My thoughts exactly

Yesterday I was browsing a number of college-campus, liberal websites. What handsome, adorable young people. And so bright, talented, and apparently, well-heeled. Far more so than my generation. Just like that houseful of students that invaded Columbus to steal our election during voter golden week. Much more fashionably dressed and better teeth than even the college students I used to hire in the 80s. Their parents have worked hard for them--private schools, braces and dermatologists--the best our capitalist system could buy. They are truly the spiritual children of the 1960s radicals, like Diana Oughton of Illinois whose headless body with both hands missing was found in the rubble of that Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970 with Terry Robbins' torso, the guy from Kent State. They had enough explosives to blow up the city block, but only killed three of their own Weather People, a group founded by Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. The unrepentant Ayers who say they didn't do enough to bring down the USA so they went into education.

Browsing the CampusProgressive.org site I noticed a review of the latest book about President Nixon, a man I never liked and never voted for, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. However, he did significantly change our relationship with Communist China and the USSR, so I'm not sure why he isn't an icon of the left. Oh well, who can fathom them? In the review I noticed this conclusion--arrived at from a different angle than my own--but everything the left wanted in the 60s they got. The right can only plug the dike from time to time but the steady stream of their views washes over us constantly.

While his electoral strategy remains popular, the success of Nixon’s ideology remains an open question. The burning issues of the 1960’s—civil rights, women’s rights, and the political agency of young people—have resulted perhaps not in complete triumph for the left, but the left’s vision has prevailed.

The whole anti-war thing, then as now, was just an excuse to get drunk, do drugs and burn a few flags before getting down to business. The problem we face in the 21st century is not the specter of a growing right wing (i.e. popularity of talk radio of Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh, according to these easily offended youngsters), but that today's students have to stretch and bend the edges and the constitution that much more than their baby boomer parents and college faculty did at the same age. They all want to out-do Dad and Mom in being big, bad liberals.