"HeyBub" wrote in message
Yep. Bush fired most of the Deputy Attorneys General. This is not to be
confused with Clinton who fired ALL of the Deputy Attorneys General.
To my lib and not lib friends I say the same thing. The law SAYS they can.
Move on to something that's a *real* problem. It's patronage and LBJ had to
promise quite a bit of it on the Hill to the Republicans whose votes he
needed for the Civil Rights Act to pass. It's like the old saying - you
wouldn't eat sausage if you knew how it was made. Some of the phone calls
made by LBJ during that era are available at the National Archives and I've
heard a few on TV news programs. A Texan horse-trader through and through.
IIRC, Jack Valenti was his professional pork dealer, handing out
Chairmanships for various Fed agencies to Senators that LBJ needed to pass
his bill.
There's a description of it he
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar.../valenti2.html
Indeed, in 1952, when the post of Democratic leader fell open, all the
senators said to Russell, "Dick, you be our leader." Russell said, "No,
Lyndon Johnson should be our leader." At that time, Johnson was four years
into his first term; he was only 44 years old. But with Russell's support,
they elected him leader, and so he became the youngest ever Democratic
leader in the history of the nation in the Senate, and soon became the
Senate's greatest parliamentary commander. So when Russell arrived - this
small, baldish Russell, with his penetrating blue eyes, and the six foot
four Johnson; they made an interesting pair - Johnson put his arm around him
and sat him down, and they sat very close to each other, and President
Johnson leaned over and he says, "Dick, I love you, and I owe you. I
wouldn't be President if it wasn't for you. You made me leader in '52. I
wouldn't have been Vice-President without you; I wouldn't be President
without you. So I owe you so much." And then he said, "Now Dick, I asked you
to come here because I want to tell you something. Do not get in my way on
this Civil Rights Bill, Dick, because if you do, I'm going to run you down."
And I remember Russell, in those rolling accents of his Georgia countryside,
said, "Well, Mr. President, you may very well do that, but if you do, you
will not only lose the South forever, you will lose this election."?
I had the experience of helping to renovate LBJ's alleged bag man, Bobby
Baker's hotel in Ocean City, MD. I was a totally unqualified but highly
paid (off the books) Formica mechanic. This was in the hippy 1970's where
my friend (whose father, a minor local mobster had the contract) got knocked
out by getting his shoulder length hair caught in a router. Zip, zoom,
bang! He was down on the floor with the router humming like a huge angry
bee. Ripped up a nice chunk of hair, too.
The work elevators weren't sealed at the roof so when strong winds came, the
elevators shafts screamed like something out of an old horror movie. The
cars bucked as well as the air pressure in the shaft varied from the venturi
effect. It made me spill a 5 gallon bucket of red contact cement on one of
the floors. There was more red goo than in an episode of Starz' Spartacus,
Blood and Sand. There's hardly anything worse you can spill, cleanup wise.
(Here come the stories of what's worse!) (-:
But there was a good side. His my buddy's teenage girlfriend from Dallas, a
5'2' natural platinum blonde with an unbelievably perfect 36" bustline
bounded out of the surf to greet me one day but her bikini top stayed
behind. I don't even think she knew it was missing until she saw my stunned
mullet expression. That image is burned into my mind like a brand into a
steer. It's those moments that make life worth living.
--
Bobby G.