"An exchange, not a giveaway"

In American Greatness, Dinesh D'Souza writes about LBJ, the man behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

by every account, LBJ was a nasty, bullying, crude, selfish, mean-spirited, and abusive individual. These are not qualities that we associate with a moral exemplar undergoing a crisis of conscience. There was the time he gave dictation to a female secretary while urinating in a corner washbasin. In the account of a Senate aide, on another occasion, while sitting next to a woman in his car with his wife Lady Bird on the other side, “Johnson made a point of placing one of his hands under the woman’s skirt and was having a big time, right there in front of Lady Bird.”

There is much, much more in this vein in Caro’s biography. I don’t need to go into LBJ’s serial infidelities, even in the Oval Office, his chronic boasting about the women he had conquered, the name that he gave to his penis, his boasting about its size, and so on. Suffice to say that Johnson would not survive five minutes of scrutiny by the #MeToo movement. LBJ, like JFK and Bill Clinton, reflects the priapic aggression of the prototypical plantation boss.

Yet even more than the other two, he liked to lord it over people, not just women but everyone. As Caro shows on page after page, he derived pleasure from degrading and humiliating others. He was known to converse with aides in his office bathroom while emptying his bowels, which Marshall Frady interprets as a sign of his “Rabelasian earthiness” but which less charitably reveals an ugly demonstration of his power over subordinates.

LBJ was a pervert in every sense of the word; if I can pursue the excremental theme, he was into this shit. As LBJ himself put it, he wanted the type of person working for him “who will kiss my ass in the Macy’s window and stand up and say, ‘Boy, wasn’t that sweet!’” Surely many Democratic plantation bosses of the 19th century could have said pretty much the same thing.

...In the mid-1960s, LBJ nominated African-American lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. When an aide suggested to LBJ that there were other qualified black jurists he could have chosen, suggesting as an alternative possibility Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, LBJ responded, “The only two people who ever heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in an otherwise positive biography Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, cites LBJ telling Senator Richard Russell during the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1957, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

Think about why Martin Luther King, Jr., encountered so little intellectual resistance to his challenges to segregation. Fifty years earlier, he would have. This is not to deny that local officials, like Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor, unleashed dogs and hoses on civil rights protesters. King himself served time as a political prisoner in the Birmingham jail, an experience that strikes a chord with me. But by this time the intellectual fight had been won. The local segregationist establishment, not King, was on the defensive. That’s because popular opinion in America had shifted dramatically between the time FDR died in 1945 and the 1960s.

So what caused the shift? The obvious answer is Adolf Hitler. In the end, the horrific crimes of Hitler overthrew the doctrine of white supremacy. Once American troops entered the concentration camps, once people saw those ghostly emaciated figures emerge out of the camps, they could not longer subscribe to theories of Nordic superiority they might once have held. Those doctrines were now permanently discredited.

Here’s the bargain that LBJ offered African Americans. We Democrats are going to create a new plantation for you, this time in the towns and cities. On these new plantations, unlike on the old ones, you don’t have to work. In fact, we would prefer if you didn’t work. We are going to support you through an array of so-called poverty programs and race-based programs. Essentially we will provide you with lifetime support, just as in the days of slavery. Your job is simply to keep voting us in power so that we can continue to be your caretakers and providers.

...Here’s the part LBJ did not say. We are offering you a living, but it’s going to be a pretty meager living. Basically, you get public housing, food stamps, retirement checks every month, and medical care for the poor. If you have children we will subsidize them, provided they are illegitimate. More than this we cannot offer you, because we have to make sure that you stay on the plantation. This means that we need you to remain dependent on us so that you keep voting for us. Your dependency is our insurance policy to make sure that this an exchange, not a giveaway.

...LBJ knew that if the government were to employ blacks on a large scale it would draw blacks out of fields like teaching, preaching, and small business. Teachers, pastors and entrepreneurs would now become administrators, service providers, and social workers. In sum, they would lose their skills for succeeding in the private sector and learn only how to administer the agencies of government. They too would become captives of a sort, fatally dependent on the Democratic plantation. They too would have no way to leave.

Also as a consequence of LBJ’s deal, Democrats became the new champions of blacks voting. From LBJ on, Democrats wouldn’t merely advocate that blacks vote; they would in many cases supply the buses to take them to the polls. In her book on the great migration, Isabel Wilkerson writes, without irony, “Suddenly the very party and the very apparatus that was ready to kill them if they tried to vote in the South was searching them out and all but carrying them to the polls.” If LBJ were around to read this, I’m sure he would have found it hilarious.

That’s why LBJ “converted” from a racist Democrat who sought to keep blacks down on the old sharecropping plantation to a racist Democrat who sought to create a new type of plantation where blacks would now willingly vote for their Democratic providers. That’s why LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Great Society. That’s why progressives lionize LBJ even though they know what a vile scumbag he was. He’s their guy; he is the creator of their urban plantation in its most modern and most recognizable form. And that’s why blacks have become, as a group, the lifetime servile dependents of the Democratic Party.

Read more here.

LBJ orders new pants

From an actual recording of the President of the United States (LBJ) ordering pants via Diogenes Middle Finger.

LBJ is his model

I doubt if this will help Jeb Bush's candidacy:

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said he would strive to be like Lyndon Johnson, the Democrat famous for expanding the U.S. welfare state through the “Great Society,” if he were elected president.

...“He went and he cajoled, he begged, he threatened, he loved, he hugged, he did what leaders do, which is they personally get engaged to make something happen,” Bush said of Johnson.

Read more here.

How times have changed...Or have they?

Jack Shafer writes in Slate about Bill Moyers:

Bill Moyers took it in the shins this week after the Washington Post's Joe Stephens, drawing on FBI files liberated by a FOIA request, reported the liberal lion's role in hunting suspected homosexuals inside the Lyndon Johnson White House.

The Post story's primary focus is on the FBI investigation of presidential aide Jack Valenti's sexual orientation, an investigation OK'd by President Johnson. It also reports that Moyers, then a special assistant to the president, asked the FBI to investigate two additional administration figures thought to have homosexual tendencies.

These weren't the only Moyers White House homo-hunts. On Commentary's blog, Jason Maoz quotes former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2005 that weeks before the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater election, Moyers "was tasked to direct [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files."

The Wizbang blog continues the Moyers bashing by quoting from CBS News correspondent Morley Safer's 1990 autobiography, Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam. Safer writes:

[Moyers'] part in Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover's bugging of Martin Luther King's private life, the leaks to the press and diplomatic corps, the surveillance of civil rights groups at the 1964 Democratic Convention, and his request for damaging information from Hoover on members of the Goldwater campaign suggest he was not only a good soldier but a gleeful retainer feeding the appetites of Lyndon Johnson.

Rounding out the week's pillory is my old boss, Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin, who finds the Post discovery consistent with the thuggery that marked Moyers' political career. As long as Moyers is taking such a well-deserved beating, allow me a couple of licks.

When Moyers was Johnson's press secretary, he believed that journalists existed to serve the president. James Deakin writes in Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House and the Truththat Johnson's assistant press secretary Joe Laitin told Moyers that it was OK to plant a question with reporters every once in a while at presidential news conferences. A bogus idea, for sure, but Laitin thought the technique was useful in getting important information out. "When [the president] volunteers something, everybody immediately is on guard: what's he trying to sell?" Laitin told Deakin.

Moyers pitched the idea of planting questions to Johnson, who embraced it, giving Moyers a couple of questions for Laitin to distribute, which he did.

Johnson so loved this innovation that he was determined to plant every question at his next news conference. About 15 minutes before the session started, Moyers brought Laitin about 10 questions from the president. When Laitin protested that this was too much—"Bill, this isn't the way it's done"—Moyers said, "Do it!"

Read more here.

LBJ and MLK: partners?

LBJ, who delighted in listening to surveillance tapes of Martin Luther King, when King was being sexually unfaithful to his wife, and who was known for using racial slurs, is back in the spotlight today because of the movie Selma. Was he Martin Luther King's partner in seeking justice for black Americans?

Adam Serwer writes:

Lyndon Johnson said the word “nigger” a lot.

In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using “nigra” with some southern legislators and “negra” with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he’d simply call it “the nigger bill.”

For two decades in Congress he was a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation. As Caro recalls, Johnson spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia. Buying into the stereotype that blacks were afraid of snakes (who isn’t afraid of snakes?) he’d drive to gas stations with one in his trunk and try to trick black attendants into opening it.

In Flawed Giant, Johnson biographer Robert Dallek writes that Johnson explained his decision to nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court rather than a less famous black judge by saying, “when I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a nigger.”

According to Caro, Robert Parker, Johnson’s sometime chauffer, described in his memoir Capitol Hill in Black and White a moment when Johnson asked Parker whether he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.” When Parker said he would, Johnson grew angry and said, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”

After Johnson’s death, Parker would reflect on the Johnson who championed the landmark civil rights bills that formally ended American apartheid, and write, “I loved that Lyndon Johnson.” Then he remembered the president who called him a nigger, and he wrote, “I hated that Lyndon Johnson.”
Read more here.

Thanks to Mary Grabar

The Great Society Summer of 2014

Roger L. Simon writes that we are in the Great Society Summer:

But, you say, this was a white-on-black crime. An o-fay cop offed a brother. (Never mind that brothers can butcher brothers like it’s going out of style, this pig had white-skin privilege.) Well, yes, and we don’t yet know the circumstances, but even accepting the narrative of, say, the Huffington Post that the cop was the reincarnation of Bull Connor and that the “youth” was a “gentle giant” on the way to a contract with PBS as the next Mr. Rogers, the event is basically a charade. Everyone knows we’ve seen it before and everyone knows we’ll see it again. In fact, many parties don’t want it to go away. The beat must go on. It has to go on or their very personalities will disintegrate. And I will tell you why — what caused it.

The Great Society. There, I’ve said it. The Great Society, which I voted for and supported from the bottom of my heart, is the villain behind Ferguson. Ferguson is the Great Society writ large because the Great Society convinced, and then reassured, black people that they were victims, taught them that being a victim and playing a victim was the way to go always and forever. And then it repeated the point ad infinitum from its debut in 1964 until now — a conveniently easy to compute fifty years — as it all became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Great Society and similar policies screwed black people to the wall. It was racist to the core without knowing it. Nobody used the N-word. In fact, it was forbidden, unless you were Dr. Dre or somebody. But it did its job without the word and did it better for being in disguise. Those misbegotten kids running around Ferguson high on reefer and wasting their lives screaming at cops are the product of all this. Stop it already. No one has said this better than Jason Riley, author of Please Stop Helping Us. Listen to Jason if you want to end Fergusons.

Please read more here.

I don't know about how it is where you live, but where I am in Colorado, nobody cares what your skin color is. They just want to know if you are a decent human being who can do the job.