Friday  17 Aug 2018           comment?

Russell Baker on Richard Nixon, April 1994:

Nixon hated the press, of course. Later when television replaced print as the instrument for clouding men's minds he hated television too. He wanted to cloud men's minds for himself and found it unbearable that press and television were able to interfere with the purity of the process.

Thursday  16 Aug 2018           1 comment

On September 30, 1991, California Governor Pete Wilson vetoed a bill to protect gay people from discrimination in employment. He aspired to run for President and knew that signing such a bill could work to his disadvantage in seeking the Republican nomination.

Protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco turned ugly, with government buildings vandalized and police officers assaulted.

Wilson was scheduled to give a speech two days later at a celebration of the centennial of Stanford University. Protesters aplenty came to the outdoor ceremony and tried to drown out Wilson as he spoke. Staff responded by cranking up the volume on the PA sytem. I was there but didn't boo Wilson until after he was done speaking.

Some people threw stuff at Wilson. I saw him catch an orange and throw it back. There were no arrests.

Contrast that with how Donald Tr--p addressed a rally on February 1, 2016:

If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell—I promise you I will pay for the legal fees, I promise.

In light of that and numerous other uncivil statements and actions, it's not a laughing matter when Tr--p tweets a video cobbled together to look like an assault on CNN personnel.

TOMMYJOURNAL stands in solidarity with the Boston Post and hundreds of other media outlets publishing editorials today denouncing Tr--p's casting the press as "enemy of the people".