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Losing Lou Dobbs over Charlie's cousin Kevin McCarthy is not like losing Walter Cronkite over 'Nam [1]

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Date: 2023-01-04

Right Wing irrelevance now gets its voice as Trump tries to demonstrate his leadership after waffling over the choice of House speaker. This happened after four of the 20 rebels holding the vote hostage decided to vote against their boss on the first day of work. McCarthy could still withdraw but he only has 128 more ballots to reach the record.

Now Lou Dobbs calls out Previous Guy on his own platform.

The media feeds political sickness by framing egregious behaviour as popcorn worthy instead of prosecution worthy or evidence of unfitness. Not so long ago the (fast shifting) Overton window would have dictated, at the least, many resignations. https://t.co/sj0yn0hJyD

Trump dismisses the 20 patriots challenging RINO McCarthy-says McCarthy will do “good” job-and tells them effectively to do what Swamp and Corporate Globalists order: Trump Backs RINOs and Swamp Trump breaks silence on McCarthy and House speaker drama https://t.co/sxg3XREDmS

Dobbs is praising the “20 patriots” who are holding out in opposition to McCarthy taking the gavel, a situation that has been rife with chaos, cursing, and multiple ballots so far, and has pitted even seemingly natural allies like Rep. Lauren Boebert and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene against one another. And now, Dobbs against Trump.

Ultra-MAGA former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs dramatically turned on ex-president Donald Trump, on Trump’s own Truth Social, over support for Rep. Kevin McCarthy‘s bid to be Speaker of the House, which is currently not going swimmingly.

Walter Cronkite Speaks Out against Vietnam, February 27, 1968: The war in Vietnam seemed to be dragging on and Cronkite wanted to go to Vietnam and see for himself what the war was truly about. After his visit, he came home and shared his personal commentary on the situation.

Cronkite, who retired from his anchor position in 1981, worked on a 1987 documentary series on the Vietnam War. In the episode on Tet, he addressed the criticism that reporters got the story.

Douglas Brinkley’s new biography of Walter Cronkite has sparked an intriguing controversy about the CBS anchorman’s famous trip to Vietnam in February 1968. That’s when, as legend has it, Cronkite was so shocked at the devastation of the communists’ Tet offensive that he went over to see for himself what was really going on. And he concluded the war was a stalemate, probably unwinnable.

Brinkley buys the argument, put forth by the late David Halberstam in his characteristically portentous manner, that Cronkite’s February 27 broadcast, "Report from Vietnam," played a major role in turning Americans against the war and inducing President Lyndon Johnson to abandon his reelection campaign.

Cronkite’s report, writes Brinkley, was "immediately seen as a catalyst by pundits in the Monday newspapers. . . . Cronkite turned dove, and the hawk Johnson lost his talons." This tracks with what Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book, The Powers That Be: "It was the first time in American history that a war has been declared over by an anchorman." Lyndon Johnson was said to have watched the broadcast and exclaimed to his press secretary, George Christian, "If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America."

Harvard’s Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, has an interesting take on this. "The trouble with this inspiring little story," he says, "is that most of it is either invented or disputed." He cites W. Joseph Campbell’s 2010 book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misrepresented Stories in American Journalism, as noting that Johnson did not see the Cronkite report when it was broadcast. Menand recalls a 1979 quote from Christian saying he really didn’t recall what Johnson said in response to whatever or if he said anything at all like what was then being quoted. And Menand questions whether Cronkite’s broadcast had anything approaching the impact now attributed to it.

This is all great fun and the kind of thing the intelligentsia loves to kick around. But it misses a fundamental point that goes to the heart of America’s Vietnam tragedy. If Cronkite did in fact have a major impact on the American consciousness back in the winter of 1968 (and he very well may have), that impact was based on a fanciful interpretation of events.

[...]

There’s plenty of room for debate between the viewpoints of Braestrup and Oberdorfer on whether the press contributed to America’s psychological defeat. But there’s no room for debate on what actually happened and how it was covered. And when it comes to Walter Cronkite, it’s amusing to follow the discussion about whether he really had the impact often attributed to him, whether LBJ really equated losing Cronkite with losing Middle America, whether the president’s decision to quit his campaign actually flowed from the anchorman’s "Report from Vietnam."

nationalinterest.org/...

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/4/2145383/-Losing-Lou-Dobbs-over-Charlie-s-cousin-Kevin-McCarthy-is-not-like-losing-Walter-Cronkite-over-Nam

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