Posted on 07/31/2006 3:16:15 PM PDT by neverdem
En route to getting shellacked by historic proportions in the 1964 presidential race, the Republican challenger, Senator Barry Goldwater, suffered through a smear job every bit as oversize and ugly as Lyndon B. Johnsons gallbladder scar. Not the infamous daisy ad circulated by the Johnson campaign, in which a young girl innocently pulled the petals from a flower until a mushroom cloud filled the frame. While setting a new standard for negative campaigning, that TV commercial was at least rooted in Goldwaters loose talk about using low yield atomic bombs in the escalating Vietnam War.
The truly low blow came in the pages of Fact magazine, which claimed to have asked some 12,000 psychiatrists whether Goldwater was psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States. Among the more than 1,800 replies were long-distance diagnoses pronouncing the challenger a dangerous lunatic and a compensated schizophrenic similar to Hitler and Stalin. The year after the election, Goldwater sued in federal court for defamation of character and won $75,000 in punitive damages.
The ghost of Barry Goldwater hovers over Conservatives Without Conscience, the new study of authoritarian Republicans by the Watergate-era White House counsel John W. Dean. The book, whose title is a play on the senators 1960 polemic, The Conscience of a Conservative, was conceived as a collaboration between Goldwater and the Nixon administrations most famous heretic. Dean shared the senators dislike of the so-called social conservatives who have risen to prominence within Republican ranks over the past several decades, and the pair planned a book for which they would talk with people like Chuck Colson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and attempt to understand their strident and intolerant politics.
The project was cut short by Goldwaters death in 1998, but Dean remained dedicated to unmasking what he sees as...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We're hard to beat. Just ask sKerry, Dashle, and Gore
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
When is this loser's 15 minutes going to be up?? He's still got his feelings hurt from Nixon and wants to blame all Republicans for Nixon's excesses. Get a life.
Wrong era.
The articles about JOHN W.DEAN not Howard Dean. They are both missing gray matter though between the ears.
Is Gordon Liddy still alive?
.......common mistake.....John Dean...not Howard Dean.. one a screaming megalomaniac....the other.....a soft spoken megalomaniac......who both hate conservatives....they could be cousins I guess
They told me that if I voted for Goldwater we would be up to our ears in Vietnam.
I did and they were right.
John Dean would have to climb quite a few rungs on the ladder of slime to reach "scum". One wonders why he bothers?
G. Gordon Liddy hosts a radio show. It's not bad, except he butchers the pronunciation of common words on a regular basis.
http://www.liddyshow.us/
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
= = =
Where'd he find one to waste? Rummaging around in the Walter Reed Morgue, no doubt.
It was John Dean who orchestrated the Watergate break-in. The whole thing had something to do with his prostitute wife and her roommate.
I don't even like photoshopped pictures of violence to catz.
/johnny
I saw this is already on the NY Times Bestseller list. We just got a local bookstore where I live and though it is small, the front table is nothing but anti Bush, war, and conservatives in general books. They are pulling out all the stops.
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