Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojkt50 years ago: Austin was ‘all agog’ to greet JFK
Posted: 9:35 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013
By Patrick Beach – American-Statesman Staff
Austin was ready.
The city was bedecked in holiday decorations and lights. Mayor Lester Palmer and Emma Long, the first woman elected to the City Council, were among the dignitaries set to greet President John F. Kennedy when Air Force One touched down at Bergstrom Air Force Base on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963 — 50 years ago today.
About 2,500 people were expected
A tent was up outside the Governor’s Mansion for a reception before the big event of the day. The invitations to that affair, scripted in handsome cursive, had gone out.
Largely because Gov. John Connally and others had tirelessly worked the phones, checks poured in for the $100-a-plate fundraising dinner at Austin Municipal Auditorium. The caterer didn’t know exactly how many plates to set. Connally said sales had “far exceeded” his predicted 2,500.
The excitement was such that Superintendent Irby Carruth announced that Austin schools would close at 2:30 p.m. so students could see the motorcade. A hand-drawn map of the route was printed in the newspaper. Unlike Dallas — where Kennedy people and the press were braced for a possibly hostile reception — Austin was giddy.
A photo of Lyndon Baines Johnson being sworn in
“The man on the street, the kids, clerks and stenographers will have ample opportunity to see and wave their greetings to President John Kennedy and the presidential party when the president visits Austin Friday,” the Austin Statesman declared on Nov. 19. On Nov. 21, the headline: “Austin all agog over Kennedy visit.” And a second story: “Till just before departure/Jackie held up wardrobe decision.”
The plane was to land at 3:15, and Kennedy would be taken by motorcade along a published route to the Commodore Perry Hotel — “Austin’s hotel of distinction” — at Eighth and Brazos streets at 3:30, attend a reception on the lawn of the Governor’s Mansion and head to what is now part of the Long Center for the fundraising dinner, the only overtly political event on the president’s Texas itinerary.
After steaks and a speech that Kennedy hoped would reunite the liberal and conservative wings of the Texas Democratic Party, they’d fly by helicopter out to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ranch in the Hill Country to kick back after a long and tiring trip.
A page from the Austin American-Statesman’s special section from Nov. 23, 1963, on the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Longtime LBJ caterer and self-proclaimed barbecue king Walter Jetton, almost certainly cowboyed up to the nines in his trademark Stetson and pressed white shirt, would tend to the barbecue pit at the ranch. It was whitetail season, and rumor had it that Johnson had ordered deer be positioned in such a way that the president could get a good shot. (The details of Johnson’s scheme, if in fact it existed, are lost to history.) Richard “Cactus” Pryor was booked to entertain, as he frequently did at the ranch.
Local and White House press were invited to a post-deadline cocktail party with “grazing food” in Colonnade Room III of the Commodore Perry Hotel, hosted by the local chapter of what later became the Society of Professional Journalists. Democrats from all over the state were checking in there and at other Austin hotels to settle in and get ready for the big dinner. During the visit, University of Texas coach Darrell Royal was going to give the president a football autographed by the soon-to-be national champion Longhorns.
Neal Spelce, who was working as news director and anchor at a TV station in town, was ready. They had filmed the preparations at the auditorium, tables and folding chairs filling the lower level, programs laid out.
“The idea was this was to be a big unity-type dinner,” said the veteran Austin broadcaster. “John Connally pretty much personified the conservative wing and (Sen. Ralph) Yarborough personified the liberal wing, and there was all this tug-of-war for control of the party. They wanted a show of unity, plus it was a big fundraiser, raising a bunch of money for the Kennedy re-election campaign.”
Amid intraparty fighting and even rumors that Kennedy might be preparing to dump Johnson from the 1964 ticket, the president planned to deliver a galvanizing speech in which he called Johnson “my strong right arm” and spoke of past promises fulfilled and future growth, concluding: “So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our nation’s future is at stake. Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause — united in our heritage of the past and our hopes for the future — and determined that this land we love shall lead all mankind into new frontiers of peace and abundance.”
Fourteen members of Texas’ congressional delegation would be along for at least some part of the trip. “Never before in the storied history of Austin has such a large concentration of state and national leaders been here,” the Austin American reported on Nov. 22. For the people of Texas, it was to be their first chance to see Kennedy as president, and the first lady’s first official trip since the death of her infant son Patrick in August.
Johnson, in his remarks at the Austin dinner, intended to mention the pockets of antipathy directed at Kennedy from political extremists in Dallas and elsewhere. He was to conclude: “And thank God, Mr. President, that you came out of Dallas alive.” The line was sure to get a great reception.
‘Anything but ominous’
In Dallas, spectators lined the motorcade route, including a group of children with a sign that said, “Please stop and shake our hands.” The president complied.
Connally aide Julian Read was in charge of herding reporters on a press bus that day. Despite the dark warnings about the reception the president could receive in Dallas, “the mood inside the bus was anything but ominous,” Read wrote in his book, “JFK’s Final Hours in Texas.” “The air was filled with light banter akin to a holiday outing. Reporters were uniformly surprised by the warm reception for the president and his wife.”
In the president’s limousine, Texas first lady Nellie Connally turned and said, “Mr. President, you certainly can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
The press bus was following the limo. Read heard “a pop. And then pop-pop,” and then the limo rocketed away.
In Austin, Spelce was at the Driskill Hotel meeting with Police Chief Bob Miles and finalizing details for covering the visit when the news from Dallas broke, a UPI bulletin. It was 12:36 p.m.:
THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS, TEXAS.
The chief was informed. Spelce sprang out of his seat and dashed to his TV station a few blocks away to begin days of wall-to-wall coverage. The three Connally children were pulled out of Austin High, O. Henry Middle and Casis Elementary schools and taken to the Governor’s Mansion where, because of three gunshots, there would be no reception since — as the world would learn in about an hour — there was no President Kennedy to be received.
Shock and numbness
Spelce went to the auditorium and found a scene he described as eerie — everything perfect, everything ready, the catering staff weeping.
For days, Spelce said, “People were walking around with blank stares. Just numb. And glued to the TV sets. People were mesmerized, maybe a little more here because there was this anticipation that he was going to be here in just a few hours. The community had rallied around the idea that this was a historical occasion. Over the weekend, downtown was almost a ghost town. People started showing up in church who hadn’t been there in a while.”
Ben Barnes, freshly elected to the Texas Legislature and an early supporter of Connally’s campaign for governor, had spent seven or eight weeks plotting out the trip, working closely with Kennedy advance man Jerry Bruno, who for decades would blame himself for the assassination.
“This was a political trip,” said Barnes, who would go on to become lieutenant governor. “He came to raise money. He was also down in the polls. Connally was 10 or 11 points higher than Kennedy.”
Barnes remembers Nellie Connally spotting a problem in the proposed itinerary: a short turnaround for the first lady to freshen up at the hotel before the governor’s reception.
“She’s going to be mad as hell if she only has 15 minutes to change clothes,” Barnes recalls Connally saying.
Barnes, among others, had lobbied against a motorcade in Dallas. But Yarborough wanted it. And, more importantly, so did the president. He wanted people to see him.
“We delivered (Lee Harvey Oswald) a home run when that parade route was planned to get the most people out,” Barnes said.
Barnes was having lunch at the Forty Acres Club on the UT campus with Frank Erwin, a powerful state Democrat, and Bill Moyers, then deputy director of the Peace Corps and soon to become Johnson’s press secretary. Moyers got a call from the Secret Service: Johnson wanted him to proceed immediately to Love Field in Dallas. The Texas Department of Public Safety called Barnes, saying Kennedy and Connally, the latter a close political ally and personal friend, had been shot. Barnes arranged for a DPS plane to take Moyers. The door was open and both engines were running when they got to the airport.
“I never saw a plane take off like that,” Barnes said. “It was a terrible ordeal. We didn’t know if Connally was going to live or not.”
In Dallas, the president’s limo sped to Parkland Hospital while a press bus full of reporters covering Kennedy’s visit went to the Trade Mart as planned. Upon arrival they all rushed to the bank of pay phones as Connally aide Read told event organizers they feared something awful had happened.
Read had planned to return to Austin to work on Connally’s speech that night after the morning breakfast event in the Crystal Ballroom of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, where the first couple had spent the night in room 850. Jacqueline Kennedy, as she was wont to do, was late in arriving to the event, but when she did it was like a movie star walked in. Read decided to stick around. The rain had passed, the bubbletop was removed from the president’s limo, the sun was out, and the crowds were much larger and more welcoming than expected. It was going to be a great day.
No more. Barnes went to the state Capitol and with Texas House Speaker Byron Tunnell arranged a memorial and prayer service in the chamber that night. Calls were made to area hotels and motels, and programs printed on a mimeograph.
“We had to do something,” Barnes recalled. “People were beside themselves. There was some comfort to that.”
Earlier, Westinghouse Broadcasting’s White House reporter Sid Davis had arrived at Love Field just as the president’s casket was being loaded onto Air Force One. A number of seats had been removed to accommodate it, and Secret Service agents had to use a hammer or mallet to knock off the casket’s handles to get it on the plane. It was broiling inside. Davis remembers Johnson saying, “I feel like I’ve lived a year since this morning.”
Johnson asked Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing her blood-soaked outfit, if she would like to stand with him as he was sworn in. When she appeared, Davis said, “the sobbing turned to outright bawling.”
The oath was administered in 28 seconds. Davis got off the plane to file his solemn report.
‘Shame we’ll never live down’
Shock, grief and fear gripped the nation — if not the world — especially in Austin, where high expectations were replaced with horror. How could this have happened? How could it have happened here? Was it a conspiracy?
“Oh, no,” a woman described as a “gray-haired mother” told an Austin newspaper reporter. “All through the war, all over the world, and we in Texas have to do this. The shame we’ll never live down.”
Two days later, Dallas cabaret owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters — on live television and in a crowd of lawmen numerous enough to quell a riot.
Margaret Berry, long considered UT’s unofficial historian, remembers walking to lunch when someone told her the news that Kennedy had been shot. She didn’t have tickets to that night’s dinner; her mother was quite ill at the time. But she knew people who did. Those people were now possessing grim keepsakes.
She also remembers a memorial service sometime later at University United Methodist Church, which she said President Johnson chose because it was a pretty church on campus. She sat in the balcony.
At the time, some predicted that the assassination was the event that would unleash an era of violence and madness. And so it was to be.
“Dallas, Oswald, Ruby, Watts, Whitman, Manson, Ray, Sirhan, Bremer, Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate, FBI, CIA, Squeaky Fromme, Sara Moore — the list goes on and on,” Austin journalist Gary Cartwright wrote in a 1975 Texas Monthly article on Ruby, whom he knew. “Who the hell wrote this script, and where will it end? A dozen years of violence, shock, treachery and paranoia, and I date it all back to that insane weekend in Dallas and Jack Ruby — the one essential link in the chain, the man who changed an isolated act into a trend.”
Fifty years on, the aftershocks remain more faint but ongoing. Something — call it innocence or confidence or plain, naive hope — has eroded, forever melted away.
When, Berry was asked, did things return to normal? Her answer was bitter and rhetorical:
“Did they ever?”
About this story
Patrick Beach conducted roughly 10 interviews of people who were in Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and the Washington, D.C., area on Nov. 22, 1963; reviewed the archives of the Austin American and the Austin Statesman in the days preceding and following the assassination; and examined period documents and photos at the Austin History Center.
Filed under: Open Thread |
All Things in Moderation 
Thanks for that Mark. It was a different angle than I’ve read before. I was in my 8th grade homeroom class and Mr Baker sent me to the school library to pick up a book we were talking about in class. The television was on and the news was just breaking. I went back to class in tears and told everyone what had happened. I remember being glued to the television for days afterward.
Kennedy’s was the first real campaign I worked on as a 10 year old and it was his campaign that sparked many political debates between my father and I which carried on for the next 40 plus years.
Hi everyone!
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Mark:
A quotation from the article:
“All through the war, all over the world, and we in Texas have to do this. The shame we’ll never live down.”
For the life of me I will never, ever understand this sentiment. “We” in Texas didn’t do anything. A sad, sorry, screwed-up Marxist did it. It had nothing to do with Texas or Texans, other than that Texas is where Oswald happened to have landed.
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Hi lms. You should stick around.
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Good piece Mark. Hi lmsinca.
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The author let the mask slip. To blame the city, or rightwingerism is to admit a belief a conspiracy. How that can be reconciled with the leftward lurch the country took I’ll never know.
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McWing:
The author let the mask slip.
To be fair the words were not the author’s, but rather a woman he was interviewing. But it does betray a desire/need to place responsibility someplace other than where it actually belongs.
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Just saw this Gallup article from last month: History Suggests Shutdown Stakes May Not Be That High: 1995 battle didn’t affect views of Clinton, Gingrich, nor U.S. in the long term
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I don’t know if any of you e-mail subscribe to the Goldberg Files, but it is very good today. A small piece (chosen mainly because it includes a reference to my favorite Far Side cartoon), but anyone who wants the whole thing let me know and I will forward it.
But here’s the thing: Obama’s like the dog from the Far Side cartoon. You can talk about red flags and broken data hubs all day long and all he’ll hear is “blah blah blah blah Obama blah blah blah.” Having never run anything, he doesn’t even know how to ask questions that any half-way decent manager would ask when it’s clear the staff is screwing the pooch. It’s not even clear he can tell when the staff is screwing the pooch, even when a naked staffer is standing in front of him with an extremely discomfited canine.
The Arrogance of Liberalism
This isn’t just about the man, it’s about his ideology. Liberalism has no respect for fences it doesn’t understand. No appreciation for the law of unintended consequences. Obama doesn’t have the imagination to worry about serious unknown unknowns, never mind known unknowns. When he was campaigning for the stimulus, he’d talk endlessly about “shovel-ready jobs,” making it sound like only idiots and fools questioned the existence of such things. Six months later, he was the one who discovered shovel-ready jobs weren’t shovel ready. Just this month he discovered that buying health insurance is complicated.
It’s like the “you can keep your plan, period” lie. It’s impossible to know if he really truly knew it was a lie, or if he thought it was sort of true. The important point is that he’s so intellectually incurious he didn’t take the time to figure it out. Days before the website went live he was still promising it would work perfectly.
And that’s where the hubris comes in. No matter what the circumstance, no matter the potential downside, no matter how loudly God is laughing at his plans, Obama ignorantly strides on in his giant hamster sphere of epistemic closure, thinking that whatever happens he’ll be okay, because, “you’ve got me” as if that will make all the difference. And it never does.
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Why would I want to read more of something called “The Arrogance of Liberalism”…..LOL
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lms:
Why would I want to read more of something called “The Arrogance of Liberalism”
I suspect you are reading regardless. By sticking around you could convince us why its wrong.
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Worth a read.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/american-anarchist/
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jnc (from Chomsky):
The central idea, Chomsky said, was that “institutions that constrain human development are illegitimate unless they can justify themselves.”
This sounds to me like linguistic nonsense masquerading as deep thought. What does he mean by “illegitimate”? I think this “central idea” is nothing but a tautology that could be called central to literally any political ideology.
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Scott, for one thing all he’s really doing is giving examples of Obama and his arrogance. In my opinion calling that the arrogance of liberalism is a bit of a stretch. I was primarily just giving you a hard time though. I read your quote but you’ll note I didn’t ask for “more”.
I’ve missed you guys a little but doubt I’ll be around much still. I’ve gotten pretty bored with politics so I don’t actually have much to say or the time to get caught up on the latest. Just stopped by to say Hi really. Sounds like you’ve missed me……..hahahahaha
Hope y’all have a great Thanksgiving. We’re having what we like to call one of our “catch all” parties. We’ve invited a lot of people who are alone this year for various reasons, and most of them don’t know each other, so it should be interesting.
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lms:
Scott, for one thing all he’s really doing is giving examples of Obama and his arrogance.
Yes, that is largely true. That was in fact the primary point of the column, although Goldberg uses the word “hubris”. I just excerpted from the article, but to get a true sense of it you should read the whole thing. I will forward it to you.
Sounds like you’ve missed me
Of course I have. That’s why I tell you to come back every time we talk. I could use a distraction from trying to convince jnc that I’m not engaged in a criminal enterprise.
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This is the bigger hypocracy.
“Chomsky also addressed some of the issues confronting anarchist activism, noting that while anarchists stand against the state, they often advocate for state coercion in order to protect people from “the savage beasts” of the capitalists, as he put it. Yet he saw this as not a contradiction, but a streak of pragmatism. “
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jnc;
This is the bigger hypocracy.
I missed that one. Chomsky is a real card. I really don’t understand his prominence.
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Hi LMS!
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“I could use a distraction from trying to convince jnc that I’m not engaged in a criminal enterprise.”
It’s OK Scott. I don’t blame the player. I blame the game.
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jnc:
It’s OK Scott. I don’t blame the player. I blame the game.
Interestingly it is precisely such a mindset that contributes to regulators choosing to impose fines rather than pursue criminal charges against individuals. Which is the very thing to which you seem to object so strongly.
Scott, you may find this of interest:
Very, very good article. Incredibly well stated. I will have to bookmark that one. Thanks.
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Scott, you may find this of interest:
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Choke on it!
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/11/22/franken-open-to-individual-mandate-delay/
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This is only political around the edges but it’s in the news a lot. My petroleum geologist daughter sent this one to me. The truth about fracking.
http://www.dailyinterlake.com/opinion/article_9b1b6c6a-48f9-11e3-b50f-0019bb2963f4.html#.Uo6ZOqtLHiw.facebook
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Scott, thanks for sending along the Goldberg piece. I’ll try to make myself read it sometime this weekend.
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I keep saying, my inspiration is Whitaker.Motherfucking.Chambers!
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/11/22/franken-open-to-individual-mandate-delay/
Jeeeeeezzzzuuuuuuussssss, grab a clue wingnut!
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This isn’t a one off, it’s just how government works. Who here expected a different result? Why?
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What a law!
http://nalert.blogspot.com/2013/11/obamas-medicaid-expanison-father-owns-5.html?m=1
Yeah us!
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Awesome Sauce.
http://roanoke.com/opinion/commentary/2389210-12/give-back-my-health-care-policy.html
1% obviously.
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Good article in the NYT showing how deceptive framing/rhetoric has been deliberately employed by Obama on O-Care.
“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”
Interesting that it is a word you don’t use, but no problem implementing it as an idea. This is a good indication that progressives know they must deceive voters about the central core of their project in order keep their policies politically viable.
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“A tattoo artist should not be forced to put a swastika on an Aryan Nation guy,”
No longer true is it.
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McWing:
From the majority opinion:
The court agreed, to a point. “If Elane Photography took photographs on its own time and sold them at a gallery,” it said, then it could say what it liked, but a business open to the public must take all comers.
Can anyone point to where in the constitution it says either that any business open to the public must take all comers or where it grants the federal government the power to require a business open to the public to take all comers?
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Open question: How long until the Senate filibuster rule is eliminated entirely? And is its elimination a good or bad thing?
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Good observations from Kevin Williamson.
IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.
“Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.
In an important sense, the American people have no political say in the health-care law, for example, because Congress did not pass a law reforming the health-care system; instead, Congress passed a law empowering the Obama administration, through its political appointees and unelected time-servers, to create a new national health-care regime. The general outline of the program is there in the law, but the nuts and bolts of the thing will be created on the fly by President Obama and his many panels of experts. There are several problems with that model of business, one of which is that President Obama, and more than a few of his beloved experts, have political interests. The partisans of pragmatism present themselves as disinterested servants of the public weal, simply collecting the best information and the best advice from the top experts and putting that into practice. Their only political interest, they would have us believe, is in helping the public understand what a great job is being done for them. Consider President Obama’s observation that his worst mistake in his first term was “thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right . . . .The nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.” (It never seems to have entered into the president’s head that he might have got the policy wrong.) But of course there is a good deal more to politics than that. For example, the president would very much like the unemployment problem to be somewhat abated by the time of the 2014 congressional elections, but he knows that this is unlikely to happen with employers struggling under an expensive health-care mandate that he has not told enough of a story about. And so he has decided — empowered to do so by precisely nothing — that the law will not be enforced until after the elections. Neither does the law empower him arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in organized labor from the law, but he has done that too.
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I’m assuming the R’s will dump the SC filibuster when they control the Senate and Presidency. If they don not do so on the legislative filibuster under those conditions than they are endorsing a Democrat Party agenda.
I could care less about the filibuster anymore as power has become so centralized in the Senate under Reid as to be the equivalent of the House’s Speaker. Out Republic May or may not endure (I say no) with or without the filibuster. It’s ultimately about an individual’s willingness to share power and disperse power. Over time, the odds of a power grabber occupying any powerful office increases. It’s inevitable.
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McWing:
Out Republic May or may not endure…
I think a reasonable case can be made that in fact it no longer endures. The superficial appearance of a republic endures, but in reality we are ruled by an unelected and unconstitutional bureaucracy.
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I blame Woodrow Wilson.
And Whitaker. Motherfucking. Chambers.
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Obama exemplifies one of the more irritating self-deceits that is so often embraced by the left in general:
“I’m not a particularly ideological person,” he said, adding he still is passionate about giving people a fair shake, about the environment, and working for peace and national security. “But I’m pretty pragmatic about how we get there.”
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Heh. Jonah Goldberg on the Obama quotation below:
Saying he only cares about “what works” at this point in his presidency is more of a problem given that his signature achievement, you know, doesn’t.
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Help me understand Obama’s stated aversion to idealology.
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McWing:
Help me understand Obama’s stated aversion to idealology.
I don’t think he has an actual aversion to ideology. I think he has an aversion to being honest about his own ideology.
I think the whole “pragmatic”, “no ideology” marketing approach, and in particular the “I care about what works” tag line, to selling himself and his agenda is just an attempt to appeal to the conceits of two distinct constituencies. First, it appeals to the conceit of “moderate” independents who fancy themselves too complex and thoughtful to be attracted to simplistic “solutions” driven by blind ideological desires. These moderates (in their own account of things) are not beholden to a party/ideology, but instead just vote for “what works”. Obama is selling himself as one of them.
Second, it appeals to the conceit of progressives who think that liberal ideology is merely the logical and scientific product of “facts”. This conceit is epitomized by claims (which I am sure you have heard) like that the left is the “reality based community” or that “reality has a liberal bias”. In the progressive worldview, “what works” is just a synonym for “progressive ideas”.
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Breaking: Winter ushers in winter weather, may cause weather related travel delays.
I blame AGW.
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“Help me understand Obama’s stated aversion to idealology.”
Ideology: a system of ideas and ideals, esp. one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
I don’t think such a thing factors into his decision making.
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see: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115695/obamacare-failure-threat-liberalism
There was an unstated reason liberalism embraced these concepts: If liberals wanted the federal government to take on big new projects—more to the point, if liberals wanted taxes to pay for them—they needed the public to believe that the money would be well spent. It was more comforting for people to feel as if disinterested technicians*, not party hacks, were going to be running the show.
*I think this is the underlying premise. those techs are above the fray or whatever. The problem is that it is a myth. Such people do not exist
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What percent of the electorate believes the myth however?
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McWing:
What percent of the electorate believes the myth however?
At least 51% it seems.
Another question….is a belief in this myth more or less dangerous to the future of the nation than, to pick a random progressive bugbear, a belief in Intelligent Design?
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Don’t you think it’s higher than that though? I think it’s a fairly bi-partisan phenomenon
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nova:
Don’t you think it’s higher than that though? I think it’s a fairly bi-partisan phenomenon.
It may well be higher, but I think it is still a belief that is more apt to be held by the left. People on the right I think tend to be more distrustful/skeptical of government.
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I tend to think it depends on what your favorite part of government is. For R’s it would be (maybe) more on the DoD/NatSec/LawEnforcement that are unbiased, relatively uncorrupted burueacracy’s whereas they (we) might view the HUD or Dept of State as completely politicized. Vice versa for the D’s.
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I did not know this about the 2009 stimulus.
“After all, the stimulus was not some piddling appropriation for the Department of Commerce. It was a bill of stupendous size—it made up 4 percent of annual GDP, 50 percent bigger than the entire New Deal in constant dollars”
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember_2012/on_political_books/act_of_recovery041106.php?page=all
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Anybody agree with this?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100247284/refusal-will-result-in-a-racial-discrimination-note-being-attached-to-your-childs-educational-record/
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McWing:
Anybody agree with this?
Appalling. But probably soon to be in a theater near you. (Well, maybe not you, being in Texas. But me, being in the northeast.)
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Another, particularly egregious, example of unconstitutional lawmaking by the regulatory bureaucracy, as the FDA engages in its own War on Science.
jnc…it seems to me that the regulatory bureaucracy is a much, much better example of a criminal enterprise than is the banking system. The entire structure is a violation of the law.
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Scott, do the Brits take crap like this lying down? Do they have elected school boards or is this one of those private schools the Brits call “public”?
What was the follow-up to this?
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Mark:
Do they have elected school boards or is this one of those private schools the Brits call “public”?
I found the school prospectus and it appears to me to be a public school in our sense of the term, ie a government funded school. The prospectus says that the school is “maintained by Staffordshire Local Education Authority” which sounds like a government body, and there was no mention of admission/tuition fees. Also, the admission criteria was based on distance to the school, so all of that suggests to me that it is a government funded school. The fact that it is “Christian” doesn’t mean very much because, remember, the UK has no prohibition on state sponsored religious institutions. Whether or not the local education authority is elected or appointed, I don’t know.
Scott, do the Brits take crap like this lying down?
In my experience, local mandates are more likely to raise outraged protests than those handed down from, say, Parlaiment (or worse, the EU). In many respects I do think Brits are more resigned to and accepting of being ruled over by the political class than Americans, although we do seem to be catching up somewhat.
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You know, if I received a letter indicating “hey, we’re taking the kids to the XYZ” to study other cultures, I wouldn’t give it another thought.
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In response to my question to Scott I read this: http://metro.co.uk/2013/11/23/parents-fury-at-school-threatening-children-with-racism-claims-if-they-dont-attend-islam-workshop-4198482/
‘It was draconian move and it’s left a lot of parents fuming.’
The primarily Christian school has since made a U-turn on the demand, following a slew of complaints by parents and council chiefs.
South Staffordshire MP Gavin Williamson said: ‘The idea of attaching a “racial discrimination note” to children’s education records saying it will remain on their file for the duration for their school career seems unfair, particularly when it is not the child’s decision whether or not he or she attends.’
Still have no idea how school board operates over there.
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These kind of stories are fascinating to me. Very similar to racial hoax’s on college campus’s. If discrimination is so rare that it has to be conjured up, what’s that say about society and the conjurer?
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Gay-Server-Tip-Lifestyle-Receipt-Discrepancy-233040811.html
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Why do Democrats love health insurance companies so much they want to give them more money?
The house ought to pass a “No Bailout for Health Insurance Company Monsters” act and leave it at the Senates doorstep like a flaming bag of turds.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AP0ND20131126?irpc=932
How anyone can still support The Abomination at this point is a mystery to me.
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Does Identity Politics trump billionaire donors?
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/why-this-mega-hedge-funders-crusade-against-herbalife-is-probably-doomed/
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Hah!
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