Friends, this week's Newsmaker Show, featuring me and Brian O'Neil, focuses mainly on some riveting historical themes: the presidencies of FDR and Lincoln, neither of which get a thumbs-up from me; the U.S. Constitution (then and now); the incarceration of Martha Stewart; and the storybook marriage (and political partnership) of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Good stuff!
In addition, Brian and I wade into the rapidly evolving dynamics of the race for the Democratic nomination for President. A week ago, many people had decided that Bernie had it in the bag. Now, many say the same of Biden. I say...it ain't over until the fat lady sings! Am I speaking metaphorically, or will a brokered convention actually draft a fat lady to run for President? Ah, wouldn't you like to know? All will be revealed in the next few months. I, for one, anticipate a bumpy ride for the Dems, and I don't think we've seen our last momentum shift by a long shot.
Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XlX_D9GShc&feature=youtu.be
And, for those of you hungry for more accurate news about the coronavirus, check out these articles:
https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-pharmaceuticals-production
https://outline.com/v2gGJG
https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-rate-lower-than-we-think.html
Dr. Waddy: I revere Lincoln; I saluted his statue in the Monument while in Union Army uniform and I think his 1st Inaugural Address to have been of transcending eloquence. I think, in sum, that his preservation of the Union, which probably could not have been achieved other than under his leadership (or perhaps Seward's), saved both our country and western civilization because a united U.S. thrice saved the world from harrowing totalitarianism in the 20th century.
ReplyDeleteThat said; I think your reservations about Lincoln have much merit. Did he initiate an era of expansion of Federal power? I think in the Gilded Era we see much reaction to this tendency (an alternative history I read portrayed a second term Lincoln as a Marxist!). But that he may have served as an inspiration to later American radicals ( Bryan, LaFollette, even Debs), could be arguable. Did he influence Presidential FDR? It can be very effectively argued that FDR's preWWII policies did NOT assuage the Depression and that only the war did that.
Dr. Waddy: Re: FDR: Consider Lend Lease and Neutrality Patrol; both his enactments. Hitler, after realizing that the Blitz was a failure, turned to the Uboats to strangle Britain. This was well conceived; even the tin can subs the Germans deployed in WWI came within six weeks (!) of compelling a starving Britain to surrender; British First Sea Lord Jellicoe admitted as much to American Admiral Sims in 1917.
ReplyDeleteThe WWII Battle of the Atlantic was arguably the most consequential military campaign EVER. Churchill said it was the one thing which truly terrified him. FDR agreed to "lend" Britain 50 "obsolete" U.S. destroyers (which had some anti sub capabilities and provided the Brits platforms on which to mount their developing technology ) and initiated American Neutrality Patrol, which gave the Royal navy much needed assistance. The Battle of the Atlantic was arguably the decisive conflict of the European War: had the Uboats closed the Atlantic how could we have established an invasion base in Britain? It would have been madness to send our troop transports out against the then dominant Uboats (which, by the way , would have been, sans concentrated Allied bombing, much reinforced by brilliantly advanced Nazi boats, a few of which we did see in 1944). Arguably, FDR prevented this.
He was of course unable to direct any post war domestic policy but it is reasonable to think it might have followed his, yes noblesse oblige motivated world view.
Dr. Waddy: How very much the Reagans suffered from the unrestrained disdain of the MSM. After all, the Boomers were really feeling their oats weren't they and a Greatest Generation couple was a perfect target. We didn't have Rush or Fox then but Ronald Reagan was a very able opponent and Nancy backed him all the way. Their strong marriage, their exemplary negation of Baby Boomer presumption, including that of their delinquent daughter, stands them in very solid stead.And, of course, by the way, there is that defeat of world Communism (just the most vicious political, social and economic system ever forced on profoundly unfortunates).
ReplyDeleteSorry Jack, I too am a big fan of The Reagans, but Communism (in various forms, Socialism being one) is very much alive and well, and especially in The United States of America where it is gaining momentum every day, in many ways. As you can see, our so called "Democrat" party has been infiltrated by it, and the film industry, media, and academia have been that way for decades, and are getting worse.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but Communism has in no way been defeated. And don't forget that those "Boomers" were products of that so called "Greatest Generation" who survived World War 2 and produced that generation. In other words, in 1945 they produced a monster called the "Boomers" who became the Hippies of the 1960s. Most of those early Hippies were products of affluent "Greatest Generation" types who went back to colleges everywhere and were indoctrinated by hard core Marxists already in the academic quagmire.
So all things considered, The Reagans were nice folks but don't forget that his administration also produced The Iran-Contra Scandal. It is little wonder that after The United Fruit Company and the U.S. Marines got done with Central America, that Reagan's policies there screwed things up even more. Not difficult to see that the violence there in the 1980s has produced some of the worst gangs in the world.
Finally, that famous "Just Say No" coined by Nancy has apparently not curbed our national capacity for more drug addiction. It's worse than ever, and the drug cartels from Mexico and points south are now in 50 countries around the globe, if I understand that correctly.
Well anyway, I guess we can blame lots of our misfortunes on The Clintons, but then the Bush Family came along and got us into the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm beginning to think that maybe we should call that party the "DemoPublicans". As for me, I'm becoming more of a believer in Armageddon every day. I have almost arrived at the point where I am ready to say "Bring It On!"
Jack, I am, to be fair, no Lincoln expert. We also don't know what kind of President he would have been AFTER the Civil War. Would he have put the federal government back in its place? Quite possibly. Would he have conciliated the South? Almost certainly.
ReplyDeleteJack, there's no doubt that Roosevelt got us into the war. A more sincerely neutral leader probably would have been left in peace by Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini. And, absent U.S. belligerence, I think it's fair to say today's world would be a whole lot more fascist, and a whole lot less friendly to the United States. Marxism probably would have been strangled in its crib, on the other hand.
I agree with Jack that Reagan, more than any other President, deserves credit for slaying Soviet communism and Marxism-Leninism, but I agree with Anonymous (as would Jack, I suspect) that Marxism lives on, and in some ways poses as serious a threat now as it ever did in the Cold War. The "enemy within", after all, is always more dangerous than the enemy without.
And Anonymous makes a fair point about drugs. Nancy meant well, but drug addiction flourished then, and it flourishes now. I frankly am sympathetic to calls to legalize drugs, although I abhor drugs personally and am especially repulsed by leftist efforts to normalize druggies and celebrate their so-called achievements and contributions.
With regard to drugs, just wait until Joe Biden is elected President, and his junkie son is in The White House advising him on this issue, that is of course when Hunter is not out in Hollywood jazzing it up with the elite artistic degenerates.
DeleteWith regard to WW II, too bad we did not have the foresight to make many Atomic Bombs earlier, and then drop them on Germany and The Soviet Union in addition to Japan. I think at least two on Leningrad, and two on Moscow might have worked wonders. Any other Atomic Bombs could have been dropped on Communist China in 1949, before Nixon decided to kiss it up with them.
P.S. Armageddon would be a gas, to be sure, but I'll take normalcy any day...
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy and Anon. : I do stand corrected; Reagan and Saint John Paul did deal Marxism a staggering defeat and in the process freed multitudes who probably feared they would never escape its suffocating grasp. But it still flourishes today as you maintain. The war on drugs can be and has been largely won in some countries but it has required draconian measures impossible in our society. I say, legalize all but the most destructive drugs and then go all out against the dealers of the poison.
ReplyDeleteMussolini? A silly fop. If Hitler lived into, say the '50's after having conquered Britain and Russia,possessing atomic weapons, would he have come after us? But I think war with Japan was unavoidable. They were determined to become a modern industrial power and I think they were convinced that in order to secure their oil supply they must establish a Western Pacific empire. That would have to have included the Philippines, for their location athwart all the major supply and power projection routes. A Japanese empire including China and oil rich present day Indonesia would have been a direct threat to Hawaii and would understandably have been considered a threat to our West Coast. Roosevelt did cut off vital resources from them but by then, perhaps, it was just a matter of time. And they were allied with Germany.
Dr. Waddy
ReplyDeleteI am eagerly awaiting your next article. However, if it is NOT forthcoming soon, I will then realize that you are in seclusion after Elizabeth Warren's suspension of her campaign. I assume that you have someone to sympathize with you, plus lots of hot chocolate.
Anonymous: re: your observation about affluent baby boomers flooding the colleges in the '60's. Certainly they did so but so also did very many children of the blue collar part of the Greatest Generation. I was one of them. Financial aid was exceedingly abundant and the dream of college, unthinkable to so many of our fathers, was miraculously available to us. Too, the draft allowed college exemption . . . . By 1968 the leftists to whom we were also so poisonously exposed on campus , had convinced so many of the (convenient) notion that it was disgraceful to fight for one's country - that this was by definition condemned - ( unless of course you fought for Marxist North Vietnam, then you were to be celebrated, as in "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi . . . etc etc ad nauseum). Had it been only a wealthy rump of the boomers so entranced it might not have had the fell effect it had. But SO MANY of us flocked to those campuses and to the disgraceful embrace of those totalitarian advocates for whom we were a WINDFALL.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Greatest Generation: they were taking a very well earned retirement from consuming hardship. Endurance of the Depression and victory in WWII was quite enough to ask of any generation. They eagerly and consummately embraced the joy of deliverance and post war prosperity. They could never, never have anticipated the naive and ungrateful turn so many of their children took in the '60's. It was one too many ordeals for them. No, the well deserved opprobrium for the malevolent '60's rests squarely on that faction of my generation which was so very remiss. Their '50's childhood was, on balance , the best any generation had had. "Leave it to Beaver" WAS realistic, if not definitive or all encompassing. And the disdainful rejection of that blessing by so unforgiveably many of my generation is the fountainhead of today's leftist curse in America.
What you say is true! However, allow me to repeat my main point in different form and format. Bear in mind that WW II in itself changed American in many ways culturally and morally.
Delete1. A lot of the survivors of the war cam home and went back to college on the G.I. Bill. The colleges were already LOADED with older leftist professors who saw some sort of future for Marxism in The United States. Lot's of ex-G.I.s became indoctrinated by these professors.
2. The film industry was already turning left in part due to the influx of actors who were kicked out of Europe during the 1930s and went to Hollywood.
3. The media was already drifting left also after 1945 if not before.
4. The kids of the Baby Boomers who were "reeducated" in colleges were educated by changes in the U.S. education system and the drift towards the left at the elementary and high school levels.
5. The kids of the boomers also saw was was going on with the "Beat Generation" and then many made the transition to the Hippies in the 1960s.
6. Things were worse in some areas than others. Certainly the West (Left) Coast got heavy doses of leftism in the schools.
7. Finally lots of young people were spoiled during the 1950s and especially in affluent homes.
8. The young people who went off to be maimed and killed in Vietnam were those blue collar kids who still believed in the flag and Mom's Apple Pie.
9. That entire Cold War period was a damn tragedy for The United States of America.
Jack
ReplyDeleteAn excellent example of "brain washing" through film is the 1950s movie with James Dean "Rebel Without A Cause." And if you examine it closely the underling theme in the end is not that the character James Dean plays is screwed up, but his situation and attitude is really his parent's fault. A nice subtle jab at the family as the cause of problems, and not other things in society etc.
JACK
ReplyDeleteLet me make another point. While we were acting somewhat juvenile and infantile in The U.S. during the Cold War era, millions of people in Europe were not only recovering from the trauma of WW II (occupation etc.) but millions more had to grow up in Eastern Europe under Communist dictatorships because of "bad deals" FDR made with Comrade Stalin. So while we were watching some of that slop Hollywood was indoctrinating us with, many were imprisoned and killed in places like Bulgaria, Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, etc.
JACK
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong now, I still like John Wayne and I know he was NOT a Communist.
After this I promise to shut up for a while.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of film, in "Good Will Hunting" Matt Damon mentions what a great book "A People's History of The United States" is. No surprise that the author of that book is by the late Howard Zinn, a True Blue Leftist Political Activist and University Professor who managed to indoctrinate large numbers of Americans for many decades into believing that the U.S. is a nasty country with a horrible history. I see where his textbook is still being used at more than a few colleges today. I once saw a photograph of Zinn with a bunch of Hollywood actors. Does any of this tell you anything? Check Zinn out, he was a Marxist, and yet made some big bucks promoting a jaundiced view of his country. Had he done this or attempted it in say East Germany he would have been a prisoner of the Stasi. PEE ON ALL LEFTISTS!!
Jack, there is good reason to think that war between the U.S. and Japan was highly likely in the 40s, but not inevitable, in my opinion. Remember, the Japanese army had more sense than the navy and wanted to deal with the Russian bear first and foremost. Had Japan gotten its house in order in Asia first, and then taken on the U.S., well...
ReplyDeleteJack, I personally think you go too easy on the "Greatest Generation". Surely, even after their exertions in the Depression and WWII, they ought to have taken an interest in the malicious influences to which their children were subjected? If academia turned hard to the left in the 60s, it was because the students AND THEIR PARENTS tolerated this. Both were in the wrong. I agree with "Unknown," who may in fact be "Anonymous," that the ground had been prepared for "flower power" for several decades, if not longer.
Anonymous, I hadn't ever considered it before, but you're right that parent-bashing, which is really just dumbed-down Freudianism, aligns nicely with Marxism, whose general theme is the denigration of the powerful and the lionization of "victims". Good observation.
As for Howard Zinn, Anonymous, I with was with you 100% until you started urinating on him. Ha!
Thanks Dr. Waddy
DeleteDr. Waddy, anon. and unknown: So much stimulating discourse here; so much fruitful dialogue!
ReplyDeleteBefore I rebut, allow me to comment on this, as it is a harrowing manifestation of the leftist curse our nation endures. Now Schumer was bad enough in his diatribe but did you hear the shrieking harridan who preceded him (Glenn Beck broadcasted it)? In a voice which could only be that of a denizen of Dante's deepest depths, a stentorian harpy celebrated her life affirming abortion at age 19. Really, you had to hear it to believe it! And she was then SECONDED by the Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate himself, in all his characteristic sneering contempt for any but those who succor him and his disdain for Supreme Court Justices who dare to doubt him. THIS IS today's Dem party, no matter what disingenuousness they may advance (including possibly a pitiful Biden nomination)(why those devoted "realpolitik" devotees will be ready to "guide" him should he ascend in all his dotage).
Anonymous: didn't you know that the Abombs were dropped upon Asians
ReplyDeletesimply for the most base of racially disdainful justifications? Why fie that they would have been used against Germany; the use of just conventional explosives to create firestorms over Hamburg and Dresden (and it is advisable that one read about firestorms to understand their indescribable astronomical destruction and terror production) proves that European Anglo Saxons would have been spared, yes?
Dr. Waddy: Again as an aside: I forgot above to note late 19th and early 20th century Japan's absolute resolve to resist the Western incursion which had so visibly ravaged China. That above all, their very understandably based fear, motivated their imperial design, I think. They thought it vital to their independence. But they were a people then incapable of empathy with Asian civilizations other than their own and this and their misjudgement of U.S. power, led to their defeat but consequent redemption, thanks to their conquest by a civilized nation.
ReplyDeleteBut, to all , with respect: I cannot picture 1946 Marxist Profs telling veterans of the Philippines (and the Japanese war prisoner gehennas), of the relief of such as Buchenwald, of the Kamikazes and of the revelations of Nanking, that our country was of similar timbre. No! And the college culture of that time supports this view. It was a time of frats and sororities, of football games, of Winter Weekend Courts, of phone booth stuffing and goldfish swallowing! I saw the very end of it in '65 in my isolated little campus.
ReplyDeleteFor one thing, '47 to '60 was a redeemably(in my view) dangerous time for openly expressed murderously Marxist expression. In that time, Marxists were an isolated miniscule faction on most U.S. campuses. The pathetic "beatniks" ? Other than some of their stylistic affectations, they had no influence. None.
Those WWII and Depression survivors were consequently WISE and the Boomers were naive, due to their lack of harrowing experience. In the '50's the Greatest knew they had never had it so good. But the Boomers, lacking such temperance, actually thought their country as evil as those which it had or then opposed. They thought that the wrongs we had wrought historically (despite the remedies painfully enacted to right them) condemned us,despite the incalculably murderous wrong done by those we had defeated and , by then, opposed.The by then 20 year seasoned leftist cadre in their "universities" were blithe to encourage their misgivings.
Were the Vietnam soldiers mostly those who believed in "apple pie" and such. I think not. First, it was mandatory; if you got the letter you had to go, without ideological screening. That didn't mean for sure you would go to Vietnam though. That is what Slick Willy would have us believe but who, who, pays him any heed today?
Rebel without a Cause? Yes indeed. Perhaps he himself had cause but to attribute his ennui to a generation is perhaps unsupportable.
I think perhaps Anon and Unknown: you also are boomers. I'm from 1947.I do not gainsay your views and experiences.
The Greatest could not have predicted the profound effect their Boomers would have on our culture. They may well have thought their shocking excess to be a passing anomaly. By the time it was obvious that it was far more than that, the Greatest were tired, they were tired and loathe to muster the resolution to oppose their very own. They were possessed of a wisdom gained only by suffering in many forms. Imagine enduring the terror suffered by so many of them from 1929 to 1945 and then even beyond, to the Korean war and its nuclear possibilities. Did they spoil us? They were only trying to spare us the travails they had lived. That's good parentage. They could never have envisioned our widespread disdain for them.May it be forgiven.
Further: A later life blow was in store for the Greatest: the election of draft dodging, military loathing W.Clinton, a perfect example of the amorality and presumption of a shamefully large faction of the Boomers. And there was more: his blasphemous presence at 50th anniversary commemorations of WWII events like D Day.What deep hurt his debauched visage must have caused them but right noble as they surely were, they bore it with transcendent grace.
ReplyDelete