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Lyndon Johnson Was Thirteen Of The Most Interesting And Difficult Men I Ever Met. He Could Be As Couth As He Was Uncouth, As Magnanimous As Malicious, At Times Proud And Sensitive, At Times Paranoid And Darkly Uneasy With Himself. Freud Would Have Had A Field Day With Him.

-Bill Moyers

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Lyndon Johnson Was Thirteen

Bill Moyers

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Lyndon Johnson Was Thirteen Of The Most Interesting And Difficult Men I Ever Met. He Could Be As Couth As He Was Uncouth, As Magnanimous As Malicious, At Times Proud And Sensitive, At Times Paranoid And Darkly Uneasy With Himself. Freud Would Have Had A Field Day With Him.

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Charity Is Commendable; Everyone Should Be Charitable. But Justice Aims To Create A Social Order In Which, If Individuals Choose Not To Be Charitable, People Still Don't Go Hungry, Unschooled Or Sick Without Care. Charity Depends On The Vicissitudes Of Whim And Personal Wealth; Justice Depends On Commitment Instead Of Circumstance.

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They're Counting On Your Patriotism To Distract You From Their Plunder. They're Counting On You To Be Standing At Attention With Your Hand Over Your Heart, Pledging Allegiance To The Flag, While They Pick Your Pocket!

Charity Depends On The Vicissitudes Of Whim And Personal Wealth; Justice Depends On Commitment Instead Of Circumstance. Faith-based Charity Provides Crumbs From The Table; Faith-based Justice Offers A Place At The Table.

Our Economy Is A Plantation Run For The Aristocrats - The Ceos, Hedge Funds, Private Equity Firms - While The Field Hands Are Left With The Scraps.

The Rich Today Are Richer, There Are More Of Them, They Have Round-the-clock Propaganda Factories In Rupert Murdoch's Empire And Rightwing Talk Radio, And Corporate Media Have Their Back.

Unless You're Willing To Fight And Refight The Same Battles Until You Go Blue In The Face, Drive The People You Work With Nuts Going Over Every Detail To Make Certain You've Got It Right, And Then Take Hit After Unfair Hit Accusing You Of Bias, There's No Use Even Trying. You Have To Love It, And I Do. You Just Hope It Strikes A Spark Somewhere In The Critical Mass Of Public Opinion And Helps Some People To Resist Further The Seductions Of Political And Corporate Advertising.

Reagan's Story Of Freedom Superficially Alludes To The Founding Fathers, But Its Substance Comes From The Gilded Age, Devised By Apologists For The Robber Barons. It Is Posed Abstractly As The Freedom Of The Individual From Government Control A Jeffersonian Ideal At The Roots Of Our Bill Of Rights, To Be Sure. But What It Meant In Politics A Century Later, And Still Means Today, Is The Freedom To Accumulate Wealth Without Social Or Democratic Responsibilities And License To Buy The Political System Right Out From Everyone Else.

There Are Honest Journalists Like There Are Honest Politicians - They Stay Bought.

There Is A Historic Strain Of Dominion Theology Which Says, Taking Its References From The Psalms, That Man Is Made Just A Little Lower Than God, And That We Are The Crown Of Creation. That Interpretation Has Come At The Expense Of The One That Says When God, In The Story Of Noah, Intervened To Save Human Life Against The Flood, Against The Acts Of Nature, He Did Not Stop With Human Beings. He Made Sure That Every Kind Of Animal Was Represented Twice On That Ark.

Having Lost Faith In All Else, Zealots Have Nothing Left But A Holy Cause To Please A Warrior God. They Win If We Become Holy Warriors, Too; If We Kill The Innocent As They Do; Strike First At Those Who Had Not Struck Us; Allow Our Leaders To Use The Fear Of Terrorism To Make Us Afraid Of The Truth; Cease To Think And Reason Together, Allowing Others To Tell What's In God's Mind.

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I Report The Assault On Nature Evidenced In Coal Mining That Tears The Tops Off Mountains And Dumps Them Into Rivers, Sacrificing The Health And Lives Of Those In The River Valleys To Short-term Profit, And I See A Link Between That Process And The Stock-market Frenzy Which Scorns Long-term Investments-genuine Savings-in Favor Of Quick Turnovers And Speculative Bubbles Whose Inevitable Bursting Leaves Insiders With Stuffed Pockets And Millions Of Small Stockholders, Pensioners, And Employees Out Of Work, Out Of Luck, And Out Of Hope.

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Sure Enough, As Merger Has Followed Merger, Journalism Has Been Driven Further Down The Hierarchy Of Values In The Huge Conglomerates That Dominate What We See, Read And Hear. And To Feed The Profit Margins Journalism Has Been Directed To Other Priorities Than "the News We Need To Know To Keep Our Freedoms"

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Creativity Is Piercing The Mundane To Find The Marvelous.

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I've Always Thought The American Eagle Needed A Left Wing And A Right Wing. The Right Wing Would See To It That Economic Interests Had Their Legitimate Concerns Addressed. The Left Wing Would See To It That Ordinary People Were Included In The Bargain. Both Would Keep The Great Bird On Course. But With Two Right Wings Or Two Left Wings, It's No Longer An Eagle And It's Going To Crash.

Hyperbole Was To Lyndon Johnson What Oxygen Is To Life.

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You Only Have To Glance At The Daily News To See How Passions Are Stirred By Claims Of Exclusive Loyalty To One's Own Kin, One's Own Clan, One's Own Country, And One's Own Church. These Ties That Bind Are Vital To Our Communities And Our Lives, But They Can Also Be Twisted Into A Noose.

When Ideology And Theology Couple, Their Offspring Are Not Always Bad But They Are Always Blind.

Lyndon Johnson Believed The Poor Deserved A Better Life Than The Economy Was Providing Them. He Thought Private Power And Greed Had To Be Checked By A Vibrant Democracy.

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In Uniform Patriotism Can Salute One Flag Only, Embrace But The First Circle Of Life - One's Own Land And Tribe. In War That Is Necessary, In Peace It Is Not Enough.

In Tracking Down And Eliminating Terrorists, We Need To Change Our Metaphor From A "war On Terror" - Exactly What, Pray Tell, Is That? - To The Mind-set Of Interpol Tracking Down Master Criminals Through Intense Global Cooperation Among Nations, Or The Fbi Stalking The Mafia, Or Local Police Determined To Quell Street Gangs Without Leveling The Entire Neighborhood In The Process.

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Best Is Yet To Come

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An Unconscious People, An Indoctrinated People, A People Fed Only Partisan Information And Opinion That Confirm Their Own Bias, A People Made Morbidly Obese In Mind And Spirit By The Junk Food Of Propaganda Is Less Inclined To Put Up A Fight, Ask Questions And Be Skeptical. And Just As A Democracy Can Die Of Too Many Lies, That Kind Of Orthodoxy Can Kill Us, Too.

Conservatives Or Better, Pro-corporate Apologists Hijacked The Vocabulary Of Jeffersonian Liberalism And Turned Words Like "progress," "opportunity," And "individualism" Into Tools For Making The Plunder Of America Sound Like Divine Right. This "degenerate And Unlovely Age," As One Historian Calls It, Exists In The Mind Of Karl Rove The Reputed Brain Of George W. Bush As The Seminal Age Of Inspiration For Politics And Governance Of America Today.

I Was Not A Public - I Was Not A Thinker. I Was A Doer.

Democracy May Not Prove In The Long Run To Be As Efficient As Other Forms Of Government, But It Has One Saving Grace: It Allows Us To Know And Say That It Isn't.

News Is What People Want To Keep Hidden And Everything Else Is Publicity.

I Can Tell You That The Job Of Trying To Tell The Truth About People Whose Job It Is To Hide The Truth Is About As Complicated And Difficult As Trying To Hide It In The First Place.

How Do We Protect The Soul Of Democracy Against Bad Theology In Service Of An Imperial State?

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The Interfaith Alliance Has To Become An Ongoing Sustaining And Powerful Movement Whose Interest Is To Prove That Religion Has A Healing Side As Well As A Killing Side, And That Democracy Is The Consequence Of Conscience

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America Is The Longest Argument In The World.

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What's Right And Good Doesn't Come Naturally. You Have To Stand Up And Fight For It - As If The Cause Depends On You, Because It Does.

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Freedom Begins The Moment You Realize Someone Else Has Been Writing Your Story And It's Time You Took The Pen From His Hand And Started Writing It Yourself.

A Journalist Is Basically A Chronicler, Not An Interpreter Of Events. Where Else In Society Do You Have The License To Eavesdrop On So Many Different Conversations As You Have In Journalism? Where Else Can You Delve Into The Life Of Our Times?

...there Is No More Effective Public Interest Watchdog In Washington, D.c.

Public Interest

In Marriage, Everyday You Love,and Everyday You Forgive.it Is An Ongoing Sacrament, Love And Forgiveness

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These Are The Now-endangered Markers Of A Civilized Society: Legally Ordained Minimum Wages, Child Labor Laws, Workers Safety And Compensation Laws, Pure Foods And Safe Drugs, Social Security, Medicare And Rules That Promote Competitive Markets Over Monopolies And Cartels.

Capitalism Is Out Of Control, Thanks In No Small Part To Citizens United, The Supreme Court Decision Which Said That A Corporation Is A Person, Even Though It Doesn't Eat, Drink, Make Love, Sing, Raise Children Or Take Care Of Aging Parents. You Can't Have A People's Democracy As Long As Corporations Are Considered People.

A Free Press Is One Where It's Okay To State The Conclusion You're Led To By The Evidence. One Reason I'm In Hot Water Is Because My Colleagues And I At Now Didn't Play By The Conventional Rules Of Beltway Journalism. Those Rules Divide The World Into Democrats And Republicans, Liberals And Conservatives, And Allow Journalists To Pretend They Have Done Their Job If Instead Of Reporting The Truth Behind The News, They Merely Give Each Side An Opportunity To Spin The News.

Charity Provides Crumbs From The Table; Justice Offers A Place At The Table.

President Bush, Whose Scorn For Journalists Is Balanced By A Soft Spot In His Heart For The Conglomerates They Work For, Threatens To Veto The Senate Action. Keep In Mind That When The Public Was Asked To Submit Comments To The Fcc About Consolidation, Only One Percent Approved It. The President May Not Be Listening, But The Senate Is, And The Public Won This Round. The House Has A Similar Resolution Under Consideration.

On The Eve Of The Election Last Month My Wife Judith And I Were Driving Home Late In The Afternoon And Turned On The Radio For The Traffic And Weather. What We Instantly Got Was A Freak Show Of Political Pornography: Lies, Distortions, And Half-truths - Half-truths Being Perhaps The Blackest Of All Lies. They Paraded Before Us As Informed Opinion.

A Profound Transformation Is Happening Here. The Framers Of Our Nation Never Envisioned These Huge Media Giants; Never Imagined What Could Happen If Big Government, Big Publishing And Big Broadcasters Ever Saw Eye-to-eye In Putting The Public's Need For News Second To Their Own Interests. I Approach The End Of My Own Long Run Believing More Strongly Than Ever That The Quality Of Journalism And The Quality Of Democracy Are Inextricably Joined ... .

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You Can't Have A People's Democracy As Long As Corporations Are Considered People.

Democracy Works When People Claim It As Their Own

When All Our Efforts Have Come To Nothing, We Naturally Tend To Doubt Not Just Ourselves, But Also Whether God Is Just. At Those Moments, Our Only Hope Is To Seek Every Evidence That God Is Just, By Communing With The People We Know Who Are Strongest In Faith.

The Supreme Court Consistently Favors Organized Money And The Political Privileges Of The Corporate Class. We Have A Senate That Is More Responsive To Affluent Constituents Than To Middle-class Constituents, While The Opinions Of Constituents In The Bottom Third Of Income Distribution Have No Apparent Effect At All On The Senate's Roll Call Votes.

A Producer Is A Saboteur Who Tries To Infiltrate The Passivity Of Viewers And To Create Impressions That Are Lasting.

Although I Was Brought Up In A Culturally And Religious Conservative Culture, As A Baptist I Was Taught That No One Has The Right To Subpoena Your Conscience.

We See More And More Of Our Presidents And Know Less And Less About What They Do.

Now Barack Obama, Who Campaigned For Transparency, Is The President Defending Secret Negotiations On New Trade Agreements That Are Largely Being Written By Corporate Lawyers And Lobbyists. He Would Give Corporations The Key To The Treasury While He Gets The Authority To Fast Track Another Hammering Of Working People And The Environment. Yet The Only People Who Get A Real Tongue-lashing From This President's White House Are Progressives Around Town Who Dare To Call Him On The Carpet For Abandoning His Promises.

We Have To Face The Unpleasant As Well As The Affirmative Side Of The Human Story, Including Our Own Story As A Nation, Our Own Stories Of Our Peoples. We Have Got To Have The Ugly Facts In Order To Protect Us From The Official View Of Reality. Otherwise, We Are Squeezed Empty And Filled With What Other People Want Us To Think And Feel And Experience.

Our Very Lives Depend On The Ethics Of Strangers, And Most Of Us Are Always Strangers To Other People.

I Really Believe That Coincidence Is God's Way Of Remaining Anonymous.

David Rockefeller Is The Most Conspicuous Representative Today Of The Ruling Class, A Multinational Fraternity Of Men Who Shape The Global Economy And Manage The Flow Of Its Capital. Rockefeller Was Born To It, And He Has Made The Most Of It. But What Some Critics See As A Vast International Conspiracy, He Considers A Circumstance Of Life And Just Another Day's Work... In The World Of David Rockefeller It's Hard To Tell Where Business Ends And Politics Begins

I Can't Speak For A War That I Believe Is Immoral.

Democracy Belongs To Those Who Exercise It.

Big Money And Big Business, Corporations And Commerce, Are Again The Undisputed Overlords Of Politics And Government. The White House, The Congress And, Increasingly, The Judiciary, Reflect Their Interests. We Appear To Have A Government Run By Remote Control From The U.s. Chamber Of Commerce, The National Association Of Manufacturers And The American Petroleum Institute. To Hell With Everyone Else.

Watching The Debate This Afternoon It Was Apparent They Loved Term Limits In The House - As Brutus Loved Caesar.

There's Hardly A More Bitter Pill To Take Than When A President Disappoints The People Who Most Believed In Him.

There's 1,000 Ways Into Addiction 1,000 Ways Out.

Here Is The Crisis Of The Times As I See It: We Talk About Problems, Issues, Policies, But We Don't Talk About What Democracy Means - What It Bestows On Us - The Revolutionary Idea That It Isn't Just About The Means Of Governance But The Means Of Dignifying People So They Become Fully Free To Claim Their Moral And Political Agency.

Revolutionary Ideas

I'm Angry At What's Happening To America And Angry With Myself That I Can't Do More. I Would Be Miserable If I Couldn't Bear Witness.

In Fact, So Much Of Life, As You Know, Is Serendipitous. That's Why You Better Be Prepared At Any Time For Anything, Because It May Happen To You.

But There Is Nothing Idealized Or Romantic About The Difference Between A Society Whose Arrangements Roughly Serve All Its Citizens (something Otherwise Known As Social Justice) And One Whose Institutions Have Been Converted Into A Stupendous Fraud. That Can Be The Difference Between Democracy And Plutocracy.

Democracy Only Works When We Claim It As Our Own.

The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal.

Professionals Give Advice; Pilgrims Share Wisdom.

Although Our Interests As Citizens Vary, Each One Is An Artery To The Heart That Pumps Life Through The Body Politic, And Each Is Important To The Health Of Democracy.

The Most Important Thing The Giant Philanthropies Could Do - Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Open Society Institute, And New Ones Emerging - Would Be To Create A $2-to-$3 Billion Trust For Independent Journalism. They Wouldn't Miss The Money, And Democracy Would Still Have A Fighting Chance Because Of Their Investment.

Barack Obama Treated Too Lightly The People And Forces Determined To Destroy Him. They Spat In His Face And Didn't Even Get Ticketed For A Misdemeanor.

Our Media And Political System Has Turned Into A Mutual Protection Racket.

Journalism's Been A Continuing Course In Adult Education For Me.

Standing Up To Your Government Can Mean Standing Up For Your Country.

What We Need Is What The Ancient Israelites Called Hochma - The Science Of The Heart...the Capacity To See, To Feel, And Then To Act As If The Future Depended On You. Believe Me, It Does.

When Certain Causes Become Prairie Fires, Politicians Make Difficult Choices, And Often At The Expense Of Someone Like Jeremiah Wright And Walter Jenkins. That's The Cruel Nature Of American Politics, Where The End Becomes The Consummate Objective, And Sometimes The Means To Get There Come At A Great Price.

Difficult Choices

The Printed Page Conveys Information And Commitment, And Requires Active Involvement. Television Conveys Emotion And Experience, And It's Very Limited In What It Can Do Logically. It's An Existential Experience - There And Then Gone.

Television Is A Medium. It Is Neither Rare Nor Well Done.

I Take "we, The People" Seriously Because I Don't Know How We Build A Civilization Without Reciprocity.

The Thing About War Is That Once It's Triggered, It Is Unyielding In Its Appetite. And The More It Consumes And Gorges, The More It Wants.

Jon Stewart Is A Remarkable Satirist And Parodist In The Vein Of Mark Twain, Because Jon Stewart Understands What Mark Twain Knew, Which Is That The Truth Goes Down More Easily In A Democracy When It's Marinated In Humor.

The Struggle Of Ordinary People For A Decent Living, For Security, Is As Old As The Republic, But It's Taken On A New And Urgent Edge. Instead Of Shared Prosperity Our Political System Has Now Produced A Winner-take-all Economy.

Theology Asserts Propositions That Cannot Be Proven True; Ideologues Hold Stoutly To A Worldview Despite Being Contradicted By What Is Generally Accepted As Reality. When Ideology And Theology Couple, Their Offspring Are Not Always Bad But They Are Always Blind. And There Is The Danger: Voters And Politicians Alike, Oblivious To The Facts.

Barack Obama Seemed To Think He Could Win Over His Enemies. He Certainly Seemed To Believe Too Much In His Own Powers Of Persuasion. One Thing's For Sure - He Misunderstood The Nature Of His Adversaries.

People Who Don't Believe In Government Are Likely To Defy Our Government.

We Now Know That A Neo-conservative Is An Arsonist Who Sets The House On Fire And Six Years Later Boasts That No One Can Put It Out.

The Quality Of Democracy And The Quality Of Journalism Are Deeply Entwined.

Beauty Is An Expression Of That Rapture Of Being Alive.

The Massive Upward Distribution Of Wealth Engineered By Our Political Class Over The Last Few Decades Has Solidified The Plutocratic Control Of The Rule-making Machinery In Washington And State Capitals.

Distribution Of Wealth

I Hear An Almost Inaudible But Pervasive Discontent With The Price We Pay For Our Current Materialism. And I Hear A Fluttering Of Hope That There Might Be More To Life Than Bread And Circuses.

In America, One Of Our Two Major Parties Is Dominated By Extremists Dedicated To Destroying The Social Contract, And The Other Party Has Been So Enfeebled By Two Decades Of Collaboration With The Donor Class It Can Offer Only Feeble Resistance To The Forces That Are Devastating Everyday People.

Lyndon Johnson Was Thirteen Of The Most Interesting And Difficult Men I Ever Met. He Could Be As Couth As He Was Uncouth, As Magnanimous As Malicious, At Times Proud And Sensitive, At Times Paranoid And Darkly Uneasy With Himself. Freud Would Have Had A Field Day With Him.

When I Was Growing Up, I Never Heard Anyone Pray, "give Me This Day My Daily Bread." It Was Always, "give Us This Day Our Daily Bread." That Stuck. We're All In This Together.

Television Can Stir Emotions, But It Doesn't Invite Reflection As Much As The Printed Page.

Fox News And Rush Limbaugh Have Raised Ignorance To Ideology And Stupefied An Entire Political Party. No More Roguish And Rowdy Band Of Predators Ever Did More To Demean And Despoil The Democracy On Whose Carcass They Feed.

We Don't Care Really About Children As A Society And Television Reflects That Indifference To Children As Human Beings.

Scientists Investigate That Which Already Is; Engineers Create That Which Has Never Been. Creativity Is Piercing The Mundane To Find The Marvelous.

Conservatism Is Less A Set Of Ideas Than It Is A Pathological Distemper, A Militant Anger Over The Fact That The Universe Is Not Closed And Life Is Not Static.

When I Learn Something New - And It Happens Every Day - I Feel A Little More At Home In This Universe, A Little More Comfortable In The Nest.

Why Is The Country Not Having This Conversation, The Kind Of Conversation That Requires The Politicians Who Are Responsible For The War To Be Specific To The Concerns Of The American People.

[martin Luther] King Subpoened The Nation's Conscience. He Was Killed For It.

I Own And Operate A Ferocious Ego.

In One Way Or Another, This Is The Oldest Story In America: The Struggle To Determine Whether “we, The People” Is A Moral Compact Embedded In A Political Contract Or Merely A Charade Masquerading As Piety And Manipulated By The Powerful And Privileged To Sustain Their Own Way Of Life At The Expense Of Others.

Journalists Who Make Mistakes Get Sued For Libel; Historians Who Make Mistakes Get To Publish A Revised Edition.

Presidents Are Afraid To Lose Wars. They're Afraid To Be Outflanked On The Right By The Militarists. They Don't Want To Be Seen As Soft On Either Communism Or Soft On Terrorism Or Whatever. So Presidents Are Constantly Tugged Away From Their Domestic Commitments To Foreign Policy.

Democracy Doesn't Begin At The Top; It Begins At The Bottom, When Flesh-and-blood Human Beings Fight To Rekindle What Arlo Guthrie Calls 'the Patriot's Dream.

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