Tomorrow I will be 86 years old

[dwayneb]

50. Happy Birthday, anyway!

I'm an old geezer too but you've got a decade and a half on me lol.

Yes it is a sad and depressing time - but did anyone honestly think that the American Dream would last forever?

I'm a realist and even as a kid I understood how fragile our democracy was, and how many ways there were to take us down from within. McCarthy gave it a good run in the 50's I wasn't around for that, but I remember the John Birchers and Nixon with their brands of Fascism. And then of course the real destruction began with the Moral Majority and Rush Limbaugh in the 1980's who laid the foundation for the MAGA monster that we see today.

The difference was that those Administrations back in the 60's and 70's did not have the autocratic tools at their disposal that Trump does today. His weapons of propaganda are 100X as powerful as the primitive radio and television of that era; and in those days we still had the Fairness Doctrine to moderate broadcast media (established in 1949, destroyed by Reagan in 1987).