He says this is a pretty open confession, one which I myself never thought I'd see in print. I guess this is just my day to be amazed.
Ronald Reagan Started a War That Rages Today
Liberalism would not go quietly into the night.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, June 11, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Ronald Reagan was explicit in saying that his target was not the idea of government itself, as was often wrongly believed, but the Great Society. The Great Society was, and remains, a remarkable edifice. Consider the times in which it came to life. John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and the liberal promise he embodied erupted into a moral crusade, whose general was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Besides the burden of expectation left by a murdered and sanctified president, LBJ inherited two of the nation's most traumatic political crucibles--the aborning civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. For liberals then and now, the former was the most morally compelling experience of their lives; the latter, the most immoral.
…The fervor with which LBJ's speeches describe the Great Society's legislative crusade matched and even exceeded Ronald Reagan's. His 1964 State of the Union Speech was astonishing in its list of "we must" goals: "All this and more can and must be done." He committed the government to "unconditional war on poverty." The next year he was giving speeches on the signing of historic bills for civil rights, Medicare, education, even highway beautification, which seeded the environmental movement. On signing the 1965 education bill in Johnson City, Texas, LBJ remarked, "My minister assured me that the Lord's day will not be violated by making into law a measure which will bring mental and moral benefits to millions of our young people." Yes, moral benefits.
[P6: Remember-this is what Republicans are fighting]
The ethos of Ronald Reagan and LBJ represent the two great political ideologies of our lifetime. The substantive disagreements that put these factions in opposition is not that of the mundane contests between Ford and Carter or Clinton and Dole. It was more like a religious war and remains so to this day.
Posted by P6 at June 11, 2004 01:56 PM
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Comments
Honestly LBJ was in a guilt complex over Kennedy. He tried to make up for that- and Nam- in other ways by helping a just cause.
Besides he couldn't get away with drafting black soldiers and denial of rights here.Something was going to change, credit to him for doing so it was long overdue.
But yes the great society was his effort at redemption, the young vote made our country better at that time. How times have changed. Diebold is purging this legacy at the present...
Posted by Mr.Murder at June 13, 2004 12:51 PM