Today in 1968, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham played together for the first time when they rehearsed at a London studio. You know them as Led Zeppelin:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Aug. 12
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Tuesday is primary election day, and there are full ballots all over the state.
Of course, you can only vote on one party’s ballot. That’s because, despite the Progressive Era reform of primary elections replacing smoke-filled rooms (actually room, since the Republican Party was dominant in Wisconsin at the turn of the 20th century), voters cannot, for instance, vote for a Democratic candidate in the 17th Senate District and a Republican candidate in the Third Congressional District. That proves that the primary election is still about the parties and not the voters.
It remains similarly wrong that candidates for sheriff and other county elected positions have Ds or Rs after their name. In three counties in the great Southwest, there are candidates for sheriff only on the Republican ticket while the aforementioned 17th Senate District Democratic primary is taking place. As I’ve argued here before, county elected positions should not be partisan positions. The Milwaukee County Democratic district attorney’s John Doe partisan witchhunt demonstrates that you cannot trust partisan elected officials to do the right thing when partisan politics is concerned.
Making the sheriff position nonpartisan would end the charade of Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke as a Democrat in Name Only. The Democratic Party used to have, well, more conservative members, but Wisconsin Democrats have shunned from their numbers anyone who doesn’t support 100-percent tax rates on business, gun confiscation and taxpayer-funded abortion on demand.
Those who claim Clarke is lying about his party membership should really blame the governor who appointed him sheriff. That would be Gov. James Doyle, who is no one’s idea of a Republican. As it is, whether Clarke is a Democrat, DINO or anything else, he stands out because he lacks the blame-the-victim-or-society mindset of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and his police chief, Ed Flynn, and unlike those two Clarke actually believes in constitutional rights, to wit Milwaukee County citizens’ Second Amendment rights.
Of the Democrats I’m aware of running Tuesday, Clarke is the only one I would vote for. (I didn’t, since I don’t live in Milwaukee County.) Two of the three running for attorney general, Milwaukee County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne and Jefferson County District Attorney Susan Happ, don’t deserve the jobs they currently have. Happ gives sweetheart deals to multiple-offense drunk drivers. Ozanne has enacted the same catch-and-release law “enforcement” that has made Milwaukee such a wonderful place to live. (Not.) Happ, Ozanne and Rep. Jon Richards (D-Milwaukee) all said in a most illuminating Isthmus story the laws they wouldn’t enforce as attorney general because they don’t agree with the law. (Richards appears confused about the difference between making the law, which he now does as a member of the Assembly, and enforcing the law, which is what attorneys general and district attorneys are supposed to do.)
There is one interesting Democratic Senate primary, in the aforementioned 17th District to replace Republican-When-It-Suits-Me Sen. Dale Schultz. (Who, as I’ve said here before, deserves credit for pulling off the feat of voting against Republican initiatives that pass anyway.) The first candidate, chronologically speaking, was former Wisconsin Department of Transportation employee Ernie Wittwer, who excited the Democratic state leadership so much that they recruited a younger, more photogenic candidate, Pat Bomhack, despite the fact that Bomhack lost the only election he’s run in before, the 51st Assembly District Democratic primary two years ago, and initially announced he was running in the 51st. (The winner of that 2012 primary went on to lose to Rep. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green), whose announcement he was running for Schultz’s seat helped push Schultz out the door.)
Democrats in the 17th have been writing letters to newspapers supporting Wittwer, not Bomhack, including the candidate who beat Bomhack but lost to Marklein. One assumes the Democrats will dutifully march behind Bomhack after he probably wins tomorrow, since Democrats abdicated fiscal responsibility of any sort once U.S. Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) retired, but as a non-Democrat it’s been fun to watch that race. I have yet to see any substantive difference between the two; Wittwer spewed hatred of Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans not named Schultz, though with a pleasant demeanor.
Those who plan to vote in Democratic primaries should ask themselves which candidate will tell state Democratic Party leadership where they can go in the most unpleasant way possible. Democrats forfeited their right to lead this state because of Doyle’s grotesque mismanagement of the late 2000s, and Democrats’ refusal to admit anything was wrong, or that employees of government might need to pay for their benefits as the people paying their salaries have to do (for much lower quality benefits).
There is one interesting Republican Senate primary, in southeast Wisconsin’s 21st Senate District, between former Sen. Van Wangaard and Jonathan Stietz. The primary campaign has focused on two issues — which is the true conservative (a term that depends on whom you ask, of course), and whose backers are more obnoxious. I don’t live in that district either, but Republicans’ fear should be that one side’s backers have alienated the other side’s backers so much that the latter’s failure to vote will deliver the Senate district to the Democrat despite the district reportedly being Republican-leaning.
As with all primaries, one of the two most important criteria is who is most likely to win in November. The other is whose views are closest to yours.
Along that line, the only state treasurer candidate who deserves your vote is Matt Adamczyk, because he is campaigning to eliminate the office, unlike the other candidate, Randy Melchert, who I would have voted for otherwise. Neither of the candidates for secretary of state, former Rep. Garey Bies (R-Sister Bay) or Julian Bradley of La Crosse, want to eliminate the office. The way of thinking of those two and Melchert gets us such mediocrities as former treasurer Dawn Marie Sass, the Democratic candidate with this stupid idea, and current secretary of state Douglas La Follette, who should have been recalled instead of Walker. There are approximately 5.5 million reasons to get rid of those two offices.
There are two interesting Republican Congressional primaries. The first is in the Sixth Congressional District, where I used to live, to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Tom Petri (R-Fond du Lac). The winner is likely to be one of three legislators, Rep. Duey Strobel (R-Cedarburg) or Sens. Joe Leibham (R-Sheboygan) or Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend).
If I lived in the district, I would vote for Leibham. I don’t know much about Strobel. I do know a fair amount about Grothman, who is either so popular or in a Senate district so safe that an Act 10-inspired recall effort against Grothman failed to get enough signatures. I enjoy seeing how the mere mention of Grothman’s name turns Democrats into spittle-flinging obscenity-shouting maniacs. Grothman would be fun to watch in Congress, but Leibham is more likely to get elected to Congress since there are some Democratic pockets in the Sixth.
The other interesting Congressional primary is where I do live, in the Third Congressional District. One of the Republican candidates couldn’t be bothered to explore the southern end of the district she would represent, so your choice is between Army veteran Tony Kurtz and contractor Ken Van Doren.
I voted for Van Doren, who is probably the most libertarian Republican in this state, largely because I believe the Republican Party (of which I am not a member, I remind you) needs to be more libertarian. I would vote for Kurtz, whose GOP inspiration is Ronald Reagan, in November if he wins Tuesday.
Those who get to vote in Legislature or Congressional primaries need to remember that the offices they are voting for make more money by themselves than the vast majority of Wisconsin families. (State legislators make almost $50,000 per year, the secretary of state and state treasurer are paid nearly $70,000 per year, and you can multiply that by almost three for Congressional pay. Given those outsized salaries compared with the real world, you have the right to demand that candidates do what you want them to do.
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“President Barack Obama stepped in front of the cameras on Thursday to utter words he hoped he would never say as commander in chief,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “After years of resisting the pull of more Mideast conflicts, President Barack Obama has sent the military back into action in Iraq, where he once accused his predecessor of waging a ‘dumb war,’ ” the Associated Press adds.
The New York Times: “In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama on Thursday night found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition.”
The leads of the news stories thus relieve the commentator of the need to make the most obvious point: that the military action in Iraq constitutes, as the Journal’s headline understatedly puts it, a “policy reversal.”
In his televised statement [Thursday] night, the president tried to reassure his domestic audience that there were certain red lines he would not cross. “As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq,” he promised. “American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.” Though the smaller crisis is crisis enough.
One could argue the point either way, but for the sake of this column let’s stipulate that America is not “fighting another war” but merely engaging in a police action. There is nonetheless an escalatory logic to Obama’s decision–a sense in which the U.S. is already being “dragged into” the conflict.
The president offered two rationales for the action:
First, I said in June–as the terrorist group ISIL began an advance across Iraq–that the United States would be prepared to take targeted military action in Iraq if and when we determined that the situation required it. In recent days, these terrorists have continued to move across Iraq, and have neared the city of Erbil, where American diplomats and civilians serve at our consulate and American military personnel advise Iraqi forces.
Those military advisers were dispatched to Iraq in June, in response to the rapid advances of ISIL (also known as ISIS). Their presence was insufficient to prevent further rapid advances, and now the advisers themselves are in some danger, so the president has ordered airstrikes to protect them. Let us hope that turns out to be enough. But what if it doesn’t?
Logic would suggest the serious possibility that further escalation will prove necessary, especially in light of Obama’s history (noted here yesterday) of grossly underestimating ISIL’s capabilities. One assumes the White House and Pentagon are considering contingency plans short of full-scale ground combat.
But publicly ruling out that last possibility, while perhaps helpful from a domestic political standpoint, seems strategically unwise. It risks emboldening the enemy by making explicit the political (and perhaps psychological) constraints on the president’s ability to act.
It makes the worst-case scenario even worse–transforming a choice between backing down and paying in blood and treasure into a choice between backing down from the fight and backing down from a promise to the American people. And while no one doubts that Obama would very much like to avoid further escalation, does anybody believe–especially given the degree to which he has already reversed himself on Iraq–that the promise not to deploy combat troops is ironclad?
The president’s second justification is ISIL’s brutal campaign against religious minorities, specifically Christians and Yazidis. He described the plight of the latter group (also noted in yesterday’s column):
In recent days, Yazidi women, men and children from the area of Sinjar have fled for their lives. And thousands–perhaps tens of thousands–are now hiding high up on the mountain, with little but the clothes on their backs. They’re without food, they’re without water. People are starving. And children are dying of thirst. Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yazidi people, which would constitute genocide. . . . We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide. . . . I’ve, therefore, authorized targeted airstrikes, if necessary, to help forces in Iraq as they fight to break the siege of Mount Sinjar and protect the civilians trapped there.
That’s something of a reversal, too. As we noted in 2007–in the most prescient article we’ve ever written about Iraq–then-Sen. Obama was asked by an AP reporter if preventing genocide would be a sufficient reason to keep U.S. troops in Iraq:
“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now–where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife–which we haven’t done,” Mr. Obama told the AP. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”
Perhaps mindful of what he said back then, in his speech last night the president listed some criteria that set the current Iraq situation apart: “We have a mandate to help–in this case, a request from the Iraqi government,” and “we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre.”
It has the feeling of a post hoc rationalization, and Obama’s characterization of a “request” as a “mandate” does violence to the ordinary meanings of those words. (Maybe he can square that circle by invoking the taxing power.) But the qualifications do give him at least a patina of logical consistency.
It’s also true that the question he was asked in 2007 (whether to keep ground troops in Iraq) was different from the one he answered last night (whether to use air power 2½ years after the withdrawal of troops). But his remarks a few days before the last troops were withdrawn make clear that he had dispensed entirely with the premise that any dire consequences, including genocide, might follow. Obama on Dec. 14, 2011, at Fort Bragg, N.C.:
It’s harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq–all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering–all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.
Mission accomplished.
Somebody–though evidently not Winston Churchill–once observed that Americans will always do the right thing, but only after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. If that is true, then Barack Obama is a real American.
Meanwhile, Obama’s problem with the truth showed up as well, Joel Gehrke reports:
President Obama refused to take responsibility for the lack of U.S. troops in Iraq, saying that American soldiers had to pull out due to political pressure from Iraqi leaders.
“This issue keeps on coming up as if this was my decision,” Obama retorted when asked if he had any second thoughts, in light of the terrorist force taking over regions of Iraq, about having pulled all American troops out of the country. “The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq,” he said.
A report in The New Yorker showed how President Obama failed to secure the status of forces agreement necessary to leave the troops in place after 2011.
Dexter Filkins explained:
President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said.
When Obama announced the withdrawal, he portrayed it as the culmination of his own strategy.
“After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011,” he said. “So today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”
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We begin with a non-musical anniversary, though we can certainly add music:
On Aug. 11, 1919, Green Bay Press–Gazette sports editor George Calhoun and Indian Packing Co. employee Earl “Curly” Lambeau, a former Notre Dame football player, organized a pro football team that would be called the Green Bay Packers:
(Clearly the photo was not taken on this day in 1919. Measurable snow has never fallen in Wisconsin in August … so far.)
Today in 1964, the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” opened in New York:
Two years later, the Beatles opened their last American concert tour on the same day that John Lennon apologized for saying that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus. … Look, I wasn’t saying The Beatles are better than God or Jesus, I said ‘Beatles’ because it’s easy for me to talk about The Beatles. I could have said ‘TV’ or ‘Cinema’, ‘Motorcars’ or anything popular and would have got away with it…”
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Today, this would be the sort of thing to embellish a band’s image. Not so in 1959, when four members of The Platters were arrested on drug and prostitution charges following a concert in Cincinnati when they were discovered with four women (three of them white) in what was reported as “various stages of undress.” Despite the fact that none of the Platters were convicted of anything, the Platters (who were all black) were removed from several radio stations’ playlists.
Speaking of odd music anniversaries: Today in 1985, Michael Jackson purchased the entire Beatles music library for more than $45 million.
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So what kind of president was Richard Nixon?
Mostly bad. The good would be achieving a ceasefire in Vietnam (which proved temporary; the North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam two years later and the Democratic-controlled Congress did nothing about it) and going to China. (Because, as Spock put it in one of the Star Trek movies, only Nixon could go to China.)
Nixon also did the statesmanlike thing by resigning before the House of Representatives was about to impeach him. Nixon resigned after Republicans in Congress told him he was about to get impeached, and he was probably going to be convicted and booted out of office. (Which brings to mind the quote apparently misattributed to Winston Churchill about doing the right thing after all other possibilities are exhausted.) It’s impossible to imagine, say, Barack Obama resigning for any reason (or, for that matter, anyone else in American politics who has any chance to become president), and certainly Bill Clinton didn’t resign even though it probably would have made Al Gore president into the 2000s.
Nixon gets credit for making inroads with the Soviet Union, though I’m not sure that’s something worth applauding. By the end of the decade, the U.S. was looking second-rate compared to the Soviets, and Gerald Ford’s successor as president, Jimmy Carter, was impotent. It took one of Nixon’s challengers in 1968, Ronald Reagan, to decide, and have the fortitude to stick with, a radical strategy: “We win, they lose.” And if you think Vladimir Putin is bad today, imagine him with everything the Soviet Union had, including numerous puppet Warsaw Pact governments.
On the other hand, no one could ever accuse Nixon of being a small-government conservative. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Environmental Protection Agency began under his presidency. It’s not that workplace safety and the environment aren’t important, but the EPA is one of the biggest detriments to the economy that exists in this country, and OSHA isn’t anyone’s idea of bureaucratically sensible either. Worse were Nixon’s 1971 wage and price controls to stop inflation, which succeeded only in delaying it and the resulting recession until after the 1972 presidential election. That also made it Ford’s problem, and then Carter’s to a much greater extent. We can also thank Nixon, if that’s what you want to call it, for the 55-mph national speed limit.
For those who don’t know what Watergate was about, the Washington Post summed it up succinctly:
What Richard Nixon did that was wrong was to surround himself with a group of aides who were unaccountable to anyone but himself, whom he empowered to use the authority of government to break into any place they wished — an opposition party’s headquarters, a political opponent’s psychiatrist’s office — to further Mr. Nixon’s political interests and personal animosities. Then he and they lied about it and further tried to employ the intelligence agencies of government to concoct an alibi for them; they paid people to lie in federal court about their involvement. And for almost two years, with great contempt for the public and also, incidentally, for their own political supporters who went out on a limb for them, they kept lying — using the White House Oval Office to lend majesty to the criminal cover-up.
Watergate was a cancer on the country for numerous reasons. If you think I’m going to defend for any reason people like John Dean (who has spent the years since castigating conservatives apparently to atone, which means he missed the point of Watergate entirely), John Erlichmann and H.R. Haldeman, you’re wrong. Everything about Watergate, in fact, proves the worldview of small-government conservatives — when the stakes in elections are too high, politicians will do literally anything to get elected and stay in office, including blatant disregard for the law. (And Nixon was supposed to be the law-and-order president.) That’s true whether the Watergate Hotel burglary and resulting cover-up was about winning the 1972 election, or, as suggested here yesterday, about covering up the run-up to the 1968 election.
Watergate launched the journalism careers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, though it also prompted some people to get into journalism for the wrong reasons — becoming a media rock star instead of, you know, doing the job you were hired to do. Ronald Reagan was already in the GOP limelight in the early 1970s, but the 1974 and 1976 losses helped make Republicans think that maybe the Democrat-lite approach wasn’t the right approach for the party. It also served to either inflate, or deflate every national-level political scandal since then, as if _____gate was either (1) “the next Watergate!” or (2) not as bad as Watergate. (Nixon was about to be impeached when he resigned. Bill Clinton was impeached, but the Senate decided that lying to a grand jury really wasn’t a big deal. Barack Obama has decided that federal laws are things he can ignore when he feels like it.)
There are no do-overs in elections. Had Nixon not been the GOP choice in 1968, and hadn’t been president in 1972, who would have been a better choice? New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller wasn’t any more conservative than Nixon. Reagan had been governor of California for two years. (And who knows if Reagan would have even gone into politics had Nixon not lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race. Reagan enacted an odd kind of revenge by beating George Brown, the man who beat Nixon.) Democrats were extremely torn about Vice President Hubert Humphrey; antiwar Democrats looked at him as Lyndon Johnson without the drawl. George McGovern was the captive of every Democratic special interest group, and the 1972 nominating process couldn’t have gotten Franklin Roosevelt elected. Jimmy Carter may not have run for president at all had it not been for Watergate. And then there’s the racist George Wallace.
Well, there is one way Watergate could have been avoided. Americans should have voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964.
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Today should be a national holiday. That is because this group first entered the music charts today in 1969:
That was the same day the number one single predicted life 556 years in the future:
Today in 1975, the Bee Gees hit number one, even though they were just just just …
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Richard Nixon’s resignation, which became effective one day later, ended the Watergate crisis. (Except that it didn’t. Nixon’s replacement, Gerald Ford, pardoned him one month later. Republicans got hammered at the polls in 1974, and after narrowly defeating former California Gov. Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination, Ford lost his election in 1976 to a candidate who as president turned out to be basely incompetent.)
Conventional wisdom says that the break-in at Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington was about the 1972 presidential campaign. George S. Will passes on a theory that the break-in wasn’t about 1972:
At about 5:15 p.m. on June 17, 1971, in the Oval Office, the president ordered a crime: “I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”
The burglary he demanded was not the one that would occur exactly one year later at the Democratic National Committee’s office in the Watergate complex. Richard Nixon was ordering a break-in at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, to seize material concerning U.S. diplomacy regarding North Vietnam during the closing weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign.
As they sometimes did regarding his intemperate commands, Nixon’s aides disregarded the one concerning Brookings. But from a White House atmosphere that licensed illegality came enough of it to destroy him.
Forty years have passed since Aug. 9, 1974, when a helicopter whisked Nixon off the White House lawn, and questions remain concerning why he became complicit in criminality. Ken Hughes has a theory.
Working at the University of Virginia, in the Miller Center’s Presidential Recording Program, Hughes has studied the Nixon tapes for more than a decade. In his new book, Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate, Hughes argues that Nixon ordered a crime in 1971 hoping to prevent public knowledge of a crime he committed in 1968.
In October 1968, Nixon’s lead over his Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was dwindling, partly because Humphrey had proposed a halt to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. Five days before the election, President Lyndon Johnson announced the halt, hoping to convene peace talks. One impediment, however, was South Vietnam’s reluctance to participate. Its recalcitrance reflected its hope that it would be better supported by a Nixon administration.
On July 3, 1968, a Nixon campaign aide, Dick Allen, sent a memo proposing a meeting with Nixon and Anna Chennault, a Chinese American active in Republican politics. She would bring to the meeting South Vietnam’s ambassador to Washington. The memo said the meeting must be “top secret.” Nixon wrote on the memo: “Should be but I don’t see how — with the S.S. [Secret Service].” On July 12, however, she and the ambassador did meet secretly in New York with Nixon who, she later said, designated her his “sole representative” to the Saigon government.
The National Security Agency was reading diplomatic cables sent from South Vietnam≠±=’s Washington embassy to Saigon, where the CIA had a listening device in the office of South Vietnam’s president. The FBI was wiretapping South Vietnam’s embassy and monitoring Chennault’s movements in Washington, including her visit to that embassy on Oct. 30.
On Nov. 2 at 8:34 p.m., a teleprinter at Johnson’s ranch delivered an FBI report on the embassy wiretap: Chennault had told South Vietnam’s ambassador “she had received a message from her boss (not further identified). . . . She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on, we are gonna win.’ ” The Logan Act of 1799 makes it a crime for a private U.S. citizen, which Nixon then was, to interfere with U.S. government diplomatic negotiations.
On June 26, 1973, during the Senate Watergate hearings, Walt Rostow, who had been Johnson’s national security adviser, gave the head of the LBJ library a sealed envelope to be opened in 50 years, saying: “The file concerns the activities of Mrs. Chennault and others before and immediately after the election of 1968.” Rostow died in 2003.
Based on examination of the available evidence, Hughes concludes that Chennault was following Nixon’s directives (which Nixon denied in his 1977 interviews with David Frost). Hughes’s theory is:
June 17, 1971, was four days after the New York Times began publishing the leaked “Pentagon Papers,” the classified Defense Department history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Nixon worried that further leaks, including documents supposedly in a Brookings safe, would reveal his role in sabotaging negotiations that might have shortened the war. This fear caused Nixon to create the Special Investigations Unit — a.k.a. “the plumbers” — and to direct an aide to devise other proposals such as the one concerning Brookings. This aide suggested using the Internal Revenue Service against political adversaries, but added:
“The truth is we don’t have any reliable political friends at IRS. . . . We won’t be . . . in a position of effective leverage until such time as we have complete and total control of the top three slots at IRS.” Forty years later, the IRS has punished conservative groups, and evidence that might prove its criminality has been destroyed. Happy anniversary.
So here’s an interesting mental game: What if the public had known in 1972 about Nixon’s shenanigans in 1968? First, let’s say that Nixon had been forced to resign before the 1972 election. Imagine President Spiro Agnew.
Second, would that have helped the Democrats that much in 1972? I think few historians believe Nixon really needed Watergate to win, because the Democrats were in complete disarray at the presidential-candidate level. Two Republican Congressmen, Pete McCloskey of California and John Ashbrook of Ohio, actually did run against Nixon, McCloskey as an anti-Vietnam War candidate, and Ashbrook because he was critical of Nixon’s reaching out to the Soviet Union and China. Irrespective of the fact that Nixon was extremely popular in the polls, who else would have run? Perhaps two supposed GOP candidates for vice president (because Nixon’s people wanted to get rid of Agnew but feared a conservative backlash), New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (who ran against Nixon in 1968) or Nixon’s favorite Democrat, former Texas Gov. John Connally (yes, the same Connally who sat next to John F. Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963). Or perhaps Reagan, who briefly also ran against Nixon in 1968.
(One theory, according to Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, is that Nixon somehow compelled George Wallace, who had run for president as the American Independent Party candidate in 1968, to run as a Democrat in 1972. I’m not sure how Nixon’s mental powers compelled Wallace to do anything, but all Wallace did was get 46 electoral votes and deny Nixon a popular-vote majority. Nixon got 301 electoral votes and Wallace 46, and Hubert Humphrey got 43 percent of the vote and 191 electoral votes. It seems likely that had Wallace not been on the ballot, few of his voters would have gone for Humphrey. On the other hand, had Wallace won one or two more states, that result could have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.)
The maddening thing for Nixon, though, was his complete lack of GOP coattails. Republicans never came close to winning a majority of either house of Congress while he was in office. Even though Nixon won 49 states in 1972, Republicans gained just 12 House seats, and Democrats gained two Senate seats. Nixon was popular, but his party wasn’t.
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It is time to start writing again (as if I ever really stopped) about the team I own, the Packers.
We start in the past, sort of, with the news (though it really isn’t) that the Packers will be retiring former quarterback Brett Favre’s number 4 next season with Favre’s induction into the Packer Hall of Fame.
This is a bit of a departure from past Packer practice, in that only Packer players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame had their numbers retired. (To wit: Number 3, Tony Canadeo; number 14, Don Hutson; number 15, Bart Starr; number 66, Ray Nitschke; and number 92, Reggie White. The Packers have 22 Hall of Fame members, but it would be difficult to assign numbers for players with only 77 — soon to be 76, because no one can wear 0 or 00 anymore — of them available.) It seems obvious that Favre will end up in the NFL Hall of Fame anyway (eligibility starts five years after retirement, so Favre isn’t eligible until 2016), so they’re just jumping the gun a bit.
One reason for the delay in retiring Favre’s number reportedly was fear that Favre would be booed when introduced. I find that possibility most unlikely, though I have one friend who still calls Favre a traitor. I have a hard time understanding that logic (because, of course, it’s not a logical sentiment at all). My friend is too young to remember (well, so am I) when Glory Years players Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor left for New Orleans before the Super Bowl II season. I notice no Packer fan hostility about that. For that matter, Hornung and Taylor’s coach, Vince Lombardi, left for Washington. For that matter, White retired for a season and then came back with the Carolina Panthers. Carolina was also where cornerback Doug Evans went after he decided to become a free agent.
The history of Packer fandom shows great forgiveness. Former quarterback Bart Starr didn’t leave to be welcomed back, but he was fired as head coach after the 1983 season. The following season, he showed up for the Packers’ alumni day game and was warmly received. Either Packer fans chose to remember Starr the quarterback instead of Starr the coach, or they assumed Starr had been hamstrung by his general manager.
Wide receiver James Lofton left after his acquittal for sexual assault, and he seems welcomed back into the fold. The only former Packer who might not be welcomed back is defensive back Mossy Cade, if he ever resurfaces.
The Packers told Favre he wasn’t going to be the starter anymore after the 2007 season, and Favre elected to retire, then unretire to go to the Jets. It’s too bad Favre didn’t go out a winner with the Packers, but his play in the 2007 NFC Championship had something to do with his lack of second Super Bowl championship. I’m not sure how the mess after the 2007 season could have been handled differently — Favre still wanted to play, but the Packers didn’t want him anymore, so what do you do about that?
I maintain that Favre was the most entertaining quarterback the Packers have ever had, and maybe the most entertaining quarterback in the history of the NFL. You remember that his first pass was to … himself. You recall also that after throwing an unlikely touchdown pass with seconds remaining against Cincinnati, he had to hold for the extra point, and pulled his hands back to avoid being kicked by kicker Chris Jacke, and the ball stuck in the grass and Jacke kicked it through the goalposts.
He had more career highlights than a dozen other quarterbacks combined. The playoff win at Detroit. The touchdown run in the last game at Milwaukee County Stadium. His five-touchdown game against Da Bears playing on basically one leg. His overtime throw to Antonio Freeman against Minnesota on Monday night. His game at Oakland after his father died. And, of course, the Super Bowl-winning and Super Bowl-losing seasons. The fact that he is the career leader in touchdowns and interceptions is thoroughly appropriate.
Even if Favre wasn’t involved in the play that decided the outcome, it seemed like he was. People forget that the Favre-to-Freeman finish was preceded by a certainly makeable Vikings field goal at the end of regulation that the Vikings managed to thoroughly botch. (The holder mishandled the ball, then threw, to use the verb loosely, an interception.) Mike Sherman’s first season as coach ended with an overtime win after Tampa Bay’s kicker, Martin Grammatica, missed an easy field goal at the end of regulation, after which Grammatica acted as if he was working for a Razzie Award for bad acting. Favre was the winning quarterback in the first overtime playoff game decided by a defensive touchdown after his former backup, Seattle’s Matt Hasselback, announced “We want the ball and we’re gonna score,” only to throw the ball directly to Packer cornerback Al Harris.
The stereotype is that NFL quarterbacks are supposed to be cool, like Johnny Unitas or Bart Starr or Joe Montana — act like you’ve done it before. That was not Favre. Perhaps because he only threw a few passes as Irv Favre’s quarterback in high school, Favre acted as if every touchdown pass was the first and possibly last in his lifetime, thus worthy of celebration. His running around, helmet off, after his first touchdown pass in Super Bowl XXXI, made a woman much older than him comment, like a lovestruck high-school girl, that seeing his reaction made her want to throw Favre to the ground and have her way with him. He hunted and fished, which put him right with Wisconsin men. He showed up at coach Mike Holmgren’s house at Halloween. At the NFC championship press conference the Friday before the game, Favre ended his portion of the news conference by doing his imitation of long-time Packer public relations director Lee Remmel.
Favre probably drove every coach he ever had crazy. (Particularly Holmgren, whose line NFL Films made famous: “No more rocketballs.” After a bad play, Holmgren dispatched assistant coach Jon Gruden to go yell at Favre. Gruden thought to himself that he couldn’t do that, so he went to where Favre was sitting and started waving his arms around as if he was yelling at Favre, without saying a single word.) However, the Packers had more success with Favre as quarterback than they would have with any other quarterback given the low talent level some of his teams had, particularly on defense in the post-Reggie White years and at wide receiver in the post-Antonio Freeman years. (If Favre had had the collection of wide receivers Aaron Rodgers now has, he would have obliterated the touchdown-pass record, and the Packers would have had arena football-like scores.)
Moving on from Favre: The 2013 season was both a disappointment (Rodgers’ injury, which led to more losses than the Packers should have) and a triumph (given Rodgers’ absence an NFC North title). Green Bay Packer Nation says:
… I was watching Steve Mariucci interview Aaron Rodgers (which was enlightening in more than one way) and Aaron himself made a comment about something I had been thinking for a long time.
Aaron mentioned what he thinks of as one of the best things that happened to the team last season. If you didn’t see the interview, take a guess what THAT is, then read on. …
- Injuries tend to hurt you in the current season but often help you the next because of all the experience that players get unexpectedly. Here are five reasons that last season’s injuries will help this season’s Packers.
- The fallout from Aaron’s injury (and this is according to him as well) was that during the time he was injured, Eddie Lacy took the mantle and James Starks really started to show he was back to form.
- How many snaps would Scott Tolzien have had Aaron not been injured? Would we have a solid backup in Matt Flynn if Aaron hadn’t gone out?
- If we expand the injury count to the defense, the numbers start to stack up. Again, it was painful to watch last season but how many young players got significant time due to the fact that one of their brothers had fallen?
- I would add finally, and more generally, that injuries have made this Packers team the most gritty team in football. How many teams could have gritted their way to the playoffs missing their starting quarterback … their BEST player, for like two months! Further, how many of us Packers fans, when we heard that Aaron was out … thought, “That’s it for us … without Aaron, we’re done.”
Well, this year’s Packers team knows that they are NEVER done. When the chips are down, play with a chip on your shoulder. This Packers, more than any other team, know that when a brother falls, somebody needs to stand in the gap. There are NO excuses, there is one goal and one goal only and that is to WIN. Many players on this team remember Super Bowl XLV where the Packers had multiple starters on IR going into the game and lost Charles Woodson and Donald Driver to injury during the game. There is no quit, there is only grit. No other team in the League has been through the fire the way the Packers have.
Indeed, the last time the vaunted New England Patriots didn’t make the playoffs was the season quarterback Tom Brady got a season-ending injury in the first game. This is not 1972, when Don Shula, after watching quarterback Bob Griese get a broken leg, could trade for his old Baltimore Colts backup, Earl Morrall, and have things go pretty much without a hitch.
The fun thing about this time of year is the optimism of every fan because, unlike the other pro sports and most college sports, past experience shows that teams can come from nowhere the previous season (San Francisco and Cincinnati in 1981, Washington the next year, New England in 2001) and have a decent shot to get to the Super Bowl. Baseball has more parity than it used to, but until relatively recently you could pick playoff teams on the first day of the season and, if you knew what you were doing, you had a good shot to be correct. The National Basketball Association has never had anything close to parity.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune reports about the team to the south (which, it should be pointed out, has not won a Super Bowl since they stopped training camp at UW–Platteville) off the field:
The Bears owe Cook County more than $4 million in delinquent amusement taxes after an Illinois appellate court ruled against the team in a long-running tax dispute.
The controversy had to do with more expensive club seats and luxury suites at Soldier Field sold between 2002 and 2007. For club seats, the Bears included in the ticket price a “club privilege fee” that was a charge for amenities such as access to a lounge, parking privileges and game day programs. The team described the extra amenities as “non-amusement services.”
But the Bears didn’t charge the 3 percent amusement tax on the club privilege fee. For luxury suite tickets, the Bears assigned a value to the seat portion equal to the highest price for a regular seat on the stadium, which in 2007 was $104. The team didn’t calculate the tax based on the annual fee to lease a suite, which at the time ranged from $72,720 to $300,000.
I’ll end on this thoroughly impossible idea: When the Packers stopped playing at Milwaukee County Stadium, Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist said he wanted to get an NFL team for Milwaukee. That’s a silly idea, but given what Gov. Scott Walker is trying to do to get more jobs in this state, imagine the economic impact of … the Milwaukee Bears.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 