"I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide."

Reading the previous post out loud to Meade, I get to that quote, and he says "Bob Dylan!" And I say, "No! That's from Hillary Clinton's memoir!" The post is mostly about Hillary, but Bob Dylan is in there too. Meade thought it was something Dylan wrote in his memoir "Chronicles."

What Bob Dylan wrote was:

I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn't any way to explain that to anybody. I wasn't comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I like the old news better.

I'd blogged about that when "Chronicles" came out and Meade's Hillary/Bob mixup got me looking for that old post. Searching my blog for "Dylan Goldwater," the first thing I found was this post from June 2008, about none other than Hillary Clinton.  She's everywhere! Just then, she was withdrawing from the presidential race. She gave a good speech, and I'd said: "Oh, Hillary, why weren't you like this all along?"

There's no mention of Bob Dylan in that June 2008 post. And, interestingly, the first commenter is Meade (a man I had not yet met). He quotes Hillary's "So today, I am standing with Senator Obama to say: Yes we can" and adds "Gag me." Despite Meade's tendency to bring up Bob Dylan, it wasn't Meade who dragged him in. It was a commenter named L. E. Lee who hijacked the thread to say:

"I was even more surprised that Bob Dylan said that he supports Barack Obama this past week. I do not remember Dylan ever endorsing a candidate for political office before."

Meade responded: "L.E.Lee, It's widely known that, like Hillary..., Bob Dylan was a supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964." Lee demands evidence, Meade tells him to Google "Dylan Goldwater Chronicles," and I make a comment:

If you do that Google search for Dylan and Goldwater, I hope you find this old post of mine where -- as I elaborately blogged "Chronicles" -- I wrote:

Dylan's favorite politician: Barry Goldwater. P. 283.

Why: "[he] reminded me of Tom Mix."

Bob Dylan song that mentions Goldwater: "I Shall Be Free, No. 10."

I provided the relevant lyric:

Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want ev'rybody to be free
But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I'm crazy!
I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.

And that's what I said immediately this morning when Meade brought up Dylan and Goldwater: "But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater/Move in next door and marry my daughter/You must think I'm crazy!" Back in 2008, what I did was to go on to write another post, about Bob Dylan and Barack Obama, "What did Bob Dylan say about Barack Obama — and what did he mean?"

In the then-present, which was before dawn, I was reading the new post out loud to Meade, because I want his okay for the use of quotes from him, and the material you see above in this post seemed like it needed to go at the bottom of that post I was trying to finish. I was struggling to get to the end of the whole long string of Stringband-and-Dylan-and-Hillary-and-Althouse-and-Meade and "Fishes stop and ask me where I am bound"-sense-and-nonsense.

And Meade was piling on, saying things like:

The first President Barry was almost President Goldwater... Dreams from My Goldwater... Fishes swimming in the gold water....

By then, the sun was up, and the post was up, without the update, because the update itself would need another out-loud read, what with the additional Meade quotes. It was a new morning, and this is a new post.

Can’t you feel that sun a-shinin’?
Groundhog runnin’ by the country stream
This must be the day that all of my dreams come true

Are there fishes in the stream, wondering where you're bound? What does the groundhog say? And will the Dreams from My Goldwater ever come true?