"People seem to love [Trump’s family] in the same way the public loved the Kennedys."

Writes Scott Adams....

And notice how Donald Jr. and Eric both have the speaking cadence of John and Jack Kennedy. 

John and Jack, eh? I love Scott Adams... but he's not infallible. Here at Meadhouse, we were saying Donald Jr. is Bobby Kennedy. That's who he sounded like, and it's distinctive in a way that counting John twice doesn't equal.

Notice also how Melania reminds you of Jackie Kennedy – quiet, smart, and classy. These are coincidences, but your irrational brain doesn’t care. It sees a new batch of Kennedys and wants to see more of them. That’s powerful election magic for a nation that only pretends to care about policies.

A week ago you compared ugly Donald Trump with ugly Hillary Clinton and declared them a visual tie. That matters because our visual “brain” generally wins against whatever part of the brain is pretending to be logical that day. 

Ha ha. Perfect. All is forgiven. Whatever part of the brain is pretending to be logical that day. Love it.

[O]nce we got a look at the entire Trump family, acting as a group, our visual brains started seeing them as a package deal. And when you compare the entire Trump family’s visual appeal to the entire Clinton family’s visual imagery it’s a massacre.

Would you prefer seeing Bill and Hillary Clinton decompose in front of your eyes for eight years, or watch the Trump family develop their dynasty?

"An Honest Socialist/Could Bernie Sanders show Elizabeth Warren how to beat Hillary?"

A Wall Street Journal editorial. (There's a subscription wall that you can bypass if you Google some of the text and get your own link.)

Milton Friedman once observed that the 1928 platform of the Socialist Party of America may have seemed radical at the time, but nearly all of it was eventually absorbed by mainstream parties and became law. That’s also Mr. Sanders’s hope. He wants to drive the Democratic Party debate to the left so it drags Hillary Clinton along with it.

And it may be working. Mrs. Clinton has already disavowed her husband’s trade agenda. She’s proposed a rewrite of the First Amendment to limit political speech, and don’t be surprised if she also embraces expanded entitlements. The difference is that Bernie believes what he says, while Hillary believes whatever seems necessary to win.

The practical political question is whether Mr. Sanders, or some other liberal gadfly, can do well enough to serve as a stalking horse for a stronger candidate against Mrs. Clinton. Recall how Eugene McCarthy drove LBJ out of the 1968 race with a strong performance in the New Hampshire primary. Robert Kennedy soon jumped in as a more electable antiwar candidate.

LBJ really was someone who would say whatever was necessary to win. As for that 1968 business... we ended up with Nixon... who by today's standards was a big old liberal.

[NOTE: The last paragraph of this post is rewritten. Originally, it said: "And we ended up with LBJ, who really was someone who would say whatever was necessary to win." That's not a proper account of 1968!]

Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, and Chris Matthews daintily allude to Obama's masculinity deficit.

On yesterday's "Meet the Press," Tom Brokaw said it was "just inexplicable" that the Obamacare website "suddenly landed the way that it did, in utter chaos." The President should have pressured "Kathy Sebelius and other people" about the "rollout" which was "going to be our big play for the second term."

"Big play" picks up on that football metaphor Obama used 4 times in his November 14th remarks. "We fumbled," he said, though in real football, it's an individual player who fumbles. But here was this "big play," and somebody fumbled. Was it "Kathy"?

The moderator David Gregory, immediately steps up to frame the next question in macho terms: "Who's got the muscle?" The manly (though 50-years-dead) JFK somehow shoulders his way into the conversation. Gregory turns to Chris Matthews and says:

You were making the point to me this week about, you know, where's his Bobby Kennedy? Who's got the muscle? When the president says, and he did say, "The user experience of this website is everything," who had the muscle in the White House to get it done and make sure the president gets what he wants?

Muscle, muscle, muscle. If a right-winger had phrased the question that way, somebody would call this misogyny. These 3 men — Brokaw, Gregory, and Matthews — are hankering for a muscular man who can nail the big play. He depended on a Kathy when he needed a Bobby. And here's what Chrissy Matthews said:

Everybody goes to their battle stations when there's chaos. 

I'll see you your football metaphor, and raise you a military metaphor.

You always go to where you've been arguing before. But I've always been arguing this president doesn't have a chain of command, a very clear line of authority and unique responsibility. I remember Sebelius, who I like of course, most people do like her, she's a public servant. 

She's liked. Kathy's likeable enough. She's a good servant.

But when she was asked, "Who's in charge?" in that committee, under oath, she started to talk about someone, the head of C.M.S., who handles Medicare and Medicaid. Among 30 or 40 other responsibilities, this person had the rollout responsibilities.

And was "this person" male or female? Female. Marilyn Tavenner. Can you say her name without vaulting back in time to your old macho icons Jack and Bobby? They knew what "responsibilities" to give their Marilyn.

Matthews reaches even further back, to an even manlier man:

Look at Japan, the occupation of Japan, it simple: Put one guy in charge, Doug MacArthur. 

Put one guy in charge. Doug. Call him Doug, not Douglas. Not — in the style of "Kathy" — Dougy. He's Doug. And there was a guy! Put one guy in charge.

You put somebody in charge and they're uniquely responsible for its success or failure. Obama doesn't do things that way. He's got floaters, like Valerie Jarett, floating around. 

Floaters. Like Valerie Jarrett. The disrespect! They can't even spell her name right in the transcript. Floaters, like Valerie Jarrett, floating around. Matthews being a good Democrat somehow feels secure that the double meaning of "floaters" won't bring on the accusations of racism that would surely have burst forth if a Republican had talked about Jarrett like that.

He doesn't want to have a real chief of staff, like a Jim Baker.

He's saying — it's hardly subtle — that Jarrett's not a real man. You need a man. A man like Bobby or Doug or Jim.

He doesn't want to give authority to people, and I think it's been a real problem.

So what does this say about Obama, not wanting to bring in real men, who take charge, who make the play, who exert authority? He's not man enough to work alongside real men? He needs to play with the ladies, ladies who don't know their place — who dither and float?

"Being rich changes surprisingly little... You still have to have an absorbing interest in life, something to do to make you feel alive."

Said G.D. Spradlin, who "made a fortune, retired in 1960 and spent a year and a half sailing in the Bahamas with his family," before deciding to become an actor. After a 30-year career playing many roles in movies and on TV, he has died at the age of 90. 

On TV, he played, on different occasions, 2 Presidents: Andrew Jackson and Lyndon Johnson:

Newsweek lauded his “sheer orneriness” in portraying Johnson, especially when putting down Kennedy. “That boy,” he growls to an aide, “is all hat and no cattle.”

In real life, he ran Senator John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in Oklahoma.

What item of sports memorabilia sold for $4.3 million — a sports memorabilia record?

The original rules of basketball.

The two, signed typescript pages that set out the 13 rules were drawn up by the sport's Canadian founder, James Naismith, in 1891....

Naismith had written the rules to set up a new winter sport for boys at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was a physical education teacher.

The school had given him two weeks to come up with a new sport and he finalised it the day before the deadline, pinning the rules on a gym bulletin board.

Oh, and by the way...

At the same auction, President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of slaves held in southern states during the Civil War and was owned by ex-Senator Bobby Kennedy, fetched $3,778,500.

But that's not the original handwritten proclamation, which is in the National Archives. The Bobby Kennedy document is "one of 48 printed copies signed by Lincoln." Bobby paid $9,500 in 1964 for $9,500. Who knows how much of the $3,778,500 comes from the infusion of Kennedyosity.

Also at the auction, this guidon:

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man..."

"... who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'"

Edward M. Kennedy, Address at the Public Memorial Service for Robert F. Kennedy, June 8, 1968.

"Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?" "I’m his wife." "That’s no good here."

Mildred Loving has died at the age of 68. It seems odd that she was only 68. Loving v. Virginia — the case in which the Supreme Court struck down a law that banned interracial marriages — ought to have been decided a long, long time ago. But it was not.

By their own widely reported accounts, Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, were in bed in their modest house in Central Point in the early morning of July 11, 1958, five weeks after their wedding, when the county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening voice demanded, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?”

Mrs. Loving answered, “I’m his wife.”

Mr. Loving pointed to the couple’s marriage certificate hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, “That’s no good here.”...

After Mr. Loving spent a night in jail and his wife several more, the couple pleaded guilty to violating the Virginia law, the Racial Integrity Act. Under a plea bargain, their one-year prison sentences were suspended on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together or at the same time for 25 years.

Judge Leon M. Bazile, in language Chief Justice Warren would recall, said that if God had meant for whites and blacks to mix, he would have not placed them on different continents. Judge Bazile reminded the defendants that “as long as you live you will be known as a felon.”

They paid court fees of $36.29 each, moved to Washington and had three children. They returned home occasionally, never together. But times were tough financially, and the Lovings missed family, friends and their easy country lifestyle in the rolling Virginia hills.

By 1963, Mrs. Loving could stand the ostracism no longer. Inspired by the civil rights movement and its march on Washington, she wrote Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and asked for help. He wrote her back, and referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The A.C.L.U. took the case. Its lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, faced an immediate problem: the Lovings had pleaded guilty and had no right to appeal. So they asked Judge Bazile to set aside his original verdict. When he refused, they appealed. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the lower court, and the case went to the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Cohen recounted telling Mr. Loving about various legal theories applying to the case. Mr. Loving replied, “Mr. Cohen, tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

"It wasn't that God didn't bless the union. To put if off on God I didn't feel was valid."

The Vatican has reversed the annulment of the marriage of Sheila Rauch Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy (the oldest son of Bobby Kennedy):

"When you try to defend your marriage, the army that comes after you is pretty brutal," Rauch Kennedy said yesterday from her Cambridge home. "You're accused of being a vindictive ex-wife, an alcoholic bigot, an idiot."

Isn't there some reason to see it as vindictive, though?

"In the eyes of the Catholic Church [Kennedy and Rauch Kennedy] are still married and therefore he cannot remarry and maintain good status as a Catholic," said Michelle Dillon, a University of New Hampshire professor who has written extensively about Catholicism. "It means he's stigmatized. . . . But he's not alone. Like the other divorced people in the pews or the people who use contraception or are same-sex couples, he's in a state of sin."

Rauch Kennedy, who is Episcopalian but took required classes with Kennedy to be married in a Catholic church, said she fought the annulment "almost entirely because we had two children."

If you yourself believe divorce is acceptable and the other person needs an annulment in order to go on in life without being in what his religion counts as a state of sin, wouldn't it be better to be generous about it? Wouldn't that be more Episcopalian?

At the LBJ Library.

At the LBJ Library, the floors of archives are on beautiful, grand display:



And there are three floors of exhibits, which pull you through the history and culture of the 1960s, the time when I was a teenager. Did so much more happen then, or does it only seem so to me? Much of what was on display had no real connection to LBJ but intense significance to me as I walked through the depiction of the past:



The piped in music is The Doors, The Jefferson Airplane -- all counterculture, evocative of hating LBJ. "Did people hate him more than George Bush?" Chris asks. "Yes," I say without hesitation. Remember, there was a draft, and many more people were dying in Vietnam. I watch a little video that quickly documents what happened year by year from 1963 to 1968. So many impressive achievements I counted for little at the time, because of the war. So many sad things -- riots, assassinations. I cry at the one thing that always breaks through my public stoicism: the killing of Bobby Kennedy.

I remember where I was -- standing in the kitchen in our house in Wayne, New Jersey -- when I heard these words:



I was watching a little black and white TV on the counter and thinking how much I hated that ugly, old man with his ugly, endless war. I hadn't a shred of pity for him, but when he said those unexpected words, I broke down and cried. That poor man. How strange to suddenly see him as human.

Deeply affecting too were the handwritten edits on the short speech he gave on the day of President Kennedy's assassination:



We saw the many gifts, given by heads of state, most of them perplexingly bad. Only one stood out as truly worthy, from the Shah of Iran:



That is a terra cotta effigy urn, from 1000 B.C.

There's a replica of the Oval Office:



And I'm surprised how small and uninspiring it is.

I love all the old buttons:



Some so mindbogglingly inappropriate as a political statement:



But the perfect expression of the 1960s.

And don't miss the animatronic, joke-telling LBJ!

When John Lennon died.

The doctor who held John Lennon's heart in his hands and tried to pump it back to life remembers that night, 25 years ago:

"There was just nothing left to pump," Dr. [Stephan G.] Lynn recalled in an interview. "There was so much damage to the major blood vessels leading from the heart" that his blood just leaked out....

"The bullets were amazingly well-placed," he said. "All the major blood vessels leaving the heart were a mush, and there was no way to fix it."

I remember hearing the news on the radio the next morning. I heard the news today, oh boy...

I usually listen to a little news on the radio before getting out of bed. I guess I've done that for a long, long time, because I can remember turning on the radio in 1968 and hearing that Bobby Kennedy had been shot to death.

On the day I heard that John had died, I was a law student at NYU. I remember dragging myself in to the law review office and expecting everyone there to be crying and talking about it, but no one was saying anything at all. I never felt so alienated from my fellow law students as I did on that day. I was insecure enough to feel that I was being childish to be so caught up in the story of the death of a celebrity long past his prime. I didn't even take the train uptown to go stand in the crowd that I knew had gathered outside the Dakota. What did I do? I can't remember. I probably buried myself in work on a law review article.

Back in 1968, all my friends were crying and talking about Bobby's death. When Bobby's coffin was on public view in St. Patrick's Cathedral, we got in my car and drove in to New York City (from Wayne, New Jersey) and waited in the long line to file past. I remember the feeling of being around the other mourners and how extremely kind I thought it was when office workers brought us cups of water from inside their building. In the end, we teenagers started worrying that our parents would get upset, wondering where we were, and we left the line we'd waited in for hours.

How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon! How foolish I was to think I was foolish to care and to put my effort into blending in with the law review editors who, I imagined, were behaving in a way I needed to learn!

I was especially sensitive about fitting in, because I was six months pregnant with my first child, and I worried that this experience was tearing me away from the career I had spent the last two and a half years studying to begin. I was 29 years old, older than most of the other law students. I doubted any of them had studied fine arts, my undergraduate major. With my age, my art school background, and my pregnancy, I was imposter, constantly threatened with exposure. I couldn't walk out on these people and go be with the mourners. I only watched the mourners on television and felt doubly sad.

On St. Patrick's Day, my baby was born. I named him John.

Death days.

Let's not make a regular occasion out of someone's death day. We celebrate Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. on their birthdays. We don't put the holiday on date they were gunned down. Mark October 9th on your calendar, people, not today.

UPDATE: Not long after I wrote this, a great rock musician was shot to death on stage. Scroll up for two posts on "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott. Who knows if the annual recognition of John Lennon's murder stimulated the mind of Abbott's murderer?

I received an email from a reader defending the recogintion of death dates. He wrote:

Your point is well taken about not 'celebrating' someone's death day. But it is a time to remember, where I was when I heard, what I thought about, how people reacted. The day of his death has a resonance, and an emotional connection I think most of us don't have with the day of his birth. And death is so much more emotionally affecting than birth or the cessation of death. I think Dec 7th is more notorious and marked every year than VE Day or VJ Day for the same reason, not to mention 9/11. No one is there for the birth of great or notorious people, so they have little reason to relate with that date. Everyone alive remembers the day of Kennedy's death, Lennon's death because of the emotion they have invested in those dates as opposed to their births. By all means make their birthday a holiday or recognized day of celebration, but nothing can stop people's visceral response to the day of their death. And commemorating those days is a good thing because it did make me think about that day in '80 and that isn't always bad to reflect on such things. Its more real to me than to have an announcer say "Today Lennon would have been 64."

I understand this position, but I'm genuinely tired of commemorating murders! And I'm tired of the trite "I remember where I was" reminiscing. Yeah, I remember where I was when I heard John Lennon died: in bed turning on the radio in the morning. I have an identical story to tell about me and Bobby Kennedy. But Bobby Kennedy's death isn't about me, nor is John Lennon's. But I've had enough of it, really. I've been asked a thousand times do you remember where you were when you heard President Kennedy got shot, and I feel like saying, no actually I'm the only one who went ahead and forgot that scintillating fact. But I always say, "I was in a stairwell." But, so what? I remember being in a stairwell, but so the hell what? After forty years, what are we talking about?

Kerry and the Cambridgians.

Cambridge doesn’t like Kerry much, Rachel Donadio reports in the August 2 issue of the New York Observer. Her source is New Republic editor (and Cambridge resident) Martin Peretz:

On Sunday evening, at a reception for Harvard alumni in U.S. government held in the airy main lobby of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Robert Boorstin, the senior vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress, summed up Cambridge’s enthusiasm for Mr. Kerry with a noncommittal "Eh!" as he turned his hands palms up in a gesture that drove home the point. "He’s not like Teddy Kennedy," said Mr. Boorstin, eyeing the bar. ….

[T]he Cambridge smart set’s affections for Mr. Kerry are surprisingly lukewarm, not unlike those of so many Democratic constituencies who dated other candidates before marrying Mr. Kerry. Of course, Mr. Kerry is a Yale man, and so perhaps the situation is different in New Haven. As Mr. Peretz put it, "This sounds very parochial, but there’s not the intrinsic Cambridge interest in Kerry the way there was for Kennedy and Gore, simply because there’s no Harvard connection." Still, it’s strange that for all the years he spent as a Massachusetts career politician, this year’s Democratic contender never seems to have forged particularly close ties with the Cambridge intelligentsia.

Unlike Mr. Gore, whose enthusiasm for the environment made him the darling of Cambridge scientists, "such enthusiasm as there is for Kerry is not because of any prior deep commitment that Kerry had to any issue that people identified with intellectually or politically or morally," said Mr. Peretz. "I think that Al—I’m prejudiced about him—that Al was never threatened by meeting with people who were smarter than him. He pursued those contacts to enhance himself. I don’t know that Kerry has ever really done that." …

New grist for the is-Kerry-dumb mill.

"Canterbridgians are a very peculiar, narcissistic lot. But everybody is for him," Mr. Peretz said. "And if one raises a friendly word, however modest, about Bush, one is sent into the dunce corner: ‘How could you?’, etc."

"We’re a little bit spoiled in Cambridge," said firebrand Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, speaking by phone from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. "People my age remember Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy. Everyone remembers Clinton, and whether you love or hate him, he was the most charismatic guy in the room. Kerry is not the most charismatic guy in the room. He may be the tallest guy in the room. He used to be the best-looking guy in the room."

No way! What room was that? Okay, Dershowitz was there, but who else?