Super-performance! Â
Matthew Yglesias tries to make sense out of Gallop’s opinion polling on presidents by age, and comes up puzzled, especially by Kennedy’s over-performance across the ideological spectrum.
“I can’t imagine a coherent ideological viewpoint that would justify the high ratings Americans over-35 give to Kennedy… if you could take the Kennedy-Johnson years as a whole, then divide them up into one presidency that was dominated by Vietnam and another one that’s responsible for Civil Rights and the Great Society, then you’d have one shitty president and one great president. A lot of people seem to have basically decided to divide things up this way and call the shitty president “Johnson†while the good president is called “Kennedy.†That, however, doesn’t have a great deal to do with reality.“
TCU Killed Kennedy! 
Now it can be told! the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is working the hell out of JFK’s pre-assassination overnight in Ft. Worth, and revisits once again Texas Christian University’s role in the road to martyrdom.
Kennedy’s plans originally included receipt of a TCUÂ honorary degree, but they changed when TCU’s board rejected the Papist President as not the right type of Christian.
In one of history’s great Woulda Coulda Shouldas, a TCU degree ceremony might have pushed Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade later in the day, spoiling Oswald’s shot.
  Kennedy held a rally at his Ft. Worth hotel instead, then headed for Dallas.
Many Horsemen Come 
Some clown operating a site as “Lyndon Baines Johnson II”is on their way to perfecting the confection of search terms randomly assembled into quasi-readable copy.
A detectable relationship to the beloved LBJ is non-existent, but if you have a burning need to read up on “Sales Lessons Learned from the NBA and Professional Basketball,” you’ve found the sweet spot.
 Substitutes For Victory  
The Boston Globe surveys John McCain’s version of the Vietnam War, and lordy, “Bomb, Bomb Iran” isn’t the beginning of his breezy confidence in airpower and death from above.
McCain’s father was commander of Pacific forces for much of the Vietnam war. In McCain’s version, dad was unhappy Richard Nixon wouldn’t unleash the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. His father quit quietly, and McCain feels he should have gone noisily in protest.
In Happier Times   
What didn’t Nixon unleash? Nixon escalated Lyndon Johnson’s bombing, and flirted with using atomic weapons against the North, telling old softy Henry Kissinger:
“The only place where you and I disagree … is with regard to the bombing…You’re so god-damned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”
The notion the US might have won, that the military fought only a limited war, is an old false claim, and belied by the 8 million tons of bombs we dropped, and the millions we killed.
We were bombing the crap out of a peasant economy, and there wasn’t much to hit even after dumbing down target lists early on.
“When NVN was first targeted the JCS found only 8 industrial installations worth listing on a par with airfields, military supply dumps, barracks complexes, port facilities, bridges, and oil tanks. Even by the end of 1965, after the JCS had lowered the standards and more than doubled the number of important targets, the list included only 24 industrial installations, 18 of them power plants which were as important for such humble uses as lighting streets and pumping water as for operating any real factories.”
Return To Yesteryear! 
“Mills of the gods” visits the opened to the masses and gussied up Johnson Ranch outside Austin, and comes away whimsically impressed by the old monster’s lair:
“The newly opened office brought back a flood of memories of mid-sixties furnishings and decorations. God but it has hideous. They had to tear up a very nice room to bring it back to the schlocky state Lyndon had left it in. Cheap paneling, a large T.V. built into the wall, crummy portrait of the homeowner , phones with six lines, hunting knife, everything but the head of a deer… Here were the tools of his domination of the Western world for five years. Here were the telltale signs of the Texas farm boy from Southwest Texas State Teachers College, overcompensating so that he could overcome in his own mind the fact that he was not like a Kennedy.”
The enduring weirdness of past greats is of course our endless obsession at Presidents”R”Us. True LBJ completests should check out a brief-lived but commendable effort at Minor Tweaks, where an impressive collection of Johnson oddities was accumulated in a short period.
