Last night’s third and last Presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle is now complete. Watching all 96 minutes of this exercise in (mostly) futility, some observations are in order.
- The moderator, Kristen Welken, an NBC personality, was the best of the bunch this year. She did have a tilt towards Biden, but was much more even-handed than Chris Wallace was in the first one. One question that she should have asked, but perhaps her Democratic background kept her from including it, was about foreign affairs. Only briefly, with regards to North Korea, was this broached, but the broader scope of deals in the Middle East, and the trade agreement for the Americas, was ignored.
- Joe Biden didn’t collapse, but his age and mental acuity was not the best look, especially in the latter part of the debate. As several pundits mentioned, the bar for his performance was so low he had no trouble making the getting over it, a bar that even that even a snail could exceed.
- Donald Trump gave the best performance, looking strong even if he fudged on some of his assertions. One of the most egregious was his mention of how much Hunter Biden was paid per month for his work for the Ukraine energy company. His total of $183,000 was way too high — the totals I have seen have been 50,000 or 83,000.
In spite of that, Trump was more forceful and on topic than I have seen him this campaign.
But the real focus of this post has to do with the post-debate panel on Fox News. We were subjected to the usual spectrum of punditry, from conservative to moderate to left of center. One of the “usual suspects” on this panel was Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, serving twice in that capacity. In the 2016 campaign, she was a CNN contributor, but forced to resign when it was disclosed she fed debate questions to Hillary Clinton in the primary against Bernie Sanders.
When her time came to comment on last night’s debate, Brazile seemed to ignore what transpired between Biden and Trump, and made sure that all the viewers knew what she thought about the quality of recent Presidents. Her take was simple: in her lifetime, the greatest President was Lyndon Johnson, in office from 1963 to1969 as a Democrat. He achieved that lofty status by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which greatly impacted her people in their quest for equality.
What Brazile left out of her praise for Johnson was as significant as the accomplishments of the Bill. First, it was a bill first proposed under his predecessor, John Kennedy, in mid 1963. Also forgotten (or ignored, if she knew it) was the fact that Republican votes made that bill truly bipartisan. Democrats voted in the House of Representatives at 60% of their caucus, but Republicans had a 78% vote in favor in theirs.
In the Senate, Democrats voted, again by 60%, to pass the bill, far short of the majority needed to make it into law. Republicans had n 82% vote for the Civil Rights Bill. In addition, southern Democrats staged a 57 day filibuster to try to kill the legislation. Without the Republicans, the law would never have survived.
Despite the easy access to these facts, Brazile seemed to link the success of such seminal legislation to the Democrat President, Lyndon Johnson. He may have signed the bill into law, but it was not possible without the Republican Senators’ contribution, especially by the Minorty Leader of the House, Illinois’ Everitt Dirkson.
But if Brazile was highlighting Johnson, she also deliberately overlooked the ‘elephant in the room’ about his administration: Vietnam. In late July and early August 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred, which the then President turned into a reason to involve the United States into a disastrous conflict in Southeast Asia.
This ‘incident’ occurred when an American warship, on 4 August 1964, was fired on by North Vietnamese gun boats in the Tonkin Gulf. Described by Johnson as an attack by this rogue nation against the USS Maddox as an unprovoked attack in ‘international waters’ off North Vietnam. By the time the Congress weighed in, the President had been given virtual carte blanche to wage war on the side of the South Vietnamese, without a actual declaration of war by the Congress. And, he pressed on with the war, even with knowing the Gulf of Tonkin incident was not what he had publicly proclaimed it. The Maddox was on an espionage trip in waters claimed by North Vietnam, and Johnson privately doubted the tale from the sailors aboard the Maddox. Before his term was up, over half a million U. S. troops would be stationed there, and 58, 318 (last count found) of them were killed or died because of the conflict.
Brazile, with just a little research, would have known that this war was unpopular, and sent many African-Americans to the jungles of Vietnam to fight. At one time, one quarter of the soldiers there were black. Of the 58,000 plus who died, 12.4% were African Americans, over 7,000. In addition, reports of discrimination abounded in the war zone with KKK attired soldiers in one instance and Confederate flags adorning various war vehicles. Back home, the war was very unpopular in black communities.
Realizing that many are not history buffs (full disclosure: I taught history for 38 years in the Illinois public school system and over 20 years in college), I thought that any of you who saw Brazile’s praise of Lyndon Johnson should be apprised of the reality of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the origins of ‘Johnson’s War’.
It would be instructive to have the panel of ‘talking heads’ be completely transparent in their words. They should know that somewhere out here in the flyover country perhaps someone would see through the hypocrisy they spout.