On Tue, 18 Apr 2006 16:06:32 -0500 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>
>
> Jerry Monaco wrote:
> >
> > I saw it at a college production. It modernizes the Macbeth and
> is
> > just as cynical about King Kennedy (John Ken O'Dunc in the play)
> as it
> > is about MacBird.
> >
> > If MacBird murdered O'Dunc then all I can say is that it was
> probably
> > so he could pass the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, so all and all no
> great
> > loss. This is a revisionist view no doubt.
>
> I guess we're getting into trivia now, but I'm always delighted to
> find
> someone who shares my immense antipathy to John F. Kennedy and all
> his
> works. That is one of the reasons conspiracy theories on his
> assassination are so regressive: they obscure (even deny) his total
> commitment to whatever horrors were necessssary or useful for the
> prosecution of the Cold War. His inaugural address should be seen as
> a
> declaration of all-out war on the Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
> Johnson indeed was a war criminal and a shit in many ways, but if we
> were going to play around with lesser evils, LBJ was certainly the
> lesser evil of the two.
LBJ was certainly, overall, a far more progressive president than JFK. Kennedy, only with the greatest reluctance came to support civil rights, and that was after much footdragging by his administration. It was Johnson who successfully got the Civil Rights Bill through Congress, pulling out all stops to get it passed. And it was Johnson's Great Society which gave us programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the most import social legislation since the New Deal. LBJ boasted that he would out-New Deal, FDR. And he pretty much succeeded in the effort. I think his only mistake in that regard is that he didn't press ahead for national health insurance. He reasoned that to get to that goal, he would have to proceed in steps, hence his opting for Medicare and Medicaid. In that respect, I think he miscalculated, since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, as important and useful as they are, have not taken us any closer to a universal national coverage. I think he would have been better off if he had instead opted to fight directly for national health insurance, a fight that I think he probably could have won. And I think he would have done this, if he thought that he would have succeeded.
>
> Carrol
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