JOSHUA LEINSDORF DK KENNEDY COMMENT DESERVES ITS OWN POST HERE

"American Tragedy is a great and compelling book. However, I think Kennedy's judgement was impaired by the death of his son Patrick on August 9, 1963. Instead of mourning with his wife and nursing Jackie back to health (she almost bled to death during the delivery) he sat in the White House with his mistress Mimi Alford going through and sobbing over the bags of condolence cards and notes. (See Once Upon a Secret by Mimi Alford). Then, virtually by himself, with the major (opposed) cabinet members on vacation at the end of August, he set in motion the train of events that resulted in the overthrow and murder of Diem.

"If you look at the timing of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, LBJ put it squarely on the calendar at the time he considered himself the caretaker of Kennedy's legacy, before he was nominated for the presidency in his own right.

"Overthrowing a head of state is an act of war, even if the head of state is your friend. Overthrowing Diem also jeopardized American foreign policy around the world. Who would want to be the friend of a nation that stabs its best friend in the back? No, something had to happen fast to reassure our allies that overthrowing friendly governments is a policy of the Kennedy administration alone, not the United States of America.

"Personally, I think Harkins was the eminence grise through back channels. It's almost a great joke to blame it on the Marines. And my analysis makes more sense because it means that the Vietnam War cost Kennedy his life (appropriately), Johnson his re-election, and Nixon his presidency.

Josh Leinsdorf jleinsdorf@monmouth.com

"P.S. My knowledge about Patrick Kennedy's medical condition and Jackie's comes from my personal acquaintance with Dr. William Berenberg, the head of Children's Hospital where Patrick was brought after delivery at the air force base on the cape. Dr. Berenberg was the father of a friend and told us about the president's visit to the hospital to visit his son before he died.

1:01 AM"
JL

For my views of Kennedy, terms search: Kennedy, Real Lace, Ragano

"Who would want to be the friend of a nation that stabs its best friend in the back?" JL

I agree wholeheartedly with JL on that.

YOU CAN KID YOURSELF THAT CHINA RUINED YOUR ECONOMY OR RUSSIA YOUR POLITICS

but, trust me, you really did it all to yourselves, over a very long period of time, starting, really, with the American Rebellion, its ideological underpinnings were really fatal.

 

You didn't know that was what was happening, but it was happening, nonetheless, decade by decade, since 1760.

THE AGE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

This really is its endgame, and it legacy, in so many ways:

"Trump, on the other hand, grew up while his contemporaries were joyfully tearing down traditional emotional restraints, as well as restrictions on language, clothing styles, and what could be seen and heard in movies and on television.  He built his persona on unrestrained excess, and when he entered politics, he built his appeal around unrestrained hatred, free of any code words.  And Trump, unlike Nixon, communicates directly with the public.  So it was that, at about 1:00 AM last night, Trump broadcast the following tweet, which represents a new low in Presidential conduct." DK

"Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and
women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and
corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!" DT

You have to go back to, say, the Triumvirate, to get a full flavor of events to come. But we are at a time when history is moving very very fast. Not S & H 80 year cycles at all.

You might call it a combination of the end of the Roman Republic and the end of the Western Roman Empire, at the same time, 50 BC and 450 AD, at the same time.

That sort of captures its temporal compression nicely.

See Ferguson, p 122, re the promise of the democratic age: "That promise was not fulfilled." NF

Smell the coffee, game over!

ECONOMICS AS A HOBBY ROBERT VIENNEAU

Take a walk on the wild side...

Knock yourself out!

He is a follower of Piero Sraffa, an influence on Wittgenstein at Cambridge...

THE MENU PORK CHICKEN IMPROV

I sometimes combine leftovers. I will add roast chicken to roast pork leftovers.

It serves as a base for various things, curry, Mexican, Eastern European goulash, Spanish, Italian, Creole, etc.

You can do a similar thing with beef and chicken leftovers.

I will sometimes do a chicken and seafood leftover mixture. Then you get a sort of Paella dish possibility...

ROOSKIES LOVE MY BLOG WHY NOT GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO READ?

Russia under the Czar was a far flung empire, incorporating many incompatible societies and tribes.

It was a bigger, even more disparate and conflicting motley of groups and religions than the Austro Hungarian Empire.

So, now, Russia under the Soviets has become a giant totalitarian cultural jellyfish, or rather, it doesn't know, frankly, whether it is fish or fowl, Mongolian tribesman, or urban St Petersburger!

And guess what? In its present outsized and indistinct form, it is like many oversized, supersized, Americans: you don't know whether you are looking at their head, their back, or their butt, they are so enormous and bloated!

Russia is like an enormous, unidentifiable Eurasian Sumo!

PS: You don't even know whether it's male or female, or some third thing!

RE DK POST NIXON AND TRUMP BRUCE WILDER CLASSIC RANT

. . . every previous President recognized that he and his office stood for something bigger and had a dignity that he had to try to preserve. .
Yeah, sure. That is why George W Bush lied the country into the invasion of Iraq and the botched occupation that followed. Why Obama presided over a huge financial crisis brought on by rampant fraud and could find almost no one to prosecute. Why Clinton turned his post-Presidency into a perpetual shakedown to finance his Foundation. Dignity. Hah.
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We did not fall off a cliff from some high plateau of normal; we slid down a long, slimy slope to get to Trump.

The nation's modern foreign policy establishment -- founded in effect by Woodrow Wilson -- has become a deranged Blob (are you familiar with this reference?). Trump, as personally unprepared as he is, could not be worse than Hillary Clinton, who learned the lesson of Iraq and applied it in Libya and wanted to do so as well in Syria, and who thought Saudi funding of America's enemies a PR problem.

As bizarre as the spectacle of Larry Kudlow may be as an economic advisor, the Democratic Party establishment is owned by the financial sector and that is just a fact.
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There are many precedents in history for earnest liberals failing to behave responsibly or with even minimal integrity and what followed was authoritarian reaction. We may be experiencing something similar in this generation's incapacity responsible public action or even bare sanity. The fecklessness with which Dems "oppose" Trump scares me as much as Trump himself.

FREE PRESS FALLACY FREE TRADE FALLACY

These are just two terms for topics long discussed here, from the beginning really.

I may have mentioned The Enlightenment Fallacy.
Call these the enlightenment twins.

I just never put it in these terms, though alert readers might easily have so inferred.

FOR MY NUMEROUS ROOSKIE VIEWERS

I recommend: KGB The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev

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PIVOT FOIBLES

The one to India, very comical.

Indian tribesmens' favorite hobby is gang rape. Perhaps there are queer tribesmen who can take special advantage, call it comparative, or competitive, advantage, of the pivot.

Trump's pivot to Putin, has been hilarious for me.

How bout the new pivot to Africa, Tillerson's last port o call?

Just imagine the fun I can have with that!

Terms search: pivot

RE DK POST THE LAST 13 PLUS YEARS IMMIGRATION INTO THE WEST

"...Immigration into Europe, stimulated by turmoil in the Middle East, has created huge problems for political establishments..." DK

He is really onto something there....

Liberals don't like to talk about the terrible problems caused by immigration, exile, or migration, becaues they love the idea and the feasibility of global melting potism, but they are worse, in the long run, than most other political problems, except say all out war.

If you want to really destabilize a place, just send them a bunch of immigrants suddenly, and then see what happens.

bbc TRUMP RE CHINA INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT OR TRANSFER ETC

He is actually quite right, of course, but this has been going on in Asia for most of the 20th Century, Japan being the first big beneficiary.

Transfer of technology to the Rest has been a liberal American, and Western European, policy mantra since even Wilson.

Also, if you read Pillsbury, the government secretly gave China huge strategic and IT assets, going back to Nixon's time.

Never, in the history of human conflict, has so much been given away by so few to so many for so little so quickly.

When they take over, they will use my old phrase, to explain it all to the Average American, sprinkled throghout this blog:

Smell the coffee, game over!

NEW INFORMATION AGE NEW PROTESTANTISM MOSTLY COMPLEX BULLSHIT

IT Revolution: Expensive hand held global babysitting.

PROGRESS INNOVATION ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROTESTANT REFORMATION

My classic, go to, example of the dead ends of the ideas of progress and of innovation, call it entrepreneurship, is the Reformation itself.

That has been a total, disastrous, unmitigated, dead end, baby, in so many many ways, for the West.

Ferguson is also with me on this...so I could be in worse company.

Weber's ideas, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, total bullshit!

Call it The Max Weber Double Fallacy: it is a fallacy in more than one way.

The idea of the Protestant Ethic, as a good thing, or even a single thing, rather than a ridiculous crazy quilt of ludicrous sectarian beliefs and superstitions, is itself a complete fallacy.

The idea of the Spirit of Capitalism, as a good thing, whatever that is, is another separate utter fallacy.

Weber puts these two completely separate and disparate fallacies together in a causative way:

Call it The Double Weber Protestant Capitalism Fallacy

THE REFORMATION FERGUSON VIEW SAME AS MINE SQUARE AND TOWER FREE PRESS

Generally, an unmitigated disaster for the West, mitigated somewhat by unintended consequences re redistribution of church lands.

 

Whether even these redistributions were favorable, given the neglect in which landed noble estates were often maintained anyway, versus Catholic church administration, is for me still an open question left unaddressed in Ferguson's squib.

Another very important aspect, left out of Ferguson's all too brief account, is the terrible effect Luther had on the Hapsburg effort to defend against and to drive the Muslims out of Eastern and Southern Europe at that time.

I was thrilled to see that he, up front, tags the Gutenberg Revolution, shall we say the beginning of the free press, with causing the almost unmitigatedly disastrous Reformation, right out of the box. Square and Tower, p 93. "Here (Scotland), as everywhere in Protestant Europe, the printing press proved itself a Pandora's box." p 104.

That is what networked innovation can get you, right there, before you know it.

AUDIENCE TODAY

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PORNGATE

XI CHINA ENEMIES WILL RECEIVE THE VERDICT OF HISTORY

All acts and tricks to separate the country are doomed to fail and will be condemned by the people and punished by history. Xi

I quite agree with him.

Yet this is a far cry from a Lincoln moment.

Nevertheless, why would Americans love Lincoln and yet hate Xi?

Both sought and seek to preserve their union.

On the other hand, what is so wrong with self determination, Woodrow Wilson's great call to all the world's minorities and disgruntled masses?

Lincoln or Wilson, union or self determination, an American Morton's Fork.

EXCERPT OF DK CURRENT POST RE MY COMMENTS THERE AND HERE

"In October 1971--long before Watergate, but subsequent to the Pentagon Papers release and the formation of the Plumbers unit--Richard Nixon saw something on the evening news that he did not like.  An INS California regional director named George Rosenberg had ordered a raid on a company owned by Romana Banuelos, whom Nixon had nominated to be Treasurer of the United States, and arrested dozens of illiegal immigrants.  Nixon called Attorney General John Mitchell the next day with specific instructions.

" "The fellow out there in the Immigration Service..is a kike by the name of Rosenberg. He is to be out. He is to be out. Transfer him to some other place out of Los Angeles. I don't give a goddamn what the story is.

"There's one thing that I want done and I don't want any argument about it. I want you to direct the most trusted person you have in the Immigration Service that they are to look over all of the activities of the Los Angeles Times — all, underlined. And they are to send their teams in to see whether they are violating the wetback thing.

""Now let me explain, 'cause as a Californian, I know. Everybody in California hires them. There's no law against it, because they are there, because — for menial things and so forth. Otis Chandler — I want him checked with regard to his gardener. I understand he's a wetback. Is that clear?"

"Nixon had come to Washington in 1947 (the same year that I did, via a different route), when the Republican Party had been railing for 15 years against the bureaucracies created by FDR's New Deal, and had joined the hue and cry about socialists and Communists within the government.  His view of the bureaucracy was the same as Trump's and Fox News's view of the "Deep State": that it teemed with hostile forces determined to do him in.  He centralized power over foreign policy under Henry Kissinger in the White House, and after his re-election, he planned a significant purge of the bureaucracy--a plan that had to be abandoned because of Watergate.    In this instance, he combined his prejudice against bureaucrats with his prejudice against Jews.  (The whole exchange can be heard in the HBO documentary, Nixon in His Own Words, which reproduced many choice excerpts from the Nixon tapes.)  The media was an even more common target of such outbursts, both in writing and in print, and was every bit as convinced as Trump that the New York Times and the Washington Post were purveyors of "fake news" and deserved retaliation for it.  In retrospect it is not surprising that the Pentagon Papers set him off the way they did, since it involved those two newspapers and a Harvard-educated intellectual bureaucrat of Jewish ancestry named Daniel Ellsberg,.

"Nixon was worried that Ellsberg and unknown co-conspirators might release more secrets about his own Administration that might torpedo his Vietnam policy, and that is why the Pentagon Papers led to the formation of the Plumbers Unit (to do things the FBI would not do) and eventually to Watergate.  But the case of George Rosenberg was more typical of what happened after Nixon's outbursts.  Nothing happened to him, as far as is known, because Nixon's subordinates knew better than to take that particular order seriously.  Nor did the public learn anything about Nixon's vendetta towards Rosenberg for many decades." DK

if Trump is an anti Semite, he has a pretty goddamn odd way of showing it... move the capitol to Jerusalem, children married to orthodox Jews, Breitbart backing, etc., etc.

One can say the exact same thing of Nixon, in spades, re the monumental US Israel Alliance he created.

If you're an anti Semite, you don't support Israel. Maybe I am wrong about that. Maybe Conservative Christians think you can be anti Semitic and also support Israel.  Someone better informed can correct me.

I think Nixon and Trump are among the most pro Semitic Presidents we have ever had.

FDR was also highly pro Semitic, but from the liberal Jewish side of the street.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

AMERICAN POLITICS IS NOW REALLY ALL ABOUT WHICH JEWS WIN

It really frosted the NYT, the liberal Jews, ass, when Trump, the Orthodox Jews' candidate, beat Hillary's (liberal Jews') ass.

They are never going to get over that, baby.

AMERICAN POLITICS IS NOW REALLY ALL ABOUT WHICH JEWS WIN

It really frosted the NYT, the liberal Jews, ass, when Trump, the Orthodox Jews' candidate, beat Hillary's (liberal Jews') ass.

They are never going to get over that, baby.