Tag: George McGovern

“Don’t blame me, I voted for McGovern” was the bumper sticker on my car on the day that President Richard M. Nixon resigned from office in disgrace. I proudly campaigned and voted for Senator George McGovern in 1972 who campaigned against the war in Viet Nam, as war the Richard Nixon had said he would end and hadn’t. It wasn’t the only reason, I voted for him but it was the main one.

Can you imagine a world without yellow ribbons?

Senator McGovern died early this morning after being admitted to a hospice in Sioux Falls, SD last week.

His family has requested that in lieu of flowers donations be made to Feeding South Dakota.

May the Goddess guide him on his journey to the Summerlands. May his family and friends and the world find Peace.

The Wheel Turns. Blessed Be.

Liberals need another George McGovern-and perhaps conservatives do too

In the home stretch of the ’72 campaign, [George] McGovern said, “Government has become so vast and impersonal that its interests diverge more and more from the interests of ordinary citizens.”

I was digging around the internet for statistics on liberals, conservatives, and moderates. And ran into a conservative (Bill Kauffman) writing with reverence about the left’s George McGovern. Interesting, I thought.

Especially the part where he talks about McGovern crediting George Wallace’s appeal as a candidate to “a sense of powerlessness in the face of big government, big corporations, and big labor unions.” He asked Wallace for his endorsement, though as he recalls with a smile, “He said, ‘Sena-tah, if I endorsed you I’d lose about half of my following and you’d lose half of yours.'” Well, maybe, guv-nah-but just think of the coalescent possibilities of the remaining halves.

“It is not prejudice to fear for your family’s safety or to resent tax inequities. … It is time to recognize this and to stop labeling people ‘racist’ or ‘militant,’ to stop putting people in different camps, to stop inciting one American against another,” said McGovern, who called the Wallace vote “an angry cry from the guts of ordinary Americans against a system which doesn’t seem to give a damn about what is really bothering people in this country today.”

What hits me in my gut is that last line…

…an angry cry from the guts of ordinary Americans against a system which doesn’t seem to give a damn about what is really bothering people in this country today

George McGovern, whose run for president as a peace candidate helped end the Vietnam war, has endorsed the Iraq Moratorium, saying that the Iraq war is even worse than Vietnam because the US should have learned a lesson from its disastrous Vietnam policies.

Today is Iraq Moratorium #6, which asks opponents of the war and occupation to take some action, big or small, to show that they want the war to end and the troops to come home.  Inspired by the Vietnam Moratorium, it is a loosely-knit grassroots effort which lists more than 100 antiwar events happening across the country today on its website.

“Common sense helped end the mistaken war in Vietnam.  Common sense citizen action can end the mistaken war in Iraq.  That’s why I support the Iraq Moratorium.”

“I wish our leaders today had a little more knowledge of history,” McGovern said in a talk in Milwaukee this week.  “It seems I spent half my life opposing that (Vietnam) war.”

McGovern said he remembered telling his daughter, Susan, that “even good things can come from tragedy.  Vietnam was such an obvious blunder that we’ll never again go down that road.”

McGovern was overcome with emotion and had to pause to collect himself when discussing “the loss of 58,000 wonderful young Americans” in the Vietnam War.  “To this day, I can’t walk past that black marble wall (the Vietnam Memorial)… without losing my composure, yet here we are going down that same road again, 4,000 wonderful young Americans,” McGovern said.

McGovern called Iraq “a hopeless bloody mess” and said that “in some respects, it is even worse than Vietnam because we had Vietnam as a lesson and our leaders ignored it.”

“The transcendent issue in ’72 was the war in Vietnam,” McGovern said. “We’ve got another transcendent war issue that just has to be resolved.” Although some consider the economy the top issue, the nation’s economic difficulties are rooted in the war, he said.

He was in Milwaukee to attend an event for his grandson, Sam McGovern-Rowen, who is a candidate for alderman in Tuesday’s primary election.