"A good moral character is the first essential in a man." — George Washington
Last night I was watching the O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel with guest host Laura Ingraham filling in for Bill O’Reilly. In the segment devoted to the riots in Chicago during the NATO conference Juan Williams, a Fox News contributor chastised Katherine Mary Ham for not knowing her history of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the riots held outside of the convention hall. I was a bit taken by William’s self-serving and chauvinistic ad hominem remark.
Katherine Mary Ham was born in 1980 some 12 years after the Democratic Convention and Williams, born in 1954, was a mere teenager 14 when Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin along with their SDS cohorts orchestrated the riots in Lincoln Park.
At the time I was 32-years old and watched almost every minute of the convention and the riots on television. I also recall many of the first-hand accounts of the riots by both the demonstrators and the Chicago police. It was a nasty time in our political history and the city of Chicago came in for a great deal of criticism for the way its police department handled the rioters — criticism that exists to this day. In case Juan William’s memory is a bit fuzzy I offer him the following with a hat tip to CNN:
“The 1968 Democratic Convention, held on August 26-29th, stands as an important event in the nation's political and cultural history. The divisive politics of the convention, brought about by the Vietnam War policies of President Johnson, prompted the Democratic party to completely overhaul its rules for selecting presidential delegates — opening up the political process to millions. The violence between police and anti-Vietnam War protesters in the streets and parks of Chicago gave the city a black-eye from which it has yet to completely recover.
The primary cause of the demonstrations and the subsequent riots during the 1968 Chicago convention was opposition to the Vietnam War. Young peace activists had met at a camp in Lake Villa, Illinois on March 23 to plan a protest march at the convention. Anti-war leaders including David Dellinger (editor of Liberation magazine and chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End War in Vietnam) Rennie Davis, head of the Center for Radical Research and a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Vernon Grizzard, a draft resistance leader, and Tom Hayden (also a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society) coordinated efforts with over 100 anti-war groups.
Groups related to this effort also planned events. Jerry Rubin (a former associate of Dellinger) and Abbie Hoffman (both leaders of the Youth International Party (YIPPIES) planned a Youth Festival with the goal of bringing 100,000 young adults to Chicago. They tried to get a permit from Chicago to hold a YIPPIE convention. The permit was denied, but the YIPPIES still came.
On March 31, President Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. Johnson's favorability ratings were in the mid-30% range and polls showed even less support for his Vietnam War policies (about 23%.) The announcement created uncertainty in the anti-war groups' convention plans. Many anti-war activists also became involved in the presidential campaigns of war opponents such as Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-NY), Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-WI) and Sen. (“Come Home America”) George McGovern (D-SD).
However, by early April there was much talk of Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice President, running for the presidency. Humphrey officially entered the race on April 27th. Because of his close identity with the Johnson administration, the plans for demonstrations were not cancelled.
Other events preceding the 1968 Democratic convention contributed to the tense national mood. On April 4, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out throughout the country. (This included Chicago, where Mayor Daley reportedly gave a "shoot to kill" instruction to police.) On June 3, artist and cultural icon Andy Warhol was shot. Finally, on June 5th, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy (President John Kennedy's brother) was shot in the head after winning the California primary — something I watched unfold as it happened. He died the next day. There also were countless protests against the Vietnam War at this time. Student protesters effectively shut down Columbia University in April.
Many Democrats were eager to move their national convention from Chicago to Miami, where the Republicans were to hold their nominating event. Democrats were concerned not only about the possibility of unruly protests; an ongoing telephone strike in Chicago threatened to cause logistical nightmares. The television networks also lobbied to move the event to Miami – TV and phone lines already were installed at the Republican convention site. In addition, because of the phone strike in Chicago, television cameras would be limited to the hotels and the convention center — new phone lines were needed to cover outside events. Any footage taken outside this area would have to be shot on film, which would require processing before it was broadcast.
Mayor Richard J. Daley would not let the convention leave Chicago. He promised to enforce the peace and allow no outrageous demonstrations. He also threatened to withdraw support for Humphrey, the apparent nominee, if the convention was moved. President Johnson also wanted to keep the convention in Chicago and is rumored to have said "Miami is not an American city."
Humphrey came to Chicago with the nomination virtually sewn up — he had between 100 and 200 more delegates than he needed, as well as the support of blacks, labor groups and Southern Democrats. However, he still felt his nomination was in jeopardy.
Humphrey was clearly seen as Johnson's man. President Johnson still had a grip over the convention; even going as far as to ensure states supportive of him received the best seats at the convention hall. But Johnson did not show up for the event.
Mayor Daley, who wanted Ted Kennedy to run for President, caucused his delegation of 118 the weekend before the convention and decided to remain "uncommitted." Humphrey also was at risk from the growing anti-war wing of the Democratic Party. After vacillating between the pro-war policies of the Johnson administration and the anti-war policies of his opponents, Humphrey made it clear on CBS's Face The Nation the weekend before the convention he supported President Johnson's Vietnam policies.
Humphrey faced a major credentials fight. Delegations from 15 states tried to unseat Humphrey's delegates and seat anti-Vietnam delegates. Humphrey's forces won every fight. There also was maneuvering behind the scenes at the Conrad Hilton (where the press and the Democratic Party were staying) to try and get Sen. Ted Kennedy to run.”
Perhaps if Daley had his way Mary Jo Kopechne would still be alive and Ted Kennedy would have suffered the same defeat that Humphrey did.
You can read more about the events of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention by clicking here.
I watched most of this on television where Walter Cronkite and his TV cohorts attempted to defend the actions of the rioters and decry the actions of the Chicago police. The entire remaining election campaign was a disaster for Humphrey, the so called happy warrior socialist from Minnesota, and Richard Nixon won the election by capturing 301 electoral votes. This number would have been higher had not George Wallace been running as a third party candidate.
Today the most contentious issues are the failures of Barack Obama. These are the failures in the economy, Afghanistan, and the pervasive dislike of ObamaCare. The failures of the Obama administration’s policies towards the economy with his corporate bailouts, failed stimulus programs, and his green job initiatives brought us the Occupied Wall Street gang last summer and fall and the so-called 99%.
This Occupied Wall Street movement has now morphed to anarchists and Marxist mob that have taken to the streets with revolutionary zeal. The latest round of demonstrations in Chicago during the NATO summit meetings gave us a preview of what is to come as the November election draws near. To me this is reminiscent of the summer of 1968 when it was the Vietnam War that drove the anarchists, Marxists, and revolutionaries to the streets.
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them; it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run. The current outbreaks of riots in Europe show what happens when the truth catches up with both the politicians and the people in the long run.
Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the people with things they want but cannot afford. Since the government gets its resources from the people, if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government.
There is, of course, the perennial fallacy that the government can simply raise taxes on "the rich" and use that additional revenue to pay for things that most people cannot afford. What is amazing is the implicit assumption that "the rich" are all such complete fools that they will do nothing to prevent their money from being taxed away. History shows otherwise.
Since Obama and the Democrats cannot run on their failed record of the past four years they are resorting demonizing the conservative opposition and giving tacit support to the street mobs with the support of their cohorts in the mainstream media. How is this demonizing taking form? Here are three of the latest examples.
In the latest transparent attempt by the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party to make the 2012 election a referendum on supposed racism and not Obama’s dismal performance, House Democrats received training last week on how to portray neutral free-market rhetoric as racially charged.
Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion, whose statements were distributed at a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, cynically called conservative messages “racially coded … right-wing rhetoric has dominated debates of racial justice – undermining efforts to create a more equal society, and tearing apart the social safety net in the process” for over 25 years.
Wiley was invited to the caucus by Rep. Barbara Lee, D-CA to run the Democrats "through their strategy and how they message and talk about stuff" pertaining to race and fiscal policy.
Wiley’s evidence of racism bordered on the ludicrous. Citing Newt Gingrich’s
Then, in typically Obama-like cynical fashion, she explained how to lure white voters to her side even while crying racism: “Don't make the mistake of telling them they're in the problem. It's emotional connection, not rational connection that we need … Explain how each racial group is affected (recognize the unique pain of each group), but start with people who are White … then raise racial disparities.” The line she offered to bait whites into joining her own inherently racist cause? “Homeownership is the American Dream. It hurts the same to lose your home if you're White, Asian, Latino or Black.”
After Obama was elected on the pretense that he was a uniter, he and his minions see opportunities in constantly dividing Americans by race, creed or color and then appealing to them separately. You can read more about this latest Democrat ploy in the Washington Examiner article of May 11, 2012.
The next example of the Obama mystique has to do with our public schools and their union teachers. After a debate about presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and President Obama got personal, a teacher at North Rowan High School in Spencer, N.C. warned a student that speaking ill of Obama could lead to his arrest.
A report in The Daily Caller stated:
“On Monday, Rowan-Salisbusy school officials suspended Tanya Dixon-Neely, with pay, for making that comment and others in her social studies class.
The Salisbury Post first reported that Dixon-Neely told the student that he could be jailed for slandering the president, and that several people were arrested for talking negatively about President Bush.
According to Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College, no one was ever arrested for speaking poorly of President Bush, and you cannot be arrested for simply disrespecting the president.
“Her point about not being able to say anything ‘disrespectful’ about the president does fly in the face of the First Amendment,” he told the Post.
The student asked about President Obama’s bullying in grade school, and the teacher began defending the president, saying that there is no comparison between Romney, who is running for president, and Obama, the current occupant of the White House.
Because Romney is just running for president, he is not afforded the same respect as Obama, the teacher said, and the class should give President Obama the same respect as others before him have been given. The teacher is still employed with the school district and has not commented on the controversy. You will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom,” Dixon-Neely said.
A video taken by a student captures the argument, but neither the teacher nor students can be seen. The Rowan-Salisbury School System released a statement saying that the incident should be used a learning experience.”
This is just one of hundreds of egregious example of how public schools are indoctrinating our children with progressive and Marxist clap trap getting them prepared to take to the streets when they enter college where they can really begin to make silly protests against the free enterprise system and become new pawns in the hands of the Democrat Party.
The final example has to do with an attack patrons at a Tinsley Park, Illinois restaurant. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:
“It was the middle of the lunch rush Saturday, and Mike Winston was working in the kitchen of his Tinley Park restaurant, the Ashford House, when a waitress screamed a fight had broken out in the dining room.
Police call the melee at the restaurant a targeted assault by a mob that Winston said wielded metal batons and hammers. Ten diners were hurt in the attack, and three of those were hospitalized.
Tinley Park police had five suspected assailants in custody, and Winston said 18 young men, all wearing hooded jackets and obscuring their faces with scarves and other coverings, stormed into the restaurant.
“They came running in the door single file,” said Winston, who owns Ashford House, 7959 W. 159th St., and the adjacent Winston’s Market.
Winston, and police, said the men knew who their targets were, and that the attack wasn’t a random act of violence. Winston said the mob “targeted” a group of 20 diners, all of whom were from out of state.
“Once they attacked the table, they went and started hitting random people,” Winston said.”
In another related case Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel reported that he was accosted by an OWS type protestor outside of a theater in New York City who was looking for a fight with O’Reilly. The Daily Caller reported:
“On his Fox News Channel show Monday, host Bill O’Reilly went after President Barack Obama for equivocating on his opinion of Occupy Wall Street and some of the movement’s more controversial antics.
O’Reilly, calling in from a cable convention in Boston, told fill-in host Laura Ingraham that it’s time for the president to weigh in on the occupiers after dodging the question in a press conference from the NATO summit in Chicago on Monday.
“The president should be answering the question: Do you still support the Occupy Wall Street movement, because in the beginning he did,” O’Reilly said. “So now, and we’ll get to this in a moment, when he is asked about the protesters he gives an answer that doesn’t say one way or the other whether he approves of this kind of thing.”
O’Reilly teased his Tuesday program, explaining he would be featuring a segment that tied the Service Employees International Union to the Occupy protests. But then he shared an incident from Friday night on Broadway in New York City.
“On a personal note, on Friday, I went to see a play called ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ on Broadway,” O’Reilly said. “I had three kids with me. When I left the theater I was confronted by an Occupy Wall Street guy who was very obnoxious, came within inches of my face. I told him there were children present. He didn’t care — actually chased the car down the street. Now, that wasn’t an accident. Somebody had seen me going in or in the theater had texted the Occupy people, who dispatched this guy to chase me down. This is what is happening across the country, I think people should know about it.”
O’Reilly said there were other incidents and that the Occupy movement’s efforts to “manufacture and contrive trouble” were the acts of “terrorists.”
“[W]hat I’m trying to say is it’s not just about me,” O’Reilly said. “This movement is now very coordinated and they are terrorists. They are trying to create trouble. That’s what terrorists do. They are not on the par of al-Qaida, but they are trying to create trouble — manufacture and contrive trouble.”
These are the harbingers of things to come by the time both political parties have their conventions in August. It will be 1968 all over again, but with more money behind the agitators. The followers of Saul Alinsky like George Soros, Van Jones, SEIU, AFL-CIO, and other left-wing socialist and Marxist groups will attempt to disrupt the conventions and with the use of their useful idiots.
Edward Cline writes in Accuracy In Media about the sponsorship and influence of Alinsky and his Rules For Radicals in his column entitled Alias Marx and Alinsky:
“Calling socialists liberals is as deceptive as calling goose gizzards foie gras. It fools no one but the epistemologically blinkered. The term liberal allows liberals to pose as concerned, generous and forward-thinking individuals and to act under what was once an honorable term for anyone who advocated or endorsed liberty. And as any well-read American knows, liberals do not advocate liberty. Quite the opposite.
The subject here is the devolution of the term liberal, not its evolution.
Even out-and-out communists are called liberals. President Barack Obama is called a “liberal.” The late Senator Ted Kennedy was called a “liberal.” Barney Frank is a liberal. Obama’s cabinet is largely staffed by liberals (unless outed, as self-confessed communist Van Jones was). Communism and socialism still carry a bad reputation, so everyone, including the Main Stream Media, and even well-intentioned pundits and commentators friendly to liberty, use the term liberal. The MSM, however, does it to dodge the reputation. Others use it from habit or ignorance, or because calling liberals socialists or communists in drag might open a can of worms they couldn’t handle. This is courtesy carried to a fault. Underlying the fault is a fear of the inevitable clash between those who advocate freedom, and those who do not.
Obama’s campaign slogan, “Forward,” is simply a Progressive marching order. “Forward” to what? To socialism. To communism. To a command economy and a slave state, one half governed by bureaucrats, the other half by an alliance of Islam and quivering religionists of various stripes, willing to pay jizya to Islam in order to be granted their “religious freedom.”
The Washington Post trumpeted “Forward” with no reservations or even curiosity about its Communist and Nazi origins. But then the Washington Post has been in the Saul Alinsky camp for over a generation.”
…..
“Neither Time, nor the Washington Post, nor the New York Times has changed its tune. If anything, they have grown more shrill from the standpoint of endorsing not just Alinsky but socialism. But they repress that term socialism, and deny they are of the Left. They’ll admit only that they’re “progressive” because, you see, they’re “humanitarians.” Well, so were Pol Pot, and Mao, and Stalin, and Lenin, and Hitler. So are Robert Mugabe, and Hugo Chavez, and Ahmadinejad, and all the Kings of Saudi Arabia.
But, what are uncountable millions of dead of humanitarianism, when “progress” has been made, and man has been nudged “forward” into impoverished, straight-jacketed societies?
Let’s set the record straight. Liberals are fundamentally collectivists. Specifically, either socialists or communists. Their policies and programs are demonstrably socialist or communist, whether one is speaking of Social Security, Medicare, the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and innumerable regulatory and confiscatory programs and policies, practically every bit of legislation that has been entered into The Congressional Record and The Federal Register for the last one hundred years. The term liberal should be retired, put out to pasture, and substituted with the appropriate and correct terms.”
These Alinsky Marxists, Communists, and anarchists groups are gearing up for a summer of riots and discontent as we near August when the real trouble will begin, just as it did in Chicago in 1968. There will riots and arrests. The patience and professionalism of the police will be tested to the maximum and the mainstream media will have a field day showing the brutality of the police. All of this will be done to cause turmoil to stick to the strategy of Cloward–Piven to bring the system down.
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