Sunday, May 6, 2012

some random ruminations

Some ruminations ********************** *Indiana long-time Senator Dick Luger will likely lose in Tuesday's primary. His overall conservative ratings are in the upper 70ies. What do the tea partiers, the purists, want? He is 80 yrs. old, with over 35 yrs. in the Senate...one of the ol' bulls. He works across the isle, and he is considered a gentlemen in the Senate club. **France's Pres. Sarko will likely lose in the Pres. second round voting today. His persona is not attractive; and he has been the French political leader for 5 yrs. The French voters seem not to want to spend another 5 yrs. with this guy. Enough is enough! His moderate Socialist opponent argues that the German/French alliance promoting euro zone austerity has caused severe hardships; and he pledges to moderate the German led austerity program. Good luck with that. The Greeks also vote today, and the large swath of the voter population are angry and don’t like the German/French austerity measures. The French and Greek voters will be sending the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the euro bankers a strong message today. “After Dallas, LBJ acted like Popeye after a can of spinach..” Unknown source in Robert Caro’s brilliant 4th installment of LBJ bio., Passage of Power -- I am reading this book, and it is a vivid page turner. I am a student in the JFK murder conspiracy school, and accept Caro as a non-believer in conspiracy. So I have some serious questions after getting to the end of Caro’s masterpiece: …why did he go on Air Force 1 in Dallas, when AF2 had the same communication capabilities? Caro does’t answer this. …Caro describes the conflict between Robert Kennedy and LBJ, including RFK’s opposition to having LBJ as VP candidate; the campaign to marginalize VP LBJ by RFK and the WH staff; the three episodes on the funeral weekend when RFK sorta blocks the Oval Office doors when LBJ wants to move in on Sat, when RFK comes in late to the first LBJ cabinet meeting, and when RFK seems to be in denial that LBJ was now the POTUS. But Caro ignores the more serious issues between these two men. More on that when I compose my review of Caro’s tomb. …there are many more questions, than answers. Former Pres. Bill Clinton wrote the NYT review of the Caro book this weekend. Being a member of the Club, former POTUSes, Clinton is generally laudatory of LBJ and Caro. More on Clinton’s review later, either here or elsewhere. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/the-passage-of-power-robert-caros-new-lbj-book.html?_r=1