Question Time; You Ask, I Try to Answer...

Yours and one of mine.

I appreciate every highly intelligent question readers ask me, and from time to time I try to answer some, especially those I think may be of high interest, in this column.

Health care is something that is either constantly on our minds, or will be eventually. Gloria Maloney, a retired registered nurse with a strong interest in health care affordability issues, wrote me this:

A commentator and retired sociology professor said this in reply to one of my articles.

“Lyndon Johnson, the most politically astute president in my lifetime, had to pull out all the stops, break arms, and pull teeth to institute Medicare for the elderly, a step in the right direction. The only reason he was able to pull it off was the fact that he also allowed the military-industrial complex to continue its obscene production of immense wealth through that awful war of imperial aggression against the people of Viet Nam. It was a quid pro quo”.

I hadn’t heard that before, but it is the only thing that makes sense of LBJ’s apparent escalation of the Vietnam War. What do you think?

I know a fair amount about Lyndon Johnson, his presidency, and the era, and I have to say while that sounds believable, it’s not correct. LBJ was a disciple of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and wanted very much to expand access to health care for all. Harry Truman had tried to get a form of Medicare passed when he was president, but the AMA (American Medical Association) spent tons of money to lobby Congress and beat him.

But in 1965, Johnson had just won one of the biggest landslides in modern American history, and had huge majorities in Congress — 295 to 140 in the House, and 68 to 32 in the Senate. Additionally, when it came to dealing with Congress, LBJ was probably the most skilled president in history, having been a powerful and effective Senate majority leader. He beat the AMA lobby, and Medicare became reality.

Also, 1965 was only three decades after the New Deal saved millions of Americans from starvation and destitution, and people were not inclined to be automatically hostile to government programs.

Vietnam did indeed destroy LBJ’s presidency, and why he became so obsessed with it is a mystery that endures to this day. But I suspect the key reasons were 1) the lingering fears of communism that gripped America during the Red Scare of the 1950s, 2) LBJ’s guilt at not seeing combat during World War II, as John F. Kennedy and so many others had, and 3) his stubborn unwillingness to ever be defeated, much less by what he called “a fourth rate nation.”

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Now let ME pose a question.

As I have said before, I normally loathe conspiracy theories, and most of them are nonsense. Americans are blabbermouths, and aren’t good at keeping secrets. I am utterly convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, for example.

But there is something very fishy about these Trump assassination attempts. Praising the Secret Service after the Correspondents dinner fiasco, Donald Trump said they got the Pennsylvania shooter “with a single shot, right between the eyes,” from more than 100 yards away.

So why did the Secret Service fire five times at the guy in the Washington Hilton and miss every time? Why didn’t they take out the Butler shooter before he got eight rounds off, when there had been multiple reports he was up on a roof and fully visible?

He got eight rounds off before he was put out of action by a local policeman who shot at and damaged the would-be assassin’s rifle. Why didn’t the Secret Service’s crack sniper team do this first?

What did the autopsy of the guy in Butler show? Has anyone in the press even seen it? Have the New York Times and Wall Street Journal been investigating this further?

There may be perfectly plausible answers to all these questions.

But what are they, and why haven’t legitimate investigative reporters not been louder about demanding them?