POLI-SCI-FI AT ITS MOST HACKISH

This morning, Never Trump former Republican Bill Kristol chose as a topic for his first post of the new revised Bulwark newsletter Morning Shots, the idea that Biden must step aside for the good of the country to win the November election. And to think when Charlie Sykes announced last week that Butcher’s Bill Kristol would be his replacement at the newsletter, I thought itwould be a good thing. I got this gem just when I’d concluded that the moron who performed as head cheerleader for Widdle Georgie’s Invasion of Poland, er, I mean Iraq, as the Greatest Thing Ever in American History might not actually be the poli-sci-fi hack I had believed he was for the past 25 years.

I’ll give Bill his due; he’s not the only fuckwitted politically-illiterate member of Punditocracy Inc. to come up with this fool’s gold. That kind of stupidity is powerful enough it even brings out the Democrats’ Brie-chomping, Chardonnay-swilling Volvo drivers, aka the Knickers In A Permanent Knot Caucus. And of course we can never forget the over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable trust fund babies of the DC Press Corpse, our National Greek Chorus of Moron Malevolence.

This mug’s game was played out 56 years ago during the National Nervous Breakdown otherwise known as the year 1968. I know all about it. I was there. I was even one of the fuckwits who listened to the bullshit and decided my highly moral fee-fee’s required me not to vote in the most meaningful election of the 20th Century. So before I proceed, I will take this moment to apologize to all of you for my (admittedly minor) role in giving you President Richard Nixon and the past 50+ fucked-up years of American political history that followed. Yes, my role was small, but add it in with all the other background players, and you get the margin of loss for Hubert Humphrey that November.

Admittedly, that bullshit was pretty damn powerful - still is! There are still far more people who consider Lyndon Johnson personally responsible for Vietnam than there are those who don’t. Hell, it took me writing two Vietnam War histories after agonizing over the war and my participation in it for 50 years to finally figure out that “the graduate of Southwestern Texas State Teacher’s College” got played by the Ivy League’s “Best and the Brightest” assembled by his predecessor - the real author of the American War in Southeast Asia. His image has been carefully curated for the past 60 years, to the point where I’ll bet there are readers of this post who actually believe the Lib’rul’s Fable that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA because he was going to end the war in Vietnam. Sorry to bust your bubble, but JFK is the guy who started our involvement there because he was looking for something to hide the fact he’d been humiliated by Nikita Khrushchev at the 1961 Vienna Summit. JFK was the True Believer’s True Believer about every myth of the Cold War. LBJ turns out (if you look up the PDFs of the now-declassified reports from that war, as I did) to be the guy who questioned every escalation; his “crime” was delaying them till they didn’t work because he kept trying to keep the war under the control of people he mistakenly believed - because he was intellectually cowed by them - were experts who knew what they were doing.

By 1968, even Walter Cronkite was asking “Hey, Hey, LBJ - How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” in the wake of the American humiliation in the Tet Offensive.

When Johnson made his announcement on March 31, 1968, at the end of his televised speech on Vietnam, that “I will not accept the nomination of my party to be your president,” my friends and I in our Berkeley apartment were so stoned on Owsley Blue that we spent the next hour arguing over whether or not we had hallucinated it (the days before rewind on the DVR), until a couple friends dropped over to buy some of Michael’s $10/ounce Mexican weed he’d recently driven across the border, hiding the four $70/each Keys under the sleeping bag in the back of his VW MicroBus (yes, it really was that cheap - a measured, weight ounce! - and the border was that easy then). They confirmed to us that, indeed, LBJ really had said good-bye.

The Democrats were immediately even more badly split between the Clean For Gene kids, the Kennedy realistic idealists or the Humphrey party hacks caucuses. In the end, it would take over ten years and the election of Ronald Reagan to bring all three back together in what would eventually become an effective coalition 12 years after Reagan took office. RFK’s assassination on the night he made it a two-man race with Humphrey only made the divisions worse. The Humphrey caucus of party “pros” was close to mortally-damaged after Mayor Daley sicced the Chicago police on the demonstrators in Grant Park during the convention.

And in the meantime, despite all that, Johnson came damn close to achieving the goal he had set with his resignation - achieving a peace agreement over Vietnam.

The talks were so close to achievement that Nixon - who saw them as the deadly theat to his campaign they were (as Trump saw the border bill to his) - engaged in out-and-out treason when he intervened to sabotage the talks by giving the South Vietnamese the promise they would get a better deal from him (Nguyen Van Thieu learned four years later that one should never buy a used car from a Republican). The result was a narrow loss by Humphrey in November.

Despite all the “Dump the Hump!” baloney from the Never Trust Anybody Under Thirty caucus, Humphrey and the Democrats really were committed to getting that peace agreement as soon as possible.

As opposed to Nixon and his “secret plan to end the war” that turned into the majority of American casualties of the war, the illegal bombing and invasion of Cambodia, the secret bombing of North Vietnam during the “bombing pause,” the promotion of culture wars here in response to the antiwar movement, and did I mention Watergate?

All that is what “stepping aside for the good of the country” got us the last time it was tried by a U.S. president. And as broken and polarized as the country was then, it was solidly unified in comparison to the polarization and brokeness we have today.

Everything now is “on steroids” as compared to my memories of 1968, the year I spent living in the eye of the storm.

A decision by Joe Biden to follow the excellent advice (/snark) of Butcher’s Bill Kristol or the Knickers In A Permanent Knot Caucus would only insure a victory by Trump and the Recently Fallen Out Of The Trees Party.

And this time, that victory would mean the end of the Republic as we have known it.

So, please, let’s drop the poli-sci-fi. It’s third-rate semiliterate hackery at best, the kind of crap you’d be embarrassed in ten years to have to admit you ever considered was worthwhile.

You’d be forced to have to ask for far more forgiveness than I had to here.

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