Politics of past carries warning

By:  Cal Thomas
While we shouldn’t live in the past, we can certainly learn from it. We are not the first humans to walk the Earth and yet too many, especially the young, suffer from the conceit that history is just a boring subject in school.

PBS is rerunning episodes on its award-winning series “American Experience” on modern presidents and the challenges they faced. Each episode retraces what presidents believed to be good ideas at the time — from Lyndon Johnson’s program to wipe out poverty and defeat the communists in Vietnam to George W. Bush’s toppling of Saddam Hussein. In each episode, historians, as well as members of those administrations, are interviewed and provide perspective only hindsight can give.

One scene in the LBJ segment is particularly instructive when thinking about the two main candidates in the current presidential race. During consideration of Johnson’s…