McAdams gets Salvaged

[W. Niederhut]

       This brings to mind what I have read about Nancy MacLean's recently published book, Democracy in Chains, about the Koch brothers' long-term plan to implement the strategies of the "misanthropic libertarian" George Mason University economist James McGill Buchanan.   

[Pamela Brown]

McAdams has a history of slandering anyone who is a threat to him on his group aaj.  After tearing them to pieces himself he turns them over to his acolytes to dogpile on the helpless victim.  This is exactly what happened to Abbate imo.  

[James DiEugenio]

10 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

       This brings to mind what I have read about Nancy MacLean's recently published book, Democracy in Chains, about the Koch brothers' long-term plan to implement the strategies of the "misanthropic libertarian" George Mason University economist James McGill Buchanan.   

I liked her interview in which she quoted the nut Grover Norquist:

As an example, I offer this quote from Grover Norquist: "We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals — and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship."

This is what the Kochs and their allies have done with their regional groups.  BTW, before McAdams even was released he threatened his dean with a lawsuit from this group.

[Pamela Brown]

50 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

I liked her interview in which she quoted the nut Grover Norquist:

As an example, I offer this quote from Grover Norquist: "We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals — and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship."

This is what the Kochs and their allies have done with their regional groups.  BTW, before McAdams even was released he threatened his dean with a lawsuit from this group.

McAdams is just a skunk in my book. Not surprised.

[James DiEugenio]

Take a look at the profile of his lawyer.

http://archive.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/lawyer-rick-esenberg-revels-in-public-policy-fights-e69tilg-207137331.html

 

Please note how this jibes with what I started this thread with.  These rightwing fruits actually excuse what they are doing by saying that advocacy lawyering began with the NAACP and ACLU and they call them "left groups".

In other words, the crusade to get voting rights for black Americans and to get integrated facilities in the south, that is a leftist agenda to them. Does this mean they were fine with Jim Crow?

The ACLU began when AG Mitchell Palmer and J Edgar Hoover tried to imprison and deport workers and union organizers without due process.   In other words protesting the deprivation of someone's  legal rights, that is leftist to them.

This is how goofy these people are and this is how they salve their consciences for what they do.

McAdams is right at home with them.  Since they think terrorizing a student teacher in print and on the radio is academic freedom. I wonder what this guy would have said if Abbate had been killed or seriously injured.  Well, heck, its part of academic freedom?

 

Edited July 7, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Clark]

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Take a look at the profile of his lawyer.

http://archive.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/lawyer-rick-esenberg-revels-in-public-policy-fights-e69tilg-207137331.html

 

Please note how this jibes with what I started this thread with.  These rightwing fruits actually excuse what they are doing by saying that advocacy lawyering began with the NAACP and ACLU and they call them "left groups".

In other words, the crusade to get voting rights for black Americans and to get integrated facilities in the south, that is a leftist agenda to them. Does this mean they were fine with Jim Crow?

The ACLU began when AG Mitchell Palmer and J Edgar Hoover tried to imprison and deport workers and union organizers without due process.   In other words protesting the deprivation of someone's  legal rights, that is leftist to them.

This is how goofy these people are and this is how they salve their consciences for what they do.

McAdams is right at home with them.  Since they think terrorizing a student teacher in print and on the radio is academic freedom. I wonder what this guy would have said if Abbate had been killed or seriously injured.  Well, heck, its part of academic freedom?

 

This is a great little piece, Jim; thanks. 

[Ron Bulman]

20 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

       This brings to mind what I have read about Nancy MacLean's recently published book, Democracy in Chains, about the Koch brothers' long-term plan to implement the strategies of the "misanthropic libertarian" George Mason University economist James McGill Buchanan.   

Thanks for mentioning this book.  After reading the description on amazon and review's I'm ordering it.  Jane Mayer of The New Yorker's book Dark Money was eye opening for me regarding the Koch's in particular though it encompasses much more.  Their personal attacks inspired her in part to write it.

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980974/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531016373&sr=1-1&keywords=democracy+in+chains&dpID=51i8aMhNSlL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

[Robert Harper]

On 7/7/2018 at 1:37 AM, Pat Speer said:

The tribal nature of the courts is once again revealed.

Any reader of this Forum is familiar with Prof. McAdams--if for nothing else than his overuse of the silly word "factoid." Most  are likely familiar with his website which maintains information on the Warren Commission. I had a "gut" reaction to this case when I first encountered it, and that initial response has been fortified by reading the Court decision over-turning the Marquette University determination. Now the Professor might very well be a "skunk" but I don't think that the ACLU is "goofy" should it defend McAdams. 

 

Frankly, I was far more disturbed by the decision making process of DePaul University when it allowed that bottom-feeder (Intercept phrase) Alan Dershowitz to contact each faculty member who was to judge the suitability of tenure for Professor Norman Finklestein. Dershowitz's intrusion had the desired effect -- and the relevant administrators were afraid of the attack dogs of the Israeli Lobby - and one of the premier scholars of the Middle East was denied tenure. The attack dog himself frequently bragged how he was the youngest tenured professor at Harvard, so to see him go out of his way to hurt a fellow scholar was despicable. That such a scholar was his intellectual equal as well as an adversary, made his intrusion into the DePaul process doubly unwarranted.

 

To return to the issue at hand. Previous posts of mine have prioritized what Mark Lane called the "most important sentence in American history"--the first amendment to the Constitution. Whether a topic is considered "unspeakable" or whether a topic is the accepted result of "group-think," it's a firm belief of mine that such topic is always open to discussion. Right off the bat, when I read that an instructor in "Ethics" in a philosophy department at a University, disallowed any discussion of any "rights' because it was "set" already, I was disturbed. A philosophy department that doesn't allow questioning? Already a raised eyebrow on my face.

 

 The saga is then prolonged through blogs and responses and Faculty committees on the guidelines of the University. The Court decision relates the various processes available and used. It states, however, that it is passing judgment on the merits of the case, not on the process.

 

Although I remain surprised - a bit - by the Court even ruling in a matter involving a private institution, I think the case is persuasive that access to the Court was agreed upon by both parties. The following are excerpts from the decision which I found instructive (my bold for emphasis):

 

 

The University breached the Contract's implied

covenant of good faith and fair dealing...The primary goal in contract

interpretation is to give effect to the parties' intentions.

 

 We ascertain the parties' intentions by looking to the language ..

that it had no express agreement with Dr. McAdams that the Discipline Procedure would preclude his right to

litigate his cause here. It is not to test the process that led to the suspension; it is instead to determine whether there

was a legitimate basis for it. This is a question of merit, not procedure...

 

But the University did not identify any aspect of what Dr. McAdams actually wrote to support its charge. Instead, it used third-party responses to the blog post as a proxy for its allegedly contempt-inducing nature. Just because vile commentary followed the blog post does not mean the blog post instigated or invited the vileness.

 

Because the doctrine of academic freedom protects the blog post, we must now determine whether the University breached

the Contract when it suspended Dr. McAdams...

 

The term 'academic freedom' is used to denote both the freedom of the academic institution to pursue its ends without interference from the government, as well as the freedom of the individual teacher to pursue desired ends without interference from the institution."

 

....succumb to the dominant academic culture of microaggressions, trigger warnings and safe spaces

 that seeks to silence unpopular speech by deceptively recasting it as violence? In this battle, only one could prevail, for academic freedom cannot coexist with Orwellian speech police. Academic freedom means nothing if faculty is forced to self-censor in fear of offending the unforeseen and ever-evolving sensitivities of adversaries demanding retribution..

 

Some universities recognize the incompatibility of insulating students from micro-aggressions, via trigger warnings

and safe spaces, with academic freedom.

 

John Ellison, Dean of Student at University of Chicago, to the Class of 2020:

 "Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called 'trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."

 

Many American universities were founded "on the illimitable freedom of the human mind" to develop, articulate, examine and communicate ideas in order to "follow truth wherever it may lead.

....one of America's oldest universities (Yale 1974)  reaffirmed that "[t]he history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly

demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable."

 

the contract guarantees McAdams academic freedom, academic freedom encompasses his blog post,

and Marquette's suspension of McAdams breached the contract.

...freedom as being "of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a

special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom."

 ("The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self evident. . . . Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.").

 

Black's Law Dictionary defines academic freedom as "the right (esp. of a university teacher) to speak

freely about political or ideological issues without fear of loss of position or other reprisal."

 

The search for truth to which the founder of the first academy, Plato, was dedicated, has been

identified as the progenitor of academic freedom.

 

AAUP (American Association of University Professors) appears as amicus in this case in support of McAdams and declares it "is committed to advancing academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas, and higher education's contribution to the common good."

The concept appears in American history as early as the eighteenth century in Thomas Jefferson's founding vision of

the University of Virginia: "This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not

afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left to combat it."

 

Academic freedom encompasses "two distinct concepts":

(1) "professional academic freedom" tied to AAUP standards, and

(2) the "legal concept of academic freedoms" tied to the First

Amendment.

 

"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought——not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate." United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644,

Just as no citizen could "be punished for writing a book that angers the state legislature——no matter how

outrageous or offensive the book might be," id., professors at universities should not be punished for speaking on matters of 

public concern even if——especially if——that speech does not conform with mainstream thought.

 

University campuses inhabit a unique environment. The doctrine of academic freedom has no application within private

enterprise, unless of course a private entity incorporates the doctrine into employee contracts. Marquette University,

although a private institution, chose to guarantee academic freedom to McAdams in his contract.

 

The Court struck down a West Virginia law compelling all teachers and students to salute the American Flag while

pledging allegiance to it and those who refused were expelled from school. W. Virginia Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S.

624, 626-30 (1943):

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

 

In every case presenting the Supreme Court with the issue, it unfailingly declared the importance of academic

freedom and freedom of expression in academia. It struck down many laws that undoubtedly had the support of a majority of the people. In the midst of the fear and tension gridlocking American international politics during the Cold War, few would

publicly object to ensuring that teachers——entrusted with educating the future leaders of America——would denounce

Communism and would not influence students to become Communists.

 

Abbate (the instructor) invited J.D.(the student) to drop the class and Snow (the Dept Chair) told him to "change his attitude so he comes across as less insolent and disrespectful," later calling him a "little twit" and a "jackass" in email exchanges with colleagues. Absurdly, Marquette's Faculty Hearing Committee would later support its disciplinary recommendation against McAdams by citing Marquette's Guiding Values, which obligate professors to "respect the dignity of others"

 

Marquette subjected a tenured professor to discipline for writing something that triggered an adverse response from

third parties over whom he has no control, thereby holding McAdams responsible for the actions of third parties. Allowing

this retribution to stand would set a dangerous precedent, leading faculty to self-censor for fear of third-party reactions

to speech and post hoc disapproval of it.

 

Some thoughts from the dissent that appealed to me:

 

It fails to recognize, much less analyze, the academic freedom of Marquette as a private,Catholic, Jesuit university. As a result, it dilutes a private educational institution's autonomy to make its own academic decisions in fulfillment of its unique mission.....His contract does not give him the full-throated First Amendment rights that would be given a private citizen vis-à-vis the government....

 

To manifest this freedom to pursue their ends,educational institutions set their own missions. As a Catholic,

Jesuit institution, Marquette University operates according to certain guiding values. These values include the "holistic

development of students" and a "commitment to the Jesuit...Jesuit institutions operate under the "Ignatian

pedagogy." This educational philosophy encourages faculty to consider the "context" of the individual students in the

classroom and "uniquely characterizes the relationship the faculty member has with the student [with whom] he [or] she

attempts to create a teaching/learning environment...If the founding principles of each individual

university are to be given life, the institution must possess the freedom to determine the consistency or inconsistency of

actions with those principles....

 

...the first of these "essential freedoms": who may teach. Although also relevant to public universities, this

concern is especially germane in the context of private universities.

[Michael Clark]

The publishing of the essay, by Ward Churchill, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens", and the aftermath, seems like a fair case study with which we can compare and contrast to the McAdams case.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Justice_of_Roosting_Chickens

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill

 

Edited July 8, 2018 by Michael Clark

[Robert Harper]

50 minutes ago, Michael Clark said:

the essay, by Ward Churchill, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens", and the aftermath, 

Michael -- an excellent linkage to an analogous case, with which I was unfamiliar.

Unlike with McAdams, there does seem to be personal infractions involved with Churchill which are not applicable  in the Marquette case.( Why did he resign?)   This complicate the comparison at the same time it echoes it.

(ps) Thank you for your sifting of the new documents, along with others here, since it has made the reading easier to navigate.

[James DiEugenio]

Robert:

I am afraid you don't know this case that well.  And for you to quote only what the rightwing Supreme Court wrote in its decision, which was clearly designed to conceal the specifics of what McAdams did that was so offensive, and then to compare it with the Dershowitz case,  that is not really accurate.

Dershowitz never put FInkelstein's life in danger and as far as I can tell, his mental health.  And the same comparison applied to the Churchill case. In the Abbate case, that is what McAdams did.  He made sure that the issue WAS NOT JUST academic freedom.  And he hid three facts that were important to the case: 1.) That  he was the faculty advisor to the student in question, 2.) The student was taping his conversations with Abbate and lied about it, and 3.) The student was flunking the class.

This part of the inquiry, I believe, did not go far enough.  From all the indications I saw this clearly had all the earmarks of a provocation.  Consider what the faculty report mentioned about the student, who:

“had a leadership role in the student chapter of a national organization that encourages…confronting professors in the classroom to expose liberal bias.”  The report states they did not discover this fact until after their four day hearing was concluded, and they decided not to reopen the proceedings, because there was no indication McAdams was aware of this.  The report gives no evidence as to how they made that conclusion. But I should add, the report does state that the student switched to McAdams as his advisor prior to the semester in question.  Which, to me, suggests the issue merited further inquiry. Because, in conjunction with this, McAdams told the committee that he was not aware that the student was failing the class.  Yet, he was the young man’s faculty advisor!  And further, the student told the committee that he never told McAdams that he was dropping the class for any other reason than his failing grade.  (See report p. 84)

And if you have studied McAdams' career at Marquette, which I do not think you have, you will see that this was his method of operation for about the last 10-15 years.  His issue was not really academic freedom.  It was the rightwing meme as propagated by Dinesh D'Souza at Dartmouth, that of Political Correctness. If you recall, D'Souza made his name doing things like putting pictures of Klan hangings of black Americans in the college newspaper. This eventually got him an audience with President Reagan. 

When the controversy over Abbate first surfaced, McAdams got his gig on national Fox TV.  This was after he had forwarded his first writings on the subject to the local Fox outlet.On national TV he then lied about what he had done by saying he had only mentioned the woman's name once in his blog.  Not true. He had mentioned her several times, and he then went on the radio to do the same. Further, he had mailed and emailed the info to allied bloggers and TV stations. He was clearly on a crusade to make her radioactive and to advance his name in the process.  It worked.  Once he had her name out there in the rightwing broadcast media, it was pretty simple to track her down.  She began to get threats via phone and even at her faculty mailbox.  The university had to give her a  security guard to escort her to and from her classes. This began to take a mental toll on her.  She eventually decided to leave the campus.  And she essentially had to start her graduate career over at Colorado.

McAdams was granted not one but two hearings.  One by the dean:  you can read that report here http://d28htnjz2elwuj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-01-30-Holz-to-McAdams.pdf. and one by a faculty committee of his peers. It became clear through the inquiries that the main problem was that McAdams had a long record of doing these things, at least 12 incidents. Not just with faculty members but with administrators and students also.  And his MO was as it was in this case: to publicize the names and email addresses of those involved. For instance in a student production of The Vagina Monologues. Thereby making them targets of the like minded PC fleet. (Click here for an article on this https://kennedysandking.com/news-items/john-mcadams-and-marquette-go-to-court) 

The history of these cases is that most of the time, a civil court does not interfere in administrative law.  The Churchill case was an exception not the rule.  But McAdams and his lawyer knew what the Kochs and the Bradley foundations had done in Wisconsin. Through Scott Walker they had begun implementation of the whole rightwing paradigm and the Supreme Court was a big part of it.  They knew what would happen once they got there and that was their aim all along.  Anyone can see that by reading the New Yorker article I posted on how the right had altered the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The law firm that represented McAdams was part of the Koch brothers' affiliated State Policy Network which Norquist alluded to. That amounts to a large, sprawling network to create mini-Heritiage foundations with about 83 million behind them. 

I object to what happened to Finkelstein myself.  Because that really was about academic freedom. This case was not.  It was about terrorizing a student teacher to advance one's own reputation and name.  To quote a kangaroo court that backed Walker's move to strip public worker's collective bargaining rights and during which one justice threatened to strangle another is, to say the least, a bit odd. And weirdly one sided.

 

 

Edited July 8, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[Robert Harper]

44 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

And if you have studied McAdams' career at Marquette, which I do not think you have

You are correct. I haven't. I am passing familiar with D'Souza's antics; I am not familiar with the Wisconsin pack-the-Court strategy; I have only the thinnest awareness of the Koch Brothers.

I am however, a fairly good reader of material within my range.  I like to encounter what is there in print to read. No loudspeakers, no flashing lights, just the words. I'll let them mean to me what I wish them to mean, but I also must understand what they mean within a culture. I can't make appeals to international law if I dump on the judges and the system which produces the law. Not long ago I left an edited version of Justice Scalia's dissent in the case about the constitutionality of the special prosecutor law of 1978. It was 8-1 and yet his dissent spoke - in my opinion - way more truthfully to the law and to history than what was decided by the other 8 in the shadow of the Church Committee Hearings and post Watergate (which, btw, didn't need the 1978 law to apply). "Packing" any court with a prevailing political ideology has been the practice of  most American political figures. I prefer everyone was a Justice Brennan, or could at least write like Oliver Wendell Holmes , but one has to deal with what one has - minus a  revolution. The way to counter the influence of any group on the Courts is to react politically; not to mangle a reading of what a Court says in a particular case.

 With legal decisions, I try to absorb what is being said, how it is being said and,  try to connect it with my own instincts or knowledge. My interest in the Firing Line transcripts which I articulated here a few times, arose from my notion that ideas were being  lost within "feelings." That preconceptions of "Fox TV" or of "John McAdams"  or of "Jesse Jackson" would trigger a response not in tune with  the requirements of an impartial spectator. The facts and history of this case - as written by the Judges - I do not find offensive. 

Are you saying that the Court restricted evidence? What did the trustees of Marquette say? Didn't both parties agree on jurisdiction? Wasn't all the evidence mutually presented?  It didn't seem that your issue was private v public(as mine was) but rather that McAdams was a skunk and the Court is rigged. Both may be true. But my reading of the decision remains where it is. 

[James DiEugenio]

Academic freedom, as any such concept as we know it, ends at the well being and health of the person next to you.  

As I described it, that is what happened here.  There were many ways that McAdams could have pursued a complaint within the academic confines.  He did not want to for the simple matter that he did not wish to reveal what he did not reveal:  the student was being advised by him, and he was flunking the class.  So far from being a dispute about academic freedom, one can see that this was a way for both the student and the advisor to serve their own ends.  And, in fact, the student's agenda was brought out at the first academic hearing he had on the subject. He wanted to drop the class without sustaining the fail.  The administrator told him that this was not possible since the deadline had passed.  As I said, McAdams covered all this up in his writings and emails on the subject by saying that somehow the administrator had not given the student due process.  And, as predicted, the people who he mailed this out to cooperated with him.

As I have  noted, being in the field of education for over three decades, as both a teacher and student, I had never seen a case like this before.  Not even close.  McAdams should have been disciplined or suspended far earlier for the antics he was pulling on campus.  And this was a problem in my view.  Marquette had been far too lenient with him prior to this case.

Whatever you think about Scalia and the special prosecutor,  did you also think he was correct in issuing the order to stop the counting of ballots in Florida in the year 2000?  Did you like the excuse he used for that one?  The continued counting of the votes could cause irreparable harm to candidate Bush?  

Talk about Orwell.  The irreparable harm was to Gore. Scalia and Jeb Bush stole the election for W.  Which then caused the invasion of Iraq.

Here is another indication as to what these fruits and nuts have done with the Federalist Society:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-supreme-court-roe-v-wade-abortion_us_5b422ba3e4b07b827cc1c6d5

People like Alito and Gorsuch get their ticket punched by doing things like what happened in the agency fees case for public employees unions and Citizens United. As if people like the Koch Brothers need more help.  These guys then compare what they are doing to what the NAACP and ACLU did.  When, in fact, they are not remotely the same. Giving black Americans access to public places and the right to vote, and giving immigrant workers due process before the are fired and deported is not the same as saying that influence over elections should be unlimited for billionaires, and workers in public unions should not have to pay for the benefits they get from that union.  Especially when the court manipulates the first case in order to set it up more completely for a reversal of stare decisis, and when the same stare decisis overthrow is used for agency fees. (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/21/money-unlimited) 

As I said at the beginning, what we are seeing here is the ultimatum reaction to the Kennedys belated supporting of Brown vs Board.  These same people felt that was lawyer advocating.  Somehow the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, plus the horrible bloodshed of the Civil War did not exist. 

 

 

Edited July 8, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

  One of the greatest abominations in modern American history was, surely, the systematic violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments in the former Confederacy after the collapse of Radical Reconstruction in 1877 (in a pre-inaugural deal brokered by Rutherford Hayes and a Southern bloc in Congress.)

    The statistics about black voter suppression in Columbia University historian Eric Foner's book, Reconstruction, are mind-boggling. The number of registered black voters in states like Louisiana and South Carolina had plunged to zero by 1900.

    And, of course, nothing substantive was done about these systematic civil rights violations for nearly a century, until the JFK administration, (and LBJ's surprising advocacy of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act after 11/22/63.)

    But now we have seen Neil Gorsuch and the new Trump SCOTUS vote 5-4 to uphold racial gerrymandering in Texas and North Carolina- a shocker!

[James DiEugenio]

Those are both good points.

See, as most good historians will tell you--and Foner was good--Reconstruction was simply a failure.  And this is one of the problems I had with Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War.  And its why Foner would not cooperate with Burns.  Because he left out Reconstruction.  And then he made the film's leading talking head that Confederacy apologist Shelby Foote.  Thereby selling about two million copies of his book. Off of that, one could see what Burns was going to do with Vietnam.  Again, Koch brothers money. 

So when the Kennedys came in, and JFK made that phone call to Coretta King, and then RFK got King out of jail, that was a signal to the civil rights activists that, hey, you finally have an administration that will back you.  Its a  longer story than that of course, going back at least to 1957.  But once the Kennedys were in the White House, the geyser exploded.  And the reason it was so powerful is because it had been laying dormant for almost a century.

Now, if I could find one of these conservative guys--e.g. Bill Buckley-- who said something positive in public about what the Kennedys were doing at the time they were doing it, or if I could find something negative they said about the relative non action of Eisenhower and Nixon even after Brown vs Board, then maybe you could make some kind of case for equivalency, no matter how small or isolated.  But I have never been able to see anything at all substantial in that regard. I mean McAdams grew up in Alabama, has he ever said how he admired how the Kenendys faced down George Wallace at Tuscaloosa? I will never forget watching that whole episode on TV.  I thought it was uplifting to see the power of the federal government asserted in the cause of integration.  Even if it was a hundred years late. I mean McAdams is so wrapped up in denial that he once said to me in a debate that both Truman and Johnson were more liberal than JFK!!!  

My God in heaven Mr. Professor: who dropped those 4 billion tons of bombs over Indochina as part of Rolling Thunder?  It wasn't Kennedy. Who inserted  a half million combat troops, deliberately breaking with JFK's policy?

And this is what I am talking about.  The Koch brothers look at what they are doing as some kind of moral cause.  A way of rolling back whatever is left of the  New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society.  In other words the whole idea and concept that somehow the government can intervene in public policy and be a force for good, that has to be dashed, to be caricatured, to be destroyed. And make no mistake, I have been exposed to these people.  They really do not like JFK.  They can barely utter his name.  In fact its always expressed as something like "that damn liberal Kennedy!"   

Edited July 8, 2018 by James DiEugenio