The politically activist baby boomers were “useful idiots” here, too. / They were a major, perhaps the major, factor in America withdrawing from the Vietnam War.

Well, which one was it then, motherFUCKER?

I also appreciate the graphic’s “Bye Bye Birdie” background.

Yes, young people were also involved in the civil rights movement. And that was a wonderful thing.

Except for that whole thing of now enabling a black to actually think he might become president.

But unlike the anti-war movement, which was largely spearheaded by, and relied for its effectiveness on, young people, the civil rights movement did not need massive numbers of young people in order to prevail.

And DP’s point, as if there is one, would be …?

ew exceptions — and those exceptions are usually those rare cases when young people confront dictatorships — when youth get involved in politics in large numbers, it is not a good thing for us dodos

Emended.

I’m going to hop in early on this thread:

Boston Sadlys: I need your e-mail addresses! Drop me a line at marita at mit dot edu, ok?

[waves hello to her new friend PeeJ!]

But unlike the anti-war movement, which was largely spearheaded by, and relied for its effectiveness on, young people, the civil rights movement did not need massive numbers of young people in order to prevail.

And DP’s point, as if there is one, would be …?

That it takes a President to make civil rights a reality. Silly gurl.

If people had sharks (…with…lazers…on…their…heads) on their firckin’ lawns, Dennis wouldn’t have to tell all them jungen folks to get the fuck off.

This must be the opening salvo is bring back child labor. After they export all the immigrants, of course.

The real reason they are dismissing youth is because youth is dismissing them. So this was just a nyah nyah.

Hallo Doctor Missus Marita !!1!one!!

btw, I still have that camera. Think I scared him away with my toothbrush joke. Could you get an email to him perchance?

Having been a young person at that time and having watched as…

Allow me to reinterpret the rest:

“…my university (Columbia) had its classrooms taken over and teaching interrupted by fellow students who had some clue as to what was going down; having watched the sexualization of society that followed the “Make Love Not War” generation that made me even more envious of my peers than when I was in high school; having watched America become obsessed with youth rather than wisdom masquerading as nascent Rethuglican youth frat swine as a result of the “Never Trust Anyone Over 30” mantra of the ’60s young people; having seen the myriad speech codes that arose, ironically, out of the “Free Speech” movement at Berkeley and elsewhere that, inexplicably, eschewed the traditional racist misogynist hegemony-embracing discourse that’s now known as ‘hate speech’; having watched pacifist-like doctrines decimate America’s moral compass; that is to say, make people think imperialistic warmongering wherever whenever was somehow not an inherent American right; having witnessed a selfish preoccupation with an ever increasing number of inherent “rights” that somehow seemed to include the poor, people of color, and/or those with different views on gender with a commensurate devaluing of inherent moral obligations such as the right to never have to pay taxes to help anyone else for any reason, I, among many others, am not enamored of the ’60s and ’70s youth movement because no one would have sex with me and I was scared if I did LSD my children would have 12 toes and external organs.”

Sorry, but this one touches all of my many remaining Boomer raw nerves. What a disconnected fartbag.

also,

and those exceptions are usually those rare cases when young people confront dictatorships

Isn’t that pretty much what’s going on?

When young people get excited, Dennis Pranger gets excited.

Then the young people say “Dude, nast!” and run away. And Dennis is left all alone.

So he goes back to his lonely house and collection of inflatable donkeys and drools out a few hundred words about how stooopid young people should know their place and stay out of things they don’t understand and respect their elders.

Oh yes. Respect their elders’ every whim.

I say we see the Prager glass as half crazy:

…if one believes that the American attempt to prevent South Vietnam from falling under Communist totalitarian rule was an immoral, imperialist venture, then America’s young people were terrific. Likewise, if one believes that the movement toward having college students help shape college curricula was a good thing, then the youth movement of that time was a boon to education.

Just quote that from him, over and over and over, and let him whine about “context” like that really old grimacing dude who keeps talking about keeping “my friends” in some desert war for 100 years and there will be more.

those rare cases when young people confront dictatorships

Translation: Young people should leave politics to wise men like myself. Unless politics involve any real danger of getting shot, in which case I’ll hide under the bed and let the kids lead the way.

Conservatives will never get over their jealousy for all the fuckin’ that us liberals got in the sixties and seventies.

And all the dope we smoked. And how our bands were cooler than theirs— like the King’s Men and the Association.

Ha, ha, Prager and all you other stupid bastards!

You spent the sixties engaged to your sorority girl, praying at your retarded lily-white church, and knocking on doors for Nixon!

Ha ha!

when youth get involved in politics in large numbers, it is not a good thing

going into the army, on the other hand? that’s fine with Dennis.

Except for his kid.

Of course, you could expand this thinking. There are lots of “adult” things involving “reasoned judgement” that young people shouldn’t get involved in. Getting married. Having kids. Getting jobs. The aforementioned going into the military and being killed or killing people.

Why, I think Dennis is advising that the best course for human beings is to be 40 year old Virgins living at home with Mom and Dad.

Kind of like the Virgin Ben.

You are all enemies of the state!

Whose camera are you thinking it is, PeeJ? I wasn’t really sure. What were the pictures on it, anyway? I seem to remember a lot of pictures of a gate.

Anyone at the PDX bachelor bash who likes to photograph gates missing a camera?

I think this proves that childish minds should not attempt punditry.

Or am I getting ahead of myself?

Sedition Act of 1918 said,

History thread marches onward?!!

The Preg says:

If one believes that the American attempt to prevent South Vietnam from falling under Communist totalitarian rule was an immoral, imperialist venture, then America’s young people were terrific.

Well, sort of, not really, and yes.

The communist totalitarian rule of Ho Chi Minh turned out to be far less boot-to-the-face than any of the capitalist totalitarian regimes of the time, notably in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia, all backed by the USA. As for the GOP policy of not dealing with or even talking to totalitarian states, the T-shirt I’m wearing was made in Vietnam and bought at K-Mart. We ‘Murkans seem to like doin’ business with them communist totalitarians, yessiree…

But if one believes that America’s defeat in Vietnam was unnecessary,

No, it was as inevitable as the falling of the Berlin Wall.

and that it led to unspeakable atrocities in Southeast Asia, to a greatly weakened America and to a revived Left…

I was around then, and though the details are a bit fuzzy now, didn’t the Vietnamese Army go into Cambodia to try to stop the genocide? That it was the secret bombing of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger which drove the country into chaos? Maybe I’ve just got my moonbat sunglasses on…

then the youth movement of the ’60s and ’70s was a moral, social and political disaster.

It was anyway, what with War, Watergate, Kent State, the “drug war” and Reagan as the Governor of California. But the Dirty Fucking Hippies didn’t do any of that, did they Preggers?

Dear Lord, Pat Buchanan (on the Dan Abrams Verdict show) just shouted “Liberal paranoia” regarding the Obama/Whitehouse button.

He called it a “third grade level joke.”

To which my SO replied, “So, Pat, are you summing up the Republican party?”

Conservatives will never get over their jealousy for all the fuckin’ that us liberals got in the sixties and seventies. And all the dope we smoked. And how our bands were cooler than theirs

In a nutshell. And now, as the aging ones can no longer avoid that stare into the abyss, they’re going totally apeshit over lives poorly lived. Which would explain a lot.

they’re going totally apeshit over lives poorly lived. Which would explain a lot.

Dang, you are so right.

I hope it’s so for Pat Buchanan. His appearances after Obama got the presumptive nomination were strangely subdued, rather Thorazinian, or in the Latin, post-cranium-explodus.

That it was the secret bombing of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger which drove the country into chaos?

Actually, it was the bombing and then carpet bombing of Cambodia under both Johnson and Nixon, from 1965 to 1973, which ended up handing power to the Khmer Rouge, and then, yes, they were only thrown own when the unified Vietnam invaded. And after that, the U.S. voted at the UN for the displaced lunatic guerrilla Khmer Rouge to retain their UN seat.

And then the right wing and the liberal hawk left spent the next several decades trying to blame that all on Noam Chomsky because after the Khmer Rouge takeover he wrote some articles in which he suggested disagreements on which numbers to use in estimating casualties from which causes; even worse, he noted that a lot of people who were more than happy to slaughter millions of people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were now solemnly acting like they gave a serious flying f*** about the poor dears now that they were being killed by the Khmer Rouge.

And they woulda done it, too, if it ain’t been for them meddlin’ kids.

And they woulda done it, too, if it ain’t been for them meddlin’ kids.

Which is, actually, central to his point.

The communist totalitarian rule of Ho Chi Minh turned out to be far less boot-to-the-face than any of the capitalist totalitarian regimes of the time, notably in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia, all backed by the USA.

Um, there are a lot of people down the road from me in Westminster who would argue with that.

but anyway…

… the American attempt to prevent South Vietnam from falling under Communist totalitarian rule …

Are we sweet? Never a thought for our own interests, always only thinking of others.

Are we sweet? Never a thought for our own interests, always only thinking of others.

Exceptionally so.

Aren’t we sweet, I meant. Like 300 million Jesuses, only with good hygiene.

After all, most adults, even among baby boomers, believe that they themselves are wiser today than 10 years ago, let alone than when they were 20 years old.

Some people might look at their lives and say “I think differently now than I did ten years ago. I guess that goes to show that maybe I didn’t know everything.”
Some of those people, though, follow that up with “… but now I do.”

Prager would have to take a course to become the useful kind of idiot, though.

Firefox can’t find the server at http://www.whenyoungpeoplegetexcited.com.

Imagine my disappointment.

Alternative Shorter Dennis Prager: “Don’t vote”

“If people had sharks (…with…lazers…on…their…heads) on their firckin’ lawns, Dennis wouldn’t have to tell all them jungen folks to get the fuck off.”

Lazer guided land sharks!

I had the impression from your last post on Prager that he was excited about young people (and not in a good way).

leave it to dennis prager to make paul lynde look macho.

[/bye bye birdie metaphor]

All this seems to be true. The question, however, is whether it is a good thing for the country and not just for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

The answer is that it probably is not. With a few exceptions — and those exceptions are usually those rare cases when young people confront dictatorships — when youth get involved in politics in large numbers, it is not a good thing.

Fuck you Dennis Prager. Fuck you and the fucking cat that dragged you in. Mr. these young ‘uns disagree with me so it’s a real shame they can vote. You don’t even have the guts to disagree, all you’ve got is the youth of my youth did stuff thay I didn’t like.

For those of us who view the late ’60s and ’70s as the beginning of a downward spiral for American society, however, the mobilization of many young people on behalf of Barack Obama is not encouraging. It is only the latest example of young people getting excited as a result of their unique combination of naivete, lack of wisdom, romantic idealism and narcissism.

Yeah, total bummer about chicks thinking they had a say in anything. I mean the only reason they had the vote earlier was so that married men would get to count twice. Hey Dennis, you know what the difference is between you and your view of youth? The romantic idealism has been replaced with an extra dose of narcissism.

Actually, for a wise adult, it is not heartwarming

1. How the fuck would Dennis Prager know what a wise adult thinks?
2. The type of adult who assumes that youth is automatically wrong about everything, while they are always right is not wise. It’s a stupid idiot.
3. How the fuck would Dennis Prager know what a wise adult thinks?

Here’s your argument, Dennis you piece of shit Prager: The youth movement is responsible for US withdrawl from Viet Nam (not that draft aged people had any right to protest a war that they would be dying in – right DP?) therefore all youth movements are inherently wrong. And for that you advocate that civic involvement is bad.

Did I mention…Fuck you Dennis Prager

Alternative Shorter Dennis Prager: “Don’t vote”

Or rather: Youth participation is overrated, in fact, counterproductive. Vote for the Old Guy in November.

Another vacuous, disjointed, rambling commentary from the Dennis the Dean. Moving on…

Yeah, total bummer about chicks thinking they had a say in anything. I mean the only reason they had the vote earlier was so that married men would get to count twice. Hey Dennis, you know what the difference is between you and your view of youth? The romantic idealism has been replaced with an extra dose of narcissism.

Dragon-King Wangchuck: Wild thing, I think I love you.

David Letterman ridicules Bush, who is sitting in the audience. Reading out “highlights” of GW’s proposed memoirs, at one point Letterman says:

“March 5, 2000: Blows off CIA memo about Osama to watch Urkel Marathon on TV Land.”

Audience laughs. GW and Laura do not look pleased.

Letterman looks up and says “It’s not so funny, is it George?”

…when youth get involved in politics in large numbers, it is not a good thing.

Obviously, but the problem isn’t just young people. I think it’s disastrous for the nation when any human beings get involved in that confusing political stuff. Look at history – nearly all stupid political decisions were made by people. Clearly, we need to turn our government over to space aliens and start spending our time laying in our front yards masturbating.

I’m reminded of the Onion headline after the 2004 election.

“Young Americans Totally Meant to Vote in Record Numbers.”

Excited youth? We’ll see.

“I lived through May ’68. I was a 24-year-old graduate student and a journalist who covered the revolt, during which students armed with cobblestones battled the police, and 10 million workers went on strike. …

one graduate student is a tragedy, 10 million workers is a statistic

Do I count as a Boston Sadly, Yankee hat n all?
I am gonna be back up that way around the end of/beginning of the month, prob, tho.

Fucking pelicans pterodactyls.

Phuckin’ Awesome!

Can they take Dick Cheney away? plz?

I was a 23 year old graduated student in San Francisco in 1968, Frenchie. I went through all the fun in the 60s with Mario Savio, David Harris, and S.I. Hayakawa. And you know, Frenchie and Preggers, the DFHs turned out to be right, and the Hitler Youth Young Republicans, middle-aged Republicans and the Elderly Republicans were all wrong. The Man *was* out to screw the world and he used his own children’s blood to pay for it.

Well, if Preggers can’t see the truth with 40 years of hindsight and several very revealing memoirs to guide him, we can’t really expect him to see it now. He’s got his head so far up his ass he has two uvulas.

Crap. WordPress ate my strikeout “Hitler Youth”. How do you guys get HTML to work?

How do you guys get HTML to work?

We get him all hopped up on lattes regular old coffee and the next thing you know he’s cranking out posts like a motherfucker. Srsly, if he asks what’s in the thermos that’s what you tell him.

Mo’ srsly, you’ve got to spell out “strikeout”. But don’t worry it works fine the way it came out. Nobody would’ve known you fucked up the tag if you didn’t say so.

D’oh. That’s what I get for posting after staying out all night. I think it’s just the word “strike”. Going to bed now.

“Rare cases where young people confront dictatorships” – WTF?!?
Fat old man-bitch needs to Google “World War 2” some time.
The US not only gave Pol Pot his start in politics with all that lovely carpet-bombing of a neutral country, it then promptly gave “Democratic Kampuchea” official recognition & economic protection as a tie-in with its new trading partner China – & kept on covering for his genocidal regime until the dead grew too numerous to hide or deny anymore. Folks there & in Laos are getting maimed & poisoned to this day from all the “freebies” America dropped on them … & neither was ever a threat to anybody. Yep, those hippies must’ve been driven mad by injections of pure marijuana, to be upset about the brave effort to halt the (theoretical) Domino Effect.

These freeper-types are starting to sound like protein-based time-capsules, they’ve been playing their little 3-note-symphony for so bloody long now. But you just can’t make a trumpet out of a kazoo.

“…my university (Columbia) had its classrooms taken over and teaching interrupted by fellow students who had some clue as to what was going down; having watched the sexualization of society that followed the “Make Love Not War” generation that made me even more envious of my peers than when I was in high school; having watched America become obsessed with youth rather than wisdom masquerading as nascent Rethuglican youth frat swine as a result of the “Never Trust Anyone Over 30″ mantra of the ’60s young people; having seen the myriad speech codes that arose, ironically, out of the “Free Speech” movement at Berkeley and elsewhere that, inexplicably, eschewed the traditional racist misogynist hegemony-embracing discourse that’s now known as ‘hate speech’; having watched pacifist-like doctrines decimate America’s moral compass; that is to say, make people think imperialistic warmongering wherever whenever was somehow not an inherent American right; having witnessed a selfish preoccupation with an ever increasing number of inherent “rights” that somehow seemed to include the poor, people of color, and/or those with different views on gender with a commensurate devaluing of inherent moral obligations such as the right to never have to pay taxes to help anyone else for any reason, I, among many others, am not enamored of the ’60s and ’70s youth movement because no one would have sex with me and I was scared if I did LSD my children would have 12 toes and external organs.”
Sorry, but this one touches all of my many remaining Boomer raw nerves. What a disconnected fartbag.

This is a thing of beauty. U win the thread.

Clearly, we need to turn our government over to space aliens and start spending our time laying in our front yards masturbating.

Snorghagen, should you ever run for office, I’d emigrate in order to be allowed to vote for you.

Mind you, it’d take several decades to get through the immigration procedures, but hey, it’s well worth it for such a candidate.

“Rare cases where young people confront dictatorships” – WTF?!?
Fat old man-bitch needs to Google “World War 2? some time.

Naah, WWII was fought entirely by old guys. Y’know – John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson…

Don’t you know anything about history..?

MzNicky,
But you wanna know for sure?

Two words – I bake.

having watched pacifist-like doctrines decimate America’s moral compass

Does that mean our moral compass is 10 degrees off? And yet it still works better than his, which I suppose we’d have to call centioctidecimated.

Go to bed old man!

Mz.Nicky owns the thread, but come on. How great/Escherian/multi-dimensional is this:

“He’s got his head so far up his ass he has two uvulas.”

(to the tune of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”)

He’s got his head so-far
Up his ass
He’s got his head so-far
Up his ass
He’s got his head so-far
Up his ass
(That) He has two u-vu-las.

Thank you and good night.

having witnessed a selfish preoccupation with an ever increasing number of inherent “rights”

What’s mind-blowing about DP is that the “rights” he implies are selfish and destructive are:

* the right to be gay and not-beaten-to-death at the same time
* the right to tell people who make nasty comments that they’re total dillholes (zomg political correctness stifles free speech if you won’t approvingly listen to DP complain about feminazis, fags, lazy Mexicans and welfare queens!)
* the right to be considered by the law first and foremost as a person, and not as a black person, a female person, a Christian person, a Muslim person, a rich person, a gay person or a fratboy.

While the rights some of his readers actually think they have (and I am not making this up):

* the constitutionally guaranteed right to drive alone in the HOV lane.

You kids get off’n my lawn! indeedy.

When my parents were young, most of the young men got drafted to fight in WWII. When the war was over, that generation was left well indoctrinated with certain beliefs: that avoiding war was cowardly and that American military might was the answer to every problem.

Experience don’t always make you wiser. Some experiences (like say, watching Fox News fr’instance) make you less able to see the world as it really is.

Pragar says:

Having been a young person at that time and having watched as my university (Columbia) had its classrooms taken over and teaching interrupted by fellow students; having watched the sexualization of society that followed the “Make Love Not War” generation; having watched America become obsessed with youth rather than wisdom as a result of the “Never Trust Anyone Over 30” mantra of the ’60s young people; having seen the myriad speech codes that arose, ironically, out of the “Free Speech” movement at Berkeley and elsewhere; having watched pacifist-like doctrines decimate America’s moral compass; having witnessed a selfish preoccupation with an ever increasing number of inherent “rights,” with a commensurate devaluing of inherent moral obligations, I, among many others, am not enamored of the ’60s and ’70s youth movement.

wikipedia confirms that Prager likes to watch:

Prager attended Brooklyn College, majoring in Anthropology and History; he graduated in 1970.[1]

In 1969, Prager spent his junior year abroad at the University of Leeds in England. Having studied Russian, Prager was sponsored to be sent to the Soviet Union to bring in Jewish religious objects and meet with Russian Jewish dissidents. Upon his return, Prager began his career as a public speaker, lecturing several times a week about the state of Jews in the Soviet Union.

From 1970-72, Prager attended the Russian (now the Harriman Institute) and Middle East Institutes at the Columbia University School of International Affairs. He studied under Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who later served in the Carter administration as the head of the National Security Council.

Prager did not complete his Masters degree, dropping out instead in 1973 to collaborate with Joseph Telushkin on an introductory book about Judaism. Prager and Telushkin self-published the book in 1975 as The Eight Questions People Ask About Judaism, later published by Simon & Schuster in 1976 as The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism.

So in spite of his belief that America’s defeat in Vietnam was an unnecessary tragedy that led to unspeakable atrocities in Southeast Asia, to a greatly weakened America and to a revived Left, Prager never considered joining the army and risking his own life and limb in the cause so wisely mandated by the wise and wrinkled leaders of the time. Which is extra interesting when considered from the viewpoint of the unemployed and underemployed youths who joined the army pre-Iraq because they needed to earn a living and/or couldn’t afford the college education so casually indulged in and then abandoned by Mr. Prager. I wonder how he could afford all that studying? I wonder what he lived on while he and Mr. Telushkin wrote and “self-published” their book on Judaism?

I’d say his description of young people as naive, lacking wisdom, romantically idealistic and narcissistic tells us a lot more about Prager’s own self as a youth than it does about young people in general.

You know who really hates useful idiots? A useless idiot.