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Military budgets were SLASHED in the 90's.
Major defense contractors suffered huge financial losses forcing mergers etc etc.
Bill Clinton not only survived, but served a second term.
Certainly the Military Industrial Complex has it's own interests and agenda just like agriculture groups, unions and retirees....but to make them out to be this all-powerful force killing presidents etc is at least laughable in the face of ACTUAL history and not cherry picked anecdotes.
Military budgets were SLASHED in the 90's.
Major defense contractors suffered huge financial losses forcing mergers etc etc.
Bill Clinton not only survived, but served a second term.
Certainly the Military Industrial Complex has it's own interests and agenda just like agriculture groups, unions and retirees....but to make them out to be this all-powerful force killing presidents etc is at least laughable in the face of ACTUAL history and not cherry picked anecdotes.
So why was JFK assassinated?...
Did you fall for the lone shooter theory?...
Isn't that speculation on your part? You are simply tweaking the meaning of the term, blending it with history and stating that these are the facts.
One sentence of it ("He would be horrified...) is speculation. What's not speculation is that the conservatives of the time did not consider Kennedy one of them, and vice versa.
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The liberal of today has moved towards a socialist view.
*******s. Compare tax rates even under the reduced Kennedy rates to anything since the 1980s. Compare the relative power of unions then and now. Ask yourself the last time any politician seriously recommended price controls in any field other than medicine. Ask yourself the last time you heard a politician ask first of a proposed military intervention: "Is it right? Is it just?"
The fact is, the entire culture has shifted to the right since Kennedy.
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When JFK was in office, there was an almost universal hatred of socialists and communists from both sides of the aisle. We lived through the cold war, and people had a better understanding of what it meant.
People did have a better understanding then, but you don't know what "socialism" means and they did.
Are you saying everyone was either a Communist or a conservative until Martin Luther King?
Martin Luther King, btw, became prominent in 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott.
Whoa now....let's all calm down here....no need to inject actual facts and dates into this insane discussion.
Besides, most of the people posting here don't even know what the terms they are using mean.
P.S. We might not agree all the time with regards to conclusions but at least you cite actual history and not things from alternate dimensions and realities.
Which is a bunch of crap. Liberals are not socialist or communist. This is more Faux New Lies, just like the lie that Kennedy was a Conservative.
JFK's New Frontier is very much aligned with modern day liberal beliefs. The only difference is that if JFK was still alive and running on this platform, Conservatives would be calling him an evil commie.
Like steven_h said... You didn't see modern day "Liberals" until during Martin Luther King and LBJ...
JFK's New Frontier is very much aligned with modern day liberal beliefs. The only difference is that if JFK was still alive and running on this platform, Conservatives would be calling him an evil commie.
Isn't that speculation on your part? You are simply tweaking the meaning of the term, blending it with history and stating that these are the facts.
The liberal of today has moved towards a socialist view. When JFK was in office, there was an almost universal hatred of socialists and communists from both sides of the aisle. We lived through the cold war, and people had a better understanding of what it meant.
Eisenhower warned of the military complex. JFK was probably killed by it. Johnson embraced it. Johnson began the demise of this country through liberal social programs and war mongering. When you give the people something for nothing, calling it a right, you'll have them addicted to it for life. We have a society full of entitlement addicts and a war mongering government.
We are living through the fruits of Johnsons labor.
Leftism was far more powerful and much more radical in the 60s and 70s than it is today, no question. The political window has moved rightward since Reagan and it continues today, so your claim that "the liberal of today has moved towards a socialist view" is untrue, since the liberals have been by and large pushed to the center.
Socialists and communists are less despised now, but that's because they are less of an ontological threat, being incredibly marginalized and ignored as they are now. That doesn't mean that the American people have become more accepting of Communism as a valid way of life, but historical change means that there is less knee-jerk McCarthyesque fear of the term. You still get people like workingclasshero who throw out accusations of facism and communism every chance they get and look crazy for it.
HC475, you're really off-base with your analysis of liberalism, by the way. MLK was not the progenitor of modern liberalism. The Civil Rights Movement played a large role in its current form, but so did the Progressivism of people well before him.
Ultimately this is a game of semantic label-making, and a boring one at that. Everyone wants to define their own terms and force everyone else to accept them. All it amounts to is extreme oversimplification and weak "discussion".
People did have a better understanding then, but you don't know what "socialism" means and they did.
Ironic considering I'm one of "those" people. I was born during Eisenhowers administration, and taught in public schools when they still taught actual history.
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Originally Posted by dunks_galore
Leftism was far more powerful and much more radical in the 60s and 70s than it is today, no question. The political window has moved rightward since Reagan and it continues today, so your claim that "the liberal of today has moved towards a socialist view" is untrue, since the liberals have been by and large pushed to the center.
Socialists and communists are less despised now, but that's because they are less of an ontological threat, being incredibly marginalized and ignored as they are now. That doesn't mean that the American people have become more accepting of Communism as a valid way of life, but historical change means that there is less knee-jerk McCarthyesque fear of the term. You still get people like workingclasshero who throw out accusations of facism and communism every chance they get and look crazy for it.
HC475, you're really off-base with your analysis of liberalism, by the way. MLK was not the progenitor of modern liberalism. The Civil Rights Movement played a large role in its current form, but so did the Progressivism of people well before him.
Ultimately this is a game of semantic label-making, and a boring one at that. Everyone wants to define their own terms and force everyone else to accept them. All it amounts to is extreme oversimplification and weak "discussion".
It isn't the left who have pushed more toward the center, but the center that has been pushed further to the left. If you change the benchmark of what a liberal is, then you can make everyone seem like they are to the right of it.
P.S. We might not agree all the time with regards to conclusions but at least you cite actual history and not things from alternate dimensions and realities.
Well then, you know that advocating, for example, universal health care did not get a politician branded a socialist during the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s or even 1980s, except perhaps among Ayn Rand fans.
(Needless to say, this has nothing to do with whether UHC is a good idea. It's simply a matter of distinguishing political discourse from political hyperbole.)
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