Time to dust off this classic ad from LBJ's Presidential campaign

[Xipe Totec]

The words ring as true today as ever.

[PatrickforO]

1. LOL in your heart you know he might!

Goldwater was a regular Slim Pickens.

[Xipe Totec]

2. And the entire litter of republican candidates are channeling him nt

[mikehiggins]

3. copy that

I was introduced to the man who came up with this ad. He did not give me the impression that he was proud of it. As far as I know it only aired once (I could be wrong) but it put the stake through Barry Goldwater's heart. That image made his election totally impossible, which was probably for the best.

Thanks to Xipe Totec for reposting it.

[montana_hazeleyes]

4. i was a young teenager then.

I remember a campaign pin back then that had a picture of a nuke explosion and underneath it said " Bury Goldwater."

[DI Freighter Watcher]

5. Wow

I was so young barely remember that one.
Also does anyone recognize Kim Richards, Nanny & the Professor and recently arrested for drunk and disorderly assaulting an officer. Perhaps radiation poisoning.

[2naSalit]

6. Remember that one well.

There was another that came out, I'm thinking early 70s, the Vietnam war was raging, man on the moon era... because I can recall the details of the ad but I never knew who made it, and where I was when I saw it, the time of day etc.

This ad war against war, in general, not an election campaign ad that I can recall.

It goes like this:

In B&W the ad begins with three men dressed in Victorian era-looking attire, waistcoats, tails... one with a top hat, the others bowlers. They are walking briskly across a hilly field of grass, coming toward them is another group of "gentlemen". They all look so serious as they march toward each other as though we are about to witness a duel of perhaps the 18th century. All the while a voice-over is informing us of facts about the cost of war and who, exactly, decide that there should be war, who does the fighting and who does the dying and the injustice of this phenomena. As the two groups of "gentlemen" reach each other midfield, the two in top hats dress down handing their hats and coats to their attendees. The two roll up their sleeves and prepare to "duke it out" while the voice-over frankly states that it is politicians who get into disagreements and choose to go to war while it is their country's finest generation who fights them and they along with countless innocent civilians die in them and that war should look like this scene on the screen... two elderly guys having a one-on-one rumble with bare hands, in the grass with witnesses but no audience, period.

That is the ad that I saw just before sign off for two nights in a row, it changed my whole view of politics and how my country works. I would sure like to see that one again, I think it could go viral in a hurry. Wish I knew where to find it and who made it. It aired in New England then, don't know it's broadcast history, just the ad.

[Peace Patriot]

7. That was my first vote for President--and I got 2 million Southeast Asians killed,

including many, many children, and nearly 60,000 U.S. soldiers killed, in exchange for my vote, and those of millions of other Americans who voted in that LANDSLIDE FOR PEACE!

The problem was that LBJ was lying.

The destruction of our democracy began with that LBJ lie, or rather about a year before.

Don't resurrect that ad without telling the truth about it.

[Xipe Totec]

8. This isn't about LBJ; it's about the message. nt

[Peace Patriot]

9. I'm sorry. I don't see it that way. It brings back all the sorrow.

That ad is WHY I voted for LBJ. As he conned voters into thinking he was the peace candidate, WITH THAT AD, he was meanwhile planning the FALSE incident ("Gulf of Tonkin&quot by which to drag us all into a major, a pointless, a horrible, horrible war. He was no better than Bush-Cheney and Rumsfeld. Worse, actually. More people were slaughtered. More U.S. soldiers died. WITH THAT LYING, MANIPULATIVE, DESPICABLE AD!

I will never forget it. I will never get over it. I will never forgive it. Our own Democratic Party--a party of which I've been a member and activist for over 50 years--did that to me and to all of us, and to all those, here and there, whose lives, families and communities were destroyed by death, death and more death.

We have yet another crisis now, within this party, and it is the LIES told by Bill Clinton and now by Hillary Clinton about the causes of vast economic inequality. We have the Forever War, yes, that, too--of which Hillary is a major advocate. The purpose was then, and is now, to loot us blind. Then it was war profiteering. Now it is war profiteering and every other kind of profiteering.

Yep, that ad brings it all back--the lies, lies and more lies, with only a few bits of light here and there. We need to face this and we need to NOT lie about it--not lie about the past, and not lie about the present.

NO MORE LIES!

[Xipe Totec]

10. You are free to feel it any way you like. We don't have to agree

You can add your comments and observations as you have already done.

I guess your position is that, if it weren't for this 'lying' ad, you would have voted for Barry Goldwater and the world would have been all peaches and cream with unicorns and rainbows?

[rusty quoin]

11. Peace Patriot didn't say anything about peaches and cream.

He lived that time and obviously hates wars, and being lied to. I do too.

[Peace Patriot]

13. Thank you, rusty quoin, for defending me.

I take on "peaches and cream," below.

[Peace Patriot]

12. In the interests of peace, I will say, yes, it's a very moving ad,

very hard hitting, very scary. I can see now how people were sucked in; how I was sucked in, thinking I was voting for peace. But these qualities of an ad can be used to sell you poison and can be used to sell you war. TV commercials by our Corporate Rulers do it all the time.

But you were saying more than look at this moving, hard-hitting, scary ad. You were saying "Bring it back." You shouldn't do that without providing the context of that ad, which was almost as horrible as the nuclear bomb explosion that the ad uses to suck us into believing that LBJ wanted peace. He did not. He was plotting a terrible war even as he put that ad on TV.

As for "peaches and cream with unicorns and rainbows," those things were denied to thousands and thousands of little girls, who were incinerated by napalm or torn to pieces by U.S. rifles and other weaponry. Only they weren't cute, chubby little blonde girls. They were brown, and thin, and poor.

Can't you mourn them with me, just for a little bit? Can't you express a bit of sorrow for their fate? Can't you understand how terrible that ad makes me feel? Must you defend it with sarcasm?

I suspect that, by "peaches and cream with unicorns and rainbows," you are referring to universal health care, free tuition at public colleges, ending mass incarceration mostly of blacks and Latinos in privatized prisons whose owners donate to Hillary Clinton, and breaking up the banksters, whom Bill Clinton de-regulated, who nearly brought down the world economy--and who also donate generously to see their friend Hillary Clinton in the White House--and returning to some semblance of fair taxation (90% tax on the rich under Eisenhower! 90%!), with the uber-rich now paying almost no tax. And guess who they donate to?

You may think we can't have these basic policies of a decent society because the Clintons and their surrogates say they are "unicorns and rainbows."

Have you bought that awful lie? I hope you haven't.

And she will likely use fear--is already using it, as this ad used it so long ago--to scare us into putting her in power, for more looting and more wars.

In 1964, we had no alternative to vote for. Our alternative had been assassinated.* Today, in 2016, we DO have an alternative, miraculous as that seems. We have Bernie Sanders, who seems to have great honesty and integrity, who seems not to be bought and who clearly is drawing upon the lost principles of the Democratic Party itself--help for the poor, strong middle class, fairness to all, education for all, the government siding with the poor working majority against the bosses and the fat cats, to even things out and create a country that is good for all. Maybe he'll end up lying to us, too. I don't think he will, but if he does, you can be sure I will be on the alert for more betrayal and will readily condemn it, if it occurs. That is not "unicorns and rainbows." That is a promise made from bitter and infinitely sad experience.

------------------------


*(Recommended: "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," by James Douglass.)