40 Years Ago Today...

...LBJ told the world he was hangin' up his spurs, the lascivious old bastard.

I was tuned into POTUS08, XM radio 130, this morning when I heard his gravelly Texas drawl oozing out of my speakers mid-speech.

I remembered that in '68 Johnson had surprisingly announced that he was no longer in the running for re-election. It oocurred to me that this was probably the anniversary...why else would they be rebroadcasting one of his speeches? He would have had to have done it this time of year...

The speech was apparently 35 minutes long, so I guess I caught the last 20 minutes or so.

The announcement, at the very end, was jarring different from the tone of the rest of his speech. Much of what I heard was devoted to recapping history and progress in Vietnam. I enjoyed getting to hear most of it today, even though the whole time I kept thinking about the awful parallels with Iraq.

If only Bush had had such qualms in 2004, maybe we'd be out there by now. But no...he is not only ignorant, he's stubborn.