Tag Archives: RFK

political news

JFK would be a Republican … and Ike would be a Democrat

Ted Cruz says John F. Kennedy would be a Republican.

The U.S. senator from Texas, and a GOP candidate for president, said there’s “no room” in today’s Democratic Party for a tax-cutter like JFK.

Really? And in my view Dwight Eisenhower would be laughed out of the Republican Party today. It was Ike, you’ll recall, who warned us during his farewell message as president in 1960 of the “military-industrial complex” and the danger of making it too powerful.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/ted-cruz-believes-jfk-would-be-republican-today?cid=sm_tw_msnbc

How would that fly today in the world of the neocons who relish the idea of going to war rather than solving problem through diplomacy?

Cruz, though, I believe offers an incorrect attribution to a famous political quote from the 1960s — which was before Cruz was born.

According to Cruz: “I would point out that in the 1960s, one of the most powerful, eloquent defenders of tax cuts was John F. Kennedy. As JFK said, ‘Some men see things as they are and ask why; I see things that never were and ask why not.’”

Actually, senator, that observation came from another famous Democrat, U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who recited that mantra as he campaigned for the presidency in 1968.

Yes, the parties have changed since those days.

Let’s not single out one politician and one political party. If you look at the bigger picture, you’ll also find that today’s Republican Party isn’t very welcoming either to those who saw the world differently than many see it today.

 

local news, media news, political news

No lawn signs or bumper stickers … just yet

I had thought that when my daily print journalism came to an end in August 2012 I’d be able to wear my political preference openly.

It’s not going to happen any time soon, or at least that’s my hope.

The last lawn sign I put in my yard — I think — was in 1976. I put a sign out front for U.S. Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, who was a candidate for president in the Democratic primary. That was in Oregon, before my journalism career got started.

I went to work on the copy desk of the Oregon Journal in Portland and then took a job as a sports writer for the Oregon City Enterprise-Courier, a suburban afternoon daily just south of Portland. I toiled in the business for the next 36 years, moving eventually to Texas in 1984.

I’ve had a keen interest in politics for many decades, going back to my college days and even farther back, to a time when I was just a year out of high school.

That was when I had a chance meeting late one night in May 1968 with another U.S. senator, Robert F. Kennedy. I shook his hand as he got out of his car on the eve of the Oregon primary, got his autograph, we exchanged a few words and he disappeared inside the restaurant he was visiting.

RFK was murdered a week later in Los Angeles.

My print career ended more than two years ago, but now I’m back in the journalism game once again, in a new format.

So, I’ve decided I still cannot display lawn signs or paste bumper stickers on my vehicles. Since February, I’ve been writing for NewsChannel 10’s website, newschannel10.com, as the station’s “special projects reporter.” Moreover, I’ve been blogging for Panhandle PBS for more than two years, writing about public affairs programming. Thus, I’m back in journalism.

Am I having fun? Does the bear do his business … well, you know.

Does that disqualify me from writing this blog? I don’t see that it does. I just won’t make the leap and endorse candidates for local office, as much as I want to do so, while I’m writing about local political and civic affairs for a local TV news station.

That means my lawn will be sign-free and my vehicle will be bumper-sticker-free for the foreseeable future.

national news, political news

Cruz the Hawk a no-show at Armed Services

You hear about this occasionally.

U.S. senators or House members take office and immediately become what’s known as “show horses,” not workhorses. A young Illinois Democratic senator, Barack Obama, demonstrated little interest in the nuts and bolts of legislating before launching his bid for the presidency. Flash back to the mid-1960s, and another young Democratic senator from New York, the late Robert Kennedy, showed equally little interest in these matters — unlike his kid brother, Ted, who became one of the Senate’s legislative giants.

So, what gives with Ted Cruz, the Republican from Texas, who’s also running for president?

He’s a serious hawk on defense, but he’s rung up the worst attendance record by far on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/ted-cruz-2016-armed-services-committee-attendance-116522.html?hp=lc2_4

While the young senator has been MIA at the panel’s hearings, many of his colleagues are settling in to do the people’s business. Several of them have perfect attendance. Others have been called away on other official business; Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., missed a key hearing because he was part of a U.S. delegation sent to Saudi Arabia to honor the late Saudi King Abdullah.

Back to the man I like to refer to as the Cruz Missile.

Sure, he’s running for president. These campaigns gobble up a lot of lawmakers’ time. However, just as it matters for all the individuals who’ve run for president before, it matters now for Sen. Cruz.

Is he going to do what he’s getting paid to do, which is study, debate and vote on key issues affecting his country and the state he represents? Or is he going to remain absent from his day job while pursuing another office down the street from the one he already occupies?

 

national news, political news

Crusades, slavery … in the name of Christianity?

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Barack Obama cannot possibly have a tin ear to the prevailing attitude among his harshest critics.

Can he?

The president stood before the National Prayer Breakfast audience Thursday and managed to offend Christians by invoking the memory of the Crusades and ol’ Jim Crow laws in scolding those who contend that Islam is the only great religion that produces horrible acts against humanity.

Not true, the president said. The Crusades and slavery were carried out — in the minds of many — in the name of Jesus Christ.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/critics-pounce-after-obama-talks-crusades-slavery-at-prayer-breakfast/ar-AA92xT8

Let’s understand something: President Obama spoke the harsh truth about the Crusades and U.S. laws that placed Americans in bondage.

He said: “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

His comments enraged some Republicans. According to the Washington Post: “’The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,’ said former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore (R). ‘He has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.’”

Have we gotten over-sensitized to hearing such harsh scolding from our politicians? I’m beginning to think that’s the case. The late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy used to admonish Americans for not exhibiting more understanding and compassion toward others and he, too, enraged critics by speaking words not everyone wanted to hear.

Barack Obama’s own Christian faith ought to give him some license to tell the truth the way he sees it.

That, of course, won’t sell to those who continue to insist he has “Muslim sympathies,” or even that he’s actually a “closet Muslim.” He has proclaimed his faith in Jesus Christ more times than I can remember, but that won’t quell the critics this time.

Then again, the Constitution of the United States declares there should be no religious litmus test for those seeking public office. But what the heck, that’s another story for another time.

 

national news, political news

JFK conspiracy? I still doubt it … seriously

A few of my closest friends and members of my immediate family know that Robert F. Kennedy was the first politician I grew to actually admire.

I watched him grow from a ruthless operative to a serious leader of Americans looking for a serious change in the political landscape.

An assassin ended that dream in June 1968.

I am dismayed, then, to read that RFK harbored some doubts about the official findings associated with the death of his brother, President John Kennedy, who also was cut down by an assassin on Nov. 22, 1963.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/was-bobby-kennedy-a-jfk-conspiracy-theorist-111729.html?hp=pm_1#.VDvTQFJ0yt8

According to author Philip Shenon, Bobby Kennedy believed the mob had a hand in his brother’s death. The Warren Commission, charged by President Johnson to examine the details of the assassination, didn’t interview RFK, who reportedly had this notion that the mob figures working with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro played a role in the murder in Dallas.

I cannot pretend to know all the details. RFK, then the attorney general of the United States, had access to information very few Americans ever will have. Who am I to doubt his view that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a grand conspiracy?

Well, I keep going back to this fundamental question: How does anyone keep quiet about such a monstrous act over the course of 51 years?

The answer I keep getting is this: Because there’s no one to blab; the one guy who did the deed was himself shot to death in the Dallas Police Department basement two days after he killed the president.

Still, this notion presents another set of questions.

What precisely did RFK know? If he knew something was amiss, why in the world didn’t he say something publicly at the time when the Warren Commission released its findings?

We cannot know the answer to either of those questions. Robert Francis Kennedy is the one man with the answer. We cannot bring him back.

Thus, these theories live on.

Uncategorized

This killer must never walk free

Mark David Chapman has been denied parole yet again.

For the life of me, some elements of the criminal justice system seem unsolvable. Such as why someone like this ever would be considered for parole.

Chapman shot John Lennon to death on Dec. 8, 1980. As the parole hearing today noted, the officers interviewing Chapman denied him parole because “the victim,” Lennon, showed kindness to his killer before the bullet started flying that night in New York City.

http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/parole-denied-yet-again-for-lennons-killer

The former Beatle had signed Chapman’s copy of Lennon’s new album, chatted briefly with him, boarded his limo and then returned later in the evening — to meet his bloody death at Chapman’s hand.

“This victim had displayed kindness to you earlier in the day, and your actions have devastated a family and those who loved the victim,” the parole board wrote. Among those who “loved” John Lennon was, well, me and millions of others around the world.

Chapman is among the world’s most notorious murderers who go through this parole ritual every couple of years, only to be denied. Two other stand out:

* Sirhan Sirhan, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s killer, gets the same treatment. As he should. Sirhan’s gunning down of RFK, it’s been argued, changed the course of political history in this country as Kennedy died while campaigning in June 1968 for the presidency of the United States.

* Charles Manson, who ordered the murders of actress Sharon Tate and several others in 1969, is a raving bleeping lunatic. If you’ve ever listened to this man talk — today — about what happened 45 years ago, then you understand that he needs to stay locked up forever.

Chapman has exhibited all the signs of a sociopath, someone with no conscience. OK, so John Lennon wasn’t a world leader. He was a musician and a songwriter whose work still stands as an anthem for several generations of people all around the world.

Good night, Mark David Chapman. May you rot in that cell.

Uncategorized

Space flight video chokes me up

I am not prone to weeping openly. That is, I don’t just start sobbing when something pushes my emotional hot button.

But I tend to swallow hard, get a little choked up at sights. Historic videos do that to me.

I cannot, for instance, watch Muhammad Ali light the 1996 Olympic torch in Atlanta without getting teary-eyed; the same thing happens when I watch video of Secretariat winning the Belmont Stakes in 1973 and the announcer says he’s “running like a tremendous machine!”; ditto for watching Sen. Robert F. Kennedy say “on to Chicago and let’s win there” moments before the gunman wounded him mortally in Los Angeles.

So … I’ve been choking back tears this week watching CNN’s series on “The Sixties.” The segment this week dealt with the space race. The United States competed with the Soviet Union to be the first nation to land someone on the moon. We won that race. It was a come-from-behind victory, you’ll recall.

The segment that does it to me every time I see it is the launch of Apollo 8, the first lunar orbit mission that blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Dec. 21, 1968. The launch itself is an emotional moment for me. It reminds me of when my late mother and I would get up early to watch the countdown of those Mercury and Gemini launches. The thrill is something that has never left me.

The CNN series, though, takes you through the launch and quickly to the point where Apollo 8 commences lunar orbit with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders aboard.

Then, on Christmas Eve 1968, Borman pulls out his Bible as he trains the TV camera on the Earth-rise over the moon’s horizon and he starts reading from the Book of Genesis … reminding us of our world that God created.

Yep, that chokes me up.

1968 was a hideous year. The Vietnam War was going badly; assassins killed Martin Luther King Jr. and RFK; our streets were erupting in chaos as Americans protested the war.

Then, to have the commander of a space mission read on Christmas Eve from the passage in the Bible that takes us back to the beginning of our very existence in the universe …

As Tom Hanks says on the CNN segment, “Who wrote that script?”

Uncategorized

‘Civil war’ not a new thing in U.S. politics

Intraparty warfare has engulfed the Republican Party.

It’s the tea party vs. the establishment wing. Not sure yet who’s winning. To be honest, I don’t really care who wins this one. Rest assured, the GOP will emerge from it eventually. I’m not sure it will be any stronger as a result. Then again, I don’t really care about that, either.

It fascinates me, though, to see the GOP entangled in this imbroglio, this struggle for what’s left of its soul. Why? Because I thought I’d seen the worst of the worst political party civil wars. It happened to the Democrats back in the 1960s and early 1970s.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/republican-civil-war

Some of us remember those times. The Vietnam War was raging. It was hawks vs. doves back then.

The hawks were led by some stalwart Democrats. I can think of the late Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and the late Vice President (and later Sen.) Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota — who, by the way, served in the Senate before being elected VP in 1964. The doves were led by equally stalwart Democrats, such as the late Sens. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, George McGovern of South Dakota and (my first real political hero) Robert F. Kennedy of New York.

They fought equally hard for the soul of the Democratic Party. They all were patriots. They loved their country in equal measure, just as Republicans love their country today. They fought with each other back then over the terms of how we should prosecute and eventually end the Vietnam War.

One interesting similarity emerges between then and now. The Democratic hawks accused the doves of being not quite patriotic enough. Today, we hear the “tea party patriots” accusing establishment Republicans and even those dreaded Democrats of, um, being somewhat impure and tainted, that they aren’t the true believers.

The Democrats’ civil war ended eventually. It took a constitutional crisis, Watergate, to coalesce Democrats behind a winning candidate, Jimmy Carter in 1976. They hit a major bump four years later when the economy tanked and Iranian militants took Americans hostage on President Carter’s watch. Republican Ronald Reagan took the White House back in 1980. Bill Clinton recaptured it for the Democrats in 1992.

How will the current GOP battle end is anyone’s guess. The tea party is calling the cadence within the party, which still comprises some smart folks who know how to make government work.

I’m going to sit back and watch this one play out.