This was an excellent dissection. I've been taken aback, too, by the really raw and rabid tone the media has taken to the Swiftvets campaign (see Tina Brown's Washington Post column today where she says Bob Dole is ugly, John O'Neill is fat, and Van Odell has a moustache that is offensive to her). Another excellent and similar take on this was provided by the Brazilian journalist and blogger Nelson Ascher a few days ago at http://europundits.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_europundits_archive.html#109319042875350255
I think you will like it.

I'd read about, but never really understood, the rage that Republicans felt about FDR, how the Democrats felt about Lincoln and how the Federalists felt about Jackson. I think now we're seeing first-hand how a democratic elite is overturned.

Brandon:

Revolutionaries are always hated by those with a stake in the existing regime. That Bush is a counter-revolutionary can not diminish the hatred.

What protest years?
In 1968 I was 13 and heavily into slot cars.
Not VIETNAM! VIETNAM! VIETNAM!

Nixon was evil, though not as evil as Wilson. The trick the boomer media (can I refer to them as the "BM"?) played was to convince people that he was a conservative when in fact he was a liberal.

David:
You certainly have my permission to use BM. In fact, I think you should copyright it.

David - I've usually seen BM as shorthand for Bowel Movement (having kids you see stuff like that). But Boomer Media = Bowel Movement makes sense to me.

I was born in 1947. In 1965, when I was 18:

**I was a liberal -- just like my parents, a Jewish New Deal Democrat.

**I opposed the VietNam war -- it was fashionable.

**I went on peace marches -- just trying to meet girls.

**I dodged the draft -- pure cowardice, not pretty but true and no one to shame me into being better.

But:

I grew up. I did not just get older. I learned from my experiences. I changed my opinions to reflect what I learned from life. I hope I am not unique in this respect, but looking at dofussisim like Matthews and Kerry sometimes I think I am.

Speaking for my fellow late-Boomers (1957-64), I just want to say we're pretty tired of being dragged along as balast for the foibles and self-centered whims of the early-Boomers, who the media of the 1960s fell in love with because certain key leaders (many of whom, like Kerry, were actually born before the boom) were able to voice the political beliefs they couldn't overtly say in the press or on TV.

We were between the ages of 4 and 11 when the Chicago riots occurred, and were between 5 and 12 when John Kerry was busy trying to located Cambodia. But for the past 35 years, whatever paths the early Boomers have gone down have been portrayed as representing "the voice of their generation", and now that those same people hold many of the positions of power in the media, they don't even have the same restraint on letting their biases show that the reporters of a generation ago did.

If it wasn't so early-Boomerish, I'd hire John Edwards to sue that group for defamation, and demand federal demographers give us our own generational designation so we won't be linked to their ongoing annoyances for another 35 years.

John,
I'm a mid to late Boomer (1957). I agree that the early Boomers got to set the agenda for our generation. First off, they always say that the defining moment was the Kennedy assasination. All I remember about Kennedy was that I couldn't watch cartoons on the day of his funeral. I wasn't obsessed with Vietnam, but also I didn't have a real expectation that I would have to worry about the draft. Us late Boomers got off the hook for that. My big passion from the 60s was the Space program and the Moon landings.

We are the generation that unleashed Disco, so I wouldn't brag too loudly about us.

John and Ken: Well put. I was born in 1966 (Early Gen X, but I only speak for myself). I remember a polisci prof at Michigan State talking about the Watergate Scandal, and all us students busy scribbling in our notes and he looked around and asked why we were so quiet, why we weren't outraged. I raised my hand and pointed out that in 1974 I was eight and more interested in my matchbox cars than Pres. Nixon. The look on his face when he said "Thanks. Now I feel old" was priceless. It was only 13 years previous that Nixon had resigned, yet it was all past, far past, for his students.

Kind of humbling. You and your times may not be all that and a bag of chips.

Um, that's actually spelled "doofusism", Robert. The adjective form is doofusoidal

Well, yes, Robert, we late-Boomers do have our own hideous crosses to bear on the social landscape of the times. But by the late 1970s the early-Boomers were looking at some of our cultural choices with condesending disdain, because we weren't following their path to enlightenment.

That's a pretty weak justification for the disco era, but if it pissed a few counter-culture folks off along the way, it's worth a point or two on the positive side of the ledger.

The early Boomers definitely set the generational agenda, but at least Bush (1946) is trying to change the national one.

As for the Kennedy assasination, this Boomer (1948) spent the evening of Sunday November 24, 1963 trying unsuccessfully to get some NFL scores on the radio (the AFL decided not to play that day).

I assumed Robert was harking back to the plural of the ancient Hebrew root: doofussim.

Brandon: Paul Johnson wrote amusingly on Republican invective against FDR in his classic _Modern Times_ and also in his later _History of the American People_; the passage he quotes from Thomas Wolfe about the reactions of people aboard a transatlantic cruise ship when he told them he proposed to vote for Roosevelt in 1936 is a corker.

Mikey and all: I just realized something. This month is the 30th anniversary of Nixon's resignation. In fact, the anniversary date has already come and gone - _yet nobody paid any attention_!!!

Getting in late here--- As an eldest child born in 1957, I agree. My criteria for being a Baby Boomer has been--did your parents experience in WWII as an adult? That seems to be the key. There's a great difference in being the sixth child of someone who's pushing forty, and the first of someone who's in the early-twenties.

And not just Nixon's resignation, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki got little play, too. It's almost like the Left is so consumed with defeating Bushitler the Evil Smirking Chimp that they can't afford to waste any time on celebrating the past.

Robert:

>My big passion from the 60s was the Space
>program and the Moon landings.

The Moon by 1970, Mars by 2000, the doughnuts-in-orbit space stations, the nuclear and ion-driven deep-space craft cruising to the outer planets, domes and cities on Mars and the outer moons, and after that -- the starships...

Never forget:

We threw away the stars so we could screw in the mud at Woodstock.

We threw away the stars so we could masturbate all our lives with ANGST! ANGST! ANGST! about VIETNAM! VIETNAM! VIETNAM!

David Ha'Cohen has it right. The Shrophshire lad is congugating in the wrong language.

Ken:

We threw away the stars so we could screw in the mud at Woodstock.

No, we didn't.

Getting to Mars by 2000 was always going to be a stretch, although we could have done it, had it been a national priority.
Don't forget, the difference between getting to the Moon, and getting to Mars, is similar to the difference between getting to the corner bodega, and getting from downtown to the 'burbs.

As for the doughnuts-in-orbit space stations, and the nuclear and ion-driven deep-space craft, with luck, you'll still see 'em fly.
You're a fairly young guy.