Aside from continuing the Vietnam conflict that was started by JFK, I believe Johnson's legacy easily places him among the top ten presidents. His consummate political skills, at times a bit of a bullying nature, enabled him and the Congress to achieve great progress on the social front: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1968, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, nominating Thurgood Marshall to be the first African American on the Supreme Court and establishing the National Endowment for the Humanities and for the Arts, Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start.
The photograph that accompanies this newsletter strikes me as illustrative of a functional democracy/republic. Only one of those 5 Presidents served two full terms. One resigned. One lost to the Republican candidate. Two lost to the Democratic candidate. People lost. People won. And Earth's magnetic poles did not flip.
"Blow back": Criticisms, protests... if it doesn't cost them money they don't care. You have to hurt them in their wallets like the Tesla Take downs.
Remember there is a safe and silent at-home and about-town way to protest too: This is the first day of the economic blackout dubbed Blackout the System, from September 16 to 20. The media won't cover it, but if it makes a dent in their bottom lines they will care. Encourage your friends, as consumers, to show our power by not spending money at major retailers and chain stores. Do instead use small local businesses, family owned businesses and farmers' markets. You might find some new favorites and send a message with your $... or lack of it pouring into their pockets. For those already protesting, writing and calling representatives and engaging in other forms of active resistance this is an easy add.
Things may look hopeless. Just remember Churchill's immortal words. We will never surrender! No matter how bad things get, not matter how strong the Right becomes, no matter if the Supreme Court gives MAGA a blank check, no matter if our media, corporations, lawfirms, univesities and foundations fail us - we will never surrender! I for one am willing to lay down my 78 year old life to defend our freedom, and although I certainly hope it never comes to that, I am confident that tens of millions of our fellow citizens are willing to do the same. We will never surrender!
the new word for the day is"reimagine" , I have a feeling it's going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting! I graduated from high school in '61 , the anger over Vietnam developed as we watched the war nightly in our living rooms . Because the press was embedded with the troops, we knew when the government was lying to us . Young men had to make a choice to be cannon fodder , or leave the country .
I'm about the same age as Bill. To me, the difference between the late-60s/early-70s and today is that today we are in a post-Constitution, post-rule-of-law space. In the before-time, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against Nixon in the tapes case, Congress threatened impeachment if he disobeyed, and Nixon yielded. Although there were subsequent assassination attempts against Ford, I've always felt that the fever broke when Marine One lifted off the White House lawn with Nixon on board.
Re: Pam Bondi and violent and/or hate speech. "Hang Mike Pence" doesn't seem to have bothered her at all.
LBJ a failure? Civil Rights and Medicare and Medicaid? He and Biden have been the greatest Presidents of my lifetime. Both passed legislation that made lives better regardless of political consequences. LBJ peace talks were undermined by Nixon before the election.
I recently finished an older book by William Shirer titled "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" It was first published in 1960. Shirer was a journalist in Germany in the years leading up to World War Two , from 1934 - 1940.
If you want proof of the saying "History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes" all you need to do is read that book. In it, Shirer describes Hitler's rise to power.
Much of Hitler's rise to power was accomplished within the framework of the law and governance as it existed in Germany in that period. The killing started later.
After reading Shirer's book, and now living through this MAGA era, the similarities between what occurred before when Hitler's extra-judicial killing started , and Trump 2016 - 2025 is uncanny.
People should be very concerned.
You do not need to distort or take things out of context to fit Trump into Hitler's shoes. Think of it like Trump wears a size 12 shoe and Hitler wore a size 11.5. It doesn't take much squirming to get the shoe on.
You CAN use Hitler as an example for the Trump administrations actions, as long as you don't get ahead of yourself in a rush down that timeline. We know Hitler's history. Trump's history is incomplete and as of September 16th, 2025.
Don't say "Comparing Trump to Hitler is bogus because Hitler perpetrated The Holocaust" is a bad argument.
Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, the Austrian Anschluss was in 1938. Is it historical rhyming when Trump talks about taking over Greenland or making Canada the 51st state? It took Hitler about 5 years to annex his first sovereign nation, Austria.
You do not know what Trump will do in the future but a good guess is his actions will be bad AND will get worse over time. Anyone care to speculate on what the federal government might look like if Trump and Miller have five years of unopposed governance to look forward to with the capitulation of the House and Senate Republican's? It is not a pretty picture.
Reading that book did not give me a warm feeling that things will work out for the USA. Just the opposite in fact. Shirer talks about numerous opportunities that the future Allies missed to stop Hitler and I would contend that the GOP rolling over and playing dead for Trump will certainly go down in anyone's future history of the MAGA era. Is the rolling over of the GOP for Trump a historical rhyme of Chamberlain rolling over for Hitler with the Munich Agreement?
I am doubly concerned about the administration, and what is going on with the military, primarily the USAF and the USN down in the Caribbean.
Is that Trump* testing the limits of his control of the military, or is it Trump doing stupid things?
I ask myself if the uniformed leaders of the armed forces are receiving any independent military legal counsel as to the legality of targeting boats, or are they "Just following the orders of the Commander-in-Chief"?
There was a lot of "just following orders" mentality took place during the 1930's in Hitlerian Germany.
DO NOT say...."Oh, that could never happen here". It is happening here, as I type. The DoD under Hegseth is problematic. Hegseth isn't going to listen to some military attorney telling him he can not kill people.
Part of Trump "owning" the military is first sucking the military into collective criminal acts that make the military accomplices in crime. The military will justify their illegal acts with the "Just following orders" defense and Trump will throw them to the wolves saying "I depend on the counsel of the military to prevent me from doing illegal things.
In a normal world, Counsel for the president would never have authorized those killings.
If these are extra-judicial killings, the military might squeak out on the first one, but two, separated in time gets to be much more problematic.
That second extra-judicial murder was probably easier to swallow for military leaders than the first one was.
Why? Because nothing bad happened to anyone when they launched the first boat attack/missile strike.
No one in the military got fired "Due to a loss of confidence".
Everything I've read from legal scholars versed in this area of law says these were illegal killings. Are we really going to take Trump's, Hegseth's, or Miller's* word as to the veracity of their claims of knowing, categorically, who the people in those boats were, and that the lawyers and political specialists the Trump administration has access to blessed their killing as okay? They didn't ask. They just gave the ship drivers and plane flyers an order which they followed. Absolute power corrupts absolutely
There is another aspect of these killings, as it relates to the military, that I find very troubling, which is the purging of the higher echelons of the military. No one doubts it is going on, but I have not heard anyone really address the justification for the individual firings other than invoking DEI or Wokeness. Attributing the purge to Wokeness or DEI automatically puts each fired general or admiral in the "Trump doing stupid Trump things" bucket which is a bad choice.
So, lets talk about General Michael Flynn.
Flynn (imo) is a straight up traitor, but my problem with Flynn is that he is probably involved in the purging of the upper levels of the military.
Flynn didn't spring from the ground a fully grown MAGA Red Hat in 2016. He was all the things that define MAGA, long before the name was created. MAGA is a belief system with racism, guns and hatred of "the other" being among it's core tenets.
So you have this guy Flynn feeling out other officers as to what their beliefs were, in a position to push people forward with promotions and to also ruin other peoples careers with a well placed negative fitness report.
Flynn, at a minimum in the US Army, was likely promoting people of like mind and I think it is fair to say that Flynn's beliefs do not reflect a belief in the US Constitution. This dude was reaching out to the Russians in a concerning way back in 2014.
How many other military brass were padding the officer corps of their respective services with fellow travelers? Padding the ranks with people predisposed to following the illegal orders of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.
*I think Stephen Miller is the driving force behind all the things Trump is doing. It is Miller that puts a coherent plan in place to make these things happen. I do not think Trump could do this on his own. He and Miller are 100% sympatico in their beliefs so he has handed the reins to Miller. Miller is the one generating the plan, Trump lends his name to the document or action.
Why don’t Americans and all protest organizations and Bulwark writers tell people to BOYCOTT ALL big companies that support Trump or ignore his attacks on democracy, including Amazon, which means also their Prime and Whole Foods? Now that SCOTUS has made it Impossible to prosecute Trump for lawbreaking, the only way he’ll stop is to get HUNDREDS OF BIG CEOs to pressure him! Money, and approval from the powerful, mean more to him than anything. So turn both against him! Also, uniting to boycott the rich and powerful gives us citizens something TO DO together besides march and wave signs.
I've never shopped at Walmart; and when Bezo's killed the Harris endorsement I cancelled my WaPo subscription and have not bought anything from Amazon since. Never had Prime. Shop at an independent co-op.
Great blog post, as usual. But I got stumped on the line saying Johnson was a failed president. I was under the impression he accomplished a lot of really important things for our country: lowered taxes; got the Civil Rights Act passed (think of the challenge of school integration, how he called out the National Guard to insure that poor little girl in the famous photo could so bravely walk into her new school.); programs like Food Stamps in his War on Poverty; the creation of Medicare and Medicaid; funding for schools in low-income areas; the Clean Air Act; and more. Granted, Vietnam was a huge mistake. But he signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. So, maybe as a Republican, you thought he was bad, but as a Democrat, what he accomplished in his presidency played a huge part in the formation of my political belief towards "justice for all".
Yesterday I was in traffic while feeling terrible about our country. This is the time when I am most engulfed in an honest cross section of my purple city. Everyone letting each other merge, giving each other grace for mistakes, most people driving relaxed. I want to believe this is who we are without social media.
I saw a video meme where two dogs are furiously barking and snarling at each other through a slatted wooden gate. Then the gate slides open, and the dogs stand there looking at each other with slightly wagging tails. When the gate slides closed again, they go back to barking and snarling.
It was labeled "People on social media vs. people in real life."
As long as we are reminded that, if we look to history for the reassurance that we have "come back from" or simply overcome from its terrible events, we are keeping our head in the sand. And, as well, we will have indeed foreclosed on a positive future.
Have you not noticed that it is each and every one of the perpetrators of the immoral, cruel and undemocratic initiatives that are the ones who are immune from criticism and blowback. Sure, Trump listens to polls and critical commentary and may modify a policy, but then he orders his DOJ to go after each individual or institution that refused to do his bidding. The citizenry is, more and more, protesting, standing up for neighbors who are being ripped from their families, arguing against the death imperative coming from RFK, horrified at our newly minted care-less who it hurts as long as I benefit, society. It is a callous and illegal administration that is running the show, sucking any goodness and empathy from us. A pandora box of selfishness and greed has been unleashed; in the "god-head" that we call Trump, or at least Medusa's face, we have a man who disregards any laws, historical imperatives, decency. There is no honest broker who will finally own up to misdeeds, or even excuse them, and fade from scrutiny only to return rehabilitated. Rehabilitation is anathema to them. This group laughs at us suckers, believers in the snake-oil they sell us, relying on their honesty masquerading in the blatancy of purpose and crudeness to sway the day. And worse, no 4th estate to hold power accountable or even expose to the people. With absolute power comes absolute corruption -- only in this upside-down world the corruption built the power. Therefore, any backlash and protest from the people is not covered -- maybe a mention on the weekend when few are watching.
Gil Scott Heron sang: "The Revolution will not be Televised". And it won't, when a call to arrest liberals, has no pushback from anyone with the ability to make a difference.
Optimism is a good counterpoint to the despair we are all feeling, but it must be placed in the context of today -- we must put aside precedent, just as the Supreme Court does.
Watching these right wing politicians in positions of power come completely unglued over the fact that other people, mostly powerless, say things they don’t like, is surreal. They control all three branches, they have their own media propaganda system, they’ve been doing whatever they want with very little pushback, yet they’re still not satisfied. Nobody can say anything that displeases them. What unbelievable crybabies.
"Everything is rigged against conservatives" has been a staple of right-wing thinking and propaganda for a long time. They'll point to specific areas of the culture that are dominated by left-leaners while ignoring anything that skews in their own favor.
The sense of perpetual aggrievement was put on steroids by Trump, with his pathological belief that whatever diminishes his image or thwarts his will is wrong by definition. Since he is more deserving of criticism than any president before him, the MAGA apologists complain that their hero is facing an unprecedented onslaught of attacks and say it must be stopped. They seemed positively giddy after the Butler shooting, which gave them an opportunity to allege that any strong criticism of Trump amounts to "assassination prep."
"Perhaps this generation of Americans will turn out not to have been very good at resisting an authoritarian movement."
Which generation is that Bill? It seems the boomers and older are most to blame for $32 trillion in debt and an unhealthy world burning from wars and pollution. Maybe it's time y'all move along into the sunset.
An interesting discussion comparing the late 60s and 70s to the present. I came of age politically during those years, actively marching in the streets, camping out on the Pentagon steps etc.
There simply is NO comparison. Yes it was a tumultuous time and great leaders were murdered. Yes we had one great President plunge into failure because of the war and another who was terrible from day one and only got worse.
BUT we had a functioning House and Senate with real politicians attempting to govern and respond. We had the amazing experience of the (really bipartisan) Watergate Hearings. We had a real Supreme Court that made decisions openly and transparently.
And we did NOT have a soon to be full dictator in office surrounded by sycophants and thuggish advisors who are single-mindedly pursuing the complete overthrow of our Democracy with ZERO pushback or response even from the House, Senate and Supreme Court.
Even at the worst moments in those years, eg Kent State, the Weathermen, the assassinations, we never faced the openly planned strategy of destroying our democracy, tainting and revising our history all in the name of creating a White Christian Nationalist State.
As you say, we now have a president who can kill people in boats at will, lie left and right, break the laws, not enforce the laws, engineer mind boggling corrupt self enriching deals and NOTHING is happening..
We are look those trees in the woods that crash to the ground but it didn't happen since nobody hears.
Hard not to feel total despair, esp when a significant majority of the country fully supports Trump and MAGA or simply doesn't care.
Aside from continuing the Vietnam conflict that was started by JFK, I believe Johnson's legacy easily places him among the top ten presidents. His consummate political skills, at times a bit of a bullying nature, enabled him and the Congress to achieve great progress on the social front: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1968, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, nominating Thurgood Marshall to be the first African American on the Supreme Court and establishing the National Endowment for the Humanities and for the Arts, Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start.
A failed presidency, hardly!
Heather Cox Richardson put it well. "We are neither dead nor in prison, so this is not over".
The photograph that accompanies this newsletter strikes me as illustrative of a functional democracy/republic. Only one of those 5 Presidents served two full terms. One resigned. One lost to the Republican candidate. Two lost to the Democratic candidate. People lost. People won. And Earth's magnetic poles did not flip.
"Blow back": Criticisms, protests... if it doesn't cost them money they don't care. You have to hurt them in their wallets like the Tesla Take downs.
Remember there is a safe and silent at-home and about-town way to protest too: This is the first day of the economic blackout dubbed Blackout the System, from September 16 to 20. The media won't cover it, but if it makes a dent in their bottom lines they will care. Encourage your friends, as consumers, to show our power by not spending money at major retailers and chain stores. Do instead use small local businesses, family owned businesses and farmers' markets. You might find some new favorites and send a message with your $... or lack of it pouring into their pockets. For those already protesting, writing and calling representatives and engaging in other forms of active resistance this is an easy add.
Things may look hopeless. Just remember Churchill's immortal words. We will never surrender! No matter how bad things get, not matter how strong the Right becomes, no matter if the Supreme Court gives MAGA a blank check, no matter if our media, corporations, lawfirms, univesities and foundations fail us - we will never surrender! I for one am willing to lay down my 78 year old life to defend our freedom, and although I certainly hope it never comes to that, I am confident that tens of millions of our fellow citizens are willing to do the same. We will never surrender!
the new word for the day is"reimagine" , I have a feeling it's going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting! I graduated from high school in '61 , the anger over Vietnam developed as we watched the war nightly in our living rooms . Because the press was embedded with the troops, we knew when the government was lying to us . Young men had to make a choice to be cannon fodder , or leave the country .
Two thoughts:
I'm about the same age as Bill. To me, the difference between the late-60s/early-70s and today is that today we are in a post-Constitution, post-rule-of-law space. In the before-time, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against Nixon in the tapes case, Congress threatened impeachment if he disobeyed, and Nixon yielded. Although there were subsequent assassination attempts against Ford, I've always felt that the fever broke when Marine One lifted off the White House lawn with Nixon on board.
Re: Pam Bondi and violent and/or hate speech. "Hang Mike Pence" doesn't seem to have bothered her at all.
LBJ a failure? Civil Rights and Medicare and Medicaid? He and Biden have been the greatest Presidents of my lifetime. Both passed legislation that made lives better regardless of political consequences. LBJ peace talks were undermined by Nixon before the election.
I recently finished an older book by William Shirer titled "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" It was first published in 1960. Shirer was a journalist in Germany in the years leading up to World War Two , from 1934 - 1940.
If you want proof of the saying "History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes" all you need to do is read that book. In it, Shirer describes Hitler's rise to power.
Much of Hitler's rise to power was accomplished within the framework of the law and governance as it existed in Germany in that period. The killing started later.
After reading Shirer's book, and now living through this MAGA era, the similarities between what occurred before when Hitler's extra-judicial killing started , and Trump 2016 - 2025 is uncanny.
People should be very concerned.
You do not need to distort or take things out of context to fit Trump into Hitler's shoes. Think of it like Trump wears a size 12 shoe and Hitler wore a size 11.5. It doesn't take much squirming to get the shoe on.
You CAN use Hitler as an example for the Trump administrations actions, as long as you don't get ahead of yourself in a rush down that timeline. We know Hitler's history. Trump's history is incomplete and as of September 16th, 2025.
Don't say "Comparing Trump to Hitler is bogus because Hitler perpetrated The Holocaust" is a bad argument.
Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, the Austrian Anschluss was in 1938. Is it historical rhyming when Trump talks about taking over Greenland or making Canada the 51st state? It took Hitler about 5 years to annex his first sovereign nation, Austria.
You do not know what Trump will do in the future but a good guess is his actions will be bad AND will get worse over time. Anyone care to speculate on what the federal government might look like if Trump and Miller have five years of unopposed governance to look forward to with the capitulation of the House and Senate Republican's? It is not a pretty picture.
Reading that book did not give me a warm feeling that things will work out for the USA. Just the opposite in fact. Shirer talks about numerous opportunities that the future Allies missed to stop Hitler and I would contend that the GOP rolling over and playing dead for Trump will certainly go down in anyone's future history of the MAGA era. Is the rolling over of the GOP for Trump a historical rhyme of Chamberlain rolling over for Hitler with the Munich Agreement?
I am doubly concerned about the administration, and what is going on with the military, primarily the USAF and the USN down in the Caribbean.
Is that Trump* testing the limits of his control of the military, or is it Trump doing stupid things?
I ask myself if the uniformed leaders of the armed forces are receiving any independent military legal counsel as to the legality of targeting boats, or are they "Just following the orders of the Commander-in-Chief"?
There was a lot of "just following orders" mentality took place during the 1930's in Hitlerian Germany.
DO NOT say...."Oh, that could never happen here". It is happening here, as I type. The DoD under Hegseth is problematic. Hegseth isn't going to listen to some military attorney telling him he can not kill people.
Part of Trump "owning" the military is first sucking the military into collective criminal acts that make the military accomplices in crime. The military will justify their illegal acts with the "Just following orders" defense and Trump will throw them to the wolves saying "I depend on the counsel of the military to prevent me from doing illegal things.
In a normal world, Counsel for the president would never have authorized those killings.
If these are extra-judicial killings, the military might squeak out on the first one, but two, separated in time gets to be much more problematic.
That second extra-judicial murder was probably easier to swallow for military leaders than the first one was.
Why? Because nothing bad happened to anyone when they launched the first boat attack/missile strike.
No one in the military got fired "Due to a loss of confidence".
Everything I've read from legal scholars versed in this area of law says these were illegal killings. Are we really going to take Trump's, Hegseth's, or Miller's* word as to the veracity of their claims of knowing, categorically, who the people in those boats were, and that the lawyers and political specialists the Trump administration has access to blessed their killing as okay? They didn't ask. They just gave the ship drivers and plane flyers an order which they followed. Absolute power corrupts absolutely
There is another aspect of these killings, as it relates to the military, that I find very troubling, which is the purging of the higher echelons of the military. No one doubts it is going on, but I have not heard anyone really address the justification for the individual firings other than invoking DEI or Wokeness. Attributing the purge to Wokeness or DEI automatically puts each fired general or admiral in the "Trump doing stupid Trump things" bucket which is a bad choice.
So, lets talk about General Michael Flynn.
Flynn (imo) is a straight up traitor, but my problem with Flynn is that he is probably involved in the purging of the upper levels of the military.
Flynn didn't spring from the ground a fully grown MAGA Red Hat in 2016. He was all the things that define MAGA, long before the name was created. MAGA is a belief system with racism, guns and hatred of "the other" being among it's core tenets.
So you have this guy Flynn feeling out other officers as to what their beliefs were, in a position to push people forward with promotions and to also ruin other peoples careers with a well placed negative fitness report.
Flynn, at a minimum in the US Army, was likely promoting people of like mind and I think it is fair to say that Flynn's beliefs do not reflect a belief in the US Constitution. This dude was reaching out to the Russians in a concerning way back in 2014.
How many other military brass were padding the officer corps of their respective services with fellow travelers? Padding the ranks with people predisposed to following the illegal orders of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.
*I think Stephen Miller is the driving force behind all the things Trump is doing. It is Miller that puts a coherent plan in place to make these things happen. I do not think Trump could do this on his own. He and Miller are 100% sympatico in their beliefs so he has handed the reins to Miller. Miller is the one generating the plan, Trump lends his name to the document or action.
Why don’t Americans and all protest organizations and Bulwark writers tell people to BOYCOTT ALL big companies that support Trump or ignore his attacks on democracy, including Amazon, which means also their Prime and Whole Foods? Now that SCOTUS has made it Impossible to prosecute Trump for lawbreaking, the only way he’ll stop is to get HUNDREDS OF BIG CEOs to pressure him! Money, and approval from the powerful, mean more to him than anything. So turn both against him! Also, uniting to boycott the rich and powerful gives us citizens something TO DO together besides march and wave signs.
I've never shopped at Walmart; and when Bezo's killed the Harris endorsement I cancelled my WaPo subscription and have not bought anything from Amazon since. Never had Prime. Shop at an independent co-op.
Great blog post, as usual. But I got stumped on the line saying Johnson was a failed president. I was under the impression he accomplished a lot of really important things for our country: lowered taxes; got the Civil Rights Act passed (think of the challenge of school integration, how he called out the National Guard to insure that poor little girl in the famous photo could so bravely walk into her new school.); programs like Food Stamps in his War on Poverty; the creation of Medicare and Medicaid; funding for schools in low-income areas; the Clean Air Act; and more. Granted, Vietnam was a huge mistake. But he signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. So, maybe as a Republican, you thought he was bad, but as a Democrat, what he accomplished in his presidency played a huge part in the formation of my political belief towards "justice for all".
Yesterday I was in traffic while feeling terrible about our country. This is the time when I am most engulfed in an honest cross section of my purple city. Everyone letting each other merge, giving each other grace for mistakes, most people driving relaxed. I want to believe this is who we are without social media.
I saw a video meme where two dogs are furiously barking and snarling at each other through a slatted wooden gate. Then the gate slides open, and the dogs stand there looking at each other with slightly wagging tails. When the gate slides closed again, they go back to barking and snarling.
It was labeled "People on social media vs. people in real life."
As long as we are reminded that, if we look to history for the reassurance that we have "come back from" or simply overcome from its terrible events, we are keeping our head in the sand. And, as well, we will have indeed foreclosed on a positive future.
Have you not noticed that it is each and every one of the perpetrators of the immoral, cruel and undemocratic initiatives that are the ones who are immune from criticism and blowback. Sure, Trump listens to polls and critical commentary and may modify a policy, but then he orders his DOJ to go after each individual or institution that refused to do his bidding. The citizenry is, more and more, protesting, standing up for neighbors who are being ripped from their families, arguing against the death imperative coming from RFK, horrified at our newly minted care-less who it hurts as long as I benefit, society. It is a callous and illegal administration that is running the show, sucking any goodness and empathy from us. A pandora box of selfishness and greed has been unleashed; in the "god-head" that we call Trump, or at least Medusa's face, we have a man who disregards any laws, historical imperatives, decency. There is no honest broker who will finally own up to misdeeds, or even excuse them, and fade from scrutiny only to return rehabilitated. Rehabilitation is anathema to them. This group laughs at us suckers, believers in the snake-oil they sell us, relying on their honesty masquerading in the blatancy of purpose and crudeness to sway the day. And worse, no 4th estate to hold power accountable or even expose to the people. With absolute power comes absolute corruption -- only in this upside-down world the corruption built the power. Therefore, any backlash and protest from the people is not covered -- maybe a mention on the weekend when few are watching.
Gil Scott Heron sang: "The Revolution will not be Televised". And it won't, when a call to arrest liberals, has no pushback from anyone with the ability to make a difference.
Optimism is a good counterpoint to the despair we are all feeling, but it must be placed in the context of today -- we must put aside precedent, just as the Supreme Court does.
Watching these right wing politicians in positions of power come completely unglued over the fact that other people, mostly powerless, say things they don’t like, is surreal. They control all three branches, they have their own media propaganda system, they’ve been doing whatever they want with very little pushback, yet they’re still not satisfied. Nobody can say anything that displeases them. What unbelievable crybabies.
Republicans are the sorest winners imaginable.
"Everything is rigged against conservatives" has been a staple of right-wing thinking and propaganda for a long time. They'll point to specific areas of the culture that are dominated by left-leaners while ignoring anything that skews in their own favor.
The sense of perpetual aggrievement was put on steroids by Trump, with his pathological belief that whatever diminishes his image or thwarts his will is wrong by definition. Since he is more deserving of criticism than any president before him, the MAGA apologists complain that their hero is facing an unprecedented onslaught of attacks and say it must be stopped. They seemed positively giddy after the Butler shooting, which gave them an opportunity to allege that any strong criticism of Trump amounts to "assassination prep."
Agreed. It’s non-stop whining, and I’m so sick of it.
"Perhaps this generation of Americans will turn out not to have been very good at resisting an authoritarian movement."
Which generation is that Bill? It seems the boomers and older are most to blame for $32 trillion in debt and an unhealthy world burning from wars and pollution. Maybe it's time y'all move along into the sunset.
An interesting discussion comparing the late 60s and 70s to the present. I came of age politically during those years, actively marching in the streets, camping out on the Pentagon steps etc.
There simply is NO comparison. Yes it was a tumultuous time and great leaders were murdered. Yes we had one great President plunge into failure because of the war and another who was terrible from day one and only got worse.
BUT we had a functioning House and Senate with real politicians attempting to govern and respond. We had the amazing experience of the (really bipartisan) Watergate Hearings. We had a real Supreme Court that made decisions openly and transparently.
And we did NOT have a soon to be full dictator in office surrounded by sycophants and thuggish advisors who are single-mindedly pursuing the complete overthrow of our Democracy with ZERO pushback or response even from the House, Senate and Supreme Court.
Even at the worst moments in those years, eg Kent State, the Weathermen, the assassinations, we never faced the openly planned strategy of destroying our democracy, tainting and revising our history all in the name of creating a White Christian Nationalist State.
As you say, we now have a president who can kill people in boats at will, lie left and right, break the laws, not enforce the laws, engineer mind boggling corrupt self enriching deals and NOTHING is happening..
We are look those trees in the woods that crash to the ground but it didn't happen since nobody hears.
Hard not to feel total despair, esp when a significant majority of the country fully supports Trump and MAGA or simply doesn't care.
Ignorance is not bliss. We are all so screwed.