by AWR Hawkins Much has been made of the Jimmy Carter-like malaise that Barack Obama has placed this country in. With good reason, comparisons are being made of the fact that they’re both weak and that neither demonstrates a working knowledge of the military or how foreign policy and energy solutions should be pursued. (Concerning the latter, Carter gave us Gasohol and Obama has given us the Chevy Volt.)
Thus, we’ve been inundated with comparisons to the 1980 presidential elections and predictions of how the right GOP candidate, say Gov. Palin or Gov. Perry, will ring up Obama in November 2012 the way Ronald Reagan rung up Carter some 31 years ago.
But when I recently visited with guest hosts Cameron Gray and John Popp on the NRA’s “Cam & Company,” and we discussed the mobs that betray a seething rage just below the surface in many parts of America, it dawned on me that the comparison to 1980 may not be apropos. Instead, what may be needed is to turn back the clock a bit further to when the counter-culture was in full swing and another Democrat who knew nothing about the presidency was making a fool of himself.
The year was 1968, and the president was Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ).
A Democrat’s Democrat, LBJ spent us into oblivion (and continues to long after his death) via the “War on Poverty.” He watched as the counter-culture went from somewhat peaceful to somewhat violent to completely out of control. And he didn’t take the Vietnam War seriously because he was so intent on passing his domestic agenda (“The Great Society”) and he didn’t want anything to distract from it.
Just think about it folks: Obama has spent us into oblivion (he added more money to the national debt in his first 19 months “than all presidents from Washington to Reagan combined”). He has not only watched the mobs break loose in certain cities, but has instigated them via his ongoing habit of pitting one group or class of people against another. And while our soldiers are being shot and killed overseas, Obama is angling for a way to pass a second stimulus bill and to raise more taxes in his ongoing bid to “spread the wealth around.”
Perhaps more infuriating than anything is the fact that while our brave troops continue to be carried off the battlefield on stretchers, our pathetic president continues to carry a pitching wedge around the edge of well manicured green while grinning like the Cheshire cat for any reporter who still cares enough to snap a photo.
(And I haven’t even mentioned Gunwalker, Fast and Furious, or the other gun smuggling operations that are being attributed to the administration.)
In 1968, the solution to the mess LBJ had created was Richard Nixon’s campaign on “law and order,” his willingness to put the hippies in their place, and his eagerness to fight the war in Vietnam aggressively so as to win. Sure, he made a terrible mistake at the end of his first term when he covered up Watergate after learning of it, but the ideals on which he campaigned before that lapse in judgment are no less real and even now, are no less important.
I’m just saying, 2012 is fast approaching, and I hope it turns out to be the same kind of Democrat-smack down we saw in 1968. (They don’t really hate Nixon because of Watergate – they hate him because he cleaned their clocks with the electorate.)
Big Government
