CNN: Race For The White House: Richard Nixon vs John Kennedy (1960)

Source: CNN- The 1960 Democratic National Convention. 

Source:The New Democrat 

"CNN Race for the White House 1of6 Nixon vs JFK" 

From CHARLEMAGNE DUMDUM CALOTES

1960 between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, was one of the last presidential elections in America that was about ideas, vision, experience, and qualifications. Instead of having two unlikable candidates who know they're unlikable and unpopular and use that to defeat their opponents. Going back to really 1996 and perhaps 1992, American presidential elections have been about destroying the other side instead of winning the election. And telling American voters, "we know you don't like us, but you should hate our opponents more and this is why." Where winning presidential elections has become about and has been about for a generation now negative adverting and campaigning. The campaign that runs the best negative ads and makes the best negative arguments agains their opponent, tends to win.

Instead of winning elections because your opponent is more qualified, has better experience, better ideas, better vision, more forward looking, more likable as an individual. In 1960 America had two great choices. Two very bright well-educated presidential candidates, who both wanted to be President and both knew why. Both had something positive to offer Americans. And of course there was negative advertising and campaigning between Dick Nixon and Jack Kennedy. but that wasn't what their campaigns was about.

Vice President Nixon offered American four more years of what was already working from the Eisenhower Administration. Senator Kennedy was offering Americans a new generation of leadership and new way of thinking. That the U.S. Government needed to new leadership to deal with the challenges of the 1960s. Americans had a real choice of either sticking with what was working ( according to the Eisenhower Administration ) or move in a different direction and deal with issues like civil rights for all Americans, health care for senior citizens, and other issues.

1960 to me is what presidential elections should be about, at least within the two-party system. Putting the two best candidates that America has to offer, or at least the best Democrat and Republican against each other. With both candidates offering why they should be President, instead of arguing why their opponent shouldn't be President. And because America is so divided not just politically, but culturally, and now even ethnically and racially, having a positive presidential election doesn't seem possible anymore. At least not with the two-party system.

Jack Ruby: Lee Harvey Oswald Assassin

Source:Britannica- Dallas nightclub owner and perhaps part-time Dallas Mafia assassin Jack Ruby.

Source:The New Democrat  

“Jack Ruby, in full Jack L. Ruby, original name Jacob Rubenstein, (born March 25?, 1911, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died January 3, 1967, Dallas, Texas), American nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin of Pres. John F. Kennedy, on November 24, 1963, as Oswald was being transferred to a county jail. Despite Ruby’s claims to the contrary—and a lack of evidence—some have posited that he was part of a larger conspiracy concerning Kennedy’s assassination.” 

From Britannica 

“The image of Jack Ruby firing a pistol at Lee Harvey Oswald – the man arrested on suspicion of carrying out the assassination of US President John F Kennedy – is one of the most famous of the 20th Century.

We speak to Dallas Times-Herald photographer Bob Jackson about his Pulitzer Prize winning picture.”

Source:BBC News- covering the Lee Harvey Oswald killing by Jack Ruby, in 1963.

From BBC News 

"Jacob Leonard Rubenstein - Jack Ruby - Conspiracy." Originally from Mob Video Vault, but the video has been deleted or blocked on YouTube. 

Source:Mob Video Vault- Dallas nightclub owner and perhaps part-time Dallas gangster Jack Ruby.

There all sorts of wild eye conspiracy theories ranging from the Far-Left people who think either Vice President Lyndon Johnson or the CIA, perhaps Far-Rightists in Dallas who hated President John Kennedy because of his stances on civil rights, as well as people on the fringe Libertarian-Right who believe the CIA murdered President Kennedy, to people on the Far-Right who believed multiple Communists including Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President Kennedy, conspiracies that sound like they're not just from out of this planet, but from a different universe. Perhaps aliens from Planet Zolkon (or whatever the hell sic-fi fictional planet would be called) looking down on Planet Earth and seeing what's going on in Dallas, Texas in America in 1963 when President Kennedy is assassinated, with their own wild eye conspiracy theories.

Some of these crazy conspiracy theories are from crazy people, or at least people who lost touch with Planet Earth and are now doing their thinking on other planets. But some of these conspiracy theories are simply just made up in order to profit from them. Sell books, articles, documentaries, movies, etc. 

And I'm thinking of Roger Stone on the Libertarian-Right who has floated the conspiracy theory that Vice President Lyndon Johnson, ordered the assassination of President Kennedy. To the Oliver Stone's of the world on the Far-Left, who claim the JFK assassination was an inside job conducted by the National Security State either the CIA or FBI, was behind the assassination of President Kennedy. 

As well as people on the Far-Left who believe that racist Southern right-wingers in Texas, were responsible for President Kennedy's assassination.

The only alternative theory to the official U.S. Government theory being that Lee Harvey Oswald was not only the killer and assassinated President Kennedy, but he was all by himself and had absolutely no help, is the theory that organized crime especially the Italian Mafia in Dallas and perhaps Chicago as well, Chicago especially who hated President Kennedy and the Kennedy's Administration's crackdown on organized crime in America led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, were behind the assassination of President Kennedy. 

A credible theory is that the Chicago, as well as Dallas Mobs believed that if they didn't take President Kennedy out, they could be out of business all together in the 1960s because the Justice Department would put them out of business. 

Bob Kennedy and his Justice Department, deserves a lot of credit for putting the Italian Mafia out of business in America. Not completely but they're no longer powerful in America. They're also responsible thanks to the FBI, for the Ku Klux Klan being as weak as they are now as well.

The best alternative theory out there is that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin in the JFK assassination and wanted President Kennedy dead because Kennedy as a Liberal Democrat was a strong anti-communist. 

But that since the Italian Mafia also wanted Kennedy dead not because they were Communists because of course they weren't, that they worked with Lee Oswald to assassinate President Kennedy. And that perhaps there was a freak out once the assassination was completed either from Lee Oswald who is now in jail at this point because of his crime and it's now sinking into him what he actually had done, or the mob is now freaking out because they're worried that Oswald will talk and implicate the Dallas Mafia and perhaps Chicago Mafia's into the JFK assassination as well.

Jack Ruby who was a Dallas nightclub owner and businessman, but who had ties to the Italian Mafia in Dallas and perhaps Chicago as well, murdered Lee Oswald just days after President Kennedy is assassinated. He murders Lee Oswald and is arrested for it  literally right after he kills Oswald and was literally able to just walk up to Oswald and shoot him in the chest. 

How was Jack Ruby able to kill Lee Oswald? Why was the Dallas PD security so weak when attempting to move the loan suspect in the JFK assassination from the Dallas jail to the court house? 

Jack Ruby had connections not just with the mob , but with cops on the Dallas PD. So maybe he's able to pull this murder off because his friends on the police force let him in to get the clearance to shoot Oswald. Whether this is true or not we of course don't no, but it is a reasonable theory and alternative to the official theory that Lee Oswald was all by himself in assassinating President Kennedy.

Victor D. Hanson: 'Rethinking Watergate'

Source:Hoover Institution- where the Watergate scandal all started.

Source:The New Democrat

“The Watergate break-in is now 45 years old. The scandal is as distant from our own time as it was once from 1928. The median age of Americans is about 38 years old. Half of all Americans were likely born after the break-in. But Watergate is hardly ancient history.

The fumes of Watergate waft around the current FISA-gate scandal. The now septuagenarians Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, of All the President’s Men fame, are back in the news. As seasoned crusading reporters, they currently offer admonitions that Donald Trump is replaying the role of a supposedly paranoid and imperious Richard Nixon.

But is he? The two investigative journalists who first brought Watergate to public attention are certainly not wrong about parallels—but not in the way they imagine. FISA-gate is becoming Watergate turned upside down. The respective roles of the government, liberal Democrats, civil libertarians, and the White House are now reversed—and this turnaround is, in a strange way, redefining Watergate itself.”

From Victor D. Hanson 

“60 Minutes political correspondent Lesley Stahl covered Watergate 45 years ago. She visits CBSN to detail her experience and draws some parallels to the political scandals surrounding the White House today.” 

Source:CBS News- President Richard M. Nixon (Republican, California) I'm not a crook. LOL

From CBS News

I look at Watergate now more than 45 years after the 1972 break in and almost 45 years after Congress starts to look into the the Watergate break in and the 1972 presidential election with the Senate Watergate Select Committee, in a couple of ways.

First, just the pure stupidity of it from several vantage points and perhaps the biggest being how unnecessary it was. We know that President Richard Nixon didn’t personally order the Watergate break in. Why, because he was already ahead of Senator George McGovern ( the 1972 Democratic nominee for president ) by 20 points or more at this point during the summer of 1972.

Not so much because breaking and entering into private property is morally wrong and illegal. That is probably not the reason why President Nixon didn’t order the break in, but because it would’ve been politically stupid for him to do that. Especially with a Democratic Congress with clear majorities in both the House and Senate. With network news media and the print media being such huge forces.

The risks of these bunglers, I mean burglars screwing up the break in and perhaps not even finding anything that President Nixon could use against Senator McGovern. Unfortunately Richard Nixon tended to operate from purely partisan political calculations, instead of morality and doing what’s morally right and so-forth. Which is one of the reasons for his downfall, along with his paranoia and lack of self-confidence.

The other thing that makes Watergate so stupid and even laughable now at this point, but perhaps by 1973 or so, is that the crew that was put together and how they were put together and actually did the Watergate operation. ( If you want to call it that ) If you’re going to order a break in of private property and you’re not personally involved in physically committing the crime yourself, you would think that you would hire professional burglars to do the operation. You could learn that just from watching any half-decent caper movie.

Watergate goes to show you: 

you don’t hire auto mechanics to perform brain surgery. 

you don’t hire dentists to represent you in court when you’re being charged with murder. 

You hire brain surgeons to perform brain surgery, criminal defense lawyers to defend you and when you’re being charged with crimes, and you hire professional burglars to pull off break ins.

The Watergate break in team were former CIA officers who were accustomed to working in other countries and getting information for the U.S. Government. They weren’t professional burglars or criminals of any background.

The Watergate break in was Amateur Night at the Watergate and when these guys knew they were a helluva lot of trouble and looking at doing 20 years or more in prison, they decided to talk to the prosecutors and that is where President Nixon freaks out or perhaps before that and decides to try to cover it up.

The Nixon reelection effort, looks like a bunch of guys in high school who decide to run for class president and pick one guy to run with his friends helping him out with the campaign, With this of course being the first time that any of them are ever involved in any political campaign ever. Not that different from the Donald Trump presidential campaign of 2016.

You have a long list of 10-15 men who worked for President Nixon during the early 1970s either for the Administration or reelection campaign, who ended up in prison. Who pre-Nixon and perhaps post-Nixon were by en-large good, intelligent, moral, productive people, but who got in way over their heads during this presidential campaign and simply made a lot of horrible decisions that put them all in prison. Watergate is a tragedy because of how stupid and unnecessary it was and the damage that these people did to themselves.

Daniel J. Mitchell: 'Three More Reasons To Laugh At Communism'

Source:Daniel J. Mitchell- with a humorous and accurate look at communism.

Source:The New Democrat

“I sometimes feel guilty when I mock communism. Should I really be joking about an ideology that directly or indirectly caused 100 million deaths? Are laughs appropriate when there is ongoing torture, abuse, and starvation in communist hellholes such as North Korea and Cuba?’ 

From Daniel J. Mitchell

I sort of look at Communists and communism like the way teachers might look at poor students. Students who fail the exact same tests over and over who simply don’t do the work they’re assigned and don’t learn the lessons that they’re taught. That old cliche those who fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

We know communism doesn’t work, at least anyone with a brain who is mentally competent, sane, sober, and capable of learning. And yet it still exists in a lot of the third world in and now even in a country like Venezuela which is an energy independent country and at one point one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America. Similar to how Chile and Brazil are today. We know it doesn’t work and yet people keep trying to make it work and keep trying to experiment with it.

A look at Communist lack of logic-

“Maybe if we only nationalize parts of the economy, or allow people to own their own property.

Maybe if our state-owned industries are partially privatized.

Maybe if we allow free and fair open elections, Communists will actually get elected and we can hold power that way.

Maybe if we allow for some free and private media, private news organizations will still kiss the central government’s huge over paternalistic ass for fear of being taken over by the regime and thrown into jail.”

None of these experiments work for communism because when they’re tried and people get a taste of freedom, they tend to like it.

Imagine being lost in a desert for weeks perhaps your plane crashes and you have to rely on only what you brought for that trip and then you’re finally recused and you start pouring water down your throats and perhaps try to drink and entire lake, at the same time you’re eating everything in sight including eating things that months ago people couldn’t pay you to eat, but you’re starving and you’ll eat anything. Are you going to go back to being stuck in the hot desert not knowing when you’ll be able to eat and drink anything ever again, or are you going to hang onto your freedom and live in civilization with the freedom to eat an drink whenever you want whatever you want?

Freedom can be addicting. Communism and authoritarianism in general is suffocating and torturing. When people escape communism and authoritarianism in general, they tend to fall in love with freedom and not wanting to live under an authoritarian system ever again. Communists have an ego problem and over trust in government and believe that people are essentially morons who can’t be trusted to put their pants on correctly each morning and therefor need Big Government to babysit them. And as we see now with only North Korea being the only pure communist state left in the world, people tend to like having the freedom to make their own decisions and tend not to want Big Government to do their thinking and decision-making for them.

John Birch Society: John F. McManus- Understanding Donald Trump

Source: Inside JBS- President Donald J. Trump, 45th POTUS. 

Source:The New Democrat

If there is one group that you think would stick with a President like Donald Trump, it would be the John Birch Society. They’ve been talking about what he ran on for President and what he’s been trying to do as President like immigration and the so-called Cultural War, since the 1940s. Pushing this bogus ( to be overly generous ) idea that we’re losing America and America no longer looks like America because of non-European especially non-British immigration in America since the 1960s. Something that both Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter, have been talking about for a very long time. Maybe even further back than that. Maybe Newsmax, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly, will be the next people who abandoned President Trump. Something to look at.

To sort of speak up for President Trump and the next time I’ll do that might be the day I win the state lottery in five different states on the same day, but to sort of defend the President I would say the man is simply out of his element and unqualified to be President. Like an auto mechanic trying to perform brain surgery, it just doesn’t look right. The man is use to no limits where he can even push the limits of the law with his business ( perhaps even break the law ) with no one holding him accountable.

The President of The United States, is the last position where you want on the job training to be performed. Trying to perform brain surgery by yourself might be the second to last place where you want on the job training performed. Donald Trump finds himself in a place now where he can’t do whatever he wants with no consequences. Where even people around him if they don’t like what he’s doing or saying, positions he’s taking, they’ll make that clear to him, or at the very least make it clear to the public and leak what they don’t like about what the President is doing. Instead of acting like they’re participating in a bootlicking, or ass kissing contest.

Don’t know the man personally ( certainly not my loss ) but I imagine Donald Trump saw himself in New York as essentially a dictator. Who could literally do whatever he wants and say whatever he wants without any consequences. And his 2016 presidential campaign sort of reenforced that where he said the most insulting, hateful, and even disgusting things and never paid a price for any of that. Where the Access Hollywood tape from 2005 comes out where he’s caught on tape about how he can physically violate women and get away with it. If anything his popularity only went up after that.

America is the last country in the world where you can be a dictator. Where you can have dictatorial authoritarian leanings as a chief executive and head of government and believe you can get away with anything. Our checks and balances and form of government simply don’t allow for that.

And even with the President’s own National Security Adviser resigning or being fired last year, with own Attorney General recusing himself from the Russia investigation because he was part of a presidential campaign that had Russian allies and even worked with Russians to help defeat Hillary Clinton, where his own Deputy Attorney General appoints a special prosecutor to investigate not just the Trump Campaign, but Donald Trump himself , where a Congress that is controlled by his own party is looking into the Russia affect on the 2016 presidential election, where his own National Security Council and intelligence community acknowledged early on that Russia not only interfered in our presidential election, but did it successfully even though President trump denies that. At some point very early on a light would’ve gone on inside the head of an intelligent reality ( not reality TV ) based man that he can’t do whatever he wants.

That The White House Office of Legal Counsel and U.S. Justice Department, are not his personal law firms, that the FBI is not his personal private detective and security agency, that the U.S. Congress doesn’t personally work for him and can’t be fired by him. But that is not the mindset and world that Donald Trump operates in. He sees himself as King and anyone who disagrees with him is not only disloyal to him, but America as well and should lose their job if not be in jail as well. As much as Donald Trump might want to be the Vladimir Putin dictator of the West, our form of government and system simply prevents that from happening