Crying on the Toilet — ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy…’
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Nearly 50 years have passed since that fateful day in Dallas when JFK was assassinated, and now some new insights have surfaced into those few precious moments in the abrupt transition of presidential power — and it ain’t macho.
In a new book on the November 1963 event, The Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After: Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President, by Steven Gillon, paints LBJ as near the break-down point.
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, JFK’s military aide, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, could not find LBJ on Air Force One after people had told him Johnson was on board — everyone figured he had departed already on Air Force Two as Kennedy and Johnson arrived in Dallas on separate aircraft — until the general checked the shitter in the presidential bedroom.
Via a piece by Gillon at HuffPost:
What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking.
“I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled.
He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”
I soon discovered that McHugh had told a similar story when he spoke by phone with Mark Flanagan, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
Ironically, McHugh gave the interview to the HSCA a week before he sat down with the Kennedy Library in May 1978.
“McHugh had encountered difficulty in locating Johnson but finally discovered him alone,” Flanagan wrote in his summary to the Committee.
Quoting McHugh, the investigator noted that the General found Johnson “hiding in the toilet in the bedroom compartment and muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us.’”
Author Christopher Anderson claimed that McHugh shared a similar, although slightly more dramatic, version of this story when he interviewed the General for his book Jackie after Jack, published in 1998.
In complete contrast to LBJ’s blubberings, Jackie Kennedy was stoic and strong, seemingly in control despite the horror blowing around her.
She was only 34 then, the youngest First Lady in US presidential history.
In an interview (pdf) with historian Theodore White about a week after the shooting (Nov. 29, 1963), Jackie had this to say about the chaos on-board Air Force One, spinning the tale “one brief shinning moment that was known as Camelot”:
“…History…, everybody kept saying to me put a cold towel around my head” (and wipe the blood off: she is referring to the swearing-in scene at the plane, when Johnson is sworn in at the plant at Love Field and she was beside him)… “later, I saw myself in the mirror; my whole face spattered with blood and hair…I wiped it off with Kleenex.
History. I thought no one really wants me there.
Then one second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off?
I should have left it there, let them see what they’ve done…If I’d just had blood and caked hair when” (they took pictures of swearing in).
“Then later I said to Bobby what’s the line between histrionics and drama.
I should have left the blood on.”
In 1995, a year after Jackie’s death, The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston released the interview notes.
Another strange, little-known incident that day — US District Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, who administered the oath of office to Johnson, and JFK’s Bible and a three-by-five-inch file card containing the oath.
According to the National Archives:
Judge Hughes, in the process of stepping down the boarding steps, was hailed by a self-assured man who inquired if she wanted the two items she held in her hand.
Assuming he was a security man and because the items did not belong to her, Judge Hughes transferred to the man the file card and the President’s Bible, neither of which were ever located.
Kennedy’s assassination will always be clouded in conspiracy, pity and…romance.
Words and the Looneytune GOP
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This morning a note on words misplaced by right-wing, wingnuts suffering intently from schizophasia in a most non-oblique fashion.
An ex-Detroit Lions coach had to apologize for being nasty and petulent last month after saying “Good-bye, ladies,” to three male Detroit sports writers.
Reminds one of California’s Governator proclaiming members of the state legislature as “girly-men” during budget battles.
Marinelli and Schwarzenegger are just big-mouthed public oafs, linked through failure, one the fall guy for a win-less season, and the other, the big burrio roasting on such a financial hotplate the good times are over for the Golden State.
(Illustration found here).
A lot of words, and a lot of words linked together as phrases, are floating around out there in the ether, this being the age of capture-the-moment words, like Big Al Greenspan’s usage of just two of them last fall, “shocked disbelief,” to describe how he felt about helping bring down the global financial markets.
Or the locution sprouting last week from repugnant blowhard Rush Limbaugh setting the number of words he needs to explain President Obama: “…I need four: I hope he fails.”
And speaking of seven words — the late comedian George Carlin’s FBI file was recently released and not many words were contained therein:
- There’s also a letter from Hoover himself thanking one of Carlin’s critics for defending his honor, and an internal FBI memo that quotes the director as asking: “What do we know of Carlin?”
Not much, as it turned out. The memo notes the FBI has “no data concerning Carlin” other than the two letters from his critics.
“Which kind of disappoints me,” laughed Carlin’s daughter, Kelly Carlin McCall, who provided the file to The Associated Press. “It doesn’t really cover any of his more radical 1970s stuff.”
Carlin’s famous monologue: “The original seven words … that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and (laughter) maybe, even bring us, God help us, peace without honor (laughter) um, and a bourbon.”
See the original stand-up performance here.
Politics operates by words, which once spoken still mean nothing.
In this vast churning mesh of words, one wonders how Republicans can currently look themselves in the mirror (or maybe die-hard GOPers can’t be seen in mirrors) and not see the obvious — a clueless face with nasty, cruel eyes.
Even amongst themselves they ain’t pretty.
From ABC News‘ The Note blog comes word of Sarah Palin snubbing US House Republicans:
- Retreat organizers tell ABC News that Palin politely declined, giving a perfectly understandable reason. According to the Congressional Institute, which hosted the conference, Palin said she simply could not make it to the retreat because pressing state business made it impossible for her to leave Alaska this weekend.
So where is Palin this weekend? She’s in Washington, D.C., attending the super-elite Alfalfa Dinner.
“She lied to us,” said a Republican at the retreat.
Asked why Palin told the Republicans she could not leave Alaska this weekend, Palin spokesman Bill McAllister offered this non-responsive answer:
“My understanding is that the governor has not scheduled any partisan events on her current trip to D.C.,” McAllister told ABC News.
Operative word there, Bill, is partisan — apt usage to describe a political entity that has descended into a kind of mental-snow-blindness, lashing out without any kind of rhyme or reason, and doing it with a strange, though, really-sad, slap-stick stupidity.
One goofball GOPer, Dick Armey (the GOP seems to have an inordinate — great word — amount of ‘dicks’ in its ranks) used a marvelous, but ancient word to describe the argument of salon.com’s Joan Walsh on MSNBC’s Hardball last week as prattle, but of course he inadvertently described the entire Republican party’s line of rhetoric since Jan. 20.
Armey also slapped Walsh for her gender.
See and read about the whole, ugly mess at Think Progress.
This political-crap scene was focused on the above mentioned Mr. Limbaugh and the near-treasonous shit (another great word — as Carlin once noted, a word usually not used in its original form, feces, but instead, is used to explain a shitload of other stuff having nothing to do with going poo — that has blubbered out of Rush’s shit-hole of a mouth just since Jan. 20.
Read a recap here.
And in an even more obvious stunt: A black was elected head of the RNC — a first in its 155-year history — an apparent mirror-like opposition to the first-ever black president.
Michael Steele is indeed black, but he’s just another Lindsey Graham loaded with the bloated lips of a Rush Limbaugh.
Steele quickly added another new word into the GOP gutter trap: Goose egg.
He praised House Republicans for their refusal to pony-up one single vote for Obama’s stimulus package: “The goose egg you laid on the president’s desk was just beautiful,” he said.
And step forward, open big mouth, insert big foot and Blago! New word: Fraud:
- The recent allegations outlined four specific transactions.
In addition to the payment to Steele’s sister, Fabian said that the candidate used money from his state campaign improperly; that Steele paid $75,000 from the state campaign to a law firm for work that was never performed; and that he or an aide transferred more than $500,000 in campaign cash from one bank to another without authorization.
This Fabian guy isn’t cool, either. He was sentenced last October in another unrelated fraud case.
The GOP has become a corrupt-infested organization, but still swinging the bat hard for the fence.
Last Wednesday, the GOP added the word, “insurgency” to its mounting nitwit vocabulary to describe how Repubs should fight the Obama administration.
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, rolled deep into muddied waters and almost drowned before a quick-thinking aide saved his ass.
- “Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,” Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors.
“And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes.
And these Taliban — I’m not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban.
No, that’s not what we’re saying.
I’m saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.”
…
When pressed to clarify, Sessions said he was not comparing the House Republican caucus to the Taliban, the Muslim fundamentalist group.
“I simply said one can see that there’s a model out there for insurgency,” Sessions said before being interrupted by an aide.
The staffer said Sessions was trying to convey that the Republicans need to start thinking about how to act strategically from their perch in the minority.
No, the Taliban is not who we is — The Taliban is alive and very well, thank-you, driving Afghanistan to the brink of an-even-bigger disaster, a situation the GOP-led and bled.
In other words, or word, Shithead Sessions “misspoke,” another Republican word-origin from Tricky-Dick days, making all Nixon’s statements on Watergate “inoperative:” Not incorrect, not misinformed, not untrue—simply inoperative, like batteries gone dead.
And Repubs have now jumped on a feckless use of words.
Yesterday, it was concluded Obama was attempting scare tactics:
- “In discussing with the American people his approach to the stimulus of our economy, he has first really used some dangerous words,” said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican.
Mr. Kyl added, “It seems to me that the president is rather casually throwing out some careless language.”
Kyl was blubbering about Obama’s weekly address yesterday where he emphasized speed is needed for passage of his stimlus package: “Because if we don’t move swiftly to put this plan in motion, our economic crisis could become a national catastrophe.”
A mindless, clueless word thrasher — Kyl called Obama’s inaugural address not “high-brow, it was more low-brow” and even last month had already set up the current thrashing on the stimulus bill because it didn’t meet the GOP’s high standards.
The financial/economic situation — and the lying, blubber-mouth Kyle and the rest of the GOP sewage patrol knows fully well — is already in a catastrophe mode, just ask the 600,000+ people thrown out of work in January.
The anger among US peoples is getting wacko.
Frank Rich touches upon this national slow-boiling indignation in a piece this morning in the New York Times.
People are pissed at the way-overly obvious spreading of wealth — and it’s not just elitist:
- The public’s revulsion isn’t mindless class hatred.
As Obama said on Wednesday of his fellow citizens: “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.”
But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long.
The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.
Bad news on the doorstep.
Not to be out GOPed, the US military tossed in its $1 trillion word last week after stats showed US GIs are killing themselves faster than any insurgent — 24 committed suicide last month with only 16 killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Col. Kathy Platoni said that a major risk factor for soldiers is the multiple deployments most have experienced.
“When people are apart you have infidelity, financial problems, substance abuse and child behavioral problems,” Platoni said. “The more deployments, the more it is exacerbated.”
Yes, Kathy Colonel, IEDs, shattered Humvees, four or five more-than-a-year tours in a urban slaughterhouse-5-to-the-10th-power that is Iraq could indeed exacerbate problems back home, but what can you do, huh?
As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.