Great Moments in Pro-Obama Columns

So help me: if somebody at this stage decides to primary Black Eagle, I might give up reading newspapers and newsy blogs FOREVER.

I well understand Barney Frank’s reaction to Occupy Wall Street: Where were you all in 2010? I sometimes think the president’s real enemy is Democrats for whom nothing will ever be good enough. Or should I say ‘liberals’? I’m being reminded of the times after the JFK assassination when, instead of trying to pull together with LBJ, we were instead swamped with stories about how he fucked Kennedy’s wounds.

As this Pew graph shows…

@chicago bureau: He remains far superior to any alternative. But let’s not be in a rush to deify him. The things we’re “putting aside” are the things we resented Shrub for. And now they’re bipartisan.

@Benedick: Barney pretty much spoke my thoughts to Rachel the other night: If you don’t vote, you’re just whining.

(If you do vote, you’re more than welcome to whine about the futility of voting, but until you come up with something better, that’s all we got.)

I have a collection somewhere of Sixties Feiffer cartoons. As I think he mentions in an intro, everybody at first cheered wheeler-dealer LBJ for getting shit done. And then, y’know, that happened.

@nojo: The hubby reckons LBJ to have been a great preznident. But as I type he is the next room, drawing room 2, watching Gene Kelly establish the case for fag-bashing for his perf in An American in Paris. Thinks. Redo as gay romance. American soldier demobbed reluctant to return to his fundie family in OK since he has discovered his gayness while sucking cocks in troop transports lingers in Paris where he falls in love with Parisian stevedore into wrestling and tap dancing. I think it could work.

BTW. My campery should be read as a despairing take on our collapsing republic. I have hope. The alternative is too desperate to think of.

Plus. You get a suggestion from me re Cain? I find I don’t trust the Cloud. The Cloud is a fickle master. And that’s the worst kind.

@Benedick: LBJ was a tragic preznident. There’s no other way to deal with him.

Besides reading Caro, of course.

And Cain! is more entertaining than Allen West, but that’s about it.

T/J (sort of): Shrub shows grim concern over the Texas Rangers’ self destruction this inning. If only he had taken as seriously the decision over whether to go to war in Iraq…

@Benedick: LBJ needs a modern Shakespeare to do him justice (Richard III covers Nixon quite nicely).

LBJ had greatness in him and accomplished some great things. Vietnam was the real world manifestation of his hubris and America’s Cold War insanity.

I could make a case for LBJ as Claudius, RFK as Hamlet and JFK as the ghost.

@Walking Still: There was MacBird in the east Village with William Devane as LBJ that established him as a psychopathic killer. I saw it. It was putrid. Lady Bird was played by Susan something – she had a vogue – made some movies. I was in a play with her at the time at the Public. It was around that time that I developed my murderous hatred of hippies.

Much the same is going on now with Obama. On the right he’s a muslim birther: on the left he’s a Guantanamo civil rights stifling Wall Street tool.

Snark is not an option.

@Walking Still: I think he’s more Corialanus.

@Benedick: I heard about MacBird. It seemed ill conceived and I was told it was terribly executed.

As a second generation hippie, I’ll watch my back.

I do agree, snark is not an option

@Benedick: I sort of see your point about Coriolanus, but LBJ never got to try for redemption after his fall.

@Walking Still: It was when off-Broadway was the place to be. I also saw Dustin Hoffman in an N F Simpson play (invented Monty Python via the Goon Show). Who knew? MacBird was pretty silly. Wait. It was Stacy Keach. He created it, Devane took over. MacBeth done for SNL. Keach was a wonderful actor back then, brim full of promise. Played Falstaff in the park, Henry IV, parts i and ii, when he was 27. Oh dear. Twice we performed both plays in one night: curtain up at 8, down at 2: 30. And the place was packed.

Maybe LBJ was Gloucester?

@Benedick: I can’t see (and no my eyes haven’t been gouged out) LBJ as Gloucester. To me, Gloucester is an ineffectual “good guy”. He primarily exists to demonstrate the fate of one who tries to be good without wisdom in the Lear universe.

For LBJ, we need a character who puts up an enormous front to cover massive insecurities. The “front” character takes big bites of the world (War on Poverty, Civil Rights Act). But the insecure “inner” person corrupts his judgment so that he can’t oppose the suicidal stupidity of the people he feels unworthy of and must impress – the Cold War establishment that led us into Vietnam.

Shakespeare could have written such a character. I’m not sure he did.

There are a few lines of connection between LBJ and Tony Blair – with sucking up to Shrub as his Vietnam.

@nojo: Yes, a thousand times yes.