Perhaps after Watergate, people we done going after the government and they just wanted to feel good - "morning in America" - so why ask harder questions about the grandfatherly old man in the White House?
AHC: Mondale wins in 1984
- Thread starter Bomster
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Perhaps after Watergate, people we done going after the government and they just wanted to feel good - "morning in America" - so why ask harder questions about the grandfatherly old man in the White House?
Perhaps, but I think the main reason Watetgate made such a splash in the public consciousness was the man-bites-dog aspect of it: an administration, if not the president himself, was engaged in the kind of crimes normally associated with street-level hoodlums.
Whereas the Beirut bombing, as I argued earlier, was the sort of thing that a lot of people will just file under More Bad Stuff Happening In The Middle East. And, unlike hearing that Nixon knew about the break-in and then started bribing people to keep quiet, it's difficult for the average person to figure out what exactly Reagan did wrong, 'cuz it involves issues of military logistics etc.
@GeographyDude
Would you happen to recall what exactly the Moonie woman was saying about the bombing? Was she trying to spin it in a particular political direction, or just sort of remarking on the event itself?
And I don’t think people were that self-reflective and self-aware about it. They just plain liked the guy.
Plus, the conservative ideas of:
1) strong defense,
2) cutting spending,
3) balancing the budget.
Well, who can be against these? And throw in tax cuts for good measure. And if it all doesn’t add up, you have the economists and the Laffer Curve as professional cover. Basically, the idea that we can outgrow the deficit. Not a completely crazy idea, but you’ve got to run the math!
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* Myself, I think a close second is often just fine on defense. Plus, you have your industrial base. I mean, this way you aren’t feeding into an arms race.
She called me at 8:30 in the morning to lambast me!
Somehow she mixed up my name or phone number with that of a Palestinian activist, even though my name is not particularly Palestinian. And I doubt this felllow would be in favor of the bombing either, unless he’s pretty far out in the direction of believing good will come from chaos.
Okay, I will occasionally shop religions. And so, I went to their group-living house, had lunch, and listened to her presentation.
In part, I think it’s so I can better understand how I rapidly became an evangelical Christian at age 13 and stayed that way for a year and a half. And also maybe to test my worldview as an agnostic and/or atheist?
In the house, there was another woman around age 30 who was very into her newborn baby. I had not seen a baby up close for months and months. So, that part was kind of neat. I later found out that Rev. Sun Myung Moon often does these mass weddings of like 500 couples, often mixed race couples to make the world a better place. Yes, I’m in favor of being open to mixed race, but I’m not in favor of arranged marriages.
After lunch, we finally got to the first young woman’s presentation. As an outsider, it sure looks like the complexity of their theories fills up the mental bandwidth, and you put off asking, how much support is there for these ideas anyway?
Oh, yes, when I got there, one of the cars had a bumper sticker which said “ . . KGB go home. . ” A little different.
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@GeographyDude
Wow, that's a better story than I was expecting, specifically the 8:30 harangue. I was thinking maybe she was just chatting about it in the hallways or something.
I've known a little over half a dozen Moonies(yes, they do answer to that name) in Korea, almost all of whom were westerners or Japanese women married to Korean men. The ones I was closest to were an American couple who had indeed been married in one of those mass weddings, but to be honest, they seemed pretty compatible: the woman was one of the few people who told me I looked better after gaining weight, and, sure enough, her betrothed turned out to be a bit on the chubby side.
Overall, these Moonies didn't seem brainwashed in any meaningful sense of the word, and in fact, were fairly open to other religious viewpoints. The woman I knew tried to fix my me up with a protestant woman of our mutual acquaintance, and when I told the Moonie that that woman hated Moonies, she shrugged and said "Oh, I don't care about that."
Apparently, non-Moonies can get married in those mass weddings as well, without having to convert, but I'd be worried that it gets used to try and drag you into the church eventually. And apart from not being a believer in the messianic status of Sun Myung Moon, I dislike their politics intensely.
On that score, it's amusing that the Moonies in the early 80s were yelling "KGB Go Home!", given their then-recent stint as a KCIA front group operating in the US.
Wow, that's a better story than I was expecting, specifically the 8:30 harangue. I was thinking maybe she was just chatting about it in the hallways or something.
I've known a little over half a dozen Moonies(yes, they do answer to that name) in Korea, almost all of whom were westerners or Japanese women married to Korean men. The ones I was closest to were an American couple who had indeed been married in one of those mass weddings, but to be honest, they seemed pretty compatible: the woman was one of the few people who told me I looked better after gaining weight, and, sure enough, her betrothed turned out to be a bit on the chubby side.
Overall, these Moonies didn't seem brainwashed in any meaningful sense of the word, and in fact, were fairly open to other religious viewpoints. The woman I knew tried to fix my me up with a protestant woman of our mutual acquaintance, and when I told the Moonie that that woman hated Moonies, she shrugged and said "Oh, I don't care about that."
Apparently, non-Moonies can get married in those mass weddings as well, without having to convert, but I'd be worried that it gets used to try and drag you into the church eventually. And apart from not being a believer in the messianic status of Sun Myung Moon, I dislike their politics intensely.
On that score, it's amusing that the Moonies in the early 80s were yelling "KGB Go Home!", given their then-recent stint as a KCIA front group operating in the US.
Now, often these groups do love bomb. But then if a person joins, it morphs to rigid and hierarchical. And abusive behavior flows downhill.
And it’s not that the first is automatically a pretend. It’s more like, that’s their A game for the general public. Then once it gets down to the nitty gritty of everyday life, well, the hierarchy is a pretty important part of their life, too.
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PS Did you and the Protestant woman happen to hit it off?
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@GeographyDude
No. To make a rather long and nuanced story short and simple, I had some serious questions about the mental health of that protestant woman, and didn't have the linguistic ability to form a deeper impression of her. So I wouldn't have been comfortable pursuing a relationship, even if she had been interested(which was by no means a certainty).
Also, in my experience, even platonic friendships between believers and non-believers eventually get to a painful point where one party is saddened to think that they won't spend eternity with their friend, and the other party realizes there is no way they can convert to something they don't believe to be true. This has happened to me with a number of Xtian friends, and this particular woman ALWAYS expressed a strong wish for me to convert.
I remained friends with her for a few years, but only really in the sense of seeing her downtown every now and then, and then she just sort of vanished.
And I hear what you're saying about the internal hierarchies of the Unification Church etc. I definitely got the impression that the church had a relatively strong influence over the lives of my moonie friends, possibly to the point of deciding where they would live etc. There were also a couple of rather odd, church-related things about their lives that I won't get into right now.
Never really thought I was getting love-bombed. The woman especially was rather friendly and helpful, but didn't seem to be attaching too many strings. She once told me she had a weekly meeting with a Korean Catholic nun, where they would discuss religion. "I'm not going to convince her, and she's not going to convince me, but we have a good time", was I think how she put it.
No. To make a rather long and nuanced story short and simple, I had some serious questions about the mental health of that protestant woman, and didn't have the linguistic ability to form a deeper impression of her. So I wouldn't have been comfortable pursuing a relationship, even if she had been interested(which was by no means a certainty).
Also, in my experience, even platonic friendships between believers and non-believers eventually get to a painful point where one party is saddened to think that they won't spend eternity with their friend, and the other party realizes there is no way they can convert to something they don't believe to be true. This has happened to me with a number of Xtian friends, and this particular woman ALWAYS expressed a strong wish for me to convert.
I remained friends with her for a few years, but only really in the sense of seeing her downtown every now and then, and then she just sort of vanished.
And I hear what you're saying about the internal hierarchies of the Unification Church etc. I definitely got the impression that the church had a relatively strong influence over the lives of my moonie friends, possibly to the point of deciding where they would live etc. There were also a couple of rather odd, church-related things about their lives that I won't get into right now.
Never really thought I was getting love-bombed. The woman especially was rather friendly and helpful, but didn't seem to be attaching too many strings. She once told me she had a weekly meeting with a Korean Catholic nun, where they would discuss religion. "I'm not going to convince her, and she's not going to convince me, but we have a good time", was I think how she put it.
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On April 18, 1983, a truck bomb was used against the American Embassy in Lebanon, with a final death toll of 63 persons, including 17 Americans.
And so, we had more than six months to be ready for the even more serious bombing of Oct. 23, 1980.