Bits & Pieces
New Zealand voters chose this flag as the competitor to the current flag for the final election in this $18 million USD waste of taxpayers money by Prime Minister Key.
Trump cancelled his trip to Israel after Netanyahu mentioned that the Muslim ban was a terrible idea.
Trump and Carson are making noises like they will run as independents if they think the Republican National Committee isn’t treating them fairly.
It is time for people to refresh their memories about the Whig and American (Know Nothing) parties of the first half of the 19th century, because it is looking like the Republican Party is about to fragment into the parties that formed it.
26 comments
So Trump is too bigoted even for NuttyYahoo.
That’s rich. Sort of like how Darth Cheney was recently rolled out of his crypt to sneer in Trump’s direction as “he’s too extreme” recently, then rolled back down to imbibe the blood of a few more kittens and virgins in order to keep his black heart beating a few hours more.
The original Republican Party was a lot more complex than just Whigs and Know Nothings. It was basically all the pieces of the Democratic Party and Whig Party that hated slavery — which was enough of the Whig Party to basically destroy the party, since we have a binary first-past-the-gates voting system that guarantees that we will have two parties and only two because two parties that are coalitions of what would be smaller parties in a proportional system like Israel’s are the only way to guarantee the 50%+1 votes needed to win, a matter of mathematics, not of conspiracy. As time has rolled on the sub-parties have bolted from one party to the other on multiple occasions, such as when the white racists and blacks passed each other by while bolting from their respective parties to the other party.
Still, it’s looking an awful lot like today’s Republican Party is shedding sub-parties at an increasing rate. George W. Bush won a majority of the Muslim vote in 2000. Somehow I doubt the Republican candidate will win 1% of the Muslim vote in 2016…. that’s one sub-group that’s gone for good thanks to people like the current Republican candidates pandering to bigots. The question is whether there’s going to be another issue that arises that’s so critical to the nation, so important, that it’s going to strip away sufficient sub-parties from both Democrats and Republicans to reach critical mass like the original Republican Party did. At the moment I can’t think of what it could be. There doesn’t seem to be a single issue that dominates national politics today the way that slavery did from the 1830’s to the 1860’s…
– Badtux the History Penguin
I suppose I must admit that Badtux is right, but I do like the ring of “it is looking like the Republican Party is about to fragment into the parties that formed it.”
Best
Jim
The xenophobes of the “Know Nothings” often appear as isolationists, and are one of the few constants since the formation of the Republican Party. The flipping of conservative/liberal that took place beginning in the Depression really amounted to a name swap. I’m old enough to have seen it. While Democratic national candidates have been nominally left of center in my lifetime, many of the Democrats in the House and Senate were decidedly rightwingers. This led to the party-swapping that took place in the 1960s and 70s.
Yes, Badtux, I did over simplify, but the fragmentation is taking place in the South, and the current crop of Presidential candidates are surely “know nothings”, if technically not “Know Nothings”. 😈
“… but the fragmentation is taking place in the South …” This fragmentation, does it include the nixonian southern strategy?
No, Shirt, it mostly involves a racist Southern Democrat who regularly used the N-word who oddly enough became probably the most pro-civil-rights President that we’ve ever had. He knew what he was doing when he signed those laws — he was giving the South to the Republican Party for generations. He also knew it was the right thing to do, to sign those laws. Nixon merely exploited the already-existing situation.
LBJ is probably the most complex and tragic politician of the 20th century. How one man could do so much good and so much evil all at the same time would be something worthy of a treatment by Shakespeare. Alas, we do not seem to have any Shakespeares today…
Shirt, Nixon just noticed what was happening and targeted a specific group – the Strom Thurman Dixiecrats.
LBJ grew up dirt poor but married a very smart woman who knew how to make money, and studied politics at the knee of one of the most powerful House Speakers, ‘Mr Sam’ Rayburn. He became the Majority Leader of the Senate, and knew how to get laws passed, whether anyone else wanted them or not.
He would have stood at the same level as FDR if he hadn’t bought into all of the delusions about Southeast Asia.
I don’t know whether LBJ actually bought into all the delusions about Southeast Asia. But the things being said about Southeast Asia played into one of LBJ’s defining character flaws, an abiding sense that he was cowardly and not worthy of the powerful position into which he’d worked himself, and a fear of being thought of as weak and craven. He had to send troops into Southeast Asia because otherwise he would have been thought of as weak and cowardly. At least, that is what was going through his mind as he did so.(*)
LBJ was also a racist, a Southern cracker who bought in to all the stereotypes of black people that were prevalent in the South. Yet he did so much to insure equal rights for black people, because it was the right thing to do. LBJ was a complex yet flawed man whose Presidency achieved so much for civil rights, yet disintegrated so tragically because of that fatal flaw in his personality, that fear of being thought a craven. That is why I say he is worthy of a play by Shakespeare.
-BT
(*) Communication from son of LBJ’s personal physician who was probably LBJ’s closest friend, said son is a personal friend. I don’t know how much of that is public knowledge or not.
He was surrounded by Kennedy appointees, ‘the best and the brightest’, and he listened to them. They did not treat him very well, and some (Robert McNamara, for example) didn’t actually perform their jobs very well in spite of their education and intelligence. He lacked the confidence to make the changes that would have been better for his legacy and the country.
It is a flaw that the position of Vice President is so ill regarded in our system.
Few people know that LBJ visited SEA multiple times, because it wasn’t a PR stunt. He did some good things, things that only a person with his political skills could accomplish, but he was enough of a politician to know when to leave.
Strom Thurmond lived to be 100. John F. Kennedy was assassinated at age 46. The good die young…
LBJ is indeed a tragic figure. The good things he did are soooo good today’s GOP is still trying (with some success) to destroy his legacy. Then there’s that war he couldn’t seem to let go of; I think you know more than a bit about that…
It was primarily thanks to LBJ that the Kmer Rouge were put into power by an enraged population over the massive bombing raids by the USAF from ’65 to ’73 (4 years under LBJ & continued by Nixon who did escalate the attacks & greatly extended the range into Cambodia) – contrary to the popular rewrite of history that it was Nixon that started the attacks. Documents in the UN’s posession showed that more than 2.75 megtatons of ordinance was dropped in over 230,000 sorties over more than 113,000 sites. The documents claimed that almost 12,000 sites bombed (and some more than once) had either no target listed, or listed as “indeterminate”. Many innocent civilians were killed, and millions more died under the KR & the genocidal maniac Selat Sar (Pol Pot). To his credit, Kissinger did try to stop Nixon, but failed.
A great deal of deady unexploded ordinance was still there when my team were sent there, as we soon discovered the hard way.
The USA was completely responsible for millions of innocent deaths in Cambodia. I know the facts, and I saw the proof. I also hold the USA responsible for the death of 2 good friends there, and others of the more than 30,000 soldiers “who were not officially there” from several Nations.
It will take longer than all eternity before I ever forgive the USA.
Indeed, Kryten. That is part of the contradictions of LBJ. On the domestic front he created our Medicaid system for the poor and Medicare for the elderly, passed all sorts of civil rights laws that gave minorities, women, and the handicapped equal rights for the first time in our nation’s history, got electricity and indoor plumbing for the rural poor and urban housing for the urban poor, and got the US to the moon (Nixon was President when it actually happened, but the hardware that got us there was actually built under LBJ). Then there was that whole Southeast Asia thing…. it destroyed his Presidency, and arguably its effects are still distorting our politics here in the US, because it directly led to Nixon being elected (sorry, Nixon was so twisted he needed a corkscrew to put his boots on) which in turn eventually led to Reagan being elected and ushering in a 30 year period of Republican domination of US politics that has pretty well destroyed the American middle class…
Black people put LBJ up there with Abraham Lincoln on their pedestal of great Presidents despite the Southeast Asia war. The rest of us can’t do that, because that fatal flaw in his personality that led to him being talked into escalating that war turned into a slow-ticking time bomb that has had effects on America almost as dire as those it had on Southeast Asia…
Agreed. Nixon basically sumed up US Foreign Policy, when Kissinger tried to argue him out of intensifying the bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger said “The problem is, Mr. President, the Air Force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war . . . in fact, they are not designed for any war we are likely to have to fight.” Nixon replied: “Anything that flies, on anything that moves.” Kissinger called General Alexander Haig to relay the new orders from the president. Haig responded by laughing.
I searched to see if there was an accurate report and found this, which to my recollection is accurate:
CommonDreams – Bombs over Cambodia
Sadly (from my perspective) it truly does not do justice to the true evil committed there. Not to someone who was a victim, and not to those of us who saw the aftermath, and who felt an unbearable pity for the victims (which includes the millions who “survived”), and who felt a sun hot burning desire for revenge!
For the record, I am quite capable and willing to distinguish between US citizens, and the deeds done in their name by insane, or just evil, or simply weak & stupid leaders. I’m no hypocrite. We are far from perfect here, and neither is any other Nation. But, the USA pretends to be the World moral authority & leader of Justice”! And it is neither!
Humans are making the World a toilet. The sooner it’s flushed, the better. Maybe then, all those innocent souls throughout history murdered or that died for no good reason, and mine, will find peace.
World War Two armed the entire world and made violence the path of choice for change. The US should have let the former colonies settle their own policies. Getting involved with France attempting to hold on to an empire it could no longer afford, was a fool’s errand. Eisenhower provided logistic support for the French and the US government seemed to have been trapped.
The people in charge lied to you and expected you to accept it, even when you knew damn well they were lying. The officer corp was lost in politics and the local government the US supported was a group of gangsters. The political leaders of the US didn’t have the guts to admit the whole thing was FUBAR ; that we should never have gotten in, and we should get out immediately. Hundreds of thousands of people died because politicians wanted to look strong.
What’s scary for me is listening to the out-takes from the Republican debates. I have heard all of this rhetoric about being strong and attacking the ‘enemy’ before and it has always ended badly during my lifetime.
The widespread bombing of Cambodia was kept secret from the American public by our leaders and media. Those were the days before the World Wide Web, when it was possible for a nation to largely close its doors to information that the leadership deemed not patriotic. Today our leaders have different ways of doing that, the most prominent being crapflooding and terrorism, where they flood the channels of communication with misinformation and then use terrorism on the part of their willing dupes to suppress the flow of information. Terrorism being, in this case, mostly things like denial of service attacks, threats, and attacks on the employment of those who are speaking information that our leaders do not wish to spread, rather than gunshots and bombings, but that is because our leaders are both more subtle and more powerful today, possessing information about the populace that the East Germans would have envied and no need to worry about people like you and me because we only reach an audience of like-believers that is too small to be a threat to the artificial reality that they’ve constructed in the minds of the majority of the populace.
It is hard to say that a nation of mind-controlled people is responsible for what their controllers do. On the other hand, there’s a fair number who know that it’s bullshit that they’re being fed and still don’t speak out, whether for fear or whatever, and so… what about them? I wrote a song for them. They will never hear it of course.
I also wrote a song called “The Calculus of Pain” about Cambodia, but it’s painful for me to listen to and I wasn’t there, so I’m not going to link to it from here…
You are both quite probably right. 🙂
You & I Bryan see the World as it *is*. We were trained that way. And we both, I suspect, feel cursed at times. I suspect that since most of your work was classified, even covert (as was mine) you attended many debriefings, & psych evals (I certainly did). I came to realise that the purpose was not to simply gather all possible info regarding the mission, but also to gather as much info about me. The way I thought, felt, reacted… & what I believed, especially my core beliefs. So that I could be manipulated & better controlled. I realised this fairly quickly. After all, I had been trained to gain trust. For example, I was out with a friend last week. We decided to stop at a cafe for coffee & lunch. He asked about how I got people to tell me their secrets. I went to the lovely young lady who served us and began a conversation. Within 10 min’s, I learned what she liked, that she was changing job’s in the new year and studying part time, & that she was unhappy with her boyfriend & why. Given another few minutes, I would have had her address, phone # & figured out her passwords & probable security question answers. 🙂 My friend couldn’t believe it. He asked if I could teach him. I said no. The process looks simple, but actually isn’t. I could be an excellent con man, except that I have a strong sense of right & wrong, morals & ethics, and believe in honor above all else. It’s also why I’ll never be a politician! LOL
The long term NDA I was forced to sign was not primarily related to my missions in Cambodia, but mainly because of what I learned in the following years. Cambodia taught me to distrust everyone, & to question everything. Intel gathering was my primary role, and I was very good. 🙂
I have great respect for you Bryan & badtux. And the other regulars here. Why else would I have spent so much time here over the years? Simply because I can just be me, warts & all, and no mask. 🙂
Badtux, I would be interested in that song “The Calculus of Pain” (even the title intregues me). You may not have been military (and believe me, you are better off), but you are sane, rational, intelligent & honest. All qualities I value. You may not have been there to see, hear, smell or feel what I did; but you understand and you feel pain. I am glad you were not there. One of my friends I joined up with was one of the toughest people I’ve ever known. A couple years after we got out, he couldn’t handle it any more and ended his life. Many others did also I learned. They don’t get counted as casualties by anyone but people who knew them. I’ve written only 3 poems in my life, all about Cambodia.
Occasionally, I hear that Kim Wild song “Cambodia” about her man who flew on a covert mission to Cambodia & didn’t return, & I think of you Bryan. You got out before the whole SEA debacle AFAIK, but I wonder if you had remained, if you might have been tasked there, possibly even when I was there. 🙂
You have created an oasis of honer, honesty, sanity and trust Bryan in a World losing more of those values every day. Thank you.
Kryten, all it took was one photograph. One photograph found in a pile of smoldering photographs at Tuol Sleng Prison after the Vietnamese liberated it. That photograph haunted me for years. I tried writing something multiple times and threw those attempts away before finally, years later, I finally wrote something that was close enough.
It is the photograph of a girl, maybe ten years old, a beautiful young girl. She is staring at the camera with a haunted expression in her eyes. You can see the bruises on her face. There is a number on a card pinned to her chest. The number is “137”. No one knows her name, or from where it was she came. All that is known is that she is dead.
The Khmer Rouge executed her, of course.
I am so very glad that I came of age during an era when the U.S. military wasn’t involved in any foreign interventions of note, and by the time the current era of foreign interventions happened I was too old for anybody to consider drafting me even if they had reinstituted the draft. Photographs are hard enough. If I had actually seen it in person, I think this bleeding heart would have broke entirely.
As for the song, I have sung it maybe three times total in my entire life. The third time, I turned on the recorder and recorded what I had, no attempt at production, just raw microphone and guitar inputs into the hard disk recorder. I hadn’t even finalized the words when I hit ‘record’, I changed them slightly during the song where it seemed right. I have not sung it since. Even listening to it is almost unbearably sad for me, nevermind playing/singing it again.
They used NDAs backed by military law to stop people from announcing to the world that the US government was lying about just about everything, and intel was taking the hit when reality would finally catch up on one of their bogus claims.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if the bombing actually accomplished what it was supposed to do, but it didn’t. It was just a boon for the Khmer Rouge and destroyed the image of the US as a good guy for helping to kick out the Japanese.
The area you worked would primarily the responsibility of the CIA after you moved away from the Mekong. There were overflights, but they were changed from low and slow over land in RC-47s to high altitude over water in RC-135s after the troop draw downs.
Badtux, the bitterest pill was that it took the North Vietnamese Army to finally remove the Khmer Rouge. We screwed the entire area up and got hundreds of thousands of people killed for no good reason.
Badtux, I had to look at hundreds of photo’s & vid’s because it was part of my job. I am not trying to “one up” you or belittle what that photo made you feel. I want to make an important point. Going into a village that had recently destroyed & everyone killed vicously, was worse. But we had spent over 2 years training for that. The traning is hard, and most don’t make it. I would give anything to have failed. My friend who ended his life taught me a valuable lesson. He thought he could become human again. He couldn’t, not with those memories. I am not at all the man I was before I joined up.
You are a lucky man. I envy you.
The only thing that keeps me sane & alive is that I constantly remind myself of the thousands we saved. And the looks on their faces, and the tears of joy, and hugs of the children. But you know how devious the human mind is. You can’t think only of the good parts, without the bad parts lurking in the shadows, waiting for their chance to jump out.
But the truth is… I’m just waiting for that final *tock*. All the rest of the past 25 years or so, doesn’t really matter a damn to me.
Kryten, you don’t have to tell me that, I already know. I already know that what the horror of what happened was far more than one little girl tortured then executed. The horror that man does to man seems to be a constant, whether we are talking about the concentration camps of the Nazis, what Pol Pot did to his people, or the atrocities that are undoubtedly happening somewhere at this very moment in time to some other 10 year old girl guilty of nothing more than being born at the wrong place at the wrong time to the wrong people. I don’t talk too much about my own past, but I haven’t always been out here in the Silicon Valley slinging electrons. This is my second life. My first one was spent in a variety of places that nowhere compares to what happened to Cambodia but had plenty of tragedy and sadness of their own. Bleeding heart, remember?
But still, that one photograph stays with me for days every time I see it, even knowing all that. If I had been there and seen the things your friend saw, I have no doubt that my fate would have been the same, because if one photograph is enough to raise the kind of reaction in me, being faced with the horror of the real thing… no. I am grateful that was not to be.
I am glad you were not there or any other such place. I like you. 🙂 Allow me to carry enough for both us. The World needs bleeding hearts, I wish there were many more. I was one once. It was mostly why I joined up. Now I’m just a hard cynical sod that knows too much about human nature. 🙂
That image has made you a better human m8.
All I really wanted to be was an Engineer. And the Mil/Int corrupted even that. It was useful for their needs. It wasn’t my idea to work for GD. Still, I did get a half dozen years of pleasure as an Engineer, except I discovered companies used us also. I designed systems to make work easier, safer & more efficient. They used them to reduce staff. Ah well… We take what we can get, eh? 😉
I hope we get to share stories one day. It wasn’t all bad! 😀
Neither of us can change the past. What is done is done. And humans will always find away to destroy.
Oh, I should add that if seeing that photo didn’t hurt, then you would just be another selfish, inconsiderate, heartless bastard. As my mother told me before she died, “The World has enough bastards in it. It doesn’t need another one.” And that is why I keep going, and she knew it. She knew once she was gone, I had nothing to keep me here. 🙂
As bad as the pictures and the sounds are, the smell, something we can’t currently record, was the worst for me. I catch a whiff and I have the sights and sounds stored away. It makes no difference whether it is a battlefield, an accident scene, a robbery, a suicide – if you have ever smelled death, you recognize it. That’s why veteran detectives have a jar of Vicks Vapo-Rub in their glove compartment – it doesn’t eliminate it, but it covers it enough to make it possible to work.
Oh, Kryten, there was a partial comment with your name on it floating around. The body was mostly gibberish, so it looks like there was transmission error or, possibly a data base error.
Yep, true Bryan. The smell is worst. I think I mentioned in a comment a while back my experience. We were actually trained to use the sense of smell in interrogation. It’s our strongest trigger to memories, as I was to discover. Before signing up, I really enjoyed a good BBQ. It’s an Aussie tradition. 🙂
My first BBQ after Cambodia was about two years later. All was well at first, then I decided to see if my m8 wanted help, and as I approached a gust of wind blew the odor of cooking meat into my face, and I was on the ground retching until I was exhausted. I didn’t understand what had happened. My friends helped me inside & cleaned me up & I drank some ice water. I truly felt wretched. Whenever I got near the BBQ, I felt nauseous. I had a meeting with a councillor a few days later and she reminded me of the link between smell & memory. It took a few years, but I eventually dealt with it. Well, I stopped throwing up at BBQ’s anyway. 🙂
Yeah Bryan, the first time I posted the comment above, it didn’ show up. Gremlins in the machine! 😉 😀
I’m not a fan of grilling myself, especially if they use charcoal starter fluid.
There was always an area at bad accidents and murder sites where people could go when they lost control to ensure they didn’t contaminate any evidence.