Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency

My opponent points to Johnson's passion toward civil rights and ending poverty. I won't deny that he was passionate however he was also misguided. I'm sure that your visit to the LBJ library was no doubt informative however that's like visiting the foxes version of the hen house. As far as my own political background it's true that I'm a Republican but that is not how I really define myself. I tend toward being conservative, libertarian and republican but I'm first and foremost an American. President Johnson was a man who was haunted by trying to become the next FDR. By having his war and an alphabet soup of laws he could be a great man too. The result is a nation buried in debt and an entitlement state doomed to failure. Lyndon Johnson is almost the definition of the failure of liberalism in America. First he rammed through Congress the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving him war powers in Vietnam. Every president since has become war powers crazy and this is a legacy right at Johnson's feet. Next he signed into Law the Civil Rights Act. He called this ambitious undertaking his "Guns and Butter" program. The first part of this equation to go sour was the war effort. Johnson treated the war like a political problem that he could solve by twisting arms in the same way he had got things done in the Senate for so many years. He tried to micro-manage the war as if it were a giant chess game with our troops as the pawns. He went so far as to select bombing targets and to turn missions on and off instead of letting the generals prosecute the war. His Great Society and War on Poverty programs was socially engineering and sentenced our country into a welfare state prison while funding a military adventure overseas. (1) The results of his Great Society Programs were far more deadly to our nation and future generations. The mammoth social welfare entitlement programs that streamed out of Washington did more damage to the fabric of our society than any number of Vietnams could have done. The irony is, that the segment of our society that it meant to help, was the one that was most grievously harmed. Of all those who fell victim to the welfare mentality, none suffered more than the black communities. These welfare programs have created a new kind of slavery and a permanent underclass. Prior to the Great Society, although blacks were still struggling for equal opportunities and were on the low end of the economic ladder, the black family was for the most part strong and stable. Two parent families were the rule, not the exception. They attended church together, had strong moral values, and did not comprise a majority of the prison population. Compare that to the present state of the black community after 40 years of Liberal Socialism. Our prisons are disproportionally black, unwed mothers and single parent families are the rule, black youths without a strong male role model other than rap stars and basketball players, roam the streets and are drawn into a culture of drugs and crime. The following statistics are provided by Star Parker's Coalition of Urban Renewal, (CURE). 60 percent of black children grow up in fatherless homes. 800,000 black men are in jail or prison. 70 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Over 300,000 black babies are aborted annually. 50 percent of new AIDS cases are in the black community. Almost half of young black men in America's cities are neither working nor in school. What we have here is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. (2) This is the legacy of the entitlement society that LBJ's War on Poverty produced. One of the most devastating to the family was that if an unwed woman became pregnant, moved out of the home of her parents, did not name or know who the father was, then their government daddy would provide for all their needs. Therefore they no longer needed a husband or the support of her family. In fact, the more children she had out of wedlock, the more money she would receive from the government. Unfortunately many black men saw this as the best of all possible worlds. They could father as many children as they wanted, from multiple women, without ever having to accept the responsibility of fatherhood. Many women rejected marriage in favor of a boyfriend who could slip in the back door and not jeopardize her government check. There is an old saying that goes "if you want to feed a man for a day give him a fish. If you want to feed him for life teach him to fish." The Great Society taught a nation to give the poor fish instead of teaching them. The result is a legacy of LBJ's Great Society of misguided compassion defined by liberalism. Sources 1. Free Republic.com 2. Coalition of Urban Renewal