Mid-Life Mulligan

by digby

For those who are partial to the historical parallel as I am, you will love this one:

This comes with a huge hat tip to a good Friend of Attytood who was born 40 years ago on this date — Happy Birthday, dude! — and as a result is more up to speed on what happened on January 10, 1967, than the rest of us.

The big news story that night? President Lyndon B. Johnson’s State of the Union address.

The topic that dominated all others: Vietnam.

I’m going to guide you to some excerpts of that address — exactly 40 years ago tonight. See how it compares to some of the excerpts from President Bush’s speech that were just released minutes ago:

Read it and weep — for our country and all the people who will die before their time.

It’s clear to me that there is something pathologically wrong with the right wing in America in their inability let go of the 60’s. (And I’m talking to you Joe Klein.) It isn’t us — it isn’t the liberals. We are not obsessed with the past or trying to relive our glory days. The liberal baby boomers are looking to the future, just as we always did, while these boomer wingnuts are mired in the their pathetic, loser youths and punishing the rest of the country because they were anachronisms in their own time.

These people are literally taking a mulligan on American history and trying to make it come out the way they wanted it to 40 years ago. (Led by the original pathological Dad, Henry Kissinger.) They are having a massive mid-life crisis and carrying a bunch of young mouthbreathers right along with them as they make the same mistakes their fathers did a generation ago. It would be a lot less pathetic (and certainly less dangerous to the world) if these people would just buy a new sportscar or get a boob job.

You can’t recapture those days and change the course the history, boys and girls, no matter how hard you try. The war was a failure, your president was a criminal and the cultural revolution and fight for civil rights were successful. There’s no putting those genies back in their bottles. As you all used to chant like a mantra: “Get over it.”

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