Mara Liasson is the national political correspondent for NPR, but has been a regular FOX News contributor for 18 years. Americans are so easily confused. Many do not understand how the two parties reversed most of their positions in the 1960’s. After LBJ passed president Kennedy’s legacy Civil Rights Acts, he lamented that he feared he had lost the South for Democrats for a generation. He was too optimistic.
In today’s story on the surge of the Republican populism of Donald Trump, Liasson manages to state of his policies, that:
“Some of them would even be right at home on Bernie Sanders' website. But populism is often a mashup of positions from the left and right.”
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Yet she never mentions the surging Democratic populism of Bernie Sanders attracting by far, the largest crowds of supporters to his events than any other candidate. Progressive populism is also full of economic grievances, but not necessarily nativist. She credits the segregationist populism of the 1968 and 1972 presidential candidate, George Wallace, as the ideological Pied Piper of the modern Republican party.
Everyone seems to have forgotten who the “proto-Republican,” George Wallace's running mate was in 1968 – retired general Curtis LeMay. LeMay was the Air Force Chief of Staff during the Cuban missile crisis. He believed the US could win an all-out nuclear war with the USSR and was willing to sacrifice 20 million Americans to his delusions. JFK was wrongly blamed for the Bay of Pigs disaster for not providing air cover. The B-26's from Guatemala, flown by Cuban rebels, failed to destroy all of the Cuban air force.
Three Cuban jets escaped and returned to shoot down all of the B-26's, as well as sinking two of the invading rebel's supply ships. Kennedy refused to send American planes because it would have started WWIII, which is what LeMay, Allen Dulles's CIA and the Right-Wing loonies wanted all along. Kennedy fired Dulles in 1963, only to have LBJ appoint him to direct the Warren Commission.
LeMay was concerned about losing his corporate gig if he joined the Wallace campaign, so the conservative Texas Republican oil tycoon, H.L. Hunt, set up a million dollar fund to keep him on the ticket:
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The Confederacy came back to win the Civil War on 11/22/1963. Over 75% of Americans still do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was a "lone nut," but the corporate media continues to not tolerate the massive evidence to the contrary that has been forcibly de-classified, through public pressure. How can a "lone nut," be a threat to national security for 75 years?
Wallace was an un-reformed Old Southern Democrat, best known for his statement, "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
In 1968 he ran for president as an Independent, in 1972, he ran as a Democrat. An assassination attempt on Wallace failed on 5/15/ 1972, ended his candidacy and paralyzed him for the rest of his life. No one has ever found any conspiracy by Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin. Those records are not classified for national security purposes and locked away for 75 years.
His fourth, and last term as governor of Alabama, was from 1983-87. Wallace might well once have been the inspiration of the modern Republican party, if not for his apology to Black Civil Rights leaders and renouncement of segregation when he became a "Born Again Christian,” and said, “I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over." That would never fly in today’s GOP.
And that, dear Mara, is why the final George Wallace cannot be the inspiration of today’s Republican party.
7:17 PM PT: "In Wallace's 1998 obituary, The Huntsville Times political editor John Anderson summarized the impact from the 1968 campaign: "His startling appeal to millions of alienated white voters was not lost on Richard Nixon and other GOP strategists. First Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, and finally George Herbert Walker Bush successfully adopted toned-down versions of Wallace's anti-busing, anti-federal government platform to pry low- and middle-income whites from the Democratic New Deal coalition."[14] Dan Carter, a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, added: "George Wallace laid the foundation for the dominance of the Republican Party in American society through the manipulation of racial and social issues in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the master teacher, and Richard Nixon and the Republican leadership that followed were his students."[36]
Wallace considered Happy Chandler, the former baseball commissioner and two-term former governor of Kentucky, as his running mate in his 1968 campaign as a third party candidate; as one of Wallace's aides put it, "We have all the nuts in the country; we could get some decent people–-you working one side of the street and he working the other side." Wallace invited Chandler, but when the press published the prospect, Wallace's supporters objected: Chandler had supported the hiring of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Wallace retracted the invitation, and (after considering Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Harland Sanders)[35] chose former Air Force General Curtis LeMay of California.
... Campaign aides tried to persuade LeMay to avoid questions relating to nuclear weapons, but when asked if he thought their use was necessary to win the Vietnam War, he first said that America can win in Vietnam without them. However, he alarmed the audience by further commenting, "we [Americans] have a phobia about nuclear weapons. I think there may be times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons." The "politically tone-deaf" LeMay became a drag on Wallace's candidacy for the remainder of the campaign." (Wikipedia page for George Wallace)
The movie character of Dr. Strangelove was inspired by Dr. Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb, destroyer of Robert Oppenheimer's reputation and revoked security clearance, and champion of Reagan's SDI. Teller though, lost the respect of the scientific community.