods, “but you can only do so much of that,” to wit:
A majority of young adults — 57 percent — see Trump’s presidency as illegitimate, including about three-quarters of blacks and large majorities of Latinos and Asians, the GenForward poll found.
end quote
That, people, is a very telling statement about young people in America today.
Getting back to the important meat of Hillary’s 1969 commencement speech with regard to integrity, trust, and respect:
Those three words mean different things to all of us.
end quotes
And indeed they do, people, which is why we seem to have so many problems believing in what is supposed to pass for government in this country today.
Getting back to Hillary:
Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence.
If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know.
end quotes
Hmmmmm.
Getting back to Hillary, and who it is that she is speaking for when she uses the word “we”:
Trust.
This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others.”
“Talk about the trust bust.”
What can you say about it?
What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted?
end quotes
The “trust bust,” people, how well I remember those words from back then, a “trust bust” in the case of Hillary, who is one of those distrusted, but who may not understand it, that must be considered in the light of MARKETWATCH article by Caroline Baum on Aug. 3, 2016, as follows:
Hillary Clinton has a long history of lying.
In fact, her first instinct, when confronted with some tawdry, quasi-illegal activity, is to dissemble.
In 1996, New York Times columnist William Safire called her “a congenital liar,” citing her comments about her cattle-trading windfall, her involvement in the firing of members of the White House Travel Office, and the missing Rose Law Firm files that miraculously reappeared.
Most recently, Clinton’s denials about sending classified information on her private email account housed on her private server were exposed as falsehoods by FBI Director James Comey.
Asked by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” about Comey’s comments, the former secretary of state lied again, claiming Comey had called her statements “truthful.”
The Washington Post’s FactChecker awarded Clinton four Pinocchios, a rating reserved for the biggest whoppers, prompting the Atlantic’s Ron Fournier to write an article headlined, “Why Can’t Hillary Clinton Stop Lying?”
end quote
A “trust bust,” indeed!
Sooooo.
Where, oh where, people, does this elusive “common ground” of Hillary Clinton really lie, not intending to use a pun there?
How much of our own integrity do we have to get rid of and shun in order to have common ground with Hillary Clinton?
And once again getting back to Hillary:
And then respect.
There’s that mutuality of respect between people where you don’t see people as percentage points.
Where you don’t manipulate people.
Where you’re not interested in social engineering for people.
The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences.
And the word consequences of course catapults us into the future.
end quote
And you know what, people?
That future is now, right now as you read these words?
So where is it that we really are, people?
Where did that future bring us to?
And for that answer, see Mike above.
Mike says
Dude, learn to be concise. I didn’t read that drivel but maybe you are older than a boomer if you are calling Hillary young. She’s a boomer, Trumps a boomer, most of the politicians today are boomers. The politicians that are boomers are mostly awful. That is my point. They claim to be Democrats or Republican but they all vote to kick the can down the line. Obama was the first of the next generation and, despite all the resistance from the entrenched old people, he did pretty well.
You are fixated on regurgitating all kinds of junk about Clinton. Get over it. She lost. She is 70. She will not run again. If she does, she is crazy to not enjoy her twilight years in peace. God bless her for trying.
Chas Cornweller says
Mike,
As much as I hate to admit it, you are on to something. In fact, if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. The book I am talking about is called A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. It is written by Bruce Cannon Gibney. And this coming from someone born in the late nineteen fifties. I totally get that the foundations of this country are shaken to their very core. The environment is on the precipice of crisis. The economic is shattered and every program in place to ensure a safety net for those of retirement years and living in poverty will not be there in ten years. I get that this nation screwed up. But, try to believe me when I say, there were those of us out there fighting and demanding changes for the better. During the Carter administration, President Carter gave what has now been termed as the “Malaise” Speech. Trust me when I say this, had we listened (as a nation) this country would be in far different place and I believe a better place than we are today. However, it was not our generation (the boomers) who criticized it, politicized it, ridiculed and ultimately shunted it aside. It was that generation of our fathers (your grandfather?) who took Jimmy Carter’s words and turned it against him. Why? Because they believed it painted a weak and selfish America. Sound familiar? We boomers who were too numb to care, too stoned to think it mattered and basically could give a rat’s ass chalked it up to politics. The rest of those boomers (who agreed with the elders and condemned the speech as well) were too busy grabbing for the brass ring and voted Ronald Reagan into the White House in nineteen eighty. That was our Waterloo.
The Boomer Generation could have been the greatest generation on several fronts. The war in Vietnam. They (your grandfather’s generation lead by your father’s generation) killed four students at a National College to prove their point. We failed, then and there. The second opportunity came in the late seventies when Jimmy Carter came to power. Backed by a large progressive movement coupled with a sanction from the Christian Right, great things were going to take place in Washington, D.C. Except they didn’t. Complacency from the general public and a steady push back from the Washington elites did much to curtail any great movement forward from the Carter administration. They (Washington Insiders, Big Business and the Conservative movement) won the day, and Ronnie was in. Thus, the slow drip, drip, drip of corruption, defense build-up, dismantling of any and all social programs to protect the less fortunate (i.e. the poor). By the time the Clintons made it to the White House the fix was in. The boomers were not only complacent, but complicit in the sharing of the tearing down of the order. We had seen it all. From the time, they killed a president to the time they held one hostage by his own transgressions. We didn’t care anymore.
You see, it in a way you are correct, Sociopaths have been running this country for the last fifty-five years. But fifty-five years ago, the average age of a baby boomer was fifteen. Too young vote, they only had the voice of protest. Kind of like you, now, except I assume you are old enough to vote. I suggest you use it. Vote your conscience. Write your representatives. All of them. And don’t stop writing. I will do the same. And I do! You see, Mike, I was one of the few who heard Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” Speech that night and believed it for what it truly was. Google it and read it sometime. You’ll see. And then you’ll realize, as I did then, that was the time when politics cut the heart out of America.
p.s. Get the book as well. It’s right up your alley!
Paul Plante says
Thank you, Chas Cornweller, for voicing your thoughts.
Mike says
will do…thanks! I know generalizations aren’t generally good things to make. I know there are always plenty of exceptions and exceptional people. X, Y, Z, and Millennials sure have been categorized as well but I think they’re coming around.
Paul Plante says
Barack Hussein Obama Magnus, Mike, where “magnus” means “the great” in Latin.
He’s the dude who was quoted in a REUTERS article on Monday, Oct. 26, 2009, as follows:
President Barack Obama had a message for his political friends and foes on Monday — “just because I’m skinny doesn’t mean I’m not tough.”
end quotes
False bravado, Mike, to hide a lack of self-esteem deriving from having wasted his youth snorting coke and smoking dope when most young Americans were applying themselves and preparing themselves to be productive citizens?
And that is the same Barack Obama who was quoted by Ben Wolfgang in The Washington Times on Monday, September 28, 2015 as follows:
“I lead the strongest military the world has ever known.
“I will never hesitate to protect my country and our allies unilaterally and by force when necessary.”
end quotes
Is that bombast, Mike?
Is that jingoism on the hoof?
Is that what being belligerent and bellicose is all about?
And as to your claim above that it has been my narcissistic and sociopathic generation that took the great gains in science (think moon landing), social and economic equality (civil rights), civic mindedness (investing in education and infrastructure), even environmental protection (think Nixon and the clean air/water acts) all from the generation before my generation and then squandered it to leave you and your generation in the worst place possible where your generation will not ever retire, will not have affordable health care, will not have affordable housing, and will be left with looming environmental and world wide political disasters, it is that same Barack Hussein Obama magnus who was the subject of a story by Mark Hosenball of Reuters on 2 August 2012, as follows:
President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, sources familiar with the matter said.
Obama’s order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence “finding,” broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.
Precisely when Obama signed the secret intelligence authorization, an action not previously reported, could not be determined.
The full extent of clandestine support that agencies like the CIA might be providing also is unclear.
end quotes
And in an Associated Press article on 15 September 2012, as follows:
Most of the CIA’s clandestine and paramilitary team that had worked with Libyan rebels to bring about the fall of Gadhafi is now arrayed at the Syrian border, working with rebels there to try to hasten the fall of Syrian president Bashar Assad, the officials said.
end quotes
And in an article by Scott Peterson in the Christian Science Monitor on 2 November 2012, as follows:
“We hoped the American government would help us in our revolution, because it fights for the democratic flag in the world – and toppled Saddam Hussein in the name of democracy,” says a Syrian judge who runs a temporary court in a rebel-controlled district of Aleppo.
“But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did nothing.”
“America failed us,” says the secular Syrian, whose tailored suit and pressed shirt contrasted sharply with the motley collection of rebels who man the frontline a few streets away.
Abu Baraa says the US “doesn’t care how many Syrians die – for them we are like bugs.”
end quote
With respect to your generation being left with looming world wide political disasters, Mike, there is the genesis of one of the biggest world wide political disasters your generation and my grandchildren’s generation are inheriting, and it was one of your generation who caused it, Mike, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, his Cleopatra.
As to your comment that I am fixated on regurgitating all kinds of junk about Clinton and she will not run again, you obviously don’t follow the news, do you.
In a recent Associated Press article by Laurie Kellman and Emily Swanson on 18 March 2018, we were informed as follows:
Trump’s legitimacy as president was questioned earlier this year by U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.: “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected.”
“And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”
end quotes
Which is BULL****, don’t you think, Mike, being the bright kind of guy that you are?
Trump was elected by the electoral college, was he not?
So for that charge by the Hillary-ites to stick, they and Hillary, who is far from gone on the political scene, would have to prove that the Russians somehow influenced (read coerced, intimidated or bought) members of the electoral college, and where is the evidence of that, Mike?
When will that evidence be forthcoming?
More to the point, on 18 March 2017, the Associated Press ran an article by Michael Rubinkam entitled “Hillary Clinton says she’s ‘ready to come out of the woods'” wherein was stated:
SCRANTON, Pa. — Hillary Clinton said Friday she’s “ready to come out of the woods” and help Americans find common ground.
end quotes
Now, get serious here for a moment if you will, Mike, how would that be possible that Hillary Clinton, who just got done dividing us with her recent campaign rhetoric can now help Americans find any kind of common ground at all, outside of our revulsion for Hillary Clinton, who ran with the highest unfavorable rating of any American presidential contender in history outside of Trump?
If I thought Hillary Clinton was really gone, Mike, believe me, I would be very happy to never think of her again.
But she isn’t, Mike.
To the contrary, she is out there agitating trouble, urging people to resist the government, which smacks of sedition to me, Mike.
How does it strike you?
Mike says
I think it is settled then! It doesn’t matter who you are, we all love Linda Ronstadt! Fini!
Paul Plante says
“Poor, poor pitiful me,” Mike, ain’t it?
That is a classic by her, better than Warren Zevon and Jackson Browne, but truthfully, Mike, how can they compete?
And then there is “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” – You can’t buy my love with money / ‘Cause I ain’t never was that kind / Silver threads and golden needles / Cannot mend this heart of mine.
Now, that really is Dusty Springfield’s song in my mind.
She’s the one that I heard first, and she could really wail her way right into your soul with that, especially that final “cannot mend …. this heart of mine!”
If you ever heard her, Mike, you know just what I mean.
But Linda Ronstadt comes in such a close second that it is almost a tie.
Paul Plante says
And to bring this to a sort of close, anyway, since this is the beginning of something, not the end of anything, poor Hillary Clinton, people, and I mean that sincerely.
As Mike says above, God bless her for trying, and I won’t dispute that.
But more importantly, for both Hillary and the nation and its future, again as Mike so wisely states, she is crazy to not enjoy her twilight years in peace, which brings us to an article in THE HILL entitled “Trump and Clinton just can’t quit each other” by Amie Parnes on 18 March 2017, where we have as follows:
It’s 2016 all over again.
Donald Trump is bashing Hillary Clinton.
Crowds are screaming “Lock her up!” at Trump rallies.
And Clinton is trolling Trump on Twitter.
end quotes
Really, people, how childish all the way around, and especially for Hillary, who has now reduced herself to the status of a TWITTER TROLL, which is about as low a political status as there can be, given the 140-character limit imposed by TWITTER on its TWEETERS like Hillary.
As THE HILL tells us:
More than 129 days after the curtains closed on the 2016 election, the bitter rivalry between the pair shows no signs of ending.
“They can’t let it go,” said Jeffrey Lord, a Trump surrogate who logged hundreds of hours on CNN during the 2016 election cycle analyzing the pithy back-and-forth between the two candidates.
end quotes
It reminds one of the famous feud between Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopator and his sister Cleopatra VII Philopator and the Siege of Alexandria back in 47 BC, doesn’t it?
Getting back to THE HILL:
When the race finally ended in the wee hours of Nov. 9, Lord said, he knew he hadn’t seen the end of it.
“The Clintons, both of them are these political machines.”
“This is what they do,” Lord said.
“When she didn’t win the first time, she ran a second time and now the engine is still running.”
end quotes
The engine is still running, people, but the question is – is the engine now running amuck?
Is Hillary spinning out of control here with her TWEET STORMS against Trump?
Getting back to Cleopatra for a moment, when Ptolemy XII of Egypt died in 51 BC, he left his children, Ptolemy and Cleopatra, as joint rulers of Egypt, but Ptolemy soon dethroned Cleopatra and forced her to flee from Alexandria.
In our modern version of the passion play, Trump has dethroned Hillary and forced her to flee Washington to the seclusion and sanctuary of a patch of woods in Chappaqua, New York, where poor Hillary, who seems to be rapidly losing it, was seen wandering aimlessly in the days after her loss to Trump in this most recent presidential election.
Getting back to THE HILL:
A month after the election ended, tension spilled out at an event at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, where both Clinton and Trump aides went after each other.
“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, told Trump aides, including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.
“I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”
“Guys, I can tell you are angry, but wow,” Conway said at one point “Hashtag he’s your president.”
“How’s that?”
“Will you ever accept the election results?”
end quotes
And that answer is clearly no, they can’t, and they won’t, just as Cleopatra would not and did not accept being run out of town by her brother.
And back to THE HILL:
The sparring erupted again this week.
On Friday, Clinton re-tweeted her longtime senior adviser Philippe Reines, who took to Twitter to write: “Russians spy.”
“Healthcare is complicated.”
“Diplomacy is exhausting.”
“Who Knew?”
Clinton added her own quip, chiming in with: “Things I learned today.”
end quote
Now, really, Hillary, is that the best you can do anymore, you who were a world-class orator back in 1969, with your famous Wellesley commencement address where you so famously told the nation, “now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see—but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men’s needs.”
end quote
Where is the discussion of authentic reality versus inauthentic reality now?
According to THE HILL, Hillary no longer takes us to those intellectual heights with her rhetoric, which has been reduced to TWEETS on TWITTER as follows:
At the same time, Clinton, who has spent the past few months trying to figure out how it all went wrong, has been keeping the pressure on Trump – mostly on Twitter.
“With threats & hate crimes on rise, we shouldn’t have to tell @POTUS to do his part.”
“He must step up & speak out,” she wrote on the social media site late last month.
end quotes
Why, Hillary, are these threats and hate crimes on the rise?
Why don’t you tell us, instead of pointing at Trump?
And back to THE HILL:
Clinton has told allies that she plans to continue to hold the president accountable and will find ways of doing so in her future endeavors.
Political consultants expect the back and forth to continue long into the Trump presidency.
“The permanent campaign has reached a new level of intensity and relentlessness in the age of Trump,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant.
“Democrats have worked more urgently to undermine his presidency than at any time in modern history,” Mackowiak continued, adding that Trump “has also had some trouble moving beyond the election.”
end quotes
So there we are, people – nothing has ended, just a new chapter in the history of the United States of America has begun.
Ah, the road not taken – I wonder where it might have taken us, but alas.
Paul Plante says
I truly find myself perpetually amazed as I wander through all the halls and aisles that form the archives of the venerable Cape Charles Mirror, where one finds a literal cornucopia of contemporary American history from the period just before the 2016 presidential election up to the present time, and that would have to include this thread which starts on 26 February 2017, some three-and-a-half months after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential race to Donald Trump, which loss has led in an unbroken line to the present time, where we still have Hillary bleating about how unfair to her it all was that she lost, since it was her turn to be president, and Trump threw elbows and cut the line to get ahead of her, by looming behind her at one of the debates (whew, yes, I know it is rambling and convoluted, but we are talking Hillary here, so please bear with me), where we had by way of contemporary American history as follows:
My goodness, people, if you are into drama that makes the TV drama “Game of Thrones” seem pedestrian by comparison, and hey, let us face, people, we’re all adults, afterall, we all are, what a time it is to be alive!
end quotes
And my goodness, people, think how much more true that is today!
Getting back to operative reality as it was in America on 26 February 2017, we have this snapshot of that time, which no longer is, as follows:
These times we are in right now, with earth-shaking events occurring pretty much 24/7 now with the cable news cycle, make the 60s look positively dull and boring by comparison, and so they should when you think about it, since that was in a whole different century, before RAP and HIP-HOP, when all there was, was the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean and Linda Ronstadt and surf’s up and the little old ladies of Pasadena ripping around all over town in Dodge Hemi-Chargers and all that kind of stuff that was popular back then, because, let’s face it again, people just did not know any better.
It took Duane Eddy and his rocking guitar to break us out of our funk back then and now, wow, the future is here, and what never-ending drama it has brought us.
People out in what used to be sunny California are getting drenched with sewage-laden floodwaters, which is pretty icky, when you think about it.
Texas, meanwhile, is getting overrun with feral hogs according to the CBS NEWS article “Fearing “feral hog apocalypse,” Texas approves drastic measures” on 22 February 2017 where Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller announced the “feral hog apocalypse” in Texas where an estimated 2.5 million feral hogs in Texas are doing untold damage to suburban yards, God forbid with the cost of good landscaping and lawn maintenance services in America today.
Meanwhile, Chicago is plagued by some kind of bugs in their subway system, and hang on to your hats, folks, for “Flip or Flop” reality TV star Christina El Moussa is back on the market, having split with contractor Gary Anderson, her boyfriend of several months.
And then reappearing after a long absence, Lindsey Lohan has found religion and as a consequence was mistaken in an English airport for a Muslim terrorist because she was wearing a headscarf and had just been in Turkey where she just had had an audience with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
And SNOOKY of “Jersey Shore” fame has gone completely off the radar and seems to be nowhere to be found.
And how about that Mariah Carey, people!
If you can believe it, she is still bitter about the way her 2017 kicked off with that disastrous New Year’s Eve performance in Times Square and as a result, according to cable news, she’s already parted ways with her longtime creative director, dancer and tour choreographer Anthony Burrell over the live disaster, and now the diva is blaming “everybody” from the production crew to the backup dancers in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
“It’s just something where if I can’t explain it to the entire world, then they’re not going to understand it, because it’s not what they do,” Carey said, “Just like I wouldn’t understand somebody who had a desk job and how to do that.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I literally am incapable of being in the real world and surviving.”
end quotes
And if that is not enough drama for you, people, we have America’s most favorite politician Hillary Rodham Clinton ✔ @HillaryClinton, TWEETING her little heart out, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the…Congress,” at 3:54 PM on 22 Feb. 2017 while taunting Republicans on Twitter Wednesday for dodging town hall events amid the growing protests from liberal activists infuriated by President Trump’s agenda, according to an article in THE HILL entitled “Clinton taunts GOP lawmakers for dodging town halls” by Jonathan Easley on 22 February 2017 where we were informed as follows:
The former Democratic presidential nominee, who has kept a low profile since losing to Trump in the November election, linked to an editorial in the Kansas City Star called, “Cowardly members of Congress should show up and face the public at town hall meetings.”
end quotes
WAHOO, people, talk about tough talk, alright, that is showing them Republicans something, alright!
end quotes
Looking back now from this latest vantage point, we can see that in reality, Hillary Clinton was hardly washed up and finished as a POLITICAL TOUR DE FORCE in this country as many of the pundits were saying; to the contrary, and we are seeing this today, some two years and a handful of months later, Hillary was only just beginning the long road to victory over Trump to get her revenge, because to Hillary, like Keyser Söze, revenge is everything – no slight is too small to be overlooked, and Trump’s sin to grave to be forgotten, which actually takes us back to the heart of the matter, which is what has this thread coming back to life after the passage of those intervening years while we waited for Hillary to further declare herself, as follows:
And that is after being quoted in an earlier article in THE HILL entitled “Clinton: ‘This is not who we are’” by Brooke Seipel on 29 January 2017, where we were told as follows:
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Saturday tweeted in support of numerous protests that sprang up Saturday over President Trump’s executive order banning many refugees and others from predominantly Muslim nations.
“I stand with the people gathered across the country tonight defending our values & our Constitution.”
“This is not who we are,” Clinton tweeted.
end quotes
And that brings us to the title of this thread above – if that is not who we are, and I am not even sure at this point as to exactly which “that” we are even talking about, then who are we instead?
And that pertinent existential question brings us forward in time a bit to 22 March 22, 2017, where the above thread went dormant, as follows:
And to bring this to a sort of close, anyway, since this is the beginning of something, not the end of anything, poor Hillary Clinton, people, and I mean that sincerely.
As Mike says above, God bless her for trying, and I won’t dispute that.
But more importantly, for both Hillary and the nation and its future, again as Mike so wisely states, she is crazy to not enjoy her twilight years in peace, which brings us to an article in THE HILL entitled “Trump and Clinton just can’t quit each other” by Amie Parnes on 18 March 2017, where we have as follows:
It’s 2016 all over again.
Donald Trump is bashing Hillary Clinton.
Crowds are screaming “Lock her up!” at Trump rallies.
And Clinton is trolling Trump on Twitter.
end quotes
Really, people, how childish all the way around, and especially for Hillary, who has now reduced herself to the status of a TWITTER TROLL, which is about as low a political status as there can be, given the 140-character limit imposed by TWITTER on its TWEETERS like Hillary.
As THE HILL tells us:
More than 129 days after the curtains closed on the 2016 election, the bitter rivalry between the pair shows no signs of ending.
“They can’t let it go,” said Jeffrey Lord, a Trump surrogate who logged hundreds of hours on CNN during the 2016 election cycle analyzing the pithy back-and-forth between the two candidates.
end quotes
It still reminds one of the famous feud between Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopator and his sister Cleopatra VII Philopator and the Siege of Alexandria back in 47 BC, does it not?
And with that, we pause for station identification and a word from our sponsors.
Paul Plante says
And to connect past, present and future in here in a way that you will not see in the Washington Post, which makes the narrative up as it goes, regardless of reality, let us drop back in time about two years to 2 March 2017 above here, to this set of relevant existential questions posed to QUEEN OF AMERICA Hillary Clinton, as follows:
This thread asks the question of why is Hillary Clinton then spinning an alternative version of American history now that she has emerged once again from wherever it was that she was hiding in seclusion after her stunning loss to Donald Trump as American president.
On that note, I will end with these following two definitions which seem very relevant to our times, and the role Hillary Clinton has chosen to play in sowing the seeds of disruption and dissension in this country with her divisive rhetoric:
SEDITION: conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state.
SUBVERSION: the undermining of the power and authority of an established system or institution.
Hillary, what game is it that you are at here?
The candid world would truly like to know!
end quotes
And those question in turn were spurred by a quote from Hillary in THE HILL in the article “Hillary Clinton rallies DNC members in video message” by Max Greenwood on 25 February 2017, as follows:
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Friday showered praise on the wave of protests sweeping the country and urged party faithful to set their sights on elections to come.
“We as Democrats must move forward with courage, confidence and optimism, and stay focused on the elections we must win this year and next,” she said.
“Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country.”
end quotes
That was in February of 2017, and a bit over two years later, in May of 2019, that resistance by the DEMOCRAT PARTY has brought the functioning of our national government to a screeching halt, to our detriment as a people and as a nation, which brings us to this which motivates Hillary and the DEMOCRATS today, to wit:
“Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country.”
Now, people, there is a sound bite, alright, and how radical that sounds, as if it were taken from the “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky, who was the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis in 1969, while a senior at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Alinsky states as follows:
“A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists.”
“From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage — the political paradise of communism.”
end quotes
The future is now, people, and to the Democrats, the political paradise of communism is now just over the horizon.
So, another relevant existential question, to wit: Which side will you be on?
Paul Plante says
And as we mere mortals here in America who were born less than Hillary Clinton, and are bound by class rules in America to stay that way, forever, and therefore occupy its “WASTEBASKET FULL OF DEPLORABLES” as we do, continue to ponder the sound political education an American political superstar with rock star appeal such as Hillary Clinton has, a political education aimed at helping Hillary gain freedom from what she called in her famous commencement address of 1969 the “burden of an inauthentic reality” that holds so many others here in the United States of America so firmly in its grip, let’s go back once more to this quote from Hillary in THE HILL in the article “Hillary Clinton rallies DNC members in video message” by Max Greenwood on 25 February 2017, as follows:
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Friday showered praise on the wave of protests sweeping the country and urged party faithful to set their sights on elections to come.
“We as Democrats must move forward with courage, confidence and optimism, and stay focused on the elections we must win this year and next,” she said.
“Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country.”
end quotes
Now, make a mental note of that date, people, 25 February 2017, and her prophetic words “Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country.” as we now put together a time line from there to here, which next takes us to Wikipedia on the Special Counsel investigation (2017–2019), where we have as follows:
According to its authorizing document, which was signed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on May 17, 2017, the investigation’s scope included allegations that there were links or coordination between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
It included a criminal investigation which looked into potential obstruction of justice charges against Trump and others within the campaign and administration.
Following Comey’s firing, over 130 Democratic Party lawmakers in Congress called for the appointment of a special counsel, while the FBI began investigating Trump for obstruction of justice.
The special counsel’s office took over both these investigations from the FBI.
end quotes
So, on May 17, 2017, about THREE (3) months after Hillary said to the candid world and the Democrats trying to take over the government of this country on 25 February 2017, her prophetic words “Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country,” that party being the Democrat party, over 130 Democratic Party lawmakers in Congress called for the appointment of a special counsel, while the FBI began investigating Trump for obstruction of justice, which brings us in an unbroken line from there to here.
But to more fully understand the flow of events, we need to drop back in time to the original claims of Russian election involvement, where we have the first public US government assertion of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election coming in a joint statement on September 22, 2016, by Senator Dianne Feinstein and House member Adam Schiff, the top Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, respectively.
And as those who follow the Cape Charles Mirror will recall from the thread “Op-Ed: Cut the crap, Adam Schiff!” http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/o … am-schiff/ , the little Burbank, California Democrat Adam Schiff is raising money off of being the “resistance,” like Hillary and the Democrats, as follows:
And do I have proof of that?
Let’s go and see, starting with https://act.myngp.com/Forms/-4821868595118208256 where we find as follows, to wit:
CONGRESSMAN ADAM SCHIFF, A MOST EFFECTIVE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION TO TRUMP IN CONGRESS, SUPPORT SANTA CLARA COUNTY DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S RESISTANCE EFFORTS!
Date: October 14, 2017
Time: 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m. (ALL)
Location: Stanford residence upon RSVP
$1K/$2.5K/$5K – Sponsorship levels
$1000 – Platinum – Reception & photo
$500 – Gold – Reception
$250 – Silver
$100 – Bronze
$50 – Young Dems only
VIP Reception 3:00-3:30 p.m. strictly observed due to time limitations.
In support of Santa Clara County Democratic Party Together We Can! fundraising campaign
Rep Adam Schiff fundraising event for SCCDP
Come hear Congressman Adam Schiff share the story of how he came to be one of Trump’s main nemeses on Capitol Hill with regard to the Russian interference and collusion investigations, where he played such a key role in moving things forward.
end quotes
So, on 22 September 2016, before the 2016 November presidential election that Hillary lost to Trump, the smarmy little twerp and Burbank, California Democrat Adam Schiff set in motion that which became for him a veritable fundraising goldmine a year later on October 14, 2017, which goldmine for little Adam continues to this day, where he is reaping the BIG BUCK$ as a prodigious fundraiser based on that same claim of his back on 22 September 2016 about Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election, and that revelation along with Hillary’s command to her people on 25 February 2017 to “Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country” takes us curiously to a Marketwatch article entitled “Stocks close higher as tech, economic data power rebound” by Barbara Kollmeyer and Ryan Vlastelica published May 18, 2017, where we had as follows, to wit:
While investors have been holding firm in light of the drama out of Washington, Wednesday’s revelations caused the market to question whether controversies surrounding the White House would derail President Donald Trump’s economic agenda, said Karyn Cavanaugh, senior market strategist at Voya Financial, in an interview.
“Even though optimism for Trump’s pro-growth agenda has mostly unwound, if this political crisis deepens and elevated volatility persists, equities could see further weakness in the short-term driven by deleveraging across fundamental and systematic strategies,” J.P. Morgan wrote in a note to clients, adding that “fundamentals remain supportive.”
Wednesday’s decline came after the New York Times reported that Trump had asked former FBI Director James Comey to drop an investigation into possible ties between his inner circle and the Russians.
Among other things, the controversy was seen as making the passage of Trump’s economic agenda – something analysts say is necessary to justify market valuations – less likely.
Wall Street could continue to be driven by the news coming out of Washington.
Earlier on Thursday, Reuters reported that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and others on Trump’s campaign team exchanged at least 18 undisclosed phone calls or emails with Russian contacts during the 2016 presidential race.
“The scandal is so dominant at the moment that I guess it doesn’t take a lot to spook investors,” said Connor Campbell, financial analyst at Spreadex, in emailed comments.
The reports have sparked talk of potential impeachment for Trump, though many believe the situation is far from reaching that point.
In one recent development, former FBI head Robert Mueller has now been named as special counsel to investigate potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
end quotes
So intent are the Democrats on destroying Trump that they are willing to destroy the nation as well, just to have their revenge on him.
So, Hillary, tell us again, who is it that we are as a nation?
The candid world is waiting to know.