Forty seven years ago this week, Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the biggest landslide since 1936. Today, both left and right see in Goldwater’s defeat the beginnings of the conservative revolution that would bring Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. Missed in this thesis, though, is how 1964 was a prime example of modern Democratic campaigning with its allies — the mainstream media — that we suffer under today. It was also a historic turning point that might have been avoided.

It is fashionable for the Left to co-opt Barry Goldwater as they have Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton called him a “patriot” and James Carville characterized him a “principled conservative,” at odds with today’s “loony right.” But this was not so in 1964. The mainstream media, not called that then, labeled him a fascist. Walter Cronkite said of him that “Goldwater was going places, among them Nazi Germany.” Psychiatrists lined up behind the Johnson campaign, declaring Goldwater “emotionally unstable.” Reporters were aware that LBJ was heightening the conflict in Vietnam, but said nothing while LBJ promised not to send “American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

Journalists on the campaign trail saw Johnson drunkenly board a plane armed with nuclear weapons and then accidentally drop them on the United States. Luckily, by the grace of God, they did not go off. None of this was reported, while newspapers editors worked in overdrive to portray Goldwater as eager to push the button. Today, pundits argue that dirty tricks by Carville and Begalia were something new on the horizon for Democrats and were borrowed from decades of Republican campaigns. But Johnson was a pioneer of the Clinton War Room. He used the FBI to wiretap the candidate, bought political information from Goldwater defectors, and in an eerie foretaste of Watergate, put domestic CIA chief Howard Hunt on the White House payroll to infiltrate, even burglarize, Goldwater headquarters (with Democratic blessing, Hunt filtered his findings and received cash through a dummy corporation called National Press). What is striking about these tactics was how unnecessary they were. Johnson beforehand knew he was going to win, but he wanted “to crucify” Goldwater nonetheless.

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What was the FBI hiding about the late Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy’s sordid past?

Judicial Watch finally found out when we obtained previously redacted material from the FBI file of the late Massachusetts Democrat who died in August 2009 from brain cancer. We got the records pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, originally filed on June 9, 2010. And they make for a fascinating read.

Of particular interest is a December 28, 1961, FBI memo describing a tour of several Latin American countries taken by then-Assistant District Attorney of Suffolk County Kennedy.

Judicial Watch had previously obtained this very memo, but the document that was originally made public was almost completely redacted. After an initial challenge by Judicial Watch, a version with fewer redactions was released. Still not satisfied, our legal team continued to argue that the blackouts were baseless and, after six more months, the FBI relented.

So here are the statements the FBI tried to keep secret but were recently made available to Judicial Watch:

•“While Kennedy was in Santiago he made arrangements to ‘rent’ a brothel for an entire night. Kennedy allegedly invited one of the Embassy chauffeurs to participate in the night’s activities.”
•“[I]n each country Kennedy insisted on interviewing ‘the angry young men’ of the country. He wanted to meet with communists and others who had left-wing views. …Ambassador Freeman, Bogota, said the first person whom Kennedy wanted to meet was Lauchlin Currie.” (The document subsequently identifies Currie as a person who “had been mentioned in Washington investigations of Soviet spy rings.”)

•“[I]n Mexico Kennedy asked Ambassador Mann that certain left-wingers be invited to the Embassy residence where interviews could be held. Mann took the strong position that he would not invite such people and stated that if any such interviews were to be conducted, all arrangements should be made by Kennedy himself.”

All this is certainly consistent with another document in the Kennedy FBI file we uncovered last year, dated March 28, 1963.

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The White House recently released a video, narrated by Austan Goolsbee of the Council of Economic Advisers, asserting that higher tax rates on the so-called rich would be a good idea.

Since Goolsbee’s video made so many unsubstantiated assertions and was guilty of so many sins of omission, here’s a rebuttal video, narrated by yours truly.

This new Center for Freedom and Prosperity video includes the full footage of the White House production, so viewers can decide for themselves which side is correct.

This rebuttal video, incidentally, only scratches the surface. There was not enough time to cite the wealth of data and research showing how higher taxes undermine economic performance. There was not enough time to address some of the additional flaws of class-warfare tax policy. And there was not enough time to show how simple it is to balance the budget without higher taxes.

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“Education is a right!” That was the mantra of the “progressives” marching a few weeks ago against proposed tuition increases for college students.  Implicit in that chant is the thought that college should be free for everyone, after all you can’t charge for a “right.” While I’d love to retroactively wash my hands of my student loan payments, this “belief” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny because it exposes the blatant hypocrisy of those chanting it.

No responsibility at all.

To understand this you must first understand what is, in fact, a right. Many wrongly think the Constitution grants us our rights as Americans, that the right to free speech is our “First Amendment Right.”  Nothing could be more wrong.  The First Amendment does not grant you a right to free speech, it says you are born with it and the government cannot infringe upon it. (Read this for an explanation of this point.)

So, if education is a right along the lines of speech, the government has no business being involved in it in the first place. Yet those seeking a “free” education for everyone do not seek a government-free education, they seek a government monopoly of it.  Since education is a human right, the involvement of government can, logically, only serve to infringe upon that right.  But that’s not what these people are really about.

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I don’t like life long politicians any more than the next guy, but the suggested remedy to the problem, term limits, are a bad idea.

First of all, term limits strike me as a smack in the face to the idea that we should be allowed to choose whomever we want to represent us, for as long as we want them to represent us. Much like the disgustingly offensive campaign finance “reform” where politicians decided to punish the average voter because elected officials are too greedy and corrupt to keep their hands out of the cookie jar, term limits seem equally offensive in a similar way.

Why should the voters of one state have to say goodbye to a good legislator simply because the voters of another state repeatedly elect a creep?

Voters in Colorado might not like the fact that voters in Massachusetts continually reelected a hypocritical, drunk, manslaughtering, liar to term after term after term, but that is their right. Massachusetts voters clearly have no shame, but under the constitution, they have the right to be greedy scum buckets interested only in the pork their clout can achieve. (Our apologies to anyone in Mass who had the dignity and ethics to vote against Kennedy before death finally drove him from office)

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The struggles of the Democrats and the Republicans are making news.  The Democrats are learning that it is far easier to make campaign promises than it is to govern. As for Republicans, the party that loses the Presidential election often spends the off-year attempting to refine its message if not find a new message and new messengers. In the watchful eye of 24/7 cable news channels and the Internet, however, such political soul searching can appear rather untidy.  As the calendar turns, the process remains unresolved for Republicans to say the least.  Worse than mere overexposure, according to Rasmussen polling, despite Obama’s falling polls and Democrat divisions, the Republican Party would fare worse in an upcoming election than the Tea Party – a “Third Party” that, as of yet, does not exist.  It is no minor issue because with the help of Tea Party activists, Republicans certainly can beat Democrats next year – without them they may not.

It would seem evident to many that the Tea Party movement should be the natural ally of the Republican Party.  After all, the issues that inspire most Tea Party activists should not be inimical to Republican Party leaders.  However, the fact that the Tea Party movement is at odds with certain aspects of the Republican establishment belies the greater issue as to why the Tea Party movement – and its potential to be a 3^rd Party movement – arose at all.

It is worthy, as part of this discussion, to note that the rise and fall of third party movements and candidates is directly tied to whether voters perceive the existing parties as being successful.  In this context, successful means providing effective leadership on the major issues of the day.

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As Congress recklessly moves to enact evermore programs in the face of ever larger deficits, it is only a matter of time before they take up the revenue side of deficit equation: Spending – Tax Revenue = the Deficit.  Of course, in response to rising deficits, the Media and the Democrats will reflexively demand tax increases. Republicans, for their part, simply must be able to articulate why higher taxes will actually result in larger deficits not smaller.

I offer this common sense guide for the great battle to come.

At the outset, it must be noted that, in practice, politicians don’t actually raise taxes so much as they pass laws to increase tax “rates,” i.e. income rates, sales tax rates, etc.  They do in an ill-founded pursuit of more tax revenue.

It is ill-founded because tax rate increases, over time, yield less revenue than tax rate cuts.  For instance, when the economy was bad in the early 1990’s, the California legislature raised tax rates and over a 3 year period, revenues actually dropped.  By 1999, Bill Clinton’s tax rate increase resulted in the highest overall tax burden in our history – a recession naturally followed which led to declining revenues.

These common sense points explain why tax rate cuts, over time, will raise for more money than tax rate increases.

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