Thank you Blue Texan. This record needs to be remembered and appreciated.

Zed!

D’oh! Evening, BT!

BT,

succinct. nice.

happy birthday President Johnson

Wow, 100th birthday for LBJ…I’m getting old.

LBJ’s liberal accomplishments are insufficiently appreciated.

Agreed. I used to think that historians would be able to bring this out in the conventional “wisdom.” Maybe another 50 years is needed.

And all lost to the ravages of another dirty, rotten war . . .

CICS — Commander-in-Chief syndrome?

I wish Harry Reid had half the talent LBJ had. We would be in a different place now. He loved his country and tried to do the right thing but it all ended badly and it broke his heart. Happy 100.

Celebration of democratic leaders right now!.

ok boa noite pups

gonna go swim for about 30 minutes and then bed

boa noite wobbly (and any other leaving sleepy pup i may have missed)

night, wobbs!
Have a good swim.

FunnyD

So, did anyone see the whole KO/Brian Williams/Interwebs thing? The clip I saw stopped after Williams’ response, which seemed really snotty. Did Keif up the obnoxiousness ante in the rest of the exchange?

FunnyD

LBJ grieved for our soldiers killed in Viet Nam. He was poorly advised by McNamara and Westmoreland and kept sending them.
Nixon never grieved for anyone but himself.
Ditto Bush II.
Fuck Nixon-Bush.
Thanks LBJ, for everything but Viet Nam.

Digg Dugg

i remember lbj’s funeral procession moving through town.

Man, such a record of stellar accomplishment, and also spectacular failures…to me, Johnson in many ways represents the best and worst of recent American Presidents, at least until GWB redefined “worst”. JMHO.

dugg and hey

Schedule here, seems kind of lame though…

I think that side-by-side with the “accomplishments” of that other Texan Pres. (Mr. Richie Rich Guy/Phony Texan George Bush) along with LBJ’s accomplishments would pretty well show truth to dishonor. LBJ didn’t handle the VietNam “War” well….he weaked out….but he was a truer patriot by his efforts for regular Americans. George Bush, not so much. Retire Georgie Boy to Paraguay as quickly as possible.

He won so many legislative battles . . .and lost the proverbial war.

Our society doesn’t honor people who make mistakes. We sacrifice them on the bonfire of their vanity.

Oh, sorry, BT.
Thanks for this post, since the LBJ years were before my time. That list is pretty incredible. So many things I take for granted.
FunnyD

I wish Harry Reid had half the talent LBJ had. We would be in a different place now. He loved his country and tried to do the right thing but it all ended badly and it broke his heart. Happy 100.

I’ll never forgive Johnson the Gulf-of-Tonkin lie and “This great economy of aahhhzzz can provide both guns and buttaahh.” That said, however, he accomplished more of five years at the helm that have any of his successors in eight. God bless him.

The last 5 minutes of MSNBC has been hilarious!

LBJ had his faults, but he did more for African-Americans than any President since Lincoln. Happy birthday, LBJ.

what? what?

FunnyD

Pat scalded, and smacked down by, of all people, Noron. Rachel in stitches, etc.
And more,
Up in a few.

hey hey
thanks for your hey.

Thanks.
That sounds like teh awesome.
Nice of the M$M to start eating their own in prime time. Maybe us DFH blogger types should go 24/7 with the “Pundits in Disarray!!! Film at 11!!! ZOMG!!1!!!!!1″ meme.

FunnyD

i heard an ad (was washing dishes and not watching the teevee) for the rachael maddow show

did they select that as the name of the show? i thought there was a problem since she uses that on air america…

he did more for African-Americans than any President since Lincoln.

True. And I salute that. But, things like the Gulf of Tonkin, COINTELPRO, and the heroes of the USS Liberty are always going to color my view of him.

Yeah, It’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

I saw a tee vee ad that was the “Rachel Maddow Show”

easy to remember name (grin)

You remember the faults. That’s fine, and even necessary. I just think that without LBJ’s leadership, we wouldn’t be looking at the possibility of a President Obama.

I think you may very well right. I don’t seek to detract from the good he did-just the juxtaposition of the good and bad creates a kind of dissonance in me when it comes to Johnson.

I was never so happy as when LBJ announced that he wouldn’t run. Little did I know that we’d get Nixon and years more of war.

Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did ya kill to DAY?

I get that. I graduated in 1969, so I was really aware of LBJ’s faults -the possibility of becoming cannon fodder has a way of focusing the mind.

Hiya!

Fun @ MSNBC

I mean…look at that list of accomplishments. One cannot look at that and not say, “This was a great man.” And he was. Then you look at those others-and say “that was a bad man.” And both are true! It’s always confused and conflicted me.

es has pirate radio upstairs

LBJ engineered the dumbest war in our history prior to Bush.

He also created the civil rights legislation that has guided growth in Civil Rights- and led to the gooper domination of the south.

He also created the civil rights legislation that has guided growth in Civil Rights- and led to the gooper domination of the south.

You have to ask yourself - would you trade your political party for the civil rights movement?

I was never so happy as when LBJ announced that he wouldn’t run. Little did I know that we’d get Nixon and years more of war.

I was a few years older, and shuddered at what would likely (and did) happen. The horrors were roughly an order of magnitude greater than Iraq, both for our troops and for their victims. And, like Iraq, it was a war of vanity. Once the muslims did their slaughter in Indonesia, the domino theory was dead. From then on, we we fighting only for “bragging rights.” And, John McCain and his contemporaries haven’t got over their loss of bragging rights. They lost to a bunch of under-equipped *****, and they’ll never get over it. They are convinced that they were stabbed in the back and robbed of their hard-earned bragging rights by treasonous liberal politicians, who hate America. And, to them, Iraq is their opportunity to redeem themeslves, but only if we don’t quit again.

Pardon me, while I puke.

~~~ModNote: As contextually correct as certain terms may be, please keep them clear of here.~~~

Johnson may have been the most tragic of Shakespearean Presidents. He could have done so much more. I honor him for what he did get done. But dishonor him for taking the bait in Viet Nam, where so many young lives were lost, and it was his fault. Sad, and sad still.

LBJ and Kennedy were blackmailed by the McCarthy right. I’m not going to forgive them for their cowardice, though I wonder how any of us would have stood up to right-wing attacks that despite McCarthy’s self-immolation, were still probably powerful enough to unseat a Democratic President. Kennedy was going to have a very tough re-election run against the candidate most people thought he would face — Nelson Rockefeller. That’s why he was already campaigning in Texas in the fall of 1963.

The Vietnam war has put a kind of plexiglass barrier between the politics that went before, and what came after. The baby boomers were just a few years to young to have lived through the McCarthy period. It was terrible. I had fine teachers whose careers were either ruined or hamstrung by the purges. It was especially true of East Asian studies where people like John Fairbank, and Arthur and Mary Wright and others kept their heads down in the early 60s when the Vietnam business really got under way. There was tremendous political pressure not to ‘lose’ Vietnam the way McCarthy said that Marshall and Acheson ‘lost’ China. That charge was still potent in the early 60s, and that is the context in which Kennedy and Johnson let themselves be pulled into a fruitless war.

Also cold warriors. Walt Rostow was a great economic historian, but he probably bears as much responsibility for the disaster as anyone. McGeorge Bundy ditto.

It’s a complicated history, but the bottom line is that the Democrats were blackmailed into doing the Republicans dirty work, and then got blamed for the inevitable failure. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.