Left of the Looking Glass

Nice Review For My Short Story

2012-01-15T11:32:00.000-08:00

What follows is a review of the anthology "Writers On The Wrong Side Of The Road," including my short story therein, "The Barefoot Hero." The review was written by Leigh Lane of "The Cerebral Writer."

"This anthology contains some of the creepiest and unusual stories I’ve read in a long time. While a few of the selections seemed out of place either by caliber or by genre, the best works in this anthology truly set the bar for greatness in speculative fiction. As a whole, I rate Writers on the Wrong Side of the Road at four stars and recommend it as a great addition to any speculative fiction library. Here's the story breakdown:

“The Barefoot Hero” by Timothy Fleming – 5 stars

A man looks back to the past after the tragic death of an old friend.

“The Barefoot Hero” brought tears to my eyes. The story is bittersweet, tragic, and brilliantly written. The characterization is deep and thoughtful, leading to a conclusion that is as painful as it is gratifying. A lovely story.

“Hold Up” by Lucille P. Robinson – 4 stars

A serial rapist gets more than he bargains for at his local Wal-Mart.

This story is thoughtful and well-written. I liked the premise a lot, but would have liked to have read more. The ending was justifiably abrupt, but it did leave the story feeling somehow incomplete. Nonetheless, it's a good, short read.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Judgement Day” by Angelika Devlyn – 3.75 stars

A young woman jumps at the chance at revenge after an attack sends her to the hospital with a miscarriage.

This story has some great moments to it, but needs a few kinks smoothed before it might live to its full potential. The premise is very good and the twist fun; however, following the story is frustrating at times because believability of many of the character motivations is shaky in many places. The erotica was well-written.

“For Art’s Sake” by Elizabeth Coldwell – 4.5 stars

A move and career change can be a pain in the rear. . . .

I don’t claim spanking as one of my turn-ons, but I enjoyed this erotic piece all the same. The story is well-written and cohesive and moves to a satisfying ending.

“Simon Seeks” by Nathan L. Yocum – 4.75 stars

A psychic finds his own life on the line when sent on a search for a missing girl.

This story is executed beautifully, offering creative visuals and awesome depth to details other authors might leave mundane. The only disappointing part is the ending, which seems far too abrupt for such an otherwise meticulously laid out story. I wanted to read more.

“The Cenotaph” by Casey Wolf – 4.25 stars

Past and present collide when a camper stumbles upon a long-forgotten memorial.

A thoughtful commentary on perspective and war, this story does a great job at showing the fears and expectations that arise when one considers leaving for war. Some of the shifts are a little jarring, but may be intentional in an attempt to pull the reader into the protagonist’s confused state of mind. Overall, this is a very good story.

“Take Two” by Kit St. Germain – 4.5 stars

An interesting post-apocalyptic future history, this story speculates the effects of religious take-over and genetically modified food.

Very well-written and creative, “Take Two” paints a very interesting future picture, moving at a fast pace and growing in intrigue as the story progresses. The ending is anticlimactic however, offering a good twist, but not executing quite powerfully enough to hit with the five-star punch it could have.

“The Journey” by Megan Johns – 4.5 stars

A housewife on a train ride contemplates her life while eavesdropping on a group of nearby passengers.

“The Journey” cleverly explores human insecurity and interpersonal dynamics, while offering a twist ending that is sure to delight.

“Triona’s Beans” by Casey Wolf and Paivi Kuosmanen – 2 stars

A young girl goes on an intergalactic adventure with little people that look like feathered beans.

I had great difficulty getting through this story, which reads like a very young children’s fantasy. This story does not belong in a dark speculative fiction anthology.

“The Meal” by Mike Brecon – 4 stars

Two couples come together for the taping of a reality television show.

The concept behind this story is great and I enjoyed the writer’s style, although I would have liked to have seen some of the scenes hashed out a little more.

“Seven Deadly Sins” by Karen Coté – 3 stars

A man snaps after his past catchers up with him and unravels his life.

This story is creative, sick, and bleeding with potential. Sadly, the prose needs tightening, as do the structure and story development. As is, the story depends too much on shock value, leaving the reader with flat characters in a tense but static environment.

“The Smile in Her Eyes” by John B Rosenman – 4.75 stars

A man sees what he believes to be the essence of his deceased wife in a teenage girl.

Very well-written and creepy on many subtle fronts, “The Smile in her Eyes” reads like Lolita in The Twilight Zone. Pay attention to every little detail when you read this story or you’ll miss out on its full brilliance.

“Slumfairy” by Tonya R. Moore – 3 stars

Factions fight over the pilot—and therefore the future—of a super-massive space ship.

This story is difficult to follow, with plot holes and vague spots that leave too many questions throughout the work. There is too much going on, too many aliens to keep track of, and not nearly enough time taken to paint a good, cohesive picture of it all.

“A New Leaf” by Megan Johns – 4 stars

A divorce finds solace in her garden after starting over in a new home.

Sweet and well-written, this story would have been even more enjoyable if it had not ended so hastily. Even so, this is a satisfying story.

“Man Slaughter” by Lucille P. Robinson – 5 stars

An alleged murderer recalls each of the deaths she has been accused of while giving her official statement of confession.

The characters and plotline of this story are developed and executed masterfully. The characters are believable and the story creepy. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one.

“Pronghorns” by Casey Wolf – 5 stars

A double suicide goes to “Plan B” when initial plans go awry.

“Pronghorns” is a darkly brilliant commentary on life and death. It is well-written, gripping, and has a shockingly profound ending. This is one of those stories that resets the bar.

“Frame of Reference” by Mike Brecon – 4 stars

Story and reality collide in the mind of a young, insecure writer who finds himself unsure how to proceed with a scene.

Any type of artist will appreciate the twist to this quick, fun read.

Malpas by Marion Webb-De Sisto – 2 stars

A woman falls victim to, then in love with, an incubus.

The premise is decent, but the story is thoroughly unpolished. The prose is simplistic, the vast majority of the dialog recaps previous scenes, and the erotic scenes seem forced and filled with unnecessary, moment-jarring dialog. This story is a disappointing end to a very good anthology.

Overall score: Four Stars."

--Leigh Lane

Visit Blogs Of "WOTWSOTR" Authors For Chance To Win Prizes

2011-12-14T07:49:00.000-08:00

The contributing authors of the Alternative Read anthology, "Writers On The Wrong Side Of The Road," are offering a chance to win prizes for visiting their blog sites and leaving comments...thru Dec. 22. Look for the holiday hat logos on the book covers on each author's site (note: you'll have to click on my November 2011 archive button to the right to find my holiday hat logo and blog). The grand prize is a Free Kindle. Instructions on how to win that are at the bottom of this post. Here is a list of the writers and what you can win:

Holiday Hat Book Cover #1
28th Nov -- Sassy Brit - opens the tour
This is where it starts!
The Writers on the Wrong Side of the Road
Book Tour and Treasure Hunt #1 http://bit.ly/shf87H
Leave a comment on the AR blog for a chance to win
the book prize

Holiday Hat Book Cover #2
29th Nov -- Visit Editor Clayton Bye for day 2 of the tour
http://bit.ly/sFqHZQ
Leave a comment on Clayton's blog
for a chance to win the book prizes.

Holiday Hat Book Cover #3
30th Nov -- Megan Johns Invites
you to meet the editors: http://bit.ly/utwJTA
Leave a comment on Megan's blog
for a chance to win the prize!

Holiday Hat Book Cover #4
1st Dec --Megan Johns Invites
you to meet the authors: http://bit.ly/vTfl9U
Leave a comment on Megan's blog
for a chance to win the prize!

Holiday Hat Book Cover #5
2nd Dec -- Find the 5th Holiday Hat with John B. Rosenman
and win his book Dax Rigby War Correspondent while you are there http://bit.ly/rJL5UD
Leave a comment on John's blog
for a chance to win the book prize.

Holiday Hat Book Cover #6
5th Dec -- Angelika Devlyn is featured on Blossom and Thorn's blog -
To find out more about winning a copy of Black Ice
Go here and continue the hunt: http://bit.ly/tGjXio
Leave a comment on Blossom and Thorn's blog
for a chance to win the book prize.

Holiday Hat Book Cover #7
6th Dec -- Find the 7th Holiday Hat Book cover and win
an angelic fantasy with Marion Web-De Sisto
http://bit.ly/rJo0ZV
Leave a comment on Marion's blog for a chance to win the book prize.

Holiday Hat Book Cover #8
7th Dec -- Win an Erotic Deception with Karen Cote'
http://bit.ly/ud56ow
Leave a comment on Karen's blog for a chance to win the book prize.

Holiday Hat Book Cover #9
8th Dec -- Win 2 copies of Kit St. Germain's Escape clause here:
http://bit.ly/vPsicv (leave comments of the AR blog for a chance to win books).

Holiday Hat Book Cover #10
9th - Dec -- Win $25 or equivalent with Tonya R. Moore
http://bit.ly/tnxiK0
Leave a comment on Tonya's blog for a chance to win the $25 Amazon gift voucher prize.

Holiday Hat Book Cover #11
12th Dec -- Win a copy of Murder of an American Nazi with Tim Fleming
http://bit.ly/rAeCg1
Leave a comment on Tim's blog for a chance to win the book prize.

Holiday Hat Book Cover #12
13th Dec -- Win a copy of erotic dark fantasy Black Ice with Angelika Devlyn
http://bit.ly/sk4LXh
Leave a comment on Angelika's blog for a chance to win the book prize

Holiday Hat Book Cover #13
14th Dec -- Win a copy of Mike Brecon's book A Dangerous Remedy
http://bit.ly/vFTkmt
Leave a comment on Mike's blog for a chance to win the book prize.

You have until 22nd Dec to leave a comment on each of these authors blogs to win their individual prizes.

For the KINDLE CONTEST- you have until 25th Dec to send all your answers - the urls to all the places
you've found the 'Holiday Hat book covers' to Sassy Brit here: http://bit.ly/gNmBvs

Full details of both contests are here: http://bit.ly/sCuhYB

My Meeting With The History Professor Who Doesn't Know His History--The Inspiration For My Short Story "The Barefoot Hero"

2011-11-28T12:06:00.000-08:00

A few months back my wife retired from her position as a music professor at a local college. At her retirement party I struck up a conversation with a young history professor. Turns out he specializes in the history of southeast Asia. This was of particular interest to me because I consider myself something of an expert on the origins, purposes, and consequences of American involvement in the Vietnam War. I was excited to find a knowledgeable historian with whom I could share my views on the topic, and I looked forward to a stimulating discussion. The professor, however, soon blunted my enthusiasm. The more we talked, the more I realized he was the worst of all academicians--the history teacher who does not know his history.

When I mentioned that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which LBJ used as his excuse for an all-out troop commitment and irreversible escalation, was a hoax, the professor looked befuddled. When I named all the defense contractors (including Halliburton/KBR...yes, even back then Halliburton was making billions in blood money) that got obscenely rich off the war, his eyes narrowed and his expression told me, "So what?" And when I tried to explain to him that the point of the war was not to win it but to make it last as long as possible for American war profiteers to suck every last penny they could from it, the professor got indignant. He stammered and sputtered, "What gives you...on what basis...why..."

Before he could form a coherent sentence, I made a pre-emptive strike. "Take for instance the Battle for Hill 875. Certainly you're familiar with that," I gently goaded.

"The what...875th Hill...huh?" mumbled the professor.

"It took place in the Central Highlands near Dak To in November 1967. One of the bloodiest battles of the entire war. I've talked to survivors of it, and they have never shaken its horrors. To this day they have nightmares about it. The VC were entrenched on a large hill, called 875 by the American high command. The order came down to take the hill, but this was the VC's home turf and they would not be easily defeated. They knew jungle warfare and how to survive in it. The carnage went on for four days. The casualties were great. One suvivor remembered the hill running red with blood. It finally ended on Thanksgiving Day. The VC retreated and the hill belonged to the 173rd airborne brigade. What did American forces do with this hard-won hill? They abandoned it within a week. It held no strategic advantage. In other words, there had been no point to the entire battle. This sort of thing happened over and over in Vietnam. Battle after battle, won and lost, to no apparent end. The objective observer can only conclude that the war had no ultimate purpose other than to line the pockets of weapons makers and other defense contractors."

The professor was stunned for a moment, but he managed to recover and recite the refrain of the hopelessly misinformed, "We stopped communist aggression. If Vietnam had fallen who knows...the communists might have come to our shores. Better there than here."

"Ah...the old domino theory. Tell me you're not clinging to that; it's been discredited long ago...even by the most hawkish historians," I condescended. My patience with this neophyte had run out. "The fact is South Vietnam did fall, yet the communists did not take over the world. They got not closer than China. Not one nation in the western hemisphere fell after Vietnam."

The professor took a hearty swig of beer and looked away in resignation. I almost felt sorry for him. "Look," I offered, "It's okay not to know something, but you should at least be inquisitive...where's the curiosity to find out more? And please tell me you're not polluting those young, malleable minds in your history class. They deserve better than that. All of us deserve to know our real history."

With that, the young professor skulked away and made a point of avoiding me for the rest of the night.

In subsequent days, the remembrance of that encounter gnawed at me. The history professor's lack of intellectual curiosity appalled me. Rather than sit me down and grill me to find out more, he simply dismissed me as a crackpot. Were all American professors this way? Were they feeding their students disinformation? What the hell was really going on in collegiate classrooms? The study of history should be a diligent search for the truth about our past, not a lazy recitation of textbook prevarications.

I decided to do something about it--write a story that makes the causes and effects of the war more personal, more meaningful. "The Barefoot Hero" is my small way of setting the record straight.

My Short Story Will Be Published In New Anthology

2011-08-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

Publisher, editor and writer C.C. Bye came to me with an offer I could not resist. He told me, "I want to publish a book that's off-beat, wild, maybe a little dangerous. Give me a short story that fits this description." So I did. "The Barefoot Hero" is my take on what Vietnam did to my generation, the lost generation of the '60s, if you will. The publishers loved it, and have readied it and the other stories for a November release. The front and back cover design is posted here.

"Writers On The Wrong Side Of The Road" will feature edgy, unconventional offerings of sci-fi, erotica, historical fiction, and more. More details to follow

A Modest Proposal To Stop Gulf Oil Leak

2010-06-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

I've got a great idea to stop the BP Gulf Oil Leak--have Liz Cheney wrap her big mouth around it and see how much she can swallow. She's all over TV blowing off her big trap uselessly (trying to blame Obama for the spill), her family loves oil, and her father helped create the climate of Halliburton fraud and incompetence which led to the leak. Those responsible for the leak should fix it, right?

What happened to the good old days when ex-vice presidents and their families, especially hated ones, walked off into the sunset and were never heard from again? I wish Dick and his evil offspring would just disappear. But they've become corporate media darlings. Liz Cheney was on ABC's Sunday morning show (I don't even remember the name of this talking dead show...I just know it's imbued with George Will's right-wing hogwash) trying to blame Obama for the oil spill. This takes some outrageous audacity, considering it was Halliburton's faulty cementing of the pipe that caused the whole damn thing. At least Ariana Huffington ripped Liz a new one. She said, "This is just a continuation of the Bush/Cheney doctrine of allowing Halliburton to defraud American taxpayers out of hundreds of billions of dollars with incompetent, overpriced, and deadly work." Halliburton has made a fortune off the Iraq war and killed many soldiers with faulty labor. Some were fried while taking showers in quarters with faulty wiring made by Halliburton.

Yet Liz Cheney denied it all on national TV, and I'm sure the idiot right was appeased. As I watched her jack her fascist jaws (notice, she has the eyes of a snake...dead and soulless...just like Palin), I began to imagine what she would have done in previous times. Can't you just picture her screaming "Macht shnell, macht shnell!!" in 1940s Germany, as she herded prisoners into Dachau showers (made by Halliburton). Or blocking James Meredith's way as he tried to enter Mississippi U. in the '60s? Or shouting down women's equality marchers in the '70s? Or killing abortion doctors in the '90s?

America will be a better place when we are finally done with the Cheney tribe and its hateful, rapacious ways.

Opening Day Memories

2010-04-04T11:53:00.001-07:00

Spring begins for me on the opening day of the baseball season. Warm winds are blowing across the plains today, and I am flooded with rich memories of Cardinal opening days.

In the early sixties I would rush home from school, flick on the large radio in my parents' bedroom, and hear the end of the opening game. I have always associated Harry Caray's voice (yes, Cubs fans he broadcasted the Cardinals games then) with the hope and heartbreak that comes with each new season. 1961 remains vivid for how the game ended. Daryl Spencer hit a long home run off Warren Spahn to beat the Milwaukee Braves in extra innings. Six days later the term Bay of Pigs became a topic of conversation in our house and on TV. I thought they were discussing the strange sounds farm animals make.

On a cold, gray day in 1965 the Cardinals and Cubs played to a 10-10 tie on opening day. The game was called because it was too dark to continue. St. Louis scored a run in the top of the eleventh to take the lead, but knuckleball reliever Barney Schultz blew it in the bottom of the eleventh. LBJ started sending ground troops to Vietnam the same year.

Back home from the Army in 1975, and high on an illegal substance, I attended opening day at Busch Stadium. I don't remember much, except the Cardinals lost to the Expos and I heckled our washed-up shortstop Eddie Brinkman. 23 days later, Saigon fell, and the war in Vietnam ended.

On April 11, 1981, a rainy Saturday in St. Louis, the Phillies beat the Cards to begin Whitey Herzog's first full year as manager. The players' strike shortened that year, and, though they had the best cumulative record in the National League, the Cardinals were excluded from the playoffs by a goofy split season playoff format. My daughter, born the previous autumn on a football Saturday, turned six months old in April 1981. We lived in a second-story shotgun flat in south St. Louis; not much of an apartment, but I remember it fondly now.

On a warm Easter Sunday in 1994, Ray Lankford lined a home run, which never got more than 10 feet off the ground, over the center-field wall at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. The Cards won that night, but their season was doomed. And so was their manager, Joe Torre.

Pope's Publicist Pisses People Off

2010-04-02T19:47:00.000-07:00

VATICAN CITY – At a solemn Good Friday service, Pope Benedict XVI's personal preacher likened the tide of allegations that the pontiff has covered up sex abuse cases to the "more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism." But within hours, facing a storm of criticism at the comparison, the Vatican felt it necessary to distance the pope from the preacher's remarks.

Both Jewish and victims' groups responded that it was inappropriate to compare the discomfort being experienced by the church leadership in the sex abuse scandal to the violence that culminated in the Holocaust. The Vatican has been on the defensive in recent days, saying the church has been singled out and collectively stereotyped for the problem of pedophilia, which it says is a society-wide issue.

This was the AP story that ran tonight after the Pope's "preacher" tried to turn Catholic pedophile-priests into victims/martyrs. First of all, what the fuck is a "personal preacher"? Is that the Pope's PR agent? And who is this Jewish friend of his? It sounds like this letter was made up by the PR agent in a desperate attempt to deflect blame onto the real victims--abused children and their families.

These "men of God" are showing their true colors. They are vainglorious, clueless, and callous. Descendants of Peter who care only about covering their asses, trying to spin the outing of child rapists into a witch hunt. What a bunch of scoundrels. I hope the story never dies, until the Church is forced to clean its own house. The Pope is a head of state (Vatican City is its own country), but once he leaves his palace he can be arrested like a common criminal for being an accomplice to rape. This would never happen, but wouldn't it be great to see Ratzenberg, ex-Hitler youth, doing the perp walk.

Mary and Jack, my apologies, but the pious hypocrisy makes me want to hurl.

Right-Wing Hate, Threats, Violence On The Rise

2010-03-25T03:03:00.000-07:00

In the wake of passage of health-care reform, the loony right is becoming even more dangerous than usual. They are throwing bricks through the windows of Democratic offices; they are praying for the death of the President; they are even threatening to kill children.

No, these are not Minutemen hiding in some survivalist Idaho bunker. These are not Klansmen burning crosses in Mississippi. These are not neo-Nazis marching in Skokie. These are your neighbors, your pastors, your elected representatives.

Bricks have been thrown through the windows of local Democratic headquarters in Ohio and Kansas. Glass has been shattered at the offices of Louis Slaughter (D-NY) in Niagara Falls and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in Tucson. A note was left behind by a vandal at another site. It referenced Barry Goldwater's, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

A fundamentalist California preacher named Wiley Drake urged his flock to pray for the death of all congressmen who voted for the health-care reform bill. (Now that's a Christian attitude!) Racist and homophobic slurs were hurled at prominent Democrats Barney Frank and John Lewis.

Are Republican leaders encouraging cooler heads to prevail? No, they are instigating the hate. Sarah Palin cries, "Don't retreat; reload." Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) shouts "Baby Killer!" at Bart Stupak (D-MI) on the House floor.

And it's going to get worse, if you listen to the extremist rhetoric of the fringe right. Like whiny children who can't accept defeat, Republicans are still trying to derail health care with parliamentary technicalities and whacky amendments. Apparently they believe in democracy only when it works for them.

America is a scary place now, and I worry for the safety of anyone on the left who speaks his or her mind in public. We are like the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, huddled in our homes hoping that fascists don't throw bricks through our windows or haul us off to concentration camps. They are armed, and we are not. And they have Goebbels Limbaugh spewing hate on the radio all day, inciting the worst of the lot to take action.

Unlike the German Jews, however, I won't go quietly. In my little corner of the Midwest, I am still loudly resisting the bastards, and I will not stop. See my previous post, entitled "The GOP (Gathering Of Primitives) At My Door," for tips on how to deal with these mindless fanatics. Remember the words of Huey Long, "Fascism will come to America, but they will call it democracy. But only if we let it happen."

The Catholic Left: Forced Underground In The Heartland

2010-03-21T02:37:00.000-07:00

We hear a lot about the radical right-wing Catholic anti-abortionists. They are the living expression of official Church dogma. But did you also know that the Catholic Church is anti-war and anti-death penalty. There are no public expressions of this dogma. Why? Part of the reason is that the right wing has taken over the Catholic Church, and left-wing Catholics have been bullied into submission. Not only do leftists not have a voice in the Church, they have been forced underground. What do I mean? Here in southern Illinois, the eastern wing of the greater St. Louis archdiocese (no small lot, Catholics make up about half of the area's seven million citizens), anti-war, pro-choice, humanist Catholics have been banned from gathering on church properties. I learned this from a friend named Mary, who is constantly trying to re-convert me. I am a Jesuit-educated, anti-Catholic, secular-progressive heretic, and she still clings to the old faith even though, like all disciples, she is a living contradiction.

Anyway, we had a conversation yesterday which went something like this:

ME: Whatever happened to the left-wing voice of the Church...you know the humanist movement that thrived after the proclamations of Vatican II?

MARY: I don't know. We used to meet in small groups in the basement of St. Clare's. But they banned the meetings a few years ago when they found out we were pro-choice.

ME: You mean they kicked you off church property?

MARY: Yeah, we started meeting in private homes, but they found out about that too and the priests started pressuring us to decease. We tried gathering at undisclosed locations, but it just became too much of a hassle.

ME: It's like Germany in the 1930s. Why do you want to remain a member of St. Goebbels' parish?

MARY: I still believe...I still have faith.

ME: Faith in what? That Father Pedophile will be tried, convicted and defrocked after raping his next 10-year-old? That's why the Church is anti-death penalty...its afraid priests will be fried for diddling altar boys.

(Note: Mary knows me and just shrugs and laughs at my irreverence.)

MARY: I believe we all have spirits that will live on beyond us.

ME: What the fuck does that have to do with organized fascism...err...religion?

MARY: We were both raised in the same traditions. You chose to fall away. I still believe in a just and loving God.

ME: I did not choose to fall away. The Jesuits made it perfectly clear to my young mind that intellect and faith are at odds with one another. And that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of God. You either leap the abyss from disbelief to belief...or you don't. But it has nothing to do with reason.

MARY: That's why when I get to heaven I'll have to pray for your soul to join me there.

ME: I don't think the big fella wants me there. I'll have too many damn questions for him.

MARY: Like what?

ME: Like why did He allow war, pestilence and evil to thrive...and that's just Dick Cheney.

MARY: You'll have all the answers.

ME: I don't think so. The right wingers will take over heaven, and we won't be allowed to hold our left-wing meetings there either.

MARY: You're a hopeless case.

ME: I know, but these are hard times. And in hard times, we left wingers cling to our First Amendment and our gun bans.

Study Shows Liberals Are Smarter Than Conservatives

2010-03-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

It's long been my contention that right-wingers are right-wingers for one or more of these reasons: fear, ignorance of the facts, and just good old-fashioned stupidity. The most radical ones suffer from all three maladies. Now there is scientific proof to back up my suspicions. According to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch column written by Kevin Horrigan, Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa, a social psychologist, concludes that "...young adults who described themselves as 'not at all religious' and 'very liberal' politically had adolescent IQ scores that averaged 11 points higher than the young adults who described themselves as 'very conservative' and 'very religious'...11 points is significant, because liberalism (defined as caring about large groups of people you'll never meet) is a very new thing for humans."

Kanazawa's contention is, then, that conservatives are much less evolved than liberals. Conservatives, like their neanderthal ancestors, care only about themselves and like individuals. It's a survival instinct that manifests itself in lower forms of species. For right-wingers, the needs of others are irrelevant. They care nothing for the greater good. Their myopic sensibilities extend to their own kind and no one else.

We see the effects across the sociocultural and political spectrum. Republicans, 99% white, are vehemently opposed to things which would benefit those not of their tribe, i.e., blacks, Latinos, Muslims, etc. Thus, reasonable policies that address the greater good--universal health care, affirmative action, civil liberties, social welfare programs, access to abortion, brotherhood, equal rights, world peace--have always and will always be despised by conservatives.

What can be done about it? The obvious answer is to elect liberals. However, we all know this is not feasible in Republican strongholds. We are still afflicted by millions upon millions of those who have not sufficiently advanced on the evolutionary scale. I can just hear the right screaming at me, "Evolution is a myth. We were created by God." My response? Then pay heed to your Good Book. God said, "What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?"

We liberals must try to inform and educate when confronted by a lower form of life.

COPA Speech by Douglass Breaks Through CIA Disinformation

2010-03-12T13:13:00.000-08:00

I was so moved by author James Douglass's address on 11/22/09, the 46th commemoration of President Kennedy's assassination, that I am reprinting it here. It rings of the truth and is thoroughly documented, citations and all. It is long, but it is an eloquent and worthwhile read. And it's a history lesson for us all.

The Hope of Confronting the Unspeakable; A speech by the Author of:

JFK and the Unspeakable
http://www.maryknollsocietymall.org/description.cfm?ISBN=978-1-57075-755...

This book is the first volume of a projected trilogy. Orbis Books has
commissioned James W. Douglass to write three books on the
assassinations of the 1960's. The second will be on the murders of
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, while the third will be on the
assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

I want to speak tonight about the hope that comes from our
confronting the truth of the assassination of President Kennedy.
Concerned friends have asked me over the years if engaging in such a
probe into darkness hasn’t made me profoundly depressed. On the
contrary, it has given me great hope. As Martin Luther King said, the
truth crushed to earth will rise again. Gandhi spoke hopefully of
experiments in truth, because they take us into the most powerful force
on earth and in existence – truth-force, satyagraha. That is how I
think of this work, as an experiment in truth – one that will open us
up, both personally and as a country, to a process of nonviolent
transformation. I believe this experiment we are doing into the dark
truth of Dallas (and of Washington) can be the most hopeful experience
of our lives. But as you know, it does require patience and tenacity to
confront the unspeakable. We, first of all, need to take the time to
recognize the sources in our history for what happened in Dallas on
November 22, 1963.

The doctrine of "plausible deniability" in an old government document
provides us with a source of the assassination of President Kennedy.
The document was issued in 1948, one year after the CIA was
established, 15 years before JFK’s murder. That document, National
Security Council directive 10/2, on June 18, 1948, “gave the highest
sanction of the [U.S.] government to a broad range of covert
operations” – propaganda, sabotage, economic warfare, subversion of all
kinds – that were seen as necessary to “win” the Cold War against the
Communists. The government’s condition for those covert activities by
U.S. agencies, coordinated by the CIA, was that they be “so planned and
executed that…if uncovered the US government can plausibly disclaim any
responsibility for them.”

In the 1950’s, under the leadership of CIA Director Allen Dulles, the
doctrine of “plausible deniability” became the CIA’s green light to
assassinate national leaders, conduct secret military operations, and
overthrow governments that our government thought were on the wrong
side in the Cold War. “Plausible deniability” meant our intelligence
agencies, acting as paramilitary groups, had to lie and cover their
tracks so effectively that there would be no trace of U.S. government
responsibility for criminal activities on an ever-widening scale.
The man who proposed this secret, subversive process in 1948, diplomat
George Kennan, said later, in light of its consequences, that it was
“the greatest mistake I ever made.” President Harry Truman, under whom
the CIA was created, and during whose presidency the plausible
deniability doctrine was authorized, had deep regrets. He said in a
statement on December 22, 1963:
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been
diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and
at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble
and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
“We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and
for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something
about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow
over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”
Truman later remarked: “The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose
of getting all the available information to the president. It was not
intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange
activities.”

President Truman’s sharp warning about the CIA, and the fact that
warning was published one month to the day after JFK’s assassination,
should have given this country pause. However, his statement appeared
only in an early edition of The Washington Post, then vanished without
comment from public view.

What George Kennan and Harry Truman realized much too late was that, in
the name of national security, they had unwittingly allowed an alien
force to invade a democracy. As a result, we now had to deal with a
government agency authorized to carry out a broad range of criminal
activities on an international scale, theoretically accountable to the
president but with no genuine accountability to anyone. Plausible
deniability became a rationale for the CIA’s interpretation of what the
executive branch’s wishes might be. But for the Agency’s crimes to
remain plausibly deniable, the less said the better – to the point
where CIA leaders’ creative imaginations simply took over. It was all
for the sake of “winning” the Cold War by any means necessary and
without implicating the more visible heads of the government. One
assumption behind Kennan’s proposal unleashing the CIA for its war
against Communism was that the Agency’s criminal power could be
confined to covert action outside the borders of the United States,
with immunity from its lethal power granted to U.S. citizens. That
assumption proved to be wrong.

During the Cold War, the hidden growth of the CIA’s autonomous power
corresponded to the public growth of what was called a fortress state.
What had been a struggling post-war democracy in our country was
replaced by the institutions of a national security state. President
Truman had laid the foundations for that silent takeover by his
momentous decision to end the Second World War by a demonstration of
nuclear weapons on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to
stop a Soviet advance to Japan. Truman’s further, post-war decision for
U.S. nuclear dominance in the world rather than allowing for
international control of nuclear weapons was his second disastrous
mistake, in terms of initiating the nuclear arms race in the world and
subverting democracy in the U.S.A. A democracy within a national
security state cannot survive. The president’s decision to base our
security on nuclear weapons created the contradiction of a democracy
ruled by the dictates of the Pentagon. A democratic national security
state is a contradiction in terms.

The insecure basis of our security then became weapons that could
destroy the planet. To protect the security of that illusory means of
security, which was absolute destructive power, we now needed a ruling
elite of national security managers with an authority above that of our
elected representatives. So from that point on, our military-industrial
managers made the real decisions of state. President Truman simply
ratified their decisions and entrenched their power, as he did with the
establishment of the CIA, and as his National Security Council did with
its endorsement of plausible deniability. His successor, President
Eisenhower, also failed to challenge in his presidency what he warned
against at its end -- the military-industrial complex. He left the
critical task of resisting that anti-democratic power in the hands of
the next president, John Kennedy. When President Kennedy then stood up
to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the military-industrial complex, he was
treated as a traitor. His attempt to save the planet from the weapons
of his own state was regarded as treason. The doctrine of plausible
deniability allowed for the assassination of a president seen as a
national security risk himself.

The CIA’s “plausible deniability” for crimes of state, as exemplified
by JFK’s murder, corresponds in our politics to what the Trappist monk
and spiritual writer Thomas Merton called “the Unspeakable.” Merton
wrote about the unspeakable in the 1960’s, when an elusive, systemic
evil was running rampant through this country and the world. The
Vietnam War, the escalating nuclear arms race, and the interlocking
murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert
Kennedy were all signs of the unspeakable.

For Merton, the unspeakable was ultimately a void, an emptiness of any
meaning, an abyss of lies and deception. He wrote the following
description of the unspeakable shortly after the publication of The
Warren Report, which he could have been describing: “[The Unspeakable]
is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the
words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and
official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and
makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”

The void of the unspeakable is the dark abyss, the midnight reality of
plausible deniability, that we face when we peer into our national
security state’s murder of President Kennedy. And that is precisely
where hope begins.

Why President Kennedy was murdered can be, I believe, a profound source
of hope to us all, when we truly understand his story.
Now how can that possibly be? The why of his murder as a source of hope?
Let’s begin with the way Kennedy himself looked at the question.
One summer weekend in 1962 while out sailing with friends, President
Kennedy was asked what he thought of Seven Days in May, a best-selling
novel that described a military takeover in the United States. JFK said
he would read the book. He did so that night. The next day Kennedy
discussed with his friends the possibility of their seeing such a coup
in the U.S. These words were spoken by him after the Bay of Pigs and
before the Cuban Missile Crisis:
“It’s possible. It could happen in this country, but the conditions
would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young
President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain
uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his
back, but this would be written off as the usual military
dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay
of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and
inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their
patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the
nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be
defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”
Pausing a moment, he went on, “Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs,
it could happen.”

Waiting again until his listeners absorbed his meaning, he concluded
with an old Navy phrase, “But it won’t happen on my watch.”
Let’s remember that JFK gave himself three strikes before he would be
out by a coup, although he bravely said it wouldn’t happen on his watch.

As we know, and as he knew, the young president John Kennedy did
have a Bay of Pigs. The president bitterly disappointed the CIA, the
military, and the CIA-trained Cuban exile brigade by deciding to accept
defeat at the Bay of Pigs rather than escalate the battle. Kennedy
realized after the fact that he had been drawn into a CIA scenario
whose authors assumed he would be forced by circumstances to drop his
advance restrictions against the use of U.S. combat forces. He had been
lied to in such a way that, in order to “win” at the Bay of Pigs, he
would be forced to send in U.S. troops. But JFK surprised the CIA and
the military by choosing instead to accept a loss. “They couldn’t
believe,” he said, “that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try
to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”
We know how JFK reacted to the CIA’s setting him up. He was furious.
When the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, he said
he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to
the winds.”

He ordered an investigation into the whole affair, under the very
watchful eyes of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
He fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Richard Bissell,
Jr., and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell. That was a huge
decision – firing the top of the CIA’s hierarchy, including the
legendary leader who had come to personify the agency, Allen Dulles.
The president then took steps “to cut the CIA budget in 1962 and again
in 1963, aiming at a 20 per cent reduction by 1966.” John Kennedy was
cutting back the CIA’s power in very concrete ways, step by step.
We know how the CIA and the Cuban exile community regarded Kennedy in
turn because of his refusal to escalate the battle at the Bay of Pigs.
They hated him for it. They did not forget what they thought was
unforgivable.

In terms of JFK’s own analysis of the threat of an overthrow of his
presidency, he saw the Bay of Pigs as the first strike against him. It
was the first big stand he took against his national security elite,
and therefore the first cause of a possible coup d’etat.
However, in terms of our constitution, our genuine security, and world
peace, the position Kennedy took in facing down the CIA and the
military at the Bay of Pigs, rather than surrendering to their will,
was in itself a source of hope. No previous post-war president had
shown such courage. Truman and Eisenhower had, in effect, turned over
the power of their office to their national security managers. Kennedy
was instead acting like he really was the president of this country –
by saying a strong no to the security elite on a critical issue. If we
the people had truly understood what he was doing then on our behalf,
we would have thought the president’s stand a deeply hopeful one.

In terms of his Seven Days in May analysis of a coming coup, John
Kennedy did have a second “Bay of Pigs.” The president alienated the
CIA and the military a second time by his decisions during the Cuban
Missile Crisis.

JFK had to confront the unspeakable in the Missile Crisis in the form
of total nuclear war. At the height of that terrifying conflict, he
felt the situation spiraling out of control, especially because of the
actions of his generals. For example, with both sides on hair-trigger
alert, the U.S. Air Force test-fired missiles from California across
the Pacific, deliberately trying to provoke the Soviets in a way that
could justify our superior U.S. forces blanketing the USSR with an
all-out nuclear attack. As we know from Kennedy’s secretly taped
meeting with his Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 19, 1962, the Chiefs
were pushing him relentlessly to launch a pre-emptive strike on Cuba,
and ultimately the Soviet Union. In this encounter the Chiefs’ disdain
for their young commander-in-chief is summed up by Air Force Chief of
Staff General Curtis LeMay when he says:

LeMay: “This [blockade and political action] is almost as bad as the
appeasement [of Hitler] at Munich…I think that a blockade, and
political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and
neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of
our own citizens would feel that way too.
“In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”
President Kennedy responds: “What did you say?”
LeMay: “I say, you’re in a pretty bad fix.”
President Kennedy: [laughing] “You’re in with me, personally.”

As the meeting draws to a close, Kennedy rejects totally the Joint
Chiefs’ arguments for a quick, massive attack on Cuba. The president
then leaves the room but the tape keeps on recording. Two or three of
the generals remain, and one says to LeMay, “You pulled the rug right
out from under him.”

LeMay: “Jesus Christ. What the hell do you mean?”
Other
General: “…He’s finally getting around to the word ‘escalation.’ If
somebody could keep ‘em from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal, that’s
our problem…”

The White House tapes show Kennedy questioning and resisting the
mounting pressure to bomb Cuba coming from both the Joint Chiefs and
the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. At the same
time, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, the two men most responsible
for the Cuban Missile Crisis, seemed locked in a hopeless ideological
conflict. The U.S. and Soviet leaders had been following Cold War
policies that now seemed to be moving inexorably toward a war of
extermination.

Yet, as we have since learned, Kennedy and Khrushchev had been engaged
in a secret correspondence for over a year that gave signs of hope.
Even as they moved publicly step by step toward a Cold War climax that
would almost take the world over the edge with them, they were at the
same time smuggling confidential letters back and forth that recognized
each other’s humanity and hoped for a solution. They were public
enemies who, in the midst of deepening turmoil, were secretly learning
something approaching trust in each other.

On what seemed the darkest day in the crisis, when a Soviet missile had
shot down a U2 spy plane over Cuba, intensifying the already
overwhelming pressures on Kennedy to bomb Cuba, the president sent his
brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, secretly to Soviet Ambassador
Anatoly Dobrynin. RFK told Dobrynin, as Dobrynin reported to
Khrushchev, that the president “didn’t know how to resolve the
situation. The military is putting great pressure on him…Even if he
doesn’t want or desire a war, something irreversible could occur
against his will. That is why the President is asking for help to solve
this problem.”

In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled a further, chilling sentence from
Robert Kennedy’s appeal to Dobrynin: “If the situation continues much
longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow
him and seize power.”

Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita’s son, has described his father’s thoughts
when he read Dobrynin’s wired report relaying John Kennedy’s plea: “The
president was calling for help: that was how father interpreted Robert
Kennedy’s talk with our ambassador.”

At a moment when the world was falling into darkness, Kennedy did what
from his generals’ standpoint was intolerable and unforgivable. JFK not
only rejected his generals’ pressures for war. Even worse, the
president then reached out to their enemy, asking for help. That was
treason.

When Nikita Khrushchev had received Kennedy’s plea for help in Moscow,
he turned to his Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko and said, “We have to
let Kennedy know that we want to help him.”

Khrushchev stunned himself by what he had just said: Did he really want
to help his enemy, Kennedy? Yes, he did. He repeated the word to his
foreign minister:
“Yes, help. We now have a common cause, to save the world from those
pushing us toward war.”

How do we understand that moment? The two most heavily armed leaders in
history, on the verge of total nuclear war, suddenly joined hands
against those on both sides pressuring them to attack. Khrushchev
ordered the immediate withdrawal of his missiles, in return for
Kennedy’s public pledge never to invade Cuba and his secret promise to
withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey – as he would in fact do. The two
Cold War enemies had turned, so that each now had more in common with
his opponent than either had with his own generals. As a result of that
turn toward peace, one leader would be assassinated thirteen months
later. The other, left without his peacemaking partner, would be
overthrown the following year. Yet because of their turn away from
nuclear war, today we are still living and struggling for peace on this
earth. Hope is alive. We still have a chance.

What can we call that transforming moment when Kennedy asked his enemy
for help and Khrushchev gave it?

From a Buddhist standpoint, it was enlightenment of a cosmic kind.
Others might call it a divine miracle. Readers of the Christian Gospels
could say that Kennedy and Khrushchev were only doing what Jesus said:
“Love your enemies.” That would be “love” as Gandhi understood it, love
as the other side of truth, a respect and understanding of our
opponents that goes far enough to integrate their truth into our own.
In the last few months of Kennedy’s life, he and Khrushchev were
walking that extra mile where each was beginning to see the other’s
truth.

Neither John Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev was a saint. Each was deeply
complicit in policies that brought humankind to the brink of nuclear
war. Yet, when they encountered the void, then by turning to each other
for help, they turned humanity toward the hope of a peaceful planet.

John Kennedy’s next “Bay of Pigs,” his next critical conflict with his
national security state, was his American University Address. Saturday
Review editor Norman Cousins summed up the significance of this
remarkable speech: “At American University on June 10, 1963, President
Kennedy proposed an end to the Cold War.”

I believe it is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of
President Kennedy’s American University address. It was a decisive
signal to both Nikita Khrushchev, on the one hand, and JFK’s national
security advisers, on the other, that he was serious about making peace
with the Communists. After he told the graduating class at American
University that the subject of his speech was “the most important topic
on earth: world peace,” he asked:
“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek?”
He answered, “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American
weapons of war.”

Kennedy’s rejection of “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by
American weapons of war” was an act of resistance to the
military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex was
totally dependent on “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American
weapons of war.” That Pax Americana policed by the Pentagon was
considered the system’s indispensable, hugely profitable means of
containing and defeating Communism. At his own risk Kennedy was
rejecting the foundation of the Cold War system.

In its place, as a foundation for peace, the president put a
compassionate description of the suffering of the Russian people. They
had been our allies during World War Two and had suffered mightily. Yet
even their World War Two devastation would be small compared to the
effects of a nuclear war on both their country and ours.
In his speech, Kennedy turned around the question that was always asked
when it came to prospects for peace – the question, “What about the
Russians?” It was assumed the Russians would take advantage of any move
we might make toward peace.

Kennedy asked instead, “What about us?” He said, “Our attitude [toward
peace] is as essential as theirs.” What about our attitude to the
nuclear arms race?

Within the overarching theology of our country, a theology of total
good versus total evil, that was a heretical question, coming
especially from the president of the United States.
Kennedy said he wanted to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty with the
Soviet Union in Moscow – in their capitol, not ours – as soon as
possible. To clear the way for such a treaty, he said he was suspending
U.S. atmospheric tests unilaterally.

John Kennedy’s strategy of peace penetrated the Soviet government’s
defenses far more effectively than any missile could have done. The
Soviet press, which was accustomed to censoring U.S. government
statements, published the entire speech all across the country. Soviet
radio stations broadcast and rebroadcast the speech to the Soviet
people. In response to Kennedy’s turn toward peace, the Soviet
government even stopped jamming all Western broadcasts into their
country.

Nikita Khrushchev was deeply moved by the American University Address.
He said Kennedy had given “the greatest speech by any American
President since Roosevelt.”

JFK’s speech was received less favorably in his own country. The New
York Times reported his government’s skepticism: “Generally there was
not much optimism in official Washington that the President’s
conciliation address at American University would produce agreement on
a test ban treaty or anything else.” In contrast to the Soviet media
that were electrified by the speech, the U.S. media ignored or
downplayed it. For the first time, Americans had less opportunity to
read and hear their president’s words than did the Russian people. A
turn-around was occurring in the world on different levels. Whereas
nuclear disarmament had suddenly become feasible, Kennedy’s position in
his own government had become precarious.

President Kennedy’s next critical conflict with his national security
state, propelling him toward the coup d’etat he saw as possible, was
the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he signed with Nikita
Khrushchev on July 25, 1963, six weeks after the American University
Address. The president had done an end run around the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. He negotiated the Test Ban Treaty without consulting them,
because they opposed it.

Kennedy was fiercely determined but not optimistic that the Test Ban
Treaty be ratified by the defense-conscious Senate. In early August, he
told his advisers that getting Senate ratification of the agreement
would be “almost in the nature of a miracle.” He said if a Senate vote
were held right then it would fall far short of the necessary
two-thirds.

Kennedy initiated a whirlwind public education campaign on the treaty,
coordinated by Saturday Review editor Normal Cousins, who directed a
committee of activists. By the end of August, the tide of congressional
mail had gone from fifteen to one against a test ban to three to two
against.

In September public opinion polls showed a turnaround. 80 percent of
the American people were now in favor of the Test Ban Treaty. On
September 24, 1963, the Senate approved the treaty by a vote of 80 to
19 – 14 more than the required two-thirds. No other single
accomplishment in the White House gave Kennedy greater satisfaction.
On September 20, Kennedy spoke to the United Nations. He suggested that
its members see the Test Ban Treaty as a beginning and engage together
in an experiment in peace:
“Two years ago I told this body that the United States had proposed,
and was willing to sign, a Limited Test Ban treaty. Today that treaty
has been signed. It will not put an end to war. It will not remove
basic conflicts. It will not secure freedom for all. But it can be a
lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was
said to have declared to his friends: ‘Give me a place where I can
stand – and I shall move the world.’
“My fellow inhabitant of this planet: Let us take our stand here in
this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can
move the world to a just and lasting peace.”

When he said these words, John Kennedy was secretly engaging in another
risky experiment in peace. That same day at the United Nations, Kennedy
told UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson that his assistant William Attwood
should go ahead “to make discreet contact” with Cuba’s UN Ambassador
Carlos Lechuga. Was Fidel Castro interested in a dialogue with John
Kennedy? A strongly affirmative answer would come back from Castro, who
had been repeatedly urged by Khrushchev to begin trusting Kennedy.
Kennedy and Castro actually began that dialogue on normalizing
U.S.-Cuban relations, through the mediation of French journalist Jean
Daniel who personally visited both men in the month leading up to the
assassination. Daniel was actually eating lunch with Castro in his home
on November 22, conveying Kennedy’s hopeful words, when the Cuban
premier was phoned with the news of Kennedy’s death. Castro’s somber
comment to Daniel was: “Everything is changed. Everything is going to
change.”

On October 11, 1963, President Kennedy issued a top-secret order to
begin withdrawing the U.S. military from Vietnam. In National Security
Action memorandum 263, he ordered that 1,000 U.S. military personnel be
withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and that the bulk of U.S.
personnel be taken out by the end of 1965.
Kennedy decided on his withdrawal policy, against the arguments of most
of his advisers, at a contentious October 2 National Security Council
meeting. When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was leaving the meeting
to announce the withdrawal to the White House reporters, “the President
called to him, ‘And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots,
too.’”

In fact, it would not mean that at all. After JFK’s assassination, his
withdrawal policy was quietly voided. In light of the future
consequences of Dallas, it was not only John Kennedy who was murdered
on November 22, 1963, but 58,000 other Americans and over three million
Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

In his reflections on Seven Days in May, John Kennedy had given himself
three Bay-of-Pigs-type conflicts with his national security state
before a possible coup. What about six?
(1) The Bay of Pigs.
(2) The Cuban Missile Crisis.
(3) The American University Address.
(4) The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
(5) The beginning of a back-channel dialogue with Fidel Castro.
(6) JFK’s order to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam.
This, however, is a short list of the increasing conflicts between Kennedy
and his national security state.

We can add to the list a seventh Bay of Pigs – the steel crisis,
in which he profoundly alienated the military industrial complex before
the Cuban Missile Crisis even took place. The steel crisis was a
showdown the president had with U.S. Steel and seven other steel
companies over their price-fixing violations of an agreement he had
negotiated between U.S. Steel and the United Steelworkers’ union. In a
head-on confrontation with the ruling elite of Big Steel, JFK ordered
the Defense Department to switch huge military contracts away from the
major steel companies to the smaller, more loyal contractors that had
not defied him. After the big steel companies bitterly backed down from
their price raises, JFK and his brother, Robert, were denounced as
symbols of “ruthless power” by the Wall Street power brokers at the
center of the military industrial complex.
By an editorial titled, “Steel: The Ides of April” (the month in which
Kennedy faced down the steel executives), Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine
called to readers’ minds the soothsayer’s warning in Shakespeare of the
assassination of Julius Caesar. Fortune was warning Kennedy that his
actions had confirmed the worst fears of corporate America about his
presidency, and would have dire consequences. As interpreted by the
most powerful people in the nation, the steel crisis was a logical
prelude to Dallas. It was a seventh Bay of Pigs.

An eighth Bay of Pigs was Kennedy’s diplomatic opening to the fiery
third-world leadership of President Sukarno of Indonesia. Sukarno was
“the most outspoken proponent of Third World neutralism in the Cold
War.” He had actually coined the term “Third World.” The CIA wanted
Sukarno dead. It wanted what it saw as his pro-communist “global
orientation” obliterated. During Eisenhower’s presidency, the CIA
repeatedly tried to kill and overthrow Sukarno but failed.
JFK, however, chose to work with Sukarno, hoping to win him over as an
ally, which he did. Sukarno came to love Kennedy. The U.S. president
resolved what seemed a hopeless conflict between Indonesia and its
former colonial master, the Netherlands, averting a war. To the CIA’s
dismay, in 1961 Kennedy welcomed Sukarno to the White House. Most
significantly, three days before his assassination, President Kennedy
said he was willing to accept Sukarno’s invitation to visit Indonesia
the following spring. His visit to Indonesia would have dramatized in a
very visible way Kennedy’s support of Third World nationalism, a sea
change in U.S. government policy. That decision to visit Sukarno was an
eighth Bay of Pigs.

Kennedy’s Indonesian policy was also killed in Dallas, with horrendous
consequences. After Lyndon Johnson became president, the CIA finally
succeeded in overthrowing Sukarno in a massive purge of suspected
Communists that ended up killing 500,000 to one million Indonesians.

Last Sunday I interviewed Sergei Khrushchev about an important
late development in the relationship between his father and President
Kennedy. In his interview, Mr. Khrushchev confirmed that his father had
decided in November 1963 to accept President Kennedy’s repeated
proposal that the U.S. and the Soviet Union fly to the moon together.
In Kennedy’s September 20, 1963, speech to the United Nations, he had
once again stated his hope for such a joint expedition to the moon.
However, neither American nor Soviet military leaders, jealous of their
rocket secrets, were ready to accept his initiative. Nikita Khrushchev,
siding with his own rocket experts, felt that he was still forced to
decline Kennedy’s proposal.

JFK was looking beyond the myopia of the generals and scientists on
both sides of the East-West struggle. He knew that merging their
missile technologies in a peaceful project would also help defuse the
Cold War. It was part of his day-by-day strategy of peace.
Sergei Khrushchev said his father talked to him about a week before
Kennedy’s death on the president’s idea for a joint lunar mission.
Nikita Khrushchev had broken ranks with his rocket scientists. He now
thought he and the Soviet Union should accept Kennedy’s invitation to
go to the moon together, as a further step in peaceful cooperation.
In Washington, Kennedy acted as if he already knew about Khrushchev’s
hopeful change of heart on that critical issue. JFK was already telling
NASA to begin work on a joint U.S.-Soviet lunar mission. On November
12, 1963, JFK issued his National Security Action Memorandum 271,
ordering NASA to implement his “September 20 proposal for broader
cooperation between the United States and the USSR in outer space,
including cooperation in lunar landing programs.”

That further visionary step to end the Cold War also died with
President Kennedy. The U.S. went to the moon alone. U.S. and Soviet
rockets continued to be pointed at their opposite countries rather than
being joined in a project for a more hopeful future. Sergei Khrushchev
said, “I think if Kennedy had lived, we would be living in a completely
different world.”

In the final weeks of his presidency, President Kennedy took one
more risky step toward peace. It can be seen in relation to a meeting
he had the year before with six Quakers who visited him in his office.
One thousand members of the Society of Friends had been vigiling for
peace and world order outside the White House. President Kennedy agreed
to meet with six of their leaders. I have interviewed all three
survivors of that meeting with the president 47 years ago. They remain
uniformly amazed at the open way in which President Kennedy listened
and responded to their radical Quaker critique of his foreign policy.
Among their challenges to him was a recommendation that the United
States offer its surplus food to the People’s Republic of China. China
was considered an enemy nation. Yet it was also one whose people were
beset by a famine.

Kennedy said to the Quakers, “Do you mean you would feed your enemy when
he has his hands on your throat?”

The Quakers said they meant exactly that. They reminded him it was what
Jesus had said should be done. Kennedy said he knew that, and knew that
it was the right thing to do, but he couldn’t overcome the China lobby
in Washington to accomplish it.

Nevertheless, a year and a half later in the fall of 1963, against
overwhelming opposition, Kennedy decided to sell wheat to the Russians,
who had a severe grain shortage. His outraged critics said in effect to
him what he had said to the Quakers: Would you feed an enemy who has
his hands on your throat?

Vice President Lyndon Johnson said he thought Kennedy’s decision to
sell wheat to Russia would turn out to be the worst political mistake
he ever made. Today JFK’s controversial decision “to feed the enemy”
has been forgotten. In 1963, the wheat sale was seen as a threat to our
security – feeding the enemy to kill us. Yet JFK went ahead with it, as
one more initiative for peace.

The violent reaction to his decision was represented on Friday morning,
November 22, 1963, by a threatening, full-page advertisement addressed
to him in the Dallas Morning News. The ad was bordered in black, like a
funeral notice.

Among the charges of disloyalty to the nation that the ad made against
the president was the question: “Why have you approved the sale of
wheat and corn to our enemies when you know the Communist soldiers
‘travel on their stomach’ just as ours do?” JFK read the ad before the
flight from Fort Worth to Dallas, pointed it out to Jacqueline Kennedy,
and talked about the possibility of his being assassinated that day.
“But, Jackie,” he said, “if somebody wants to shoot me from a window
with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”

President Kennedy’s courageous turn from war to a strategy of
peace provided many more than three Bay-of-Pigs-type causes for his
assassination. Because he turned toward peace with our enemies, the
Communists, he was continually at odds with his own national security
state. Peacemaking was at the top of his agenda as president. That was
not the kind of leadership the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the
military industrial complex wanted in the White House. Given the Cold
War dogmas that gripped those dominant powers, and given Kennedy’s turn
toward peace, his assassination followed as a matter of course.
That is how he seemed to regard the situation – that it would soon lead
to his own death. JFK was not afraid of death. As a biographer
observed, “Kennedy talked a great deal about death, and about the
assassination of Lincoln.” His conscious model for struggling
truthfully through conflict, and being ready to die as a consequence,
was Abraham Lincoln. On the day when Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved
the missile crisis, JFK told his brother, Robert, referring to the
assassination of Lincoln, “This is the night I should go to the
theater.” Robert replied, “If you go, I want to go with you.”
Kennedy prepared himself for the same end Lincoln met during his night
at the theater. Late at night on the June 5, 1961, plane flight back to
Washington from his Vienna meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, a weary
President Kennedy wrote down on a slip of paper, as he was about to
fall asleep, a favorite saying of his from Abraham Lincoln – really a
prayer. Presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln discovered the slip of
paper on the floor. On it she read the words: “I know there is a God –
and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am
ready.”

Kennedy loved that prayer. He cited it repeatedly. More important, he
made the prayer his own. In his conflicts with Khrushchev, then more
profoundly with the CIA and the military, he had seen a storm coming.
If God had a place for him, he believed that he was ready.
For at least a decade, JFK’s favorite poem had been Rendezvous, a
celebration of death. Rendezvous was by Alan Seeger, an American poet
killed in World War One. The poem was Seeger’s affirmation of his own
anticipated death.

The refrain of Rendezvous, “I have a rendezvous with Death,”
articulated John Kennedy’s deep sense of his own mortality. Kennedy had
experienced a continuous rendezvous with death in anticipation of his
actual death: from the deaths of his PT boat crew members, from
drifting alone in the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean, from the early
deaths of his brother Joe and sister Kathleen, and from the recurring
near-death experiences of his almost constant illnesses.
He recited Rendezvous to his wife, Jacqueline, in 1953 on their first
night home in Hyannis after their honeymoon. She memorized the poem,
and recited it back to him over the years. In the fall of 1963, Jackie
taught the words of the poem to their five-year-old daughter, Caroline.
I have thought many times about what then took place in the White House
Rose Garden one beautiful fall day.

On the morning of October 5, 1963, President Kennedy met with his
National Security Council in the Rose Garden. Caroline suddenly
appeared at her father’s side. She said she wanted to tell him
something. He tried to divert her attention while the meeting
continued. Caroline persisted. The president smiled and turned his full
attention to his daughter. He told her to go ahead. While the members
of the National Security Council sat and watched, Caroline looked into
her father’s eyes and said:

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air –
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath –
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ‘twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear….
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

After Caroline said the poem’s final word, “rendezvous,” Kennedy’s
national security advisers sat in stunned silence. One of them said
later the bond between father and daughter was so deep “it was as if
there was ‘an inner music’ he was trying to teach her.”
JFK had heard his own acceptance of death from the lips of his
daughter. While surrounded by a National Security Council that opposed
his breakthrough to peace, the president once again deepened his pledge
not to fail that rendezvous. If God had a place for him, he believed
that he was ready.

So how can the why of his murder give us hope?
Where do we find hope when a peacemaking president is assassinated by
his own national security state?
The why of the event that brings us together tonight encircles the
earth. Because John Kennedy chose peace on earth at the height of the
Cold War, he was executed. But because he turned toward peace, in spite
of the consequences to himself, humanity is still alive and struggling.
That is hopeful, especially if we understand what he went through and
what he has given to us as his vision.
At a certain point in his presidency, John Kennedy turned a corner and
didn’t look back. I believe that decisive turn toward his final purpose
in life, resulting in his death, happened in the darkness of the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Although Kennedy was already in conflict with his
national security managers, the missile crisis was the breaking point.
At that most critical moment for us all, he turned from any remaining
control his security managers had over him toward a deeper ethic, a
deeper vision in which the fate of the earth became his priority.
Without losing sight of our own best hopes in this country, he began to
home in, with his new partner, Nikita Khrushchev, on the hope of peace
for everyone on this earth – Russians, Americans, Cubans, Vietnamese,
Indonesians, everyone – no exceptions. He made that commitment to life
at the cost of his own.
What a transforming story that is.
And what a propaganda campaign has been waged to keep us Americans from
understanding that story, from telling it, and from re-telling it to
our children and grandchildren.
Because that’s a story whose telling can transform a nation. But when a
nation is under the continuing domination of an idol, namely war, it is
a story that will be covered up. When the story can liberate us from
our idolatry of war, then the worshippers of the idol are going to do
everything they can to keep the story from being told. From the
standpoint of a belief that war is the ultimate power, that’s too
dangerous a story. It’s a subversive story. It shows a different kind
of security than always being ready to go to war. It’s unbelievable –
or we’re supposed to think it is -- that a president was murdered by
our own government agencies because he was seeking a more stable peace
than relying on nuclear weapons. It’s unspeakable. For the sake of a
nation that must always be preparing for war, that story must not be
told. If it were, we might learn that peace is possible without making
war. We might even learn there is a force more powerful than war. How
unthinkable! But how necessary if life on earth is to continue.
That is why it is so hopeful for us to confront the unspeakable and to
tell the transforming story of a man of courage, President John F.
Kennedy. It is a story ultimately not of death but of life – all our
lives. In the end, it is not so much a story of one man as it is a
story of peacemaking when the chips are down. That story is our story,
a story of hope.

I believe it is a providential fact that the anniversary of President
Kennedy’s assassination always falls around Thanksgiving, and
periodically on that very day. This year the anniversary of his death,
two days from now, will begin Thanksgiving week.
Thanksgiving is a beautiful time of year, with autumn leaves falling to
create new life. Creation is alive, as the season turns. The earth is
alive. It is not a radioactive wasteland. We can give special thanks
for that. The fact that we are still living – that the human family is
still alive with a fighting chance for survival, and for much more than
that – is reason for gratitude to a peacemaking president, and to the
unlikely alliance he forged with his enemy. So let us give thanks this
Thanksgiving for John F. Kennedy, and for his partner in peacemaking,
Nikita Khrushchev.

Their story is our story, a story of the courage to turn toward the
truth. Remember what Gandhi said that turned theology on its head. He
said truth is God. That is the truth: Truth is God. We can discover the
truth and live it out. There is nothing more powerful than the truth.
The truth will set us free.

__________________________________
Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 293.
Cited by Grose, ibid.
Ibid.
Cited by Raymond Marcus, “Truman’s Warning,” in E. Martin Schotz,
History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the
Murder of President Kennedy (Brookline, Mass.: Kurtz, Ulmer &
DeLucia, 1996), pp. 237-38.
Letter from Harry S. Truman to William B. Arthur, June 10, 1964. Off
the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, edited by Robert H.
Ferrell (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 408.
Pioneer assassination critic Raymond Marcus has written of the lack of
response to Truman’s remarkable December 22, 1963, article: “According
to my information, it was not carried in later editions that day, not
commented on editorially, nor picked up by any other major newspaper,
or mentioned on any national radio or TV broadcast.” Raymond Marcus,
Addendum B (published by the author, 1995), p. 75.
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions,
1966), p. 4.
Paul B. Fay, Jr., The Pleasure of His Company (New York: Dell, 1966),
pp. 162-63.
Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 274.
Tom Wicker, John W. Finney, Max Frankel, E. W. Kenworthy, “C.I.A.:
Maker of Policy, or Tool?” New York Times (April 25, 1966), p. 20.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1965), p. 428.
Sheldon M Stern, Averting “The Final Failure” (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 126, 129.
Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a
Superpower (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 2000),
pp. 618-19.
Khrushchev Remembers, ed. Edward Crankshaw (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970),
p. 498.
S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 622.
Ibid., p. 630.
Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972),
p. 9.
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 460.
Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 904.
Max Frankel, “Harriman to Lead Test-Ban Mission to Soviet [Union] in July,”
New York Times (June 12, 1963), p. 1.
Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate, p. 128.
Jean Daniel, “When Castro Heard the News,” New Republic (December 7, 1963),
p. 7.
O’Donnell and Powers, p. 17.
James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), p. 324.
O’Donnell and Powers, p. 25.
Ralph G. Martin, A Hero for our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), p. 500.
Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis
(New York: Signet, 1969), p. 110.
Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books,
1966), p. 230.
Richard D. Mahoney interview of Samuel E. Belk III. Richard D. Mahoney,
Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York:
Arcade, 1999), p. 281.

The GOP (Gathering of Primitives) At My Door

2010-03-11T11:27:00.000-08:00

I watched the HBO documentary "The Right Feeling Wronged" last night, and I got the same clammy, cloying feeling that haunted me throughout the 2008 presidential campaign. The documentary, filmed by Nancy Pelosi's daughter, profiles McCain rallies and the stunningly prejudiced, backwards knuckle-draggers who attended them. Full of hatred and violent tendencies, these people were a scary, uneducated, shockingly stupid bunch. In Mississippi a truck driver said, "I ain't gonna vote for no nigger." In Pennsylvania a handyman said, "I don't want no one taxing me out of business." When informed that Obama intended to increase taxes on the wealthiest 1% of individuals only, the handyman thought about that for a moment (no doubt, overloading all of his available neurosynapses), and then replied, "Well, I don't want nobody helping me out. That's socialism." In Virginia, at a youth church rally, a 20-year-old who was wearing a tee shirt which read "Nobama, no socilism" [sic], was asked for his definition of socialism (this after being told that he had misspelled the word on his tee shirt). The kid tried to look it up on his cell phone and then sputtered, "Well...I know that it's somewheres in-between communism and that other thing...you know...what's that called? You know, where Hitler was." In St. Louis a teabagger attacked an Obama supporter and wrestled him to the ground as the other GOP fascists cheered him on. In Ohio a middle-aged white man called Obama the antichrist. In Pennsylvania some farmers claimed that Obama, if elected, was going to personally come to their houses and steal their guns from them.

Pelosi's kid could have made them look even worse by asking more direct and penetrating questions, but she backed off and seemed satisfied to let them indict themselves. I was reminded of the time a couple of pro-lifers had the audacity to knock on my door and insist I vote Republican in the coming election. I relished the opportunity to ground their logic into a pulp. The conversation went something like this.

"The GOP is pro-life; the Democrats are murderers," sniffed the Bible-thumpers.

"Really?" I smirked. "Then why does the GOP support the death penalty? Thousands of innocent people are electrocuted every year in this country. Why does the GOP support the NRA? Thousands of innocent citizens die every year from gun accidents. Why does the GOP support the war in Iraq? Thousands of Americans have died unnecessarily in an immoral, unjust war there. Why is the GOP against health care for all? Millions die each year because they have no health care. It seems to me the GOP wants to protect human beings only before they actually become human beings. I guess the GOP is anti-abortion because it wants to make sure there are a good supply of Americans to enjoy killing off once they are born and become human beings...or fresh meat, as McCain supporters call them."

The Bible thumpers' jaws dropped open, as they attempted to formulate a response which would impugn my patriotism and allegiance to the one true God. As their cerebellum (what little there is) gyrated madly, I plowed over more of their sacred ground. "Since you call yourselves Bible experts, you must be familiar with the passages which implore us to be our brothers' keepers and to honor the least among us. As applied to health care, that seems to suggest that Christ would want all of his children to be saved from the suffering of ill health, even if it meant that those who are more well-off should pay for it."

At this point the Bible thumpers' faces turned from red to purple to ashen, as they racked their brains for the words that would put me in my place. "You're one of those...leftists," sputtered one of them.

"Yes, I am," I stated calmly, "and, thanks to you Republicans, private property is more valuable than intellectual freedom in this country, so if you don't get off my property now, I'll call the cops. And because your leaders value the Second Amendment much more than the First Amendment, if you come back I can shoot you with my concealed weapon."

The angry primitives scampered away to assualt my neighbors with more GOP drivel.

Tiger Owes An Apology To No One Except His Wife

2010-02-19T11:18:00.000-08:00

Maybe he should just change his name to Kitty Kat, because today Tiger Woods looked for all the world like a contrite (read eviscerated), chastened (read "brought into line by corporate America and its lackey media"), and cajone-less pussycat. And for what? Why is he standing before the global media apologizing for his private life. When did his private life become anyone's business except for his and his family's?

Personally, I could not care less that he violated his marriage vows by acting like a male slut. I care only about his driving and putting. He is the greatest golfer the world has ever seen, and I used to get a kick out of seeing him stick it to the figurative man: he regularly scorched the lilly white-Republican PGA tour by blowing past all his milquetoast competitors. A black man bringing a conservative, hypocritical-Puritan institution to its knees...now that's must-see TV.

Now that's all gone, because today Tiger kowtowed to the man. My feeling is that he does not give a rat's ass what we think about his behavior; it's his corporate masters he must please. Since his "ho-ing" became public knowledge, Tiger has lost most of his corporate endorsements, worth billions of dollars. It is to them he must submit and conform. It is to them that he must erect a facade of what shareholders and consumers consider acceptable. In doing so, Tiger proves that he is not so different from you and me. He even said, "...the same rules that apply to you, apply to me." We are all captives of corporate America.

Here's the speech I wish Tiger had delivered:

"I have called you together to announce that I am today resuming my golf career, and that I no longer consider it appropriate for any media person to pry into my private life. I apologize for nothing I have done; My behavior is no one's business but mine and my wife's. If infidelity were a basis for a man to be disqualified from competing on the PGA tour, we'd have no one left but the fucking caddies. Therefore, I will grant no further interviews to any TV, print, internet, or radio outlet. Furthermore, I am putting you on notice that if you say or write one false thing about me or my family, I will hire some bulldog lawyers to sue your asses with my very deep pockets. And one more thing, all you cowardly, white, pseudo-Christian golfers, who said bad things about me when I was gone: you'd better take cover. I'm going to kick your ass in every tournament we play, from now until the day I retire."

But that's just me; I'm poor enough and obscure enough to not give a damn what others think of me.

Anatomy of a Great Idea Ruined by the Right and Big Insurance Companies

2010-01-21T21:13:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, poll after poll showed health care reform, as advocated by Barack Obama and proposed by progressive Democrats, was favored by almost 80% of Americans. 80%! Today, as a Republican prepares to replace Ted Kennedy, every media outlet in the country is declaring the death of health care reform. And Gallup polls show the majority of Americans are opposed to health care reform. What the hell happened in a year's time? I'll tell you what happened, giant insurance companies, with the help of the radical right and a bunch of psycho-aggressive paid/fake protestors and lazy media enablers, used their money and power to cram the evil status quo health system down our throats and make us like it.

In a time when downsizing (the offspring of a Bush/Cheney-ravaged economy)has caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs, and thus their health insurance, there was never a better time to pass the most humane, moral legislation since FDR's NRA. And the people agreed...until those loud, vicious "tea-fascists" started showing up at town hall meetings--shouting down reason, bullying compassion, and assaulting the truth. The networks and newspapers reported this paid-for-play acting like it was a real story, and Mr. and Mrs. Middle America swallowed it whole. Never was it reported that this "grassroots" movement was bought and paid for by insurance companies, trying to kill the competition, i.e., a government-supported public health care option.

By summer, the tide had turned. Reformers and anti-reformers were split down the middle; still, the House passed a watered-down bill and the Senate had ratification in its final stages, when Massachusetts voters turned redcoat on us.

Now the millions who are without health care are out in the cold again. Literally, big corporations and the right wing will be the death of them all. Or as one liberal wag put it, "The GOP is in the pockets of the health insurance lobby, and their health care plan is this: Don't get sick...and if you do, die quickly."

Back From The American Southwest...And Down In The Dumps

2010-01-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

Take my advice--if you live in a cold-weather climate, do not travel the American Southwest in January. You'll never want to come back home.

As my wife and I traveled through Phoenix, the Nevada/California desert, Los Angeles, San Clemente, Palm Springs, and Twenty-Nine Palms, we kept getting reports of minus-zero wind chill back home. This made the sunny and 75-degree weather of southern California feel like bliss. We got lost in a "desert reverie" of dreamy days and glorious sunsets. Calm and warmth seeped into our pores.

Now we're back home, and the weather is as dreary as ever. January and February in the Midwest make me wonder why in god's name our forebears ever settled here. Didn't they know what they were in for? Yes, I know California is having floods right now, but they won't last. And it won't rain there again until June.

What's worse, Ted Kennedy's old seat has been taken over by a Republican. Now the bastards have enough votes to block health care reform. What has become of the world when you can't even count on Massachusetts any more?

It's going to be a long, cold winter.

My Response To Lone-Nutter McAdams' Review Of Douglass Book

2009-12-13T18:39:00.000-08:00

The following review of the book "JFK And The Unspeakable," by James Douglass, is being reprinted here, verbatim, with my response. John McAdams, the reviewer, is a long-time obfuscator and Warren Commission defender. His politics, naturally, are slightly right of Dick Cheney.

John McAdams: Another "Unspeakably Awful" Book About the JFK Assassination
Source: Washington Decoded website (run by Max Holland) (12-12-09)

James Douglass treads a familiar path in JFK and the Unspeakable. It is yet another book that claims John Kennedy was killed because he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Kennedy’s “rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government,” according to Douglass, and supposedly made JFK’s violent removal an urgent necessity.[1]

What makes Douglass’s volume unique is that his argument is dressed up in verbiage unfamiliar to JFK assassination buffs. Most authors of books on the assassination Jwd attempt to cloak their political views, and pretend to arrive at the truth about the assassination after a supposedly objective analysis of the facts. Douglass wears his politics on his sleeve. He is a Catholic “peace activist” and disciple of Thomas Merton, whose observations infuse the book. Self-styled activists like Douglass have a long history of being opposed to the use of military power by the United States, although they don’t seem to mind as much when military power is used by America’s adversaries. And while they employ religious rhetoric to justify and rationalize their unilateral pacifism, their worldview, ultimately, is indistinguishable from that of secular leftists like Oliver Stone (who, not surprisingly, is a big fan of Douglass’s book).

Douglass’s key villain—the “Unspeakable” of his title—turns out to be the same kind of opaque nemesis that Stone is fond of conjuring up. The best identification Douglass can offer is “shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of ‘plausible deniability,’” and even more vaguely, “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.”[2] How convenient: a culprit who is indescribable. In essence, though, Douglass’s evil-doer is indistinguishable from that bogeyman of vulgar, atheistic, and leftist radicals from the ‘60s: the “military-industrial complex,” except that he adds to the stew the Central Intelligence Agency.

JFK and the Unspeakable is structured so that it develops two parallel but supposedly complementary narratives: Kennedy’s statements and actions regarding Vietnam (in public, private, and in policy-making circles), and, simultaneously, the machinations of those who are conspiring to kill Kennedy. Both story lines are chock full of problems and cannot withstand elementary scrutiny. Long before Kennedy ever arrives in Dallas, Texas, and the strands finally come together, the book ceases to be non-fiction and enters the realm of a self-indulgent political fantasy.

The first narrative tries to portray Kennedy as a politician who started out a Cold Warrior, but broke through to a “deeper, more universal humanity” during his brief time in office.[3] This is not as easy to pull off as it might sound, because Douglass knows full well that many of Kennedy’s statements, as late as the morning of his death, were anti-Communist in thrust and substance. Accordingly, Douglass has to fudge and equivocate constantly, as he tries to depict Kennedy as “trapped in the contradiction between the mandate of peace . . . and the continuing Cold War dogmas of his national security state.”[4]

One particular trick Douglass uses is to conceal sources that show Kennedy to be a Cold War liberal. Douglass devotes page after page of analysis to Kennedy’s American University commencement address from June 1963, and the president’s admonition in this speech that “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Coming eight months after the Cuban missile crisis, the address was an inspiring call for keeping the peace in the hair-trigger nuclear age. But Douglass conspicuously fails to mention some other remarks Kennedy made in the same breath. “It is discouraging to think that [the Soviet Union’s] leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write,” Kennedy noted; moreover, the “Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.”[5]

There is none of the moral equivalence here, in short, that suffuses Douglass’s view of the Cold War, nor any hint of the idea that America’s military-industrial-intelligence complex was primarily responsible for the superpowers’ nuclear brinksmanship. Indeed, on the morning of November 22, during his breakfast address in Fort Worth, Kennedy hailed that city’s role as an arsenal in the Cold War, though one would not know that from reading Douglass’s book.[6]...

My response:McAdams,

Like all disinformationists and lone nutters, you must ignore a mountain of evidence and an ocean of coincidence to expound your dishonest version of events. You excoriate others' work on the matter in the same way. What you left out of your review of Douglass's book is his stunningly rational and meticulously documented evidence for conspiracy.

McAdams, I do not know what your motives are, but you are an unspeakable monster. Each time you open your mouth or tap on your keyboard, you deliver a right cross to the truth. You want names instead of "military-industrial complex"? How about Curtis Lemay, Lyman Lemnitzer, McGeorge Bundy, D.H. Byrd, Kellogg, Brown and Root, and Bell Helicopter (Michael Paine and Walter Dornberger). You want names instead of vague intelligence operatives? How about Allen Dulles, Dick Bissell, Charles Cabell, Ed Lansdale, and David Atlee Phillips.

General McHugh Lied; He DID leave JFK's Coffin Unattended

2009-12-03T14:38:00.000-08:00

Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, military aide to President Kennedy, always publicly maintained that he never left the dead president's coffin unattended from the time it left Parkland Hospital in Dallas on November 22, 1963, until it arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington, DC, that evening. This assertion always made me doubt David Lifton's "body alteration" thesis. Lifton, in 1981, published his book Best Evidence, which asserted that JFK's body had been altered sometime between Dallas and Washington on the day he was murdered, by conspirators who were intent on making it look as if he had been shot from the back instead of the front. This was how, according to Lifton, Lee Harvey Oswald was framed. Lifton had much evidence to support his theory: 1) the wounds as described by the Parkland doctors were not the same wounds described by the Bethesda doctors; in other words, the wounds changed between Dallas and DC; 2) JFK's body arrived in a coffin at Bethesda that was considerably different from the one in which it departed Parkland; 3) James Humes, Bethesda autopsist, stated that "...surgery of the head, namely in the top of the skull..." had been performed before the body arrived at Bethesda; the problem was, no such surgery had been performed by the Dallas doctors. Lifton theorizes that someone got access to the body as it lay aboard Air Force One awaiting departure to Washington after the assassination. This required the coffin containing the president's body be unattended for a period of time. All who were aboard the plane, including Jackie Kennedy, admitted that they were not coffin-side for the entire time the plane idled on the runway at Dallas Love Field...except for one General Godfrey McHugh. McHugh never left his dead president's side, or so he said.

A new book makes McHugh out to be a liar. According to Steven Gillon's just published The Kennedy Assassination 24 Hours After: LBJ's Pivotal First Day As President, McHugh DID leave the coffin. He furiously roamed around the plane as it sat on the runway at Dallas Love Field, demanding to know what was causing the delay in takeoff. When the pilot told him they were waiting for the judge to arrive aboard Air Force One to swear in LBJ, McHugh confronted Johnson in the plane's bathroom where the new president was babbling nervously about a worldwide plot. "It's a conspiracy. They're going to kill us all," LBJ sputtered. McHugh was shocked by what he saw, but was oblivious to its real significance. LBJ's erratic behavior might have been a ruse to distract the one person who was most loyal to JFK, thus leaving the coffin unattended for conspirators to highjack the body. What did they do with the body? Lifton thinks they either smuggled it aboard Air Force Two where it was flown to Washington surreptitiously for body alteration at Walter Reed Medical Center...or it was simply hidden aboard Air Force One, and then pirated off the plane when it landed at Andrews AFB. From there it was airlifted by helicopter to Walter Reed. Either way, JFK's wounds, according to the sworn statements of attending physicians who treated him at Parkland and performed the autopsy at Bethesda, changed dramatically between Dallas and DC. Of this there is no question. How did this happen...and why?

As wild as the theory seems, Lifton's book is well worth the read.

Keith Law Declares Kansas City Royals MLB Champs for 2009

2009-11-21T05:49:00.000-08:00

Defying conventional wisdom, ESPN baseball analyst and statistical expert Keith Law has named the Kansas City Royals as baseball's best team in 2009. "It's not even close; by almost all statistical standards, the Royals lapped the field in 2009."

Reaction in New York, where the Yankees had apparently won the 2009 World Series, was irate. Sports call-in shows were flooded with angry callers demanding to know how Law arrived at his decision. But at least one New York sports talk host, who wished to remain anonymous, agreed with Law. "When you look at KC's LAW RAT (Leveraged and Averaged Win Ratio), there's no comparison. The Royals had a LAW RAT of 19.762; the next closest was the Nationals with 17.118."

Law defended his decision by citing the numbers. "Greinke's WACKY (Win Average Coefficient per Strikeout Yield) was off the charts, the Royals' bullpen's Average Saves In Nine Innings (ASININE) led the league, and their Defensive Uncategorized Errors (DUNCE) score was first in the AL."

When an AP reporter reminded Law that the game was played on the field and not on sabremetician's spread sheets, and that the Yankees had actually won the world championship, Law responded, "The World Series is an invalid determinant of the best team. What you saw was an illusion. The complex variables that go into an assessment of which team is better has nothing to do with vague and amorphous things like a pitcher's stuff, quality at-bats, momentum, fielders' instincts, and managerial decisions. To put it in terms the layman can understand, it's about what players could do...not what they do do."

Meanwhile in Kansas City, the mayor has scheduled a belated victory parade through the downtown district on Tuesday, and Bud Selig is expected to award the Commissioner's trophy to the Royals organization on that occasion.

Law, who has an MBA from Harvard and once worked as a consultant for the Toronto Blue Jays, drew similar ire when he voted Javier Vazquez second on his Cy Young ballot and omitted St. Louis's Chris Carpenter, despite Carpenter's apparent statistical advantage over Vazquez. "Any dope can cite ERA and wins; that's not what determines good pitching. I look at Games Over Ongoing Fielding Yield (GOOFY) average."

When asked who should win the world championship in 2010, Law responded, "Well, right now I'm favoring the Pirates. Their Cosine Rating At Position (CRAP) is astronomical."

"Amelia" Lacks Excitement; How Is That Possible?

2009-11-17T19:13:00.000-08:00

Part of the allure of the Amelia Earhart story is the mystery of how it ended. World-renowned as the first successful female aviator, she attempted to circle the globe in 1937, but her flight vanished somewhere over (or in?) the Pacific Ocean just as she was about to finish the last leg of her journey. I love bios, especially those with a good mystery attached, so I entered the theater drooling with anticipation. I left the theatre needing a poke in the ribs from my wife to stay awake. How did this happen? One can lay the blame on director Mira Nair's unimaginative direction, Hilary Swank's acting, and a script that does not even attempt to speculate on what became of Amelia's last flight.

Hilary Swank's impersonation of Earhart is dead-on (no pun intended). She looks, acts, and speaks like the real Amelia...so much so that I was diverted by it several times during the film. I mean, I thought I was watching a resurrection of Earhart rather than an interpretation of her life. In other words, Swank's mechanics are impeccable, but they dominate the performance to the point that the viewer comes away wondering what Earhart was really like. Somehow Swank did not capture the elan and verve of Earhart. There was no soul in the machine.

Nair makes the same mistake. She touches all the bases of Earhart's life without hitting a home run. All the dates, times, names, and places are accurate, but it adds up to not much more than a National Geographic special. I didn't feel anything for the characters and their plights.

But all this could have be redeemed by a boffo ending. They couldn't screw that up, right? Earhart's fate has been the subject of innumerable theories and wild conjecture for over 70 years. Hundreds of books, articles, and essays have been written about her death. All of them trying to solve the mystery in an original way. There was no dearth of material from which the director and writer could choose. Some say Amelia and Fred Noonan (her co-pilot) landed safely on a remote Pacific island and lived there for years. Some say the Japanese captured and tortured and imprisoned them during World War II. Some say the flight just vanished into thin air, a victim of a South Pacific/Bermuda triangle. Whatever happened, no trace of the plane was ever found despite a massive search. So how did the film deal with all this? It ignored it entirely. The movie ends without an ending. Amelia is running low on fuel and people look worried, but no conclusion is drawn. Credits come up, and hopes crash.

Like the life and last flight of its eponymous heroine, "Amelia" is unfinished business.

Op-Ed News Article Names Traitors in JFK Cabinet Who Plotted To Have Him Killed

2009-11-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

I am re-printing below an article posted recently on Op-Ed News (an online opinion mag to which I've contributed several times). It was written by Alen Salerian, MD, a Washington-based physician, author, and historian, who has been practicing psychiatry and psychopharmacology for 35 years. He is the former chief psychiatrist of the FBI's mobile psychiatric unit. He has authored numerous articles on behavior, government integrity, neurobiology, psychiatry, and psychopharmacology in various publications.

The topic of the article posted below is the JFK assassination, and Dr. Salerian's assertions and hypotheses are stunning. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the assassination, but Dr. Salerian has new evidence based on his reading of Robert McNamara's book, In Retrospect, published a few years ago. In Retrospect was McNamara's mea culpa for his sins committed as Defense Secretary under JFK and LBJ. Dr. Salerian contends McNamara is asking forgiveness not only for the colossal blunder of Vietnam, but also (in veiled, coded language) for the assassination of JFK. I have read McNamara's book and found it to be much too little, much too late, to be an acceptable path to his redemption. But I was unable to make the same inferences that Salerian has. Salerian uses other source documents with which I am very familiar to build his case for a high-level coup d'etat, hatched by CIA operatives and traitors--McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson, and Robert McNamara among them--within the Kennedy administration...culminating in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The lesson for me was this: beware of those in the JFK cabinet who stayed on to serve LBJ after the bullets flew in Dealey Plaza. Here's the article:

"...he [McNamara] is the first modern statesman who openly acknowledges his errors and takes responsibility for them. This is a first in history and it is a very good thing for humanity.

"I want to bypass all the drama, all the phony diplomatic rhetoric, the thinly veiled transparency of obsessive minds and to leap over all the artificialities to embrace and celebrate McNamara's unique gift to humanity.

"It is my hypothesis that Bundy, McNamara, Allen Dulles (the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency), General Curtis LeMay (Air Force chief of staff), Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and possibly a few others engineered a coup d'état to wage war in Vietnam. It is also my hypothesis that President Kennedy's death was just the collateral damage of war and so was the disappearance of over a thousand people after the assassination.

"Why do common sense, reason, and statistics suggest that all the following pieces perfectly fit together for a complex design to make a coup d'état a success? They are all very rare or extraordinary firsts in history. For instance, the president, the vice president, and virtually the entire Cabinet were away from Washington on the day of the coup (2). The president was in Texas along with the vice president, and the Cabinet were on their way to Tokyo. By now, we know that the Secret Service was grossly negligent before, during, and after the ambush (3). We also know that all of the images of the president's death captured by photos and videos are not authentic (3). The president's autopsy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital is a sham, as are the X-rays and the autopsy photos (3,4). This is astonishing for Bethesda, the flagship of all the best the military can provide for medical care.

"On the day of the ambush, the phones in Washington, D.C., the press phones, and the Cabinet airplane communication all ceased to function (2). The only two people in Washington from the president's team were Bundy and McNamara, and they happened to be the architects of the new war opposed by President Kennedy but endorsed by the new President, LBJ (2). Bundy and McNamara were at the Pentagon precisely at the time the presidential limousine approached Dealey Plaza (1).

"Both Bundy and McNamara lied about small details of the assassination repeatedly and unnecessarily, in some ways inviting special attention to their own behavior. McNamara said for 90 minutes he was not aware of the president's assassination, although he was at the Pentagon, the epicenter of reaction to national emergencies (1). Strangely, he was chairing a routine budget meeting, which he did not interrupt. Even a month later when information emerged that several communication systems were sabotaged, McNamara never evinced curiousity about the origin of all these mishaps.

"None of these, of course, individually make McNamara or Bundy a suspect, yet collectively they click and suggest they were not random events. There are other more fundamental developments that can actually solve the puzzle. Most important, Kennedy had opposed the war in Vietnam and had issued specific orders through National Security Action Memorandum 263, dated November 21, 1963, to end the war (1,2). This was to begin with the withdrawal of '1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.' (2). His orders were precise and unequivocal. But upon his death, not only were his orders reversed, but then the war expanded at an eventual cost of 58,000 American lives.

"President Kennedy was the author of NSAM 263 ending the war. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, authorized NSAM 273 overriding the intent of 263 (1,2).

"If, despite the evidence, one might possibly be dubious of McNamara's role, there can be little doubt of Bundy's involvement. Bundy, according to Army General Maxwell Taylor, a trusted confidante of both John and Robert Kennedy, was the number one responsible party for the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs (2). On April 16, 1961, on D-day at 9:30 p.m., Bundy would cancel President Kennedy's orders for air strikes against Cuban targets (2). Bundy's reversal would be determined to be the most crucial error contributing to the debacle. At the end of the Cuban study group, General Taylor's conclusion declared that Bundy's blunder was the main cause of failure (2). Bundy himself would offer his resignation, which Kennedy declined.

"Bundy's blunders—if that is how we wish to characterize them—would continue. He single-handedly managed to create an epochal cable on August 24, 1963, authorizing a coup against the leader of South Vietnam, President Ngo Dinh Diem (1,2). At first, the dispatch of the cable appeared to be a mere accident. Bundy pointed the finger at his young assistants Michael Forrestal and Roger Hilsman (1,2). Kennedy was furious, of course. 'This shit must stop!' he shouted at Forrestal. The young Bundy assistant took the brunt of Kennedy's fury and offered his resignation (4). Once again, Kennedy declined. But the question is: how could Bundy, the nation's top gun on national security, be unaware of such a pivotal message? How could a young national security aide, without the knowledge or approval of his boss, send a historical paradigm-shifting cable to authorize a covert coup d'état in Vietnam? Bundy's response? It's a bad idea, he said, to make major policy decisions on weekends.

"The error of August 24 could not be fully appreciated if it had not been preceded by a similar occurrence during the Bay of Pigs. Bundy's absence was eerily similar to the disappearance of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, during the crucial days of the Bay of Pigs. Bundy's tricks with the October 29th meeting are well recorded with his admission that, in fact, he had given Henry Cabot Lodge, the ambassador to Vietnam, a green light for a coup d'état despite presidential orders against such an act (4).

"The coup did occur, not only toppling the government but also taking the lives of President Diem and his younger brother and adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu (2,4). This was yet another blow to President Kennedy's personal instructions. He had sent his personal friend as his emissary to Vietnam to negotiate Diem's peaceful exit out of Vietnam. Understandably, when the news arrived at the White House, a sickened and ashen president in visible distress quickly left the conference room (2,4). The conclusion seem inescapable that he had realized someone had been betrayed him, although he did not know who, why, or how. It might have been his gut feeling telling him that something horrendous was going on, yet he could not let himself think his most important aide and his chief military adviser was the mole.

"A modern Brutus betraying democracy. Bundy's jokes were telling. When the Diem brothers' murders surfaced with their hands tied behind their backs and bullets lodged in their necks, he commented, 'This is not the preferred way to commit suicide.' Bundy was at the White House Situation Room chatting with Lucien Conein, the CIA station chief in Saigon who was at the command center of the coup d'état with bags full of dollars for the triumphant generals (2,4). Did Conein and Bundy team up on November 22nd when Conein was on Houston Street and Bundy at the White House Situation Room? We know however, they were there (2,4). What did Bundy do at the White House situation room? Was he organizing Operation Big Lift[1] or was he running the ambush from the Situation Room?

"And why was Conein's smile published all over the world with the presidential limousine slowly approaching the death zone on Elm Street (5)?

"Was this a Dulles or Bundy genius to boldly inform the world who makes the big decisions in Texas by not concealing the face of the CIA station chief, recently returned from facilitating a coup in Vietnam only three weeks earlier?

"Perhaps it is nothing more sublime yet devastating than deception by a trusted man that makes us understand JFK's failure to suspect the virulence of Bundy, a brilliant virtuoso of deceit. Some historians and behavior experts may wrongly blame Kennedy for letting his guard down to trust a compulsive liar like Bundy. Or worse for not firing Bundy after the Bay of Pigs.

"And here comes the creative genius of Allen Dulles, the most likely architect of the big strategy. During the Bay of Pigs, Dulles made himself the conspicuous target for the blunder, the obvious villain by disappearing for several days to lure the Kennedy brothers to an elegant trap (2,4).

"What is remarkable is that Dulles's success rested on its blunt openness of his obvious responsibility for the military fiasco. He virtually produced the evidence making him the fall guy to steer any careful scrutiny away from Bundy and Bundy's defining error correctly diagnosed by General Maxwell Taylor—that is, the error or calling off the all-important air strikes, thereby ensuring a rout by Cuban forces.

"The President took the bait, so did his brother Bobby. If Dulles had designed a simple plan for future spies, his strategy should be recorded as a classic in the annals of grand deceptions. Whereas democracy, human life, and progress depend on trust and transparency, Dulles and his organization had a different premise.

"Some modern thinkers share the opinion that diplomacy always relies on deception. Consider, for instance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's masterly use of the sitting duck of Pearl Harbor to unleash the American might.

"The danger that arises with such a comparison is a dismissal of trust and hierarchy. Roosevelt was always in charge. His admirals and code breakers did not set up Roosevelt to declare war on Japan. Roosevelt was the chief architect, unlike Dulles, who was sabotaging his boss, the commander in chief.

"Let us for a moment digress and consider one other and possibly crucial act by Dulles during his service under President Eisenhower.

"Among the researchers who uncovered Dulles's sabotage of impending talks between Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev are James Douglass and Fletcher Prouty (2,4). Thanks to their meticulous documentation we now know that indeed the U2 incident with Francis Gary Powers landing on Soviet soil and canceling the talks between the two leaders was another rare Dulles gift to world politics (2,4). Prouty, a patriotic man, tactfully and methodically presents the evidence leading no doubt that Eisenhower's order for no flights was openly violated with the U2 mission (2,4).

"The revelation of Dulles's strategy sheds new light on JFK's failure to recognize Bundy's combustible presence at the White House.

"On September 21, 1996, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. eulogized Bundy with an article published in George, He wrote, 'Born a privileged Republican he has become a liberal Democrat, and a single tragic error seriously compromising his full potential as a statesman.'

"In that respect, Schlesinger just joined a distinguished group of people who never understood Bundy's sick brain. The cheating had a deep, slow, unmistakable ascent in Bundy's life leading to Dealey Plaza.

"Though the principle element is deception, the early signs are well concealed under a mixture of dry humor, intelligence, and surprise. The entire magical powers of Bundy can be surmised in how naturally Bundy cycled his triangular package of deception.

"This observation, of course, is made possible only with a bird's eye view of history from a distant site and angle and aided by an abundance of key information.
Once again Bundy's center of gravity is deception. Consider:
Bundy enters Yale without completing the entrance exam (6). With a cute and imaginative excuse, he refuses to write a mandatory essay.
- Bundy enters the Army by cheating the eye exam—memorizing the eye chart (6).
- Bundy teaches government at Harvard without ever taking a government course (6).
- Bundy becomes a Harvard dean without ever earning a Ph.D. (6).

"Such gross, open violations of boundaries are regularly and flauntingly illustrated in Bundy's pre–White House life he had mistakenly confused as daring brilliance instead of a dysfunctional brain juxtaposing his poor control of chaotic emotions and drives.

"Who is Bundy? What kind of a man would engage in such deception after reaching such a privileged position of trust, power, and influence?

"He was a broken mind with an internally roaring fury at all the Kennedys and what they represented, and his viruliferous rage destroyed so many Southeast Asian people, families, farms, forests, peasants, businessmen, enemy fighters, and more without any mercy, sorrow, or remorse—not even with his death in 1996.

"Once Bundy's deception emerges and his emotional, historical, political roots to Dulles and their frenzied, coordinated demolition of the Kennedy White House are discovered, the giant sketch of the coup d'état is visible and not so mysterious or hypothetical. You do not have to be a student of the complexity theory to marvel at the painstaking labor and extensive design that put so many diverse and dissonant pieces together that paved the road to Dealey Plaza.

"And that brings us full circle to subject of this article: Robert Strange McNamara. Why is McNamara great? History and countless researchers and ordinary citizens inspired by diverse factors have unearthed crucial pieces to the JFK puzzle. May it not be possible that as more time has passed since the assassination and with more evidence the puzzle has finally been solved?
McNamara reports only the facts. He does not openly point his finger at anyone. But he does establish the foundation of the giant puzzle. He had every reason to imitate the other three and forever take the truth to his grave as Bundy, Dulles, and Johnson did. There is, of course, some reason to indicate that LBJ did his reasonable share to leave a paper trail behind.

"LBJ was not in Honolulu, on Oahu, on November 20, 1963, possibly the most important gathering for the coup. Ostensibly, the conference was chaired by McNamara to review the political, economic, and military status in Vietnam (4). The conference was attended by key military and government leaders, including virtually the entire Cabinet. In point of fact, the end result of the conference was to torpedo NSAM 263, the document ordering U.S. troops out of Vietnam (1,2).

"In In Retrospect, McNamara's measured, careful tone reviewing the events preceding the Vietnam War meticulously introduces the important history-defining revelations. Through his stated words, as well as beautifully presented omissions, he recapitulates an important section of American history. His chain of logic, recording history by color-coding the essential truths, then gently dropping absent cues is simply magnificent.

"In the comforting illumination of his fatherly wisdom, one suddenly makes sense of so many seemingly impossible mishaps that occurred before, during, and after the ambush. McNamara makes a point of explaining what is essential and what occurred. He makes a point of specific details such as his learning the news at the Pentagon at 2 p.m., almost 90 full minutes after the president was shot (1). He reminds us gently that he is with Bundy at the Pentagon (1). Equally gently, he tells us that he continues with the meeting, a fairly routine budget discussion. He is equally tactful in pointing out that the August 24, 1963 cable was a mistake, but the mistake was not caused by the young assistant Hilsman or Forrestal and it was unquestionably Bundy's fault (1). In essence, this is McNamara's way of exposing Bundy and Bundy's successful sabotage of JFK's Vietnam strategy. He makes a very clear point of establishing the truth that Kennedy's position on Vietnam and the difference between National Security Action Memorandum 263 and 273. He therefore establishes the truth at the expense of the Pentagon Papers and their manifold misrepresentations: JFK had given clear and absolute orders to exit Vietnam.

"Most importantly, without using highly precise descriptions of actions that would be defined as 'treason' or 'sabotage,' McNamara would record history. On page 69, he is most precise. This is where McNamara reveals how Hilsman on September 27, 1963, via Michael Forrestal, sent a handwritten note to Lodge. The content of this letter is a clear violation of JFK's specific orders. Hence, McNamara exposes the treachery by Hilsman, Forrestal and of course, because Bundy is their boss, Bundy. McNamara skillfully disengages himself from the decisions made in Honolulu on November 20, 1963. On page 85, he makes a reference to Honolulu where he says, 'I remember nothing specific about Honolulu, but I remember and I know who remembers Honolulu well - Bundy.' This is McNamara's way of saying Bundy was responsible for the fateful decisions, most likely a reference to the coup d'état and assassination that was finalized in Honolulu.

"It is impossible not to inhale McNamara's wisdom or not marvel at his healing voice and the core message that he conveys: 'We should march forward wiser and more humble after Vietnam and after the loss of a great American president with a beautiful and realistic peaceful vision of the world.'

"I say thank you, Mr. McNamara, and that is why I nominate him for a peace award."

Book Signing Event--Collinsville Holiday Arts Festival

2009-11-10T11:07:00.000-08:00

I'll be signing copies of my book, Murder Of An American Nazi, at the Authors Corner in the Community Room of the Collinsville, Illinois, Public Library. The event is part of the Collinsville Holiday Arts Festival, and it will take place from 12 noon till 8 pm on both Dec. 4 and 5, 2009.

The Collinsville Public Library is located at 408 West Main Street in downtown Collinsville. Eleven other St. Louis area authors will be participating. It's an eclectic group covering a wide spectrum of genres, so there will be plenty of good books from which to choose.

For more information, you can contact Barbara Rhodes at http://www.collinsvillelibrary.org/ or call (618) 344-1112.

Mr. President, Remember The Lesson Of Jack Kennedy: Don't Let The Warmongers Box You In

2009-10-29T20:38:00.000-07:00

The United States is, once again, at the precipice of all-out war, and, if the Pentagon, the Republicans, and the military-industrial monolith have their way, Afghanistan may become another Iraq or Vietnam. One can only hope that President Obama knows his history and will refuse to repeat its mistakes. For he alone, like Jack Kennedy in the early 1960s, stands in the way of the forces of unrepentant, bloodthirsty aggression. The Pentagon and the warmongers think they have him boxed in, with cries for escalation in Afghanistan. They have even dragged out that soulless solicitor of Halliburton business--Dick Cheney--to do their bidding. But, if history tells us anything, expanding the war against an entrenched, indigenous, terrain-savvy tribe like the Taliban is futile. The body counts, the bombings, and the price tag will skyrocket, but the conflict will never be resolved.

The cries of the hawks are all too familiar. In the early 1960s, the military, the CIA, and the right-wing politicians wanted to invade Cuba, nuke Russia, and wipe out the communists in southeast Asia. Kennedy resisted, and that sealed his fate. Maxwell Taylor once said, "At one point, President Kennedy was the only one who DIDN'T want to send ground troops into Vietnam." History absolved his stance. Vietnam turned out to be a bloody, expensive waste.

Will Obama have the same courage his long-ago predecessor summoned up? And if he does, will the forces of evil put a target on his back?

This is why we elected him...to avoid the same blunders that got us into Iraq and Vietnam. Hard as it is to admit, the only resolution to this mess is diplomacy and negotiation, even when it involves a group as repugnant as the Taliban. After all, as Jack Kennedy once said about America's dire enemy in his day, "...we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's future, and we are all mortal."

"Red Sheep" Shocked, Dismayed By Cardinals Performance. They Haven't Been Paying Attention.

2009-10-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

For years, local media hacks and management shills have been tirelessly promoting St. Louis Cardinals fans as baseball's best. Let me tell you something...it ain't so. I live here in Cardinal land, have even attended a few games. These fans are passive, uncritical, and slavishly obsequious. They attend games not to live and die with their team, question the manager's moves, scream at umpires, or heckle visiting teams...they go to have a summer night out with their neighbors. Baseball games in St. Louis are social events, times to catch up with their pals and drink a Bud or two under the stars. The game itself is just background noise, like a CD playing at a neighborhood barbecue.

Sitting behind me in the right-field loge seats at the last game I attended were two families, small kids and all, gossiping, playing word games, people watching, letting the youngsters run wild, and, in general, being oblivious to the game. Not one of them could have told you the score, the inning, the pitcher, even the opponent.

These same fans (I call them Red Sheep or Crimson Lemmings) took no notice when the Cardinals ended this regular season losing 14 of their last 21 games. All they knew was that the Cardinals won the NL Central and were going to the playoffs. Little was made of the sloppy defense, the god-awful relief pitching, the lack of timely hitting, Albert Pujols' slump, and all sorts of other dark omens.

So now that the Birds have laid an enormous egg in Game 1 of the playoffs, losing 5-3 to the LA Dodgers, the Red Sheep are livid. They are now suddenly and furiously spewing their anger and shock on chat forums, sports talk shows, and blogs. If only they'd been paying attention, they would have seen this coming. Here are the warning signs they missed, and here is what the embarrassingly uncritical St. Louis media glossed over:

Albert Pujols' career is in decline. He is now, according to some, in his mid-30s, a time when baseball skills erode. Albert has not hit a home run since Sept. 9, the longest drought of his career. His slump began after he participated in the home run derby at the All-Star game, an event which has ruined many power strokes. (Bobby Abreu has never been the same since winning it several years ago.) Albert is so confused and inept at the plate that he can barely hit a loud foul ball. Why Joe Torre is intentionally walking a virtually sure out is beyond me.

Matt Holliday, the team's heralded acquisition from Oakland, has not homered since Sept. 11. He and Pujols together have one home run in 156 at-bats.

Cardinal relief pitching is horrible, especially Kyle McClellan. McClellan single-handedly blew Adam Wainwright's 20th victory a week ago. He surrendered five runs in about three minutes. His ERA in September was near 50, and he has little control over his fastball. Last night he hit a batter, walked a man, gave up a hit, and...oh Christ, he's just terrible.

The offense can't get a big hit with runners on base. In game one of the NLDS they stranded 14 runners. 14!! The last of those were left on base by Rick Ankiel, aka the human strikeout machine. Ankiel has struck out five times more often than he has walked this year. That is sub-human futility.

Boy are the Crimson Lemmings going to be pissed off when LA completes the series sweep at Busch Stadium.

Limbaugh To Buy My Football Team? Better Not.

2009-10-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting that Rush Limbaugh is part of a group trying to buy the St. Louis Rams. Huh? Limbaugh owning a team in a sport dominated by African-American athletes? I don't see it.

If you don't know Limbaugh, he's that fascist blowhard that your right-wing screwball of a neighbor has blasting on his radio every day. And here are just some of the hateful, racist things Limbaugh has broadcast:

"They ought to give a posthumous medal to James Earl Ray. Godspeed, James."

(To a black listener:) "Take that bone out of your nose and shut up."

"Historians say slavery was a bad thing. Not so. The South was built on slavery...and the streets were sure a lot safer at night then."

"Nelson Mandela was a communist agitator."

(About black pro football players:) "I mean it looks like it's the Bloods vs. Crips without weapons out there."

I know NFL owners are a good old boys network of white, middle-aged conservatives, but do they want the kind of turmoil and divisiveness that Limbaugh brings? I can just hear Limbaugh now after a game where one of his wide receivers drops a game-winning pass (a regular occurrence with the Rams): "I'm going to fire that jungle bunny. Probably had fried chicken grease on his fingers."

If Limbaugh does purchase the Rams, I'll find another team to root for. And I'll be gleeful each time Limbaugh's team loses.

Jon Voight: More Than A Bad Actor, He's An Anti-Health Care NutJob

2009-09-01T14:18:00.000-07:00

Scanning for my book trailer on YouTube, I stumbled across something called the Mike Huckabee show on FOX News. The guest was actor Jon Voight, and it turns out that he's a red-faced, closed-minded, self-centered neocon. Who knew? All I knew of him was that he mumbled his lines so badly that they were barely audible in "Heat" (1996), was typecast as a neo-fascist Army general in "The Incredible Hulk" (2005), and hammed it up in "Transformers" (2009). Turns out his politics are as offensive as his acting.

First of all, the Huckabee show is like something out of 1950s TV. The audience is all white, they nod their heads on cue, they gasp when the word "socialism" is mentioned. Just the kind of uncognizant, conformist automatons FOX loves. Huckabee has all the charm of your loony uncle who pulls nickels out of his ears at family gatherings and still laments the fact that FDR got us out of the Great Depression. He smiles approvingly when Voight calls Obama names, the kind of racial code words the Arkansas hillbillies love.

But Voight, of course, has his facts wrong. He said Americans don't want health care reform; they like things just they way there are. Sorry, Midnight Cowboy, 46 million Americans without any health care at all would make you eat those words...and hope you choke on them. Of course, Jonny Boy's rich enough to afford health care, so what does it matter to him. And spittle shot from his mouth when he whined that "Obama's playing the god card. He said god wants Obamacare to pass." No, Jon, you're lying, and, like Huckleberry, you're a hypocrite. The Bible says we are our brother's keeper; thus, it is entirely appropriate to make health care reform a moral issue. After all, aren't Christians morally obligated to help their fellow man in need? What's more needed now than health care for those who are sick?

Mainstream Media Play Stupid While Health Care Bullies Sway Opinion

2009-08-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

If ever any intelligent, objective citizen needed proof that the American media is a bunch of impotent, corporatized, weak-kneed shills--emasculated by and terrified of the right wing--you need only watch the nightly news or read your local paper. Day after day, mobs of phony anti-health reform vigilantes threaten others at town hall meetings, yet the TV networks, the Associated Press, and major dailies report this as legitimate news (perhaps because Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly sponsor some of these "news" reports?). A serious journalistic investigation, even a half-hearted one, would reveal that most of these "protestors" are paid by the health insurance corporations or their lobbyists. The rest are mindless neanderthals, propagandized by Rush Limbaugh and the usual gang of fascists. But Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Charlie Gibson don't see it that way. To them, the hostile mobs are just average Americans exercising their constitutional right to deprive 46 million people of health care.

What's most galling is that the bullies shout down the pro-reformers with lies about "death panels" and "universal vaccinations" and the end of Medicare, and God knows what else. And the media never challenge these lies. It would be like Goebbels claiming that Jews are really descended from rats, and the media, instead of dismissing this outrageous prevarication, reports Goebbels' comments (and the psychopaths it unleashes) as legitimate news. (I guess Huey Long was right when he said, "Fascism will come to America, but we will call it democracy. And a corrupt, complacent press will let it happen.") Meanwhile, polls show that public health care for all, once favored by 80% of Americans, is now dying a slow death. All because a small minority of red-faced extremists and paid propagandists are being facilitated by a brain-dead media.

This is the state of the mainstream media in this country today. Newt Gringich goes on cable talk shows saying we have the best health care system in the world; Sean Hannity repeats this lie on Fox News. Neither are challenged. The fact is, the USA's health care system ranks 37th in the world according to the World Health Organization. Dick Armey goes on "Meet The Press" and asserts that having public health care for all would kill thousands of people. It is never revealed that Armey is a paid lobbyist for the health insurance industry. This is democracy in action; this is your free press at work.

Let's be real. Health insurance corporations have billions available to flood the free market of ideas with lies and distortions, spread by the politicians, news organizations, and lobbyists it owns. Profit will always defeat the welfare of the people, when the people are cowed by fear and misinformed by a media that's "for sale." A friend of mine put it this way, "I don't watch the national news any more. You won't find the truth there."

I Shed No Tears For Cronkite--CIA Mockingbird Asset

2009-07-18T11:09:00.001-07:00

Walter Cronkite's death has caused an outpouring of grief and glowing remembrances from people who did not know the real Cronkite and who are ignorant of their own history. Cronkite, called "the most trusted man in America" during his tenure as CBS Evening News anchor, was quite untrustworthy when it came to uncovering the truth about the biggest news story of the 20th century--the assassination of President Kennedy. Yeah, I've seen the video of his "choked-up" reporting of JFK's death on Nov. 22, 1963, but what I remember most is his 1967 CBS documentary which supported and praised the Warren Commission's work. The Warren Report has since been exposed as a 26-volume pack of lies, but Walter went to his grave defending it. This indefensible lapse in journalistic integrity and fortitude was no accident. Walter was either ordered, or strongy "encouraged," to mislead Americans by his boss, William Paley.

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's subversion of the free press in America. Frank Wisner, who ran the project in the 1940s and 1950s for the Agency, once famously said that the American media was like his own "...personal Wurlitzer; I can play any tune I want on it and America Will follow along." In the 1970s, CIA director William Colby admitted, "The CIA owns assets at every major media outlet in America, TV networks, newspapers, publishing houses, and magazines. In a 1977 Rolling Stone article, Carl Bernstein estimated that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of CIA-friendly assets at all the major TV networks, newspapers and periodicals in America. William Paley, president of CBS, had an especially cozy relationship with the CIA. It began in the 1950s when Allen Dulles was head of the Agency. Dulles and Paley became close friends, and Dulles convinced Paley to broadcast CIA-approved stories, employ CIA "journalists," and provide cover for covert agents on assignment. CBS even provided film clips of stories on foreign nations and their leaders. Many times these clips were not broadcast unless the CIA gave its approval.

The apparatus, then, was in place for the CIA to prevent an honest investigation of its murder of the 35th president of the United States. The Washington Post, the New York Times, Time/Life, ABC, NBC, and CBS all attacked those who dared to criticize the official version of events, and publicized propaganda and false information about how and why JFK was murdered. CBS, in particular, led the charge with Cronkite and Dan Rather out front, heading off any real investigative journalism. Paley ruled over his reporters and his news network with an iron fist. NO way was he going to take on the CIA.

So I say, Walter, you may have been an avuncular sort who played to the camera, but you got the most important story of your lifetime wrong. Because of that, you aided and abetted the falsification of 20th century American history...and for that you will forever be disgraced as a journalist. I'll have to turn off the news this weekend, because the Cronkite tributes gushing from the mouths of the uninformed will make me want to throw up.

My Novel Is Being Serialized; Read Sections For Free

2009-07-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

Beginning Monday, July 6, Murder Of An American Nazi will be posted, a chapter at a time, on The Daily Novel's web site. This is where readers can go to access good novels for free. Just click on www.dailynovel.net

Glad To Have DeRosa; But LaRussa's Micromanaging Will Negate Him

2009-06-28T14:58:00.001-07:00

The Cardinals' Front Office actually acquired an in-season impact player. I'm shocked; I never thought this would happen. Mark DeRosa can actually hit for average and power (.270, 11 homers 56 RBI), something our present outfielders are incapable of. He should play every day, but don't hold your breath. Remember, Tony LaGenius is our manager, and if there's one thing he will never resort to it is doing the obvious thing. For, you see, geniuses do not do the obvious. That's why they are geniuses. If it is plain to all that DeRosa should play every day, then you can bet he will not. Because LaGenius knows more than any fan, any player, any manager, any front office person who has ever seen a game of baseball. In fact, I have publicly begged him to bat the pitcher eighth so that he would do what every other manager in the history of the game has always done: bat the pitcher ninth. I figure if he gets the idea that the fans think batting the pitcher eighth is a good idea, he will resort to batting the pitcher ninth. Such is the bizarre conundrum of being a St. Louis Cardinals fan. (By the way, someday, god willing, LaLoser will retire or die, and ownership--Bill DeWallet--will sell, and I will be free to love my team again. After all, this has been my team since 1958; it is more my team than it is LaGenius's or DeWallet's.)

Back to the sweet and sour of having DeRosa. Because DeRosa is a very versatile player, it presents LaGenius with many options. And one thing we do not want is for LaGenius to have too many options, because he invariably thinks and ponders and intellecutalizes himself into the wrong choice. (Baseball is a simple game, but LaLoser insists on making it rocket science.) For instance, in today's game the Twins threw a lefty, Nelson Liriano, so it was a safe bet that DeRosa would be in left field (even though he prefers the infield) because we have a paucity of right-handed-hitting outfielders. (The only other is Ryan Ludwick, so it was a safe bet he would play also, though I sweated this out until game time. Note: this is the same Ryan Ludwick who hit 37 homers last year, drove in 117, batted .300, and made the All-Star team and won a Silver Slugger award...but who has been turned into a platoon player by LaGenius.) This must have been a devastating dilemma to LaGenius, because it meant that he would have to sit either his man-crush/love interest Rick Ankiel (.234, 5 HRs, 25 RBI) or the pitching coach's son, Chris Duncan (no power, no average, no clutch hitting)...or, god forbid, horror of horrors...bench both! Ah...alas, LaGenius chose to play Ankiel, rather than Colby Rasmus, our young phenom who has also been turned into an occasional player. So although Duncan was benched, Ankiel was not.

Let's back up here a minute, and let me explain something. Until the Cardinals acquired DeRosa, they had four outfielders (five if you include Skip Schumaker, whom LaGenius has converted into a mediocre second baseman). They are Ryan Ludwick, Colby Rasmus, Rick Ankiel, and Chris Duncan. It is obvious to me, and all logical Cardinals fans, that Ludwick (for reasons stated above) and Rasmus should be playing every day. Rasmus is only 21, but he can run, hit, field and throw. He has the most potential of any player. Playing him every third game is not going to develop his abilities; he needs to be a part of the everyday lineup. That leaves one outfield position vacant for the remaining two players--Ankiel and Duncan. The logical thing to do would be to play one and sit the other (I don't care which, because they are equally awful...and now that DeRosa has arrived, BOTH of these slugs should ride the bench). But there is a problem with this. Yeah, you guessed it: LaGenius is infatuated with both of them. Let's take them one at a time:

Rick Ankiel--A converted pitcher whose pitching career was ruined by LaLoser (He played head games with Ankiel prior to a playoff game and this began Rick's inclination to regularly throw the ball over the backstop from the pitcher's mound). LaLoser may feel intense guilt over this and thus is compelled to "carry" Ankiel as an outfielder. This despite the fact that Ankiel is a streaky hitter, who has prolonged slumps, never hits for a good average, has little power, and never hits in the clutch (.155 career with the bases loaded, and 0 for 8 with six strikeouts this year). Ankiel wraps the bat around his head and waves it before the arrival of the pitch. His swing is long and loopy, and has a decided uppercut. He invariably hits the bottom of the ball (for a pop-up) or the top of the ball (easy grounder). My son and I laugh as we watch him hit. We scream in unison, "he hit the top of the ball" as we watch yet another weak ground ball roll toward the second baseman; or, "he hit the bottom of the ball" as another lazy Ankiel pop-up drifts towards short right field. If you're a Cardinal fan, he is the LAST GUY you would want in the batter's box of a tie game, ninth inning, bases loaded. He has a fragile psyche (he spent years in therapy from an abusive father), and he folds easily under pressure. However, you should see him hit when the score is 10-1. Screaming line drives. Some say he has a good arm, but as many times as he throws a runner out, he will just as often miss the cutoff man. In short, I am sick of the high-maintenance, no-performance, head-case melodrama that is Rick Ankiel. But LaGenius is not sick of it. He has made us endure it for 10 years, and there is no end in sight. I believe, don't laugh, that LaGenius has a latent homosexual crush on Ankiel. Ankiel is a great athlete (not all great athletes are competent baseball players) and a good-looking guy, and I think, at some level LaGenius is in love with him. How else to explain this obsession with Ankiel? The guilt theory holds only so much water; LaLoser has ruined many careers without a scintilla of guilt. Why this soft spot for Ricky boy?

That brings us to Little Dunc, the son of longtime pitching coach, Dave Duncan. Little Dunc looks, talks, runs and plays baseball with all the acumen and agility of Frankenstein. No, wait, Frankenstein was a better left fielder. As long and loopy as Ankiel's swing is, that's how stiff, labored, and un-athletic Duncan's is. They say, he is playing out of position; first base is his natural home, but we already have one of those (perhaps you've heard of Albert Pujols? Not even LaGenius could justify benching Albert in favor of Lil Dunc...though I am positive the thought has crossed his mind). Then one day Albert was hurt and Lil Dunc got his chance. He dropped an easy popup; so much for the first-base wunderkind. He strikes out often (all curves and changeups fool him); his power has vanished; and he never gets a big hit. So why does LaGenius play him? It's as simple as this--nepotism. LaGenius is fiercely loyal to Duncan, Sr., and this blinds him to all of Little Dunc's shortcomings.

So there you have it. Ankiel and Duncan must play, despite all the evidence to the contrary. There will never be a time when both are benched in the same game, and they WILL NEVER BE TRADED as long as LaLoser is manager. Despite LaLoser's national reputation as a great manager (this endures as the greatest American lie since Oswald acted alone), who bases his decisions on a computer-like recall of stats, proabilities and tendencies, he is nothing more than an impulsive, illogical, manipulative boss who plays favorites and and covets the power he has over others. His lineups are a reflection of his personality--a mishmash of senselessness, contradiction, contrivance and pseudo-intellectualism. And, mark my words, DeRosa's usefulness will be limited by this. Watch and see--the day will come--perhaps tomorrow night when Lincecum, a right hander, pitches against us--when LaGenius will bench DeRosa and play both Ankiel and Duncan instead. After all, it's more than just baseball; it's Tony working out his neuroses, much to the anguish of Cardinal nation.

I'll be a guest on a Blog Talk Radio show, 6/25

2009-06-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

Grant Lawrence and Judy Lopez, hosts of Dream Catcher Entertainment on Blog Talk radio, have invited me to be a guest on their radio show, Thursday, 6/25, at 8 pm (central time). To access the show, go to http://www.blogtalkradio.com/DreamCatcherEntertainment
Scroll down to upcoming episodes and click on my link.

Judy and Grant have told me that we will be discussing my book and various other topics related to history, politics and American culture. I'm sure we'll touch on CIA atrocities, including the JFK Assassination, along the way.

Tune in and/or call in, and join the conversation.

The Sorry, Pathetic Mess That Is My Team--The St. Louis Cardinals

2009-06-06T06:06:00.000-07:00

Where to begin with this woeful bunch? The anemic offense (worst in the majors in May)? The sloppy defense? The career minor leaguers who have been forced into action because the owner, Bill Dimwitt, Jr., (friend and supporter of George W. Bush) is too cheap to acquire real baseball players? The fraud of a manager? The red sheep who fill the stands each night? The sycohpantic media who fawn over the team? I have lots of gripes.

I am sick of the melodrama that is Rick Ankiel. The pitcher who used to throw balls over the backstop is now an outfielder who cannot hit, yet Tony LaLoser keeps sending him out there. Ankiel is hitting .220, with no power, and never gets a hit when it really matters. His mental and emotional problems are well-documented, and he wilts when the pressure is on. He's the last guy I want at the plate in the ninth inning of a tie game. Rarely does he make solid contact with the baseball because of his loopy, upper-cut swing. When he's not striking out, he hits the top of the ball (ground out) or the bottom of the ball (pop-up). He is erratic in the outfield and susceptible to injury. He is very high maintenance, and he never comes through in the clutch. So why is he still on the team? The manager has a man-crush on him. Ankiel is one of Tony LaLoser's favorites. As is the pitching coach's son--Chris Duncan.

Duncan plays left field with all the agility of Frankenstein. If butchers were all-star outfielders, this guy would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. And, like Ankiel, he cannot hit a curve ball or a chane-up. His swing is stiff and flawed, and opposing pitchers fool him with off-speed stuff constantly. Why is he still on the team? He's another of the manager's favorites; he's the son of LaLoser's long-time pitching coach--Dave Duncan.

The one outfielder who can hit is Ryan Ludwick. Ludwick had 37 homers, 110 RBI, and hit .300 last year. He was voted to the All-Star team and won a Silver Slugger award. So what does Tony LaGenius do with him? Platoons him in April, to the point where Ludwick questions, rightfully, the manager's sanity. This gets Ludwick a one-way ticket to the doghouse. He falls victim to the manager's mind games and now he's an average player. Who benefits? Favored children, Ankiel and Duncan, who have actually played in more games than Ludwick.

Meanwhile, unknowns like Brian Barden, Nick Stavinoha, Joe Thurston, Shane Robinson, Tyler Greene, and Brendan Ryan, all of whom should still be in AAA, get significant playing time. They are the oddest assortment of banjo-hitting slugs I have ever seen. They do not hit for power, average, or if their lives depended on it. Some nights, I swear, I think I am watching the Memphis Redbirds and not the St.Louis Cardinals.

And why do we have no talent in the minors? Because, apparently, the scouting and drafting departments are being run by Moe, Larry, and Curley. In the past 30 years, only two major league-worthy pitchers have been drafted and developed by the organization. One--Danny Haren--was traded away by Walt Jocketty. Jocketty was also responsible for signing Tino Martinez (a bust), Juan Encarnacion (a bigger bust), and Adam Kennedy (the grandaddy of busts). He traded for Mark Mulder (the most worthless ragarm of the three Billy Beane dumped), giving away Haren in the deal.

The current GM, John Mozeliak, is no better. His big signing was Khalil Greene, who is hitting about .200 and now has been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and likely will never play again. Good job researching Khalil's history, Mo.

Overseeing the whole mess is LaRussa, the most overrated manager of all time. How did he get the reputation of a genius? George Will, the creepy political geek who knows as much about baseball as I know about marine biology, once wrote a book in which he called LaLoser a genius. The label stuck, despite all evidence to the contrary. He changes line-ups every night to eradicate performance consistency. He cools off hot hitters (see Ludwick). He makes unfathomable in-game decisions, typically folding under the pressure of a tight game. (In a tie game, ninth inning, at Arizona in April, he sent up Brendan Ryan to pinch hit with the bases loaded instead of Silver Slugger Ryan Ludwick.) He typically destroys the confidence of young pitching talent. He plays favorites. He does not retaliate when his players get hit by pitches. (The one legitimate offensive threat, Albert Pujols, was plunked in the kidneys in a game in May...no retaliation was ordered by LaGenius.)

So how does the team manage to compete? The starting pitching has been pretty good. Especially Carpenter. But give it time...LaGenius will find a way to screw that up too. Meanwhile, red lemmings (aka Cardinal fans) fill the stadium every night, and Dimwitt, pockets full of cash, chortles all the way to the bank.

The Hypocrisy of Right-Wing Radical Catholics

2009-05-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

The recent flap over President Obama's appearance at Notre Dame's commencement again exposes the Catholic ultra-right for what it is--hypocritical, self-righteous, and narrow-minded.
Anti-abortionists showed up red-faced, hell-bent and furious in South Bend over the weekend to protest Obama's visit to that Catholic "sanctuary" Notre Dame. Actually, there were fewer protestors than you might think (the rabid few gave TV cameras their Jerry Springer moment), and Notre Dame (no longer a football factory due to recent losing seasons) accepts students of all faiths, backgrounds, and nationalities. Polls show a large portion of the student body backs Obama and accepts pro-choice dogma. So it was a bunch of lunatic outsiders who invaded South Bend to howl their one-issue message to the world.

Why are these people hypocrites? Because they never protest the war in Iraq, and authentic church dogma is as much anti-war as it is anti-abortion. I respect those Catholics who oppose war as well as abortion; at least, they are consistent. But those who line up on the political right, for one reason and one reason only, to oppose a woman's right to choose, do so with full knowledge that they are endorsing other political policies that fly in the face of the teachings of the Church. Apparently, they do this without the slightest flicker of conscience. For instance, Catholics who supported Bush because of his anti-abortion stance also supported, by proxy, his unholy war, his immoral torture of detainees, his defense contractors' blood profits, his eroding of civil liberties, and his anti-human positions on right-to-privacy and health care issues. These conscienceless Catholics never objected to the Bush atrocities on these fronts...only on abortion. To die on the battlefield, in prison, or because you can't pay for health care is just too bad, but perfectly okay, I guess. Think about it...that means they ascribe to this crazy logic: the end of life matters only before it begins, not after it begins. It must be quite comforting to be a white, suburban, Republican Catholic oblivious to social concerns other than abortion.

Truthfully, anti-abortion hypocrites take their cues from an out-of-touch, hopelessly isolated Roman hierarchy led by a man who once took his place in the ranks of the Hitler youth brigade. Come to think of it, if Hitler were still alive and were an anti-abortion candidate, the Catholic right would swarm to the polls to pull the lever for old Adolf.

Tune In To Authors Read show, May 18

2009-05-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

I will be a guest on the Authors Read show, hosted by Lillian Brummet, Monday, May 18, at 11:30 am CDT. It's a live web broadcast where authors read excerpts from their novels. The link is:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/AuthorsRead/2009/05/18/Tim-Fleming-Murder-Of-An-American-Nazi-

I am posting the actual excerpt I will be reading below. It is from pages 102-105 of Murder Of An American Nazi:

Marie sailed through high school. She got straight A’s and was voted class valedictorian. She was supposed to deliver the commencement address, but, when school administrators scanned an advance copy of it, Marie was told to either switch topics, or the honor of speaking at the graduation would go to another student. The principal had only to read the title of the address, “The Importance of Fighting Nazi Infiltration of the American Government,” to know that Marie’s speech had to be censored.

-102-

Marie was not surprised by the furor. Neither did she protest. She demurely turned over the valedictorian duties to a fellow student. She cared little about the provincial, narrow-minded obsessions of high school administrators. She was moving on to bigger and better things. She was going to change the world.

Because of her grades and Hannah’s lack of financial wherewithal, Marie won a full scholarship to American University in Washington, DC. She intended to study journalism and history. Her goal was to become an investigative reporter for a major U.S. paper, preferably the Washington Post or the New York Times, whose editorial
positions most reflected her own. She wanted to uncover the truth about her family’s
torturer and murderer, Walter Dornberger, and find out if there had indeed been a systematic recruitment and integration of Nazis into American government, military or intelligence positions and how it was done. Were these Nazis influencing our policy towards the Soviets? Were they exacerbating the Cold War?

She was eager to visit the university and chose to route her summer 1963 trip to St. Louis through Washington, DC. The campus was everything she had hoped it would be, a green oasis amid the monuments and momentousness of the nation’s capital.

She checked out her dormitory and discovered that her roommate was someone named
Julia Munshall. Without knowing it, she had arrived during commencement. JFK was to deliver the commencement address. Marie walked right into the ceremony as if she were with a graduate’s family. She took a seat in the bleachers, and what she heard there inspired her and, at the same time, confused her.

Kennedy’s words seemed to flow from a compartment of the government with which Marie was unfamiliar. She had developed a rather jaded, cynical view of America’s intentions. The government and the military publicly decried fascism, yet they secretly

-103-

harbored the worst of the Nazi criminals. What else was going on in secret? What other terrible truths were they hiding? Why did they seem so intent on letting hatred of the Soviet Union bring them to the brink of nuclear annihilation? Did Kennedy even know what was going on in his own government?

Listening to the speech that day, Marie became convinced that Kennedy was going to turn American militarism and secrecy on its head. What he said made her proud, for the first time, to be an American. He spoke of disarmament and world peace. He spoke of commonalities Americans shared with the communists. He spoke of the beginning of the end of the days of conflict. He mentioned the word “peace” over and over. It flew in the face of everything Marie had come to know about America. Kennedy was really sticking his neck out, she thought. Someone would soon chop it off.

Kennedy said, “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do I seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living.” An end to American military arrogance and domination? Marie was transfixed.

“Total war makes no sense in an age…when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe…we must reexamine our own attitude…every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the Cold War, and toward freedom and peace here at home.”

“He wants Americans to question themselves; he wants us to make nice with the Russians?” Marie thought. “The military will hate this. And how about defense contractors and the war weapons industry, she thought. This is going to be bad for business.”

-104-

What Kennedy said next stunned Marie. No American president had ever uttered such a revolutionary idea, such a radical or far-sighted entreaty, such an enlightened way to view an avowed enemy. “No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue…we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage. Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in
common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war…no nation in the history of battle suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes were burned or sacked.”

The Russians had been our allies in World War II; Marie recalled Hannah telling her how the Russians had liberated some of the concentration camps. How had they become our bitter enemies in such a short period?

“…we are both devoting to weapons massive sums of money that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons. In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race…if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

The eloquence, lyricism and profundity of what she’d just heard left Marie limp. The man could deliver a speech like no other. And he could make the listener believe in the country’s future and his ability to get us there. Marie viewed it as a sign that she was in

-105-

the right place at the right time. Like Kennedy, she was determined to make the world a better place. Hope abounded.

___________________________

More than three decades after JFK spoke those words, Don Hayes had a completely different interpretation of what they meant. “He signed his death warrant with that speech,” he told me. “You have no idea how that one shook the halls of the Pentagon and the CIA. And the defense contractors? Are you kidding me? No more billion dollar awards to build fighter jets and weapons and helicopters. No more war profiteering for Brown and Root, Halliburton, Boeing and Bell Textron? An end to the system that had made them all so rich and powerful? No more Red-baiting? World peace? He wasn’t going to let them have Vietnam as their own playground, and they were never going to let Kennedy get away with that. Lemay and Lemnitzer already thought he was a traitor. So did Dulles and half the CIA, including Pfisterr and Dornberger,” spurted a red-faced Don.

“What does this have to do with…” I started.

Don interrupted, “Let me explain it as simply as I can. The same people who killed Kennedy, and then covered it up, were the same people who smuggled Dornberger and hundreds of other Nazis into this country. The same people who overthrew democratic governments. The same people who arranged for war profiteers to get rich. The same people who dosed their own citizens with LSD. The same people who blocked the free press. The same people who conspired with the Mafia to kill Castro, even after Kennedy promised to leave him alone. The same people who contrived to get us into Vietnam. The same people Ike warned us about when he left office. The same people who really ran this country until Kennedy stood up to them. The same people who killed my friend, James Carney.” His anger was so overt, Hayes nearly shouted the last name.

Another Good Review for MOAAN

2009-05-03T11:20:00.001-07:00

IAG writer Clayton Bye wrote this:

MURDER OF AN AMERICAN NAZI
By Tim Fleming
Eloquent Books, 2008
240 pp., $29.95, Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-606-93401-2
Historical Fiction

Timothy Fleming claims to have spent a lifetime researching the CIA's impact on post-World War II America. His blog, Left of the Looking Glass seems to back up that statement. But it’s his book, MURDER OF AN AMERICAN NAZI, that makes me believe it’s true. Reading like a documentary or a piece of non-fiction, Fleming’s historical novel reveals an America that we’ve all seen hints of but never want to believe could exist. Here is a story full of real world people, events and CIA operations anyone can discover on the net—if they have the right names, places and code names, all of which Fleming gives us. It’s a story about an American shadow government made up of greedy conglomerates, CIA enforcers and Nazi recruits.

Woven throughout the eerie tale is the life of one Marie Hannah Kanermann. Born in Dachau (a
German concentration camp) as it is liberated by the Allies and raised in the U.S. by the friend of her dead mother, Marie grows up fighting the secret government with words and actions.
Both her story and that of America after World War II unfold through the words of a retired cop, Don Hayes, as he tells one of his friends about the murder that never was: the death of ex-Nazi
and CIA operative Walter Dornberger.

Impeccably written, Timothy Fleming’s novel feels just too real to be fiction. Perhaps it’s the
sparseness of dialogue. Maybe it’s the fact most of the people mentioned in the book really
existed. Could be that I’ve seen one too many American wars started for falsely stated reasons.
All I can tell you is that if you can wade through the complex strings of accusations laid out in
the first half of the book, you won’t be able to put it down through the second half.
MURDER OF AN AMERICAN NAZI is a book meant to make you think. My opinion is it will
also keep you from sleeping.

Hell of a job, Mr. Fleming.

My "Book Trailer" Video Can Now Be Seen

2009-04-30T03:16:00.000-07:00

"Book Trailers" are the latest things in internet book marketing. Line movie previews you see at a theatre or on DVDs, they tease you with a one-minute glimpse of what the story is about. My publisher created mine, and here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBXjwuBMTqU Let me know what you think.

Introducing Justin Sachs, Fellow Author

2009-04-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

10 Qs for Justin Sachs

I’d like to introduce you to Justin Sachs who is the author of a new book, Your Mailbox Is Full and is the founder of the Creating Possibilities Coaching Program in which Justin helps teenagers to increase their grades, eliminate procrastination, and create balance in all the areas of their life.

1. What do you do?
I work with teenagers to increase their grades, eliminate procrastination, create balance in their lives, and overcome any obstacles standing in their way of success.

2. Tell us about your new book.
Your Mailbox Is Full is a book for teenagers, that teaches them the tools they need to become successful in school and throughout their lives. They learn things like goal setting, time management, living a healthy lifestyle, and modeling and attracting success.

3. Why did you write it?
When I was 14 years old I went to my first Tony Robbins Seminar and I was in a room full of thousands of adults thinking, “Where’s all the teenagers?” “Why aren’t other youth here getting these powerful tools and strategies?” It was with that realization that I found my passion: Empowering teenagers with life-skills and leadership development tools for success. That’s what my book is all about: Teaching youth the most powerful skills they need to know to create enormous success and fulfillment in life! Now, teenagers don’t have to wait until they are 30 or 40 to get these tools and strategies, they are available to them within Your Mailbox Is Full.

4. What makes you an expert in your field?
After going to Anthony Robbins seminars for 3 years, I began working for his product sales team and non-profit organization at all his events worldwide. I then began working for Mark Victor Hansen, the co-founder of Chicken Soup for the Soul Series, and learned even more about life-skills, writing a book, and supporting people in bringing possibility into their lives. I then read everything I could get my hands on from The Secret, to Jack Canfield, to Stephen Covey, to Eckart Tolle, among many others. I learned everything I possibly could about personal development and transformation such that I can now create transformation in others!

5. What type of people should read your book?
The book is designed for teenagers and young adults, but parents throughout the country are reading the book and loving every page! The contents of the book are limitless, this is the perfect book for anyone looking to take their lives to the next level, especially youth!

6. Are you on any social networks? Eg. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
Yes, on www.Twitter.com/JustinSachs or http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=511068642
7. Advice for Teens or Parents of Teens
Follow your passions and never give up on your dreams! If you have a goal, a vision, or a hope for the future, hold on to it, focus on it, and take action to make it happen! You’ll be amazed at how quickly your dreams will manifest themselves when energy is focused on them.

8. Favorite Quote
Every day, every week and every month, you must challenge yourself to continue to grow to new heights and to take your standards to higher and higher levels. ~ Justin Sachs

9. Favorite Theme Park
Walt Disney World of course!!!

10. How can we purchase your book? Learn more about you? Do you have a blog?
My book is available on my website: www.YourMailboxIsFullBook.com To learn more about my coaching services visit www.JustinSachsOnline.com and be sure to check out my new radio show at www.MotivationalMindsRadio.com

Glowing Review of My Book...Okay, I'm Bragging

2009-04-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

Lloyd Lofthouse, author of My Splendid Concubine, recently wrote a glowing review of my book for PODBRAM (Publish On Demand Book Reviews And More). Here it is in full:

Murder of An American Naziby Tim Fleming (Eloquent Books / 1-606-93401-5 / 978-1-606-93401-2 / October 2008 / 240 pages / $25.95 hardcover)Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM.

A third of the way through Murder of an American Nazi, I stopped reading. I didn’t stop because I wasn’t interested. I stopped because I doubted the book was fiction as listed. You see, I’ve heard over the years about the CIA bringing Nazi war criminals to the United States after WWII to help fight Communism. I’ve also read extensively about the CIA flying drugs from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle into the United States where these drugs were sold in America’s inner cities to raise money to buy weapons that went back to Southeast Asia where they were traded for more drugs. Poisoning America was done to fight the spread of Communism. It’s been documented that the CIA even cooperated with the mafia to make this happen. I never connected all of these CIA events together until I read Murder of an American Nazi by Tim Fleming.

Before I continued reading, I sent an e-mail to Fleming asking how much was true.He replied, “... the background history of MOAAN (Murder of an American Nazi) is nearly 100% accurate. People do not realize this is so because our real history has been kept from us. And, yes, your supposition is correct. The CIA is responsible for this. One of its dirtiest covert subterfuges (I get into this later in the book) was Operation Mockingbird: the coercion, recruitment, and training of media assets at newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and TV networks across the country.”

“Frank Wisner who ran Mockingbird in its earliest days once boasted that the operation was like a ‘mighty Wurlitzer ... I can play any tune I want on it and America will follow along.’ Powerful, influential media magnates like Bill Paley (CBS), A.H. Sulzberger (NY Times), the Luces (Time, Newsweek), C.D. Jackson (Life), and Katherine Graham (Washington Post) considered themselves patriots for protecting the CIA from any negative press and disseminating its propaganda. The CIA could not have gotten away with all its dirty tricks had an independent, truth-seeking press been alive and well in the last half of 20th century America.”

Wanting to know more, I asked Fleming about his sources and he replied, “The FOIA (The Freedom of Information Act) has been a godsend to researchers, but the CIA still fights us tooth-and-nail. Many of the released documents are available on-line, but much of the content has been redacted ....”

“Other primary sources for me were The Secret History of the American Empire, by John Perkins; Blowback and The Sorrows of the Empire, by Chalmers Johnson; Best Evidence by David Lifton; The Dark Side of the Moon, by W.W. Norton; JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglass; Secret Agenda, by Linda Hunt; The CIA Covenant: Nazis in Washington, by Gregory Douglas; Who Will Tell The People, by William Greider; and too many more to name here. I stumbled onto this topic by reading an article written by a JFK researcher named Mae Brussell years ago. The information is out there, but it requires one to do his homework.”

After Fleming’s second reply, I started reading his book again. Murder of American Nazi, a riveting history that caused me to lose sleep while connecting the dots, reveals who may really rule America and how. It reads more like nonfiction than fiction.You may not want to read this book because you could lose sleep, too. After all, the truth will not set you free.

On the other hand, if you are the kind of person who wants to know the truth and loves what America once stood for (I’m talking about what the Founding Fathers created more than two hundred years ago), buy the book and read it. Warning, if you do, your world may never be the same.

Murder of an American Nazi may also shed light on the war in Iraq: billions of American dollars gone missing during that conflict while Bush was in the White House and the huge profits Halliburton has made from the war.

For sure, if Murder of an American Nazi gains the attention it deserves, the CIA will not be pleased.

See Also: About the Author Tim Fleming's Authors Den Page

Tune In To My Web TV interview on WNBWest's "The Authors Show"

2009-04-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

I'll be appearing on "The Authors Show," a Web TV broadcast hosted by Linda Thompson. Each week an author's work is featured, and the author is interviewed. (The show was actually taped at WNBWest studios in Phoenix in February, but is just now airing for the first time.) The show will be available for viewing the entire week of April 5-11. You can access the show anytime next week at www.AuthorsWebTV.com Just click on "The Authors Show." Thanks for watching...and please tell a friend.

Rebuttal To Right-Wing Lone-Nutters Re: JFK Assassination

2009-03-21T17:28:00.000-07:00

Recently I got caught up in a futile debate with a bunch of right-wing nut jobs on a neo-fascist discussion board called Haloscan. I am sharing portions of it with you here, to give you an example of how the far right makes it almost impossible to have a sensible, logical search for the truth in the murder of JFK. These fanatical ideologues cling rigidly to their positions regardless of the facts. For example, the most vulgar of the blowhards (who goes by the internet pseudonym Stogie...in homage to Limbaugh?), asserted that there were no technical facts or lucid testimony to prove the case for conspiracy. And in the 45 years since the murder, no one has come forward to expose the conspiracy. Here was my response:

It never ceases to amaze me how invested in proving there was no conspiracy to murder JFK the far right is. Why does it mean so much to you? As far as "technical facts," how do you explain the technical fact that more lead was removed from Connally (in fact, remained in Connally) than was missing from CE 399 (the magic bullet)? I suppose you'll dismiss the eyewitness accounts from Dealey Plaza which indicate shots from the knoll. And what about the Dallas Parkland doctors who saw an ENTRANCE wound in the front of the president's throat and fist-sized EXIT wound at the back of the president's head in the occipital-parietal area. And I suppose the violent backward movement of the president's head was caused by a bullet which did a U-turn in mid-air? I don't have time or space here to educate you; one of the hard facts of the American right is that it will choose to believe what it will despite reason, facts, common sense and absolute proof. Nothing will convince you that Kennedy was murdered by the military-industrial-intelligence complex, not even if Zapruder had filmed Allen Dulles firing a rifle from the grassy knoll. After all, you elected a moronic, criminal, Bible-thumping, sociopathic, daddy's boy twice, despite an abundance of evidence of who he really was. Still, I'll do what I can...Have you heard of a man named D.H. Byrd? Didn't think so. He was a Texas oil millionaire/businessman, financial supporter of LBJ and radical right-wing friend of Hunt, Murchison, Richardson, Bush, Phillips, Mallon, and the right-wing Dallas cabal. Byrd, with the help of his great friend, Curtis LeMay (Air Force chief of staff and profound Kennedy hater), formed the Civil Air Patrol. CAP members included Lee Harvey Oswald, James Bath (drug-running buddy of W), John Liggett, David Ferrie, and others, all of whom were recruited into the CIA. Byrd also owned Ling-Temco-Vought, which built fighter planes. After LBJ became president and started the Vietnam War, Ling-Temco-Vought got a huge defense contract to build fighter planes for the Air Force. Oh, and did I mention, Byrd also owned the Texas School Book Depository building (you've heard of that?). Oswald was steered to the job at the TSBD by his CIA handler, Ruth Paine, the Oswald family landlady. Ruth was married to Michael Paine, engineer at Bell Helicopter of Dallas/Fort Worth, another big Vietnam defense contractor. Bell made a fortune off its Huey helicopters. Michael's boss at Bell was one Walter Dornberger, ex-Nazi V-2 rocket engineer who should have been hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes. He was saved from the hangman's noose by Allen Dulles and the CIA (OSS at the time) in 1946 through Operation Paperclip which evacuated Nazi scientists, doctors, spies, and engineers to the US. (I'm sure you righties have no problem with this; you seem to love a neo-fascist state.) It was Dulles who placed Dornberger with Bell, under the auspices of the CIA and the military-industrial complex. Dulles's mistress, Mary Bancroft, was best friends with Michael Paine's mother. I could go on and on...but I don't know why I bother. What I'm trying to tell you is Kennedy was murdered by people who wanted not only to win the Cold War, by whatever means necessary, but also profit mightily from it. Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War. Kennedy, practically alone, stood in the way of the huge military-industrial-intelligence complex taking over America. But I'm sure you, and all other right-wing zealots, hated him for that...and so somehow it is necessary for you to prove that Oswald acted alone. By the way, who were all those people flashing Secret Service credentials in Dealey Plaza right after the shooting? The Secret Service itself admitted it had no one on the ground in the Plaza that day. And why would Dallas policeman Joe M. Smith say he smelled gun powder behind the picket fence and encountered someone flashing Secret Service credentials in that area? And why would Roger Craig say he saw Oswald getting in a Nash Rambler at 12:40 pm when Oswald was supposedly on a bus six blocks away at the time? And on and on...My god you lone nutters sure have to explain away a lot of strange circumstances and expert testimony and appearances of impropriety and incredible timing and stunning coincidences to believe what you do. How do you do it?

From Best Evidence, by David Lifton, pp.61-62: "White House transcript 1327-C makes the debate concerning what Dr. Perry said about the throat wound on November 22 academic. The matter came up three times. Each time, Perry said the throat wound was an entrance."...[Dr. Perry speaking]'There are two...one of the neck and one of the head.""QUESTION: 'Where was the entrance wound? 'DR. PERRY: 'There was an entrance wound in the neck. 'NEXT QUESTION: "Which way was the bullet coming on the neck wound? At him? 'DR.PERRY: 'It appeared to be coming at him...the wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of the throat...'"From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story of Dec. 18, 1963, by Richard Dudman, "...the question that suggests itself is: How could the President have been shot in the front, from the back?...Dr. McClelland said, 'It certainly did look like an entrance wound...we are familiar with wounds, we see them everyday--sometimes several a day. This did appear to be an entrance wound.'"

From Best Evidence, pp. 14-15: "Sixty-four known witnesses indicated that shots originated from forward of the motorcade, from the grassy knoll. This amounted to approximately two-thirds of the ninety witnesses whose accounts appeared in the twenty-six volumes...who expressed an opinion as to the source of the shots."

From JFK And The Unspeakable, p. 308: "Twenty-one out of twenty-two witnesses at Parkland Hospital--most of them doctors and nurses, trained medical observers--agreed in their earliest statements that JFK's head wound was located in the right rear of his skull, demonstrating a fatal head shot from the front."

From pp. 294-298: "T.F. White was a sixty-year-old, longtime employee of Mack Pate's garage in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. While White worked on an automobile the afternoon of the assassination, he could hear police sirens screaming up and down Davis Street only a block away. He also heard radio reports describing a suspect then thought to be in Oak Cliff. The mehancic looked out the open doors of the garage. He watched as a red 1961 Falcon drove into the parking lot of the El Chico restaurant across the street. The Falcon parked in an odd position after going a few feet into the lot. The driver remained seated in the car. White said later, 'The man appeared to be hiding.'...White walked across the street to investigate. He halted about ten to fifteen yards from the car. He could see the driver was wearing a white t-shirt...[White] paused, took a scrap of paper from his coveralls pocket, and wrote down the Texas license plate number of the car: PP 4537.

"That night, while T.F. White was watching television with his wife, he recognized the Dallas Police Department's prisoner, Lee Harvey Oswald, as the man he had seen in the red Falcon." Wes Wise, a Dallas reporter, heard of White's story and, realizing that the real Oswald had already been arrested by the Dallas police at the time White saw the fake Oswald, decided to investigate. Wise asked White for the license plate number and submitted it to the FBI. The FBI reported that the license was issued to a Carl Amos Mather, 4309 Colgate Street in Dallas. "The FBI also discovered that Carl Amos Mather also did high-security communications work for Collins Radio, a major contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency. Three weeks before Kennedy's assassination, Collins Radio had been identified on the front page of the New York Times as having just deployed a CIA raider ship on an espionage and sabotage mission against Cuba. Collins also held the government contract for installing communications towers in Vietnam. In 1971, Collins Radio would merge with another giant military contractor, Rockwell International. In November 1963, Collins was at the heart of the CIA-military-contracting business for state-of-the-art communications system.

"Carl Mather had represented Collins at Andrews Air Force Base by putting special electronics equipment in Vice-President Lyndon Johnson's Air Force Two plane. Given the authority of his CIA-linked security clearance, Carl Mather refused to speak to the FBI. The FBI instead questioned his wife, Barbara Mather, who stunned them. Her husband, she said, was a good friend of J.D. Tippit. In fact, the Mathers were such close friends of Tippit and his wife that when J.D. was murdered, Marie Tippit phoned them. According to Barbara, Carl and Barbara Mather drove to the Tippit home, where they consoled Marie Tippit on the death of her husband (killed by a man identical to the one seen a few minutes later five blocks away in a car bearing the Mathers' license plate number)."

From JFK And The Unspeakable, p. 103: "Abraham Bolden joined the White House Secret Service detail in June 1961 [where] he saw increasing evidence of the president's isolation and danger from the standpoint of security. Most of the Secret Service agents seemed to hate John Kennedy. They joked among themselves that if someone shot at him, they'd get out of the way. The agents' drunken after-hours behavior carried over into lax security for the president...Abraham Bolden spoke up. He complained to his superiors about the president's poor security. They did nothing."

In TV news film footage of the motorcade leaving Love Field, Emory Roberts, Secret Service shift leader in Dallas, can be seen ordering Henry Rybka off the side of the president's car. Rybka throws his hands up in dismay and disgust.In Dealey Plaza, as the shots are fired, Roberts orders his Secret Service agents to stand down. Most could not move quickly anyway because they are hungover from a night spent drinking and carousing at a mob-connected hangout in Dallas.

From page 170 of JFK And The Unspeakable: "Ruth Hyde Paine, Michael's wife and Marina Oswald's caregiver, was the daughter of William Avery Hyde. From October 1964 to August 1967, Hyde was the AID (Agency For International Development) Regional Insurance Advisor for all of Latin America. Hyde's job description was to provide technical assistance from the US State Department to insurance cooperatives being launched in south and central America. A later AID director, former Ohio governor John Gilligan, admitted that 'AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. It was pretty well-known in the agency who they were and what they were up to...The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.'"

Ruth Hyde Paine was also the younger sister of Sylvia Hyde Hoke...[a declassified] CIA Security File memorandum...noted that Sylvia Hoke was identified as a CIA employee."

From Plausible Denial, by Mark Lane, pp. 293-4: "A Novemeber 29, 1963, memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover entitled 'Assassination of President John F. Kennedy November 22, 1963' stated that on November 23, 1963, while Oswald was in police custody and available for interrogation about his affiliation with agencies of the United States government, FBI Special Agent W.T. Forsyth and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency briefed 'Mr. George Bush of the CIA' about potential problems related to the assassination. A source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the Agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine opertions."

From pg. 705 of Best Evidence: "Dr. Jones testified to the Warren Commission that he thought Kennedy was shot from the front, with the bullet exiting the rear of the head."

George H. W. Bush still denies being with the CIA before 1976.From the introduction to Plausible Denial, p. xiii, "It has been clearly evident for years that the American public, and the people of the world, do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy...the evidence is on their side. It is the side of the truth...this truth was borne out in a courtroom on February 6, 1985, in the US District Court for the Southern District in Florida, where as lawyer for the defense in the case Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby, [Mark] Lane won a verdict from a jury of our peers that upheld, against a claim of libel, a news story that E. Howard Hunt, a long-time CIA employee, was in Dallas on the day the president was shot. The testimony at that trial gave more credibility to the notion that the CIA was involved in the assassination."From the transcript of that trial (Plausible Denial, pp. 295-297): Lane's direct questioning of witness Marita Lorenz:
Q. Did Mr. Hunt pay Mr. Sturgis sums of money for activity related to the transportation of weapons?
A. Yes
Q.Did Mr. Sturgis tell you where you would be going from Miami, Florida, during November of 1963, prior to the time that you traveled with him in the car?
A. Dallas, Texas.
Q. He told you that?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you arrive in Dallas during November of 1963?
A. Yes.
Q. After you arrived in Dallas, did you stay at any accommodations there?
A. Motel.
Q. While you were at the motel, did you meet anyone other than those who were in the party traveling with you from Miami to Dallas?
A. Yes.
Q. Who did you meet?
A. E. Howard Hunt.
Q. Was there anyone else who you saw or met other than Mr. Hunt?
A. Jack Ruby.
Q. Tell me the circumstances regarding your seeing E. Howard Hunt in Dallas in November of 1963.
A. There was a prearranged meeting that E. Howard Hunt deliver us sums of money for the so-called operation that I did not know its nature.
Q. Now, can you tell us in relationship to the day that President Kennedy was killed, when this meeting took place?
A. The day before.
Q. Is it your testimony that Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald is, to the best of your ability to identify him, the person who was in the motel in Dallas with you, E. Howard Hunt, and Frank Sturgis the night before the president was killed?
A. Yes.
Q. Is it your testimony today, that today's testimony is consistent with waht you said before the House Select Committee?
A. That's right.

From p. 320-22 of Plausible Denial: "Verdict as of February 6, 1985. We, the jury, find for the defendant, Liberty Lobby, and against the plaintiff, E. Howard Hunt."

"...The reporters gathered around [jury foreperson] Leslie Armstrong. What had caused her to vote for the defendant she was asked time and time again. Patiently she explained that at the outset she was, as were all the jurors, absolutely objective. None of them had any fixed opinion about either or the facts surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy."And why had she found against Hunt, she was asked...The evidence was clear, she said. The CIA had killed President Kennedy [and] Hunt had been a part of it..."

From the HSCA report, "Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy...the Committee believes that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."

Dallas Police officer Joe Marshall Smith told Texas Observer reporter Ron Dugger, "I was approached by a woman who was yelling, 'They're shooting the president from the bushes.' When I reached the railroad yard, I caught the smell of gunpowder...I could tell it was in the air. I stopped a suspicious looking man in the area, but he presented Secret Service credentials, and I let him go. Later I regretted it, because it just didn't ring true. He was dressed like an auto mechanic, and he had dirty fingernails."

According to the Secret Service, there were no Secret Service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza. From pp. 190-191 of Best Evidence, by David Lifton: "I talked to a nuerosurgeon friend of mine...I told him I had an unusual request. I wanted to read him a description of the damage to Kennedy's brain, because I had found it puzzling. I then read [Dr. James J.]Humes' testimony regarding the 'parasagittal laceration.' The doctor replied that he could see why I was puzzled, because I was not describing a gunshot injury...I was reading from a description of the brain after it was sectioned. His exact words were: 'That brain's been sectioned...cut into as part of the standard autopsy procedure, cuts are made in the brain to expose the interior and facilitate inspection.'"I assured the doctor that was not so, that what I read to him was the way the brain was before the autopsy [according to Dr. Humes]."'Just use common sense,' he replied...'how could a bullet create that kind of damage? You're telling me that something entered the skull at the rear, and then exited somewhere on the right-hand side. And none of it stayed inside the head? How could a missile which travels a path so that it exits on the right-hand side still create the practically straight-line damage you're describing to me, which goes all the way to the front of the head?' My doctor friend said emphatically that the damage sounded like it had been made with a knife."

Finally, I got so frustrated with the Haloscan nuts that I resorted to sarcasm: What follows is my word-for-word post:
"It must be comforting to you to believe in lies, misinformation and CIA propaganda, but that also means you're living a fairy tale...a sort of Pollyanna existence. And that is not very manly. I thought all you right-wingers were gun-toting, macho, bring-it-on types who prefer the wild-west vision of America, where the most ruthless and violent prevail. Well, that's what happened. The macho, flag-waving, take-it-or-leave-it types like you should be proud to lay claim to the CIA/military-industrial complex methods and bravado. After all, they won. They removed the president, and all their greedy, conscienceless, sociopathic defense contractors got rich on the blood of dead soldiers in Vietnam. Just like in Iraq. Halliburton KBR and Blackwater got their billions and the ruthless warmongers got their bloodlust fix. That's the American establishment you're so invested in defending; why not admit it? Frankly, it's a little bit sissy-ish of you to so stridently deny that the MIIC took over America in 1963. A real man, or at least the right wing's version of a real man, would take pride in such an achievement. The most violent should prevail. The most ruthless win. Greed is good. Bullies rule. Kennedy got what he deserved. He was a communist appeaser who wouldn't bomb Cuba, tried to get out of Vietnam, and refused to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR. Why do you shy away from admitting this is what happened? You're bearing false witness to your fundamental precepts when you blame it all on silly little Oswald. You make the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs look like passive pantywaists, who rolled over and took Kennedy's resistance like a bunch of little schoolgirls. Come on, be a real gunslinger; grow a pair like your right-wing brethren did in '63. Don't be a pansy. Be proud of your heritage. It was people who believed the same things you do who pulled this off."

This, of course, merely incensed them further, and they became more entrenched than ever in their misguided beliefs. I've said it before, and I'll repeat it here. Those who believe Oswald acted alone are either paid disinformationists or nitwits. They spout their lies in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and they will not change their minds, even if a film of David Atlee Phillips, Edward Lansdale, Lucien Sartin, David Morales, George Joannides, and Curtis LeMay firing in unison from the grassy knoll surfaces.

The Basis for all Conservatism--Greed and Hypocrisy

2009-03-09T19:23:00.000-07:00

My fellow blogger, Jack Jodell, posted a wonderful quote on his blog which reminded me of what conservatism (at least the modern version of it) is all about. It reads like this:

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest excuses in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith nailed it. This rapaciousness is at the heart of everything a right-winger holds sacred. Just listen to Republican mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh ranting about how Obama's stimulus package is ruining intitiative and punishing producers. He sees America as a place where it's every man for himself. We are not our brother's keepers (even though the Bible says we are and fundamentalist preachers pound the Bible at their congregations every week). And if businesses fail, workers get fired, families are foreclosed, people go bankrupt, and the nation falls into financial ruin...so what. It doesn't affect Rush and the other landed wealthy. They have theirs; let others fend for themselves.

Who are these people Limbaugh calls "producers"? They're not the rank-and-file workers because he hates blue collar laborers, especially unionists. They're not the middle class which nearly got legislated into oblivion by Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. They're not the richest of the rich...most have inherited their dough...or they have simply bought and sold enterprises and workers as if they were cattle; they have produced nothing.

"Producers" is just an empty phrase used by the wealthy trying to protect their own wealth. In fact, that is the central motivation of all conservative wealth--protect what I have. That's why we went to Vietnam...wealthy conservatives worried that yellow hordes were going to come and take what they had. That's why we went to Iraq...wealthy oil conservatives were afraid that Muslims were going to control all the oil. (There's an added bonus in making war...conservative defense contractors get richer.) That's why conservative wealth wants those who do not have their wealth to remain uninformed, divided, without representation, diverted by gadgetry, and sedated by religion. If there is no God, then the people will revolt for social justice, for then social justice is the only form of heaven one can attain. Therefore, conservatives must force God down our throats.

Yet in their heart of hearts, conservatives are evolutionists. They know it's a jungle out there and only the wealthy survive. It's always been dog-eat-dog and every man for himself in American conservative dogma. That's its ultimate hypocrisy. The conservatives who claim God is at the center of the American dream (and, by the way, the American dream for a conservative is merely to accumulate as much wealth as possible) are the same conservatives who practice Darwinism in their daily lives.

Listen to my interview on BlogTalk Radio Taped 3/5

2009-03-06T10:01:00.000-08:00

Kelly Wallace interviewed me about my book, etc. If you'd like to listen, here's the link:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/strategic-talk-radio/2009/03/05/interview-with-timothy-fleming-author-of-murder-of-an-american-nazi

Top 10 Oscar Snubs

2009-03-04T13:25:00.001-08:00

Looking back over the history of the Academy Awards, I find it astounding how many worthy films were overlooked. The most egregious snubs occurred in 1960, when three classic films were not even nominated, and in 1976 and 2008, when the worst of the five films nominated actually won the Best Picture Oscar. But nearly every year had its injustices, and, like any other industry, Hollywood often lets politics, cronyism, and grudges outweigh merit. Here are the Top 10 Best Picture snubs, starting with the least appalling and counting down to the most appalling:

10) Tennessee Williams' steamy stageplay, "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof," got a cinematic makeover in 1958, and its exploration of familial hypocrisy and sexual identity was ahead of its time. Burl Ives and Paul Newman were exceptional as Big Daddy and Brick; Elizabeth Taylor, though at times a little too breathless and emotional, made Maggie's sexual hunger palpable. Such memorable scenes as Big Daddy's recollection of his hobo father and Brick's trashing of his father's "worthless" valuables were ignored by the Academy, which inexplicably voted for "Gigi."

9) Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" lost to "My Fair Lady" in 1964. While I admit that "Lady" was one of the best musicals ever made, no film before or since is comparable to "Strangelove." Kubrick infused his masterpiece with exquisite black-and-white photography, black humor, timely Cold War commentary, and unforgettable performances. Peter Sellers' three characters are as distinct and original as if they'd each been played by separate actors, and the other actors--George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens--are devilishly funny. The story shatters American military mythology and presages disasters such as Vietnam and Iraq. 45 years later, the film is still relevant.

8) 1951--"An American in Paris" beat out "A Streetcar Named Desire." Sure, Gene Kelly's dance number is a classic, but "American" has not much use for plot or narrative thrust. It is an average film elevated by Kelly and his athleticism. Hollywood must have owed him one. Meanwhile, Kazan and Brando created a landmark in American cinema. Actors and directors today still refer to this movie as a kind of watershed moment in the evolution of film in this country.

7) 1963--"Tom Jones," a British film directed by Tony Richardson, was ground-breaking in many respects (the quick cuts and the liberated sexual attitude), but it beat out a superior film--"Hud." This is possibly Paul Newman's best job on screeen, and James Wong Howe's cinematography has never left me. Newman plays a compelling Texas heel as if he was born to the part. Howe's depiction of the vast barrenness of the Texas landscape is as appealing as Hud's exterior and as desolate as his soul.

6) 1952--"High Noon" lost to "The Greatest Show On Earth." Think about that for a minute. A circus movie beat out one of the all-time greats. Cecil B. DeMille directed "Greatest Show," and maybe this was Hollywood's way of giving him a Lifetime Achievement Award. But Fred Zinneman's western is more than just a shoot-em-up. It was a metaphor for personal integrity in a time when congress was on a witch hunt, persecuting individuals for their personal politics. It took bravery to stand for one's principles when everyone else was running for cover.

5) 1971--"The French Connection" won the Oscar instead of "Last Picture Show." I know I'll get arguments about this one. I admit that "Connection" was highly entertaining, and Friedkin's hard-bitten direction and thrilling car chase stand out. But I prefer the elegant, black-and-white existentialism of Bogdanovich's film. The acting was first-rate, especially Ben Johnson's subdued, sad portrayal of Old Sam. The story of a dying era, embodied in a remote, dusty Texas town, evoked that greatest of all American themes--lost innocence.

4) 2008--"Slumdog Millionnaire" won despite being the worst of the five films nominated. Readers of this blog know my disdain for this movie (see previous posts), so I won't elaborate here...except to say, it lacked the epic, heartfelt sweep of "Benjamin Button," the righteous indignation of "Milk," the credible fiction of "The Reader," and the surprising suspense of "Frost/Nixon."

3) 1939--In a strong year, "Gone With The Wind" beats out "The Wizard of Oz," "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington," "Wuthering Heights," "Of Mice and Men," "Stagecoach," and "Good-Bye Mr. Chips." Any one of the losers should have beaten the winner. See my thoughts on GWTW in a previous post.

2) 1960--Before I researched the winners and losers in the Academy archives, I made educated guesses as to the winning film in each year. "The Apartment," 1960's best film, never came to mind. A long-forgotten Billy Wilder/Jack Lemmon film, it contains plenty of overacting, contrived circumstances, and forced humor...just like the Wilder/Lemmon collaboration the year prior--"Some Like It Hot" (maybe the most overrated comedy of all time). Many believed Wilder's Oscar made up for the "Hot" snub in 1959. Also nominated in 1960 was John Wayne's "The Alamo," a bloated, heavy-handed movie that did not deserve the honor. Wayne bullied the Academy into nominating "Alamo" by taking out trade ads claiming it would be un-American to snub "Alamo." But 1960 is most notable for the classics which were not nominated--"Psycho," "Inherit The Wind," and "Spartacus."

1) 1976--The cloyingly heart-warming "Rocky" beats out four worthier films--"Taxi Driver," Martin Scorsese's brilliant exploration of alienation and violence in urban America; "Network," written by one of the great screenwriters of all time, Paddy Chayefsky; "All The President's Men," a timeless and engaging political drama; and "Bound For Glory," the underrated biopic of Woody Guthrie. Rocky's tale of the underdog making good is as old as film itself, but it does not compare with the artistry of the losers.

Top 10 Most Undeserving Oscar Winning Pictures of All Time

2009-02-26T11:51:00.000-08:00

My lack of enthusiasm for "Slumdog Millionnaire" got me thinking. Surely there have been worse pictures to win an Oscar, right? Yeah, but just barely. Here's my list, with the worst of all time ranked #1:

10) 1949--"All The King's Men." I loved this film when I was a kid, because it's story of corruption and intrigue was compelling. But I viewed it again recently (not the lugubrious re-make with Sean Penn and Jude Law a few years ago) and was shocked at how dated it was. Today we expect our politicians to be seriously flawed, and government contract money is always dirty. Moreover, Broderick Crawford's performance is so over-the-top that it's laughable in retrospect.

9) 1956--"Around The World in 80 Days." The story of a 19th century balloonist who is on the run from authorities, but still has time to vacation in exotic lands, seems such a trifle that Price-Waterhouse must have miscounted the Oscar ballots. David Niven underplays as always, and that's good, but some actor named Cantinflas ruins every scene they are in together. This is a mess, and I have no idea what Hollywood was thinking when honoring this film.

8) 1958--"Gigi." The first of a whole slew of musicals ("West Side Story," "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music," etc.) to win Best Picture in the following decade, this is by far the worst of the lot. If you consider Maurice Chevalier warbling "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" entertaining, well...I don't know what to say. This held no appeal for me.

7) 2003--"The Lord of the Rings: Return of the Kings." Did you ever see those dorky kids, dressed in medieval costumes, playing "Dungeons and Dragons" in the park on a Sunday afternoon? That's what I felt like when I went to see this film. I walked out as soon as Wizard Gandalf made his first appearance. Elijah Wood played the hobbit Frodo...oh, hell, I'm embarassed to just say these names out loud.

6) 1952--"The Greatest Show on Earth." Beware of talkies made by Cecil B. DeMille. This picture is hopelessly dated. It might have worked as a documentary on circus carnies, but DeMille had to inject his heavy-handed melodrama. It is hard to watch Charlton Heston and Dorothy LaMour emote. And Jimmy Stewart, for some reason, plays a circus clown.

5) 2008--"Slumdog Millionnaire." Contrived, manipulative, and predictable...Dev Patel is not the worst actor I've ever seen, but close. (See my full review of this movie in a previous post).

4) 1992--"Unforgiven." Okay, I know this is Clint Eastwood's masterpiece, and his mea culpa to his violent past in films. But, when broken down, it is little more than a conventional oater. Gene Hackman, who was nominated in a supporting role, is simply awful. And the final shootout is too stylized and fake.

3) 1983--"Terms of Endearment." Though well-acted by all, this film is too "precious" for me. It would have been an amusing romantic comedy had the writers not taken the easy way to the Academy Awards by having the young mother die of cancer. Forced and cloying, this device makes all performances just too precious for words. Even Jack Nicholson, who, by the end, is sufficiently neutered to be palatable to the soap opera lovers.

2) 1996--"The English Patient." Skewered by a classic "Seinfeld" episode this film has become an homage to self-parody. It is too long, too contrived and too weepy to be taken seriously.

1) 1939--"Gone With The Wind." I watched the first ten minutes recently, and I was dumbstruck by the light-hearted playfulness of the opening sequence. As if David O. Selznick was returning us to the happy-go-lucky days of slavery. I've never been a southern sympathizer, yet GWTW tries to induce this sentiment in the viewer. Besides this, the acting is the epitome of superficial exteriorizing.

Next post will be the 10 most deserving films that got overlooked.

"Slumdog Millionaire": Most Unworthy Oscar Winner Of All Time?

2009-02-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

At about about 11 pm (CST) tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will hand out its Oscar for Best Picture to "Slumdog Millionaire," and I will throw my popcorn at the TV because I don't get the "Slumdog" phenomenon. The film was trite, contrived and predictable (did anyone really believe that Jamal and Latika would not hook up in the end?). The performances were pedestrian. And the "Bollywood" ending shattered any illusion that this film was to be taken seriously.

Don't get me wrong. There was some merit to the film. The graphic scenes of abject poverty in the slums of Bombay were moving and evocative. Ultimately, though, the director, Danny Boyle, used these scenes for his own exploitative purposes. The audience is hit broadside with the images of pitiable suffering, not to raise consciousness as part of an admirable character study or sociocultural epic, but merely to evince easy sympathy for hardscrabble kids who inevitably fall into pots of gold--one criminal, one coincidental. The irony is, the child stars, Azrahuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, and Rubina Ali, 9, still live in grinding poverty. They want money, not Oscars.

The older stars, Dav Patel and Freida Pinto, were sufficiently superficial to facilitate the laughable happenstances of the plot. Patel, apparently, has only two expressions--wide-eyed bewilderment and wide-eyed wonder. Even he is stunned by his success, "I have been absolutely amazed at the reaction." Pinto, though a show-stopping beauty, is not much better. Her character seems largely unfazed by her rags-to-ill-won-riches-to-true-love journey.

This is almost overshadowed by the exhilarating direction. Fast cuts, provocative angles, and memorable images might have saved the day. But in the end, it was only an attempt to disguise the wooden performances and the ridiculous contrivances. Nonetheless, Boyle is a shoe-in for Best Director.

What clinched it for me was the sudden and shocking dance number at the film's climax. It shredded the last remnant of melodramatic sweep. I've been informed that this number has theatrical precedence, but for me it rendered all that preceded it unreal and inconsequential.

In this day of heightened Muslim-Christian tensions, is Hollywood reaching out to Islamic artists? Or is this just AMPAS's lame attempt to have life imitate pseudo-art? Whatever; maybe a real dog is finally having its day.

Kelly Wallace Interviews Me on BlogTalk Radio 2/23

2009-02-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

In order to promote my book, Murder Of An American Nazi, my publisher has arranged for an Internet Radio interview of me on Mon. Feb. 23, 2 pm (central time). It will air on BlogTalk Radio, hosted by Kelly Wallace. Should be a fun 30 minutes, so listen in if you can. Here's the link for the live audio feed or streaming on your computer. A preview of the show has already been posted at this site:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Strategic-Talk-Radio/2009/02/23/Interview-with-Timothy-Fleming-author-of-Murder-of-an-American-Nazi

I think listeners can call in to ask questions also...so fire away if you want.

The Origins and Consequences of Operation Mockingbird

2009-02-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

So I'm sitting with friends yesterday, sipping coffee and eating breakfast, at a local cafe. It's a Saturday morning ritual attended by a select few from the neighborhood who form our inner circle. Coincidentally, they had all just finished reading my book, and the questions flew at me fast and furious. I took them one at a time and wound up going on at length about the CIA's subversion of the free press in America after World War II. My friends could not grasp the concept of mainstream media spouting CIA/military-industrial propaganda. They could not wrap their heads around the fact that the press, TV, publishers, and radio airwaves have been complicit in covering up the truth about the real history of this country, circa 1945 until...well...even today. Like children who had just been told there was no Santa, these friends scoffed at the notion. I laughed heartily, and then I figuratively held their hands and took them on a truncated journey through the labyrinth. I began with a quote from Jim Garrison, the brave soul who was reviled and character-assassinated for daring to take the CIA into court for the JFK murder: "In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line."

Then I gave them a history lesson. James Forrestal, Defense Secretary under Truman in 1948, implored the president to grant the CIA unlimited power to control or suppress freedoms in foreign lands. Truman, against his better judgment, relented because he was promised that this would reduce the possbility of communist takeovers and, thus, help avoid another world war. The CIA, of course, had no intention of only controlling information abroad. It created Operation Mockingbird to control the media at home. It was dreamed up by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, whose intention was to influence, through coercion, threat, blackmail, recruitment, or any other means, all branches of the American media. Wisner recruited Phillip Graham of the Washington Post to be his point man inside the newspaper industry. Graham, proud to do his patriotic duty, recruited journalists who had worked for military intelligence during the war--Russell Wiggins, C.D. Jackson, John Hayes, Alan Barth, and James Tritt. Eventually, Stewart and Joseph Alsop, the Luces (Henry and Clare Boothe) of Time/Life/Newsweek, Bill Paley of CBS, and A.H. Sulzberger of the New York Times joined the operation. Under no circumstances would these people investigate, print, or broadcast negative stories connected with the CIA. This despite the fact that the CIA was overthrowing duly elected leaders, both foreign and domestic; was drugging, brainwashing, and torturing its own unsuspecting citizens (MK-ULTRA); importing, protecting, and providing jobs to ex-Nazis (Operation Paperclip) who should have been tried and hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes; acting as procurement agents for large Wall Street interests; funding and training secret militias for right-wing paramilitary operations; and many more secret atrocities. The press and TV, instead, ran cute, fluffy stories about Ike's golf scores and LBJ's hounds. The only reason they turned on Joe McCarthy is because McCarthy tried to bring down one of their own--Cord Meyer. Meyer posed as a leftist so that he could infiltrate left-wing organizations and report on them to the CIA. McCarthy, a drunken, bilious mouthpiece for the right, was unaware of the line he had crossed...and so he became dispensable.

At this point my audience looked dazed and incredulous. So I wrapped it up with Wisner's own words: "I can play America like a grand Wurlitzer organ. The people will follow along with any tune I wish to play"; and I gave them a list of books to do their own research.

Next Saturday? More questions, I'm sure.

KBR (Halliburton) is at it again--gets $35 million contract from the Pentagon

2009-02-08T16:08:00.000-08:00

The news is as stunning as it is disturbing. KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root...until recently a part of Halliburton) was awarded a $35 million contract for major electrical work in Iraq, according to the Associated Press, "...even as it is under criminal investigation in the electrocution deaths of at least two U.S. soldiers in Iraq."

How can this be? Where is Senate oversight of defense contracts? Why doesn't President Obama step in? KBR is robbing and murdering our citizens. While doing shoddy work that has killed our soldiers, KBR has already made $615 million on similar contracts. Why haven't these greedy, inept war profiteers been banned from receiving more of our money? According to federal law, the US government can ban companies in cases of fraud, antitrust violations (i.e., no-bid contracts which Cheney procured for Halliburton/KBR), bribery, tax evasion, or for actions that reflect a lack of business integrity or honesty. KBR qualifies to be banned on all these grounds.

And if you think this all started in Iraq, you're wrong. Halliburton/KBR's war profiteering goes back to WWII and Vietnam. I wrote of this in my book, Murder Of An American Nazi: "Halliburton began as Howco, an oil well cementing company in the early 20th century. When the Texas oil boom took off and demand for oil grew, Howco got rich. By the time the founder, Erle Halliburton, died in 1957, the company was worth hundreds of millions. They bought out the Brown brothers and Root in the 1960s. Brown and Root were LBJ's biggest financial backers. When LBJ became president he made sure Brown and Root and Halliburton got the contracts for building bases, airstrips, ports, bridges, piers, helicopter landing pads...hospitals and all sorts of other crap in Vietnam. They made hundreds of millions through cost overruns, waste and price fixing."

After Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries in 1998, Dresser's engineering subsidiary, Kellogg Company, was merged with Halliburton's construction subsidiary, Brown & Root (the "BR" of KBR). George and Herman Brown were close friends with LBJ, and KBR has kept close ties with other Texas politicians including Bush I and Bush II.

Halliburton/KBR has also made a fortune doing business with terrorist states like Iran and Libya. From page 127 of my book: "In the mid-70s they got more than $800 million to build naval bases in Iran... [and] Halliburton got a $25 billion contract from Qaddafi to build an underground pipeline in Libya. Halliburton even did business with Iraq in the late '90s. The oil-for-food program enriched Saddam Hussein by billions of dollars...[Halliburton's] subsidiaries signed a $100 million contract with Saddam to provide oil production equipment and services for Iraq...[back to Vietnam] Brown & Root/Halliburton's profits were over $300 million from '65 to '72 in Vietnam...None dared call it war profiteering for fear of being unpatriotic."

You can read more about this in Murder Of An American Nazi, www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, or www.eloquentbooks.com/MurderOfAnAmericanNazi.html

You won't believe who was killed and what atrocities were perpetrated to make these profitable wars and corrupt contracts possible.

Rush Limbaugh: America's Goebbels

2009-02-03T12:43:00.000-08:00

Here in the heartland, Rush Limbaugh is broadcast for three hours every day over the most far-reaching, and, thus, influential, radio station in the midwest--KMOX of St. Louis. The southern Illinois farmer doing his chores tunes in; so does the mailman making his rounds in the suburbs; so do the elderly confined to nursing homes in Jeff City; so do policemen in Hannibal, firemen in Evansville, and nurses in Joplin. And he hates all of you. All of you who work for a barely adequate wage, all of you on the government payroll, all of you who are female, brown, yellow, black, old, young, Hispanic, whatever. He hates you all. Just like Goebbels, who also got to spew his filth unopposed, on the only airwaves that could be heard in 1930s Germany, he hates everyone who is not like him--a white, middle-aged, corporate millionaire, filled with rage and utterly devoid of compassion.

This week he reached a new low, even for him. "I'm sick of...this so-called compassion for the poor. I don't have compassion for the poor." He, of course, loathes our new president, and openly lusts for Obama's failure. When criticized by a republican congressman, Phil Gringey, for this position, Limbaugh let loose on the poor congressman. (Goebbels could use his microphone to crush anyone--friend or enemy of the Third Reich.) Duly chastised, Gingrey made a humiliating mea culpa, and begged the almighty Rush for forgiveness.

In his ever hateful rhetoric; in his exhortations to move America so far to the right that it resembles neo-fascism; in his denigration of the poor, minorities, women, the aged, homosexuals; in his repudiation of all things gentle and glorious about this land, Limbaugh is our Goebbels. A malevolent, bilious presence on the airways, free to threaten, vilify, fearmonger, and propagandize. He answers to no one, and no cogent opposition is allowed...violating FCC fairness doctrines and all decent political discourse. The bully goes unchallenged, and, like Goebbels, all who dare dispute him are punished. He represents all that is shameful and reprehensible about this country--conscienceless, heartless, maniacal rapaciousness...and vicious intolerance.

FOX broacaster Joe Buck blasts Cardinals' Front Office

2009-01-26T13:35:00.000-08:00

On a local radio show last week, Joe Buck, former Cardinal play-by-play guy and now lead sportscaster for FOX Sports, criticized the St. Louis Cardinals front office for their lack of commitment to improving the team. "I don't think they've done enough," Buck said. "They better get to work. They've got a lot of holes to fill."

The Cardinals need a closer, an upgrade at second base, a quality left-handed reliever, a starting pitcher, and an improved bench if they intend to improve on last year's fourth-place finish. The 2009 roster is worse so far because they've lost .317 hitter Aaron Miles and effective starter Braden Looper. They're counting on the feckless Adam Kennedy to play second base; Kennedy homers about as often as Isringhausen gets batters out 1-2-3 in the ninth. Oh yeah, speaking of that washed-up ragarm Izzy, the owner, Dollar Bill DeWitt, and GM, John "Moans-a-lot" Mozeliak, are actually in negotiations to bring Izzy back. On the cheap, of course. Nothing makes Cards fans wet themselves quicker than seeing Izzy trying to protect a 4-3 lead in the ninth. He blew about 55 games last year. It got so bad I started using the wordy "Izzy" as a verb to describe lots of stuff. When my wife and I babysit our one-year-old grandson, we each take turns changing him when he "Izzys" his diapers. If one of my pals on the golf course misses a six-inch putt, he "Izzys" it. And my granddaughter's tee-ball coach now just says to the girls, "Okay, 'Izzy' one," when he wants them to place a ball on a tee.

But back to the skinflint owner, Dollar Bill DeWallet, George W. Bush's good friend, has been suckering St. Louis baseball fans, aka the red sheep, for years. While pocketing the cash from three million yearly attendance, parking revenues, licensing, concessions, selling off the every last scrap from the old stadium (even urinals), he annually claims the Cardinals "just miss out or come in second" in bidding for free agents (see A.J. Burnett). Meanwhile the franchise's value has tripled since he bought it.

Buck added, "My season ticket check evidently cashed, because it came out of my bank account. So, I'm assuming they have people's money. And it's time they go spend some of it."

Need A Good Laugh? Here's My Translation of CIA "Spy Master's" Book

2009-01-23T07:25:00.000-08:00

The other day I ran across a promotion of a reprinted book, that, if it weren't so diabolically evil would be howlingly hilarious. It was Allen Dulles's book "The Craft of Intelligence: America's Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering For A Free World." Let me translate the title from CIA double-speak to plain truth for you: "The Purpose of the CIA: To Give Safe Haven To Nazis, To Brainwash American Citizens, To Subvert Freedom Of The Press and Free Speech, and To Overthrow Duly Elected Leaders For A Neo-Fascist World."

The publisher's synopsis of the book is a devilish hoot--"...[Dulles] explains how the Soviet Security State recruited operatives and planted 'illegals' in foreign countries." Translation--The Soviets learned this technique from us when we sent fake defectors like Lee Harvey Oswald over to Russia.

Publisher--"[Dulles] spells out...the philosophy and role of intelligence in a free society threatened by global conspiracies." Translation--The philosophy and role of the CIA is to serve its military-defense contractor masters in propagating unjust wars and suppressing dissent. Domestic conspiracies, like murdering a US president and covering it up, are sometimes necessary to preserve the power of the security state.

Publisher--"Dulles also [denies] that the 1961 [Bay of Pigs] invasion was based on a CIA estimate that a popular Cuban uprising would ensue." Translation--We knew the invasion would fail, but we went ahead anyway to embarrass the new president and show him who was boss.

Publisher--"This is a book for readers who seek wider understanding of the contribution of intelligence to our national security." Translation--This is a book to keep you in the dark about the atrocities committed by intelligence in the name of national security.

Publisher--"When Dulles died...President Nixon remarked, "...in the nature of his task, his achievements were known only to a few." Translation--What Nixon meant was, it's a damn good thing his achievements were known only to a few of us.

Cardinals Owner Employs Bush Tactics To Deceive Fans

2009-01-20T18:38:00.000-08:00

The weather here is miserable, and it won't let up until baseball season gets here. So today I want to daydream about the Cardinals starting spring training, but Bill DeWitt, Jr., owner of the team, is letting the franchise slide while he squirrels away the dough. Moreover, in a deceitful attempt to quell the dissenting fans, he's using tricks he learned from his great friend, fellow Republican, and Liar-in-Chief, George W. Bush.

Every off-season, the Cardinals front office makes a big, blustery splash in the local rag by telling us dupes how aggressive they are going to be in signing free agents to improve the team. And each off-season, nothing happens. Meanwhile, the franchise's value has tripled since DeWitt bought it. Estimates have it at nearly $500 million now, but payroll is declining. Last year, DeWitt spent about $105 on salaries, or so he says. This year, it's at about $80 million. Still, he whines about the economy and the risk of long-term contracts. Long-term contracts don't seem to bother the best teams in baseball, like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs. Those teams understand the cost of doing business in today's game. And the red sheep who call themselves Cardinal fans pour through the gates three million strong per year, regardless of the team's ability.

As my beloved Constitution was being trampled and shredded by W and his band of thugs, so are my beloved Cardinals being run into the ground by W's good pal. Last year we finished fourth in the NL Central. This year, we might field a team of Albert Pujols and a bunch of inexpensive ballplayers.

Today we gleefully said good-bye to King George the Dumb; why can't there be term limits for baseball owners too?

The Strange Case Of JFK's Personal Physician

2009-01-08T16:32:00.000-08:00

In perusing HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) on-line documents recently, I came across this disturbing document filed by George Burkley, JFK’s personal physician. Let me give some background first. The Dallas Parkland doctors, in the early afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, described two wounds on the president—a wound of entrance on the throat, near the Adam’s apple, and an exit wound, about the size of a fist, on the upper right back of the president’s head, in the occipital-parietal area.

The Bethesda Naval autopsy doctors, hours later on the evening of Nov. 22, 1963, saw a completely different set of wounds on the president. The throat wound had been enlarged to three times its Dallas size, and appeared to be a wound of exit. There also appeared to be a bullet’s entrance wound on the upper back, near the shoulder blade. The head wound was massive and involved nearly the entire top right portion of the president’s head. THE OCCIPITAL-PARIETAL WOUND WITNESSED BY THE DALLAS DOCTORS HAD DISAPPEARED! That portion of the president’s head appeared to be intact at Bethesda. The only conclusion a reasonable person could draw was that the president’s body had been altered sometime between Dallas and Washington D.C. Thus, also, was the direction of the shots reversed. All evidence of shots from the front was erased. Only evidence of shots from the rear remained. (Was this trajectory reversal at the heart of the plotters' scheme to frame Oswald?)

In 1976 Burkley was contacted by an investigator for the HSCA named Richard Sprague. Through his lawyer, Burkley made a statement to Sprague that “others besides Oswald must have been involved.” Burkley surely became convinced of a conspiracy after seeing the conflicting wound patterns on the corpse on Nov. 22, 1963. Burkley was perhaps the only doctor who saw the body’s condition in both Dallas and Washington. But when Sprague was fired from the HSCA, Burkley’s testimony was never taken. Instead, he submitted the below affidavit:

Reference copy, JFK Collection: HSCA (RG 233) AFFIDAVIT I, VICE ADMIRAL GEORGE G. BURKLEY (M.C.) (Ret.) living in Los Angeles, California, being duly sworn make oath as follows:

I was interviewed in January, 1978 by T. Mark Flanagan, Jr. and Donald A. Purdy, Jr. of the staff of the Select Committee on Assassinations. During the interview I set forth the substance of the information which follows. At this time I reaffirm that this information is accurate and truthful to the best of my knowledge. This statement is made freely, voluntarily, and with out threats, promises, assurance, or remuneration from any source. I was Personal Physician to President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and accompanied President Kennedy on the Texas trip. I was at Parkland Hospital and later at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of November 22, 1963. I saw President Kennedy's wounds at Parkland Hospital and during the autopsy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. There was no difference in the nature of the wounds I saw at Parkland Hospital and those I observed at the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. 1. I was with President Kennedy in Dallas. I arrived at the Parkland Hospital within five minutes of the President's arrival. I checked the Presidents physical condition, gave the doctors working with the President the blood type and some adrenal medication (Sol U Cortef) to place in the intravenous blood and fluids which were being administered. My findings clearly indicated that death was certain and imminent. 2. One of the doctors reported to me vital signs of life no longer could be elicited. I rechecked the vital signs of President Kennedy and there was no sign of life. I reported to Mrs. Kennedy who was nearby in the treatment room that President Kennedy was dead. 3. I remained with the President's body in the treatment room until the body was placed in the coffin and I saw it closed. There was no movement or manipulation of the body other than removal of the intravenous equipment during that time. 4. In Dallas I traveled from the hospital to the Air Force One in the ambulance with the President's body in the casket and also on the plane; the casket was neither opened or disturbed in any way. 5. I had ordered the United States Naval Hospital to be prepared for performing an autopsy on the body of John F. Kennedy, President of the United States, the permission having been granted by Mrs. Kennedy while enroute. It was to be a complete autopsy with no limitations and no curtailment in time necessary for completion. 6. I traveled from Andrew's Air Force Base in the ambulance with the President's body to the Bethesda Naval Hospital and accompanied the coffin to the autopsy laboratory and saw the body removed from the coffin and placed on the autopsy table. 7. I directed the autopsy surgeon to do a complete autopsy and take the time necessary for completion. I supervised the autopsy and directed the fixation and retention of the brain for future study of the course of the bullet or bullets. 8. The autopsy material was retained in a secure area and subsequently turned over by Captain Stover USN to me and a member of the Secret Service. We took this material immediately to the EOB Building where it was placed in a locked file cabinet by the Secret Service. 9. Senator Robert Kennedy, representing Mrs. Kennedy and the Kennedy family, directed that the autopsy material be transferred to the National Archives. This was done on April 26, 1965. See attached letter of transmittal with listing of individual items. The notation under Item #9, one stainless steel container, 7" in diameter x 8", containing gross material, represents the container of the brain. This material was accepted and signed for by Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln and witnessed by three people. Signed copies of these affidavits are attached. I understand that this affidavit may be introduced and received into evidence by the Select Committee on Assassinations of the United States House of Representatives, and may lead them to make various findings of fact, and the statutes applicable to Congressional investigations, including but not limited to those concerning false statements, obstruction, or misleading, would subject me to criminal penalties for not telling the whole and complete truth in this affidavit.

GEORGE G. BURKLEY SIGNATURE Vice Admiral George G. Burkley (M.C.) USN (Ret.) Personal Physician to President John F. Kennedy

Interesting that Dr. Burkley, possibly the only medical person who saw the body in both places (Parkland and Bethesda), signs an affidavit which states that the wounds he saw were unchanged from Parkland to Bethesda. All other medical personnel testimony is contradicts his affidavit--the Dallas doctors saw one set of wounds, the Bethesda doctors saw another set of wounds. Therefore, Burkley's statement is at odds with all other known medical testimony concerning JFK's wounds. One then must choose to believe Burkley or all the other doctors (and there were dozens). I tend to discredit Burkley's affidavit, because it is refuted by all other medical descriptions of the two wound patterns. Also, Burkley has no explanation for FBI agents' Sibert and O'Neill testimony that one of the autopsy doctors stated "surgery of the head area had been performed." No such surgery took place in Dallas, so when and where had this surgery been performed? Burkley gives us no clue.

Three Questions I Never Got To Ask William F. Buckley, Jr.

2009-01-02T14:48:00.000-08:00

Beloved by the far right and hailed as conservatism's intellectual (an oxymoronic term) voice, William F. Buckley died without ever answering hard questions. There are three I would have asked, and I'll supply the answers I think Bill would have given:

1) You've never spoken publicly about your work with the CIA and the nefarious connections by which your family accumulated its fortune. Why?
Bill's response: You've committed a logical fallacy; to wit, you have adduced subjective opinion from objective fact.
The truth: Billy worked under E. Howard Hunt in the 1950s before using his family's wealth to start up the National Review and a neo-fascist organization called Young Americans for Freedom. Much of his family's wealth was derived from their oil company, Pantipec Oil. The president of Pantipec Oil was Warren Smith. Two men who worked for Smith at Pantipec were CIA contract agents, George deMohrenschildt and Jack Crichton. DeMohrenschildt, identified as Lee Harvey Oswald's best friend in Dallas by the Warren Commission, was a rabid anti-communist/oil geologist who mentored Oswald in Dallas's right Russian community. Crichton sat on the board of Dorchester Gas with a man named D.H. Byrd. Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository, close friend of Texas oil millionnaires and LBJ, and founder of the Civil Air Patrol, made a fortune off the Vietnam War after JFK's assassination. LBJ started up the Vietnam War for real, and Byrd's Ling-Temco-Vought got a fat defense contract for building fighter jets.

2) Do you now denounce your racist diatribe from the August 24, 1957, issue of National Review?
Bill's response: I never laid claim to that piece, and, what's more, I have recanted those words.
The truth: Buckley never issued a retraction or recanted this editorial which ran in NR:
"The central question that emerges...is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro..."

3) In your televised debate with Gore Vidal on Aug. 28, 1968, you, the supposed master of detached and civil rhetoric, resorted to obscenties and coarse name-calling. Was this an admission that Gore had, indeed, kicked your ass?
Bill's response: Fuck you, leftist.
The truth: Buckley lost his temper, called Vidal "a queer," threatened to punch him "in the goddamned nose," and accused him of being "plastered."

Nonetheless, the right wing shed huge crocodile tears over Bill's passing in 2008.

More Proof That The GOP Is Full Of Murdering, Lying, Corrupt Extremists: The Mastermind Of 2004 Election Theft Is Killed

2008-12-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

Mike Connell, and Ohio IT wizard to whom the GOP farmed out the "responsibility" for computer tabulations in the 2004 presidential election, was killed last week when the small plane he was piloting crashed on approach at the Akron airport. Why does this have national significance? Because Connell, at the time, was under subpoena to testify in the lawsuit filed by an Ohio citizens group against the Republican Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, for election irregularities. Cliff Arnebeck, the attorney who filed the suit, had asked the Ohio Attorney General to provide protection for Connell as the suit proceeded, because Connell had been threatened. Who threatened him? None other than the Chief Minister of Bush's Evil Empire--Karl Rove. According to Arnebeck, an unnamed source swore that Rove threatened to have Connell's wife prosecuted for lobby law violations if Connell did not keep his mouth shut about the GOP's cyber-rigging of Ohio's votes in 2004. Connell, reportedly remorseful over what he'd done, became a witness for the claimants in the lawsuit. Rove, according to sources, escalated the threats to Connell, enough so to prompt Arnebeck's request for protection of Connell.

Bush's victory in Ohio in 2004 gave him just enough electoral votes to defeat John Kerry and win the presidency for a second term. Knowing all we know now about the ruthlessness, deceit and corruption employed by the Bushies, does anyone really think Karl Rove is not capable of stealing an election and arranging for witnesses to the theft to be eliminated? Will the mainstream media investigate this story? So far, their silence is deafening. Just like all the other Bush atrocities, this one will probably go unprobed and unpunished.

Three New Books on JFK Assassination--One Gets it Right, One Tries Hard, One is an Utter Joke

2008-12-18T14:37:00.000-08:00

Don't be bamboozled by the three newly published books on the JFK assassination. Only one--"JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters"--is worth reading. The others--Gus Russo's "Brothers In Arms" and "Legacy of Secrecy" by Thom Hartmann and Lamar Waldron--make outlandish claims and impugn unlikely plotters. So much so, that the application of a slight bit of common sense is all one needs to dismiss them. Simply put, the mechanics of the plot could not have been carried out by their supposed conspirators--the Castro brothers (Russo's nonsense) and the Mafia (Waldron and Hartmann are scuffling about with minor leaguers in a big-league game).

Calling Gus Russo an investigative reporter is like awarding the Oscar to porn star John Holmes. This guy would not know the facts if they accosted him, beat him senseless, kidnapped him and held him for ransom. It is utterly laughable that he blames the Castro brothers for orchestrating the plot to kill JFK. I suppose Fidel convinced the covert operatives of Operation Mongoose to pull it off. (Mongoose was the CIA's plot to kill Castro, but, instead of gunning for the Beard, they were all photographed in Dallas on Nov. 21-22, 1963.) And, of course, the Castros arranged to have Secret Service agent Henry Rybka ordered off the death limo as it was leaving Love Field and to have the rest of the agents stand down as the shots were firedin Dealey Plaza. Oh, yes, Fidel somehow managed to alter the wounds of the president between the time the body left Dallas and arrived at Bethesda. And the Castros made sure the body was highjacked from Parkland Hospital before an autopsy (manadated by Texas law) could be performed. But first, of course, they had to arrange, through their emissaries Michael Paine of Bell Helicopter and millionaire oilman and Texas School Book Depository owner D.H. Byrd, to get Oswald that job which overlooked the president's route so that he could be framed for the shooting. And it was clever how the Castros maneuvered Ruby into position at just the right time to kill the patsy. And certainly it was Castro's agents who appointed the Warren Commission to cover up the whole thing. And for the last 45 years, Fidel has somehow convinced the CIA to withhold evidence. My god the Castros were busy in 1963, and what power they have wielded since. Who says a Third World banana republic can't orchestrate a massive plot that kills the leader of the free world and stifles all investigative arms of the most powerful nation in the world, sworn enemy of communist Cuba. "Legacy of Secrecy" is almost as hilarious. Hartmann and Waldron blame the mob for the whole thing.

If you want a cogent, serious read about the assassination, and a brave, logical exploration of the true motivation behind the killing, read Douglass' book. The establishment will try to smear him as a "peace activist" (God knows there's nothing worse than someone who works for peace), but he's got it right. Unlike Russo, Douglass points fingers at the people who GENUINELY had means, motive and opportunity. If you read this blog, you know how I was, and still am, affected by Kennedy's "peace" speech of June 10, 1963. Well, Douglass sees this as the watershed moment in the rift between Kennedy and the military-industrial-intelligence complex. No more wars, no more war profiteering, you say? No more president, they say.

YouTube videos of interviews with JFK assassination eyewitnesses, circa 1965

2008-12-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

While YouTube is a morass of the inane, the improbable, and the irrelevant, sometimes one stumbles upon something that is quite extraordinary, like the vintage, black-and-white interviews conducted by Mark Lane, circa 1965, with JFK assassination eyewitnesses. Lane, if you are unaware, was one of the original Warren Commission critics, and his landmark first book on the subject of the assassination, Rush To Judgment, is considered a classic. Two of the interviews were especially riveting: one with J.C. Price, who witnessed the motorcade and shooting from a unique perspective--on the roof of the Terminal Annex building on the south side of Dealey Plaza, from where he had a clear and panoramic view of the entire plaza; the other was an interview of S.M. Holland, who witnessed the shooting from the triple overpass adjacent to the rail yards and overlooking Elm Street. Both men heard and saw at least one shot come from behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll on the north side of Elm Street. They also saw smoke waft out from under the trees which camouflaged the shooter. Price saw a man running at breakneck speed away from the fence and behind the School Book Depository Building immediately after the shooting. Holland ran to the parking lot behind the fence and saw fresh footprints and cigarette butts in the area where he suspected an assassin had fired.

Both Price and Holland have deer-in-the-headlight looks as they speak to Lane, almost as if they both realize, "Oh my god, what am I saying? This directly contradicts what the Warren Report claims. By the end of the interviews, both men appear scared and reticent, the full impact of what they have said hitting home.

I don't have a link to provide, but I imagine it would be easy enough to access these videos with a simple key word search. The interviews are short and to-the-point, and it's worthwhile to see these unedited, unaltered, first-hand accounts from eyewitnesses to history just a few months removed from the event.

Cardinal Dulles Dies; Who'll Pray for Allen's Soul Now?

2008-12-13T12:03:00.000-08:00

When I read the news of the death of Cardinal Avery Dulles the other day, I thought, again, of his uncle Allen, one the most despicable snakes who ever crawled out from under a CIA rock. Director of OSS secret ops in Europe in WWII, and Director of the CIA under Eisenhower and JFK (until JFK fired him after the Bay of Pigs), he was responsible for some of the most outlandish atrocities ever dreamed up by a demented Cold Warrior.

He okayed Operation Paperclip, the evacuation of war-criminal Nazis, who should have been tried and hanged at Nuremberg, after WWII. He gave these Nazis new lives and lucrative careers in our aerospace, defense, and intelligence complex. What they did there is a story unto itself. Let's just say, America, in the Cold War, took a turn towards neo-fascism.

One of Dulles' prize projects was Operation Mockingbird, a program which trained CIA assets as journalists who would disseminate pro-CIA propaganda from their positions at newspaper, TV stations, publishing houses, and periodicals across the country. He also recruited exisiting media moguls like the Luces, Bill Paley, and Sulzberger to "lie for their country." Subversion of the free press meant that American citizens seldom got the truth of what their secret agencies were up to.

Dulles also dreamed up MK-ULTRA, the secret biochemical and drug experimentation program which victimized innocent, unwitting citizens who were exposed to bacterial agents, LSD, and other weird psychological and hypnosis projects. The object was to see if the CIA could control one's mind and one's behavior, and create a Manchurian candidate who could kill in a brainwashed trance without later being able to recall the act.

To cap his distinguished career, Dulles covered up the truth of JFK's assassination while serving on the Warren Commission. Dulles falsified documents, harangued witnesses, misled investigators, and use "Mockingbird" assets to print lies about the evidence in the press. In other words, he did everything he could to steer the investigation away from the real culprits--the military-industrial-intelligence complex, which he had served well for a lifetime.

Cardinal Dulles lived to be 90, but I don't think even 90 years of prayer and restitution is enough to absolve uncle Allen of his sins. I wonder what covert ops Allen is running in hell?

25th Anniversary of the Death of Father James Carney, S.J., Missionary and Social Revolutionary

2008-12-10T17:06:00.000-08:00

Just a few days ago I was speaking to one of my former teachers, a Jesuit, from my days at St. Louis University High School. He reminded me that it was the 25the anniversary of the death of Father James Carney, also a SLUH grad, and one of the most selfless, humble and dedicated social crusaders who has ever lived. He led a truly Christ-like life, living and working among the indigent and helpless of central America. He got caught up in the Honduran rebels fight for freedom in 1983. He was their chaplain, and they affectionately called him Padre Guadalupe. Their fight was against the CIA-backed contras, and Father Carney ultimately lost his life in the fight. I memorialize his struggles and his dedication to the poor in my novel, Murder Of An American Nazi. In it Father Carney is tortured by a CIA agent, Daniel Pfisterr. Here is a passage (pp. 200-202):

"Pfisterr, frustrated by the priest's gentle demeanor and misguided beliefs, became more forceful. 'You completely misunderstand what's really going on down here, don't you? We must not let communism take hold in the western hemisphere. These people don't know what's best for them. We have to determine that for them. What we're doing down here is in their long-term interests.'

" 'You mean, having the CIA intervene to overthrow the leaders they elect...and then empower fascist dictators to starve them off their lands (says Father Carney)'

"Spittle shot from his mouth as Pfisterr furiously sputtered, 'People who believe in God should have nothing to do with communist guerillas. When they win, freedom of religion loses. Real Christianity, like it's practiced in the USA, will become extinct.'

"Padre Guadalupe softly replied, 'You mean real Christians support the oppression and starvation of their fellow man? Maybe that form of Christianity is not worth preserving anyway.'

"Pfisterr seethed with fury. No one had ever had the temerity to speak to him that way, but he felt compelled to answer this insolent Marxist priest. After all, America had to win not only the shooting war against the rebels, but also the war of ideas. 'America is a generous Christian nation, willing to extend a hand to anyone who accepts the precepts on which the nation was founded.'

" 'And what are those?'

" 'That all men are free to pursue their own destiny, in a society unencumbered by a totalitarian regime.'

" 'That's what the Honduran people want.'

" 'What the Honduran people want, or think they want, is to have a communist government parcel out land and goods without concern for who has the means, under a free enterprise system, to pay for those things.'

" 'So it's about riches, then. Freedom for you means free enterprise, and nothing more. The American way is to preserve, at all costs, a system where the wealthiest have the right to own all of the country's resources. And the power to oppress those who want to survive by sharing in a portion of those resources. That's neither just nor righteous. That's the real godless system, not socialism.'

"Pfisterr got so livid he turned red in the face. '...the country you turned your back on is the best country on earth. Where any man, if he works hard enough, can be as rich as he wants.'

"Confident that angels were speaking through him, and at peace with his maker, Padre Lupe serenely quoted from Proverbs, 'Whoever trusts in his riches will fail. Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death. When the wicked dies, his hope will perish, and the expectation of wealth perishes too.'

"Pfisterr's last wisp of patience evaporated. 'Enough of the fucking debate,' he shouted. He beat Padre Lupe as he had seen Dornberger beat the Archambeaus and Hughes in Saint Sernin forty years prior--to inflict the maximum amount of pain without fatally harming the prisoner. 'Give me the names of the rebels. Where are they hiding?' he screamed."

Father Carney, aka Padre Lupe, disappeared in the jungles of central America that summer. It is presumed that the CIA murdered him. Documents obtained by his family, under the Freedom of Information Act, cite several reliable witnesses who reveal that Father Carney was pushed out of a helicopter in flight by his CIA executioner.

To our great shame, the story of Father Carney's life and death is little known and seldom remembered. He is on the long, regrettable list of those tortured and murdered by the CIA in the second half of the 20th century, for having the courage to want to change the world.

2008-12-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

This is the cover of my new novel, Murder Of An American Nazi. It is available for sale on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. You can read more about the book at www.eloquentbooks.com/MurderOfAnAmericanNazi.html

CIA's Mind Control Program Exposed by Vermont Journalist

2008-12-01T12:06:00.000-08:00

Louis Porter, of the Vermont Press Bureau, today reports that a Dr. Robert W. Hyde, a psychiatrist associated with the CIA, conducted drug and psychological experiments on unwitting subjects at a Boston Hospital in the 1950s, under the auspices of MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind control program. Later, Hyde worked as the Director of Research in the Vermont State Hospital, where he secretly used abnormal and harmful treatment techniques, including LSD dosage, on unwitting patients. How does Porter know all this? Because one of Hyde's patients can't forget him and his abuse. Her name is Karen Wetmore, and, with the help of lawyers who obtained secret government documents under the Freedom of Information Act, she sued the hospital and won a private settlement. The full article can be found on the blog of "Steven Soldz: Psychoanalyst, Psychologist, Researcher and Activist."

Where did the CIA get LSD? From the Nazi scientists who brought it with them to America after the war. One of the first to discover and develop the drug, Dr. Hubertus Strughold use it on death camp prisoners during the war. Dr. Strughold, not coincidentally, is one of the Nazis rescued from a hangman's noose at Nuremberg by Allen Dulles and the CIA. I deal with this topic in my book, Murder Of An American Nazi.

For St. Louis sports fans only--10 most bitter defeats

2008-11-28T15:12:00.000-08:00

I've been a diehard St. Louis sports fan for 51 years, or since I began feeling joy and pain transmitted via the unblinking eye of the TV screen. What follows are the top 10 lows (I'll post the highs some other time; for some reason, they're harder to remember than the defeats). They are my attempt to purge the suffering that never seems to let go of me.

Losses:

1) Game 6, 1985 World Series. October 26, 1985. The Denkinger game, of course. 500 years from now this may be long forgotten, but not in the lifetime of any Cards' fan who saw it. I know, I know. Jack Clark and Darrell Porter misplayed the foul pop after the blown call; still, if Denkinger gets the call right, we are probably world champs for the second time in four years. Kansas City 2, St. Louis 1.

2) Orange Bowl, Jan. 1, 1970. Penn St. 10, Missouri 3. This game has been overlooked and/or forgotten by many St. Louis-area fans, especially those who don't follow Mizzou. But I live and die with the Tigers, going back to Dan Devine's first year. And this game will haunt me until I die. No one will ever convince me that Missouri was not the best team in college football in 1969. Texas won the mythical national championship by beating Arkansas 15-14 in December, but, in an era when most southern teams were lilly white, Texas did not have the best athletes. Missouri, on the other hand, had Jon Staggers, Mel Gray, Joe Moore, Jim Harrison, Ty Walls, Henry Brown and other great African-American football players. Devine was color-blind. The Tigers ran up and down the field on Penn State, but turned the ball over 9 times. NINE.

3) Game 7, 1957, NBA finals. April 13, 1957. Boston 125, St. Louis 123 (double overtime). Red Auerbach always called this one of the greatest games ever played. The Hawks had the ball with one second left. Alex Hannum threw an inbounds pass the length of the court, intentionally banging it off the backboard. Pettit caught the rebound and missed a 10-footer that rimmed the basket. This was the beginning of the Celtics' dynasty.

4) Game 7, 1968 World Series, Ocotober 10, 1968. Detroit 4, St. Louis 1. The always-reliable Curt Flood misplayed a fly ball, and Gibby got beat for one of the few times in the World Series. Like in '85, the Cardinals blew a 3-1 series lead.

5) Game 4, 2002 NLCS. October 13, 2002. San Francisco 4, St. Louis 3. My son and I will forever after refer to this game simply as the Rick White game. LaRussa horribly mismanaged this game, and hung White out to die against J.T. Snow. The next day SF clinched 2-1, when Matt Morris pitched a 1-0 gem into the eighth before the Cards lost it in the ninth.

6) Game 7, 1996 Stanley Cup playoffs, Western Conference Semifinals. May 16, 1996. Detroit 1, St. Louis 0 (OT). With Hull and Gretzky, the Blues were poised to go to the finals, and they have not come as close since.

7) Nebraska 45, Missouri 38. Nov. 8, 1997. The flea-kicker game. Someone named Matt Davison caught an illegal pass to tie the game at the end of regulation. The ball was kicked by Shevin Wiggen, and I felt like I'd had a shiv stuck in my side. It should have been ruled an incomplete pass, game over, Tigers win. The referee was J. Laurie, the umpire R. Whittenburg, the linesman D. Alexander, the line judge P. Brown, the back judge L. Girouard, the field judge JD Cleavinger, and the side judge L. Williams. How could all of them have missed it?

8) Thanksgiving Day, 1976. Dallas 19, St. Louis 14. The lying, cheating, thieving zebras stole another one from us this day. Our football team, the old Big Red, were called the Cardiac Cards then for their habit of winning games late. And they would have done it again had pass interference been called on Charlie Waters for clocking Mel Gray before Jim Hart's pass got to him.

9) April 15, 1966. Game 7, NBA Western Conference Finals. Los Angeles 130, St. Louis 121. Had the Hawks won this game they might have beaten the Celtics in the finals and saved the franchise. At least, that's what I've always imagined. But Jerry West could not miss that night.

10) March 1961. NIT championship game. Providence 62, St. Louis 59. The NIT meant something then, and, believe it or not, the Billikens were a perennial power. To this day, I remember the Luechtefelds, Dave Harris, Donnell Reid, and the Nordmanns.

Next time, the sweet moments.

2008-11-23T21:35:00.000-08:00

Now available on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and

eloquentbooks.com

A Tribute to JFK on the 45th Anniversary of his Murder

2008-11-21T19:38:00.000-08:00

Here is my humble homage to President Kennedy. It's an excerpt from my novel, Murder of an American Nazi, in which one of the main characters witnesses JFK's address at American University on June 10, 1963:

from pages 101 and 102--

"Listening to the speech that day, Marie became convinced that Kennedy was going to turn American militarism and secrecy on its head. What he said made her proud, for the first time, to be an American. He spoke of disarmament and world peace. He spoke of commonalities Americans shared with the communists. He spoke of the beginning of the end of the days of conflict. He mentioned the word 'peace' over and over. It flew in the face of
everything Marie had come to know about America...

"...(JFK said) 'What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do I seek? Not a Pax Americana forced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the
security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living.' An end to American military arrogance and domination? Marie was transfixed.

"...(he continues) 'every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward--by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of freedom and peace here at home.' The military will hate this (she thought)...And how about defense contractors and the war weapons industry. This is going to be bad for business.

"...(JFK concludes) 'We are devoting to weapons massive sums of money that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease...in the final analysis, our (the US and
its enemies) most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.' "

Why The Lack of New Direction in Obama's Cabinet Appointments?

2008-11-20T17:25:00.000-08:00

He's going to keep Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense? Why? Anything and anyone associated with the abomination known as the Bush Adminstration foreign policy should be forever banished from serving in government again. Gates' policies are Bush's policies, and we've all had enough of that. Obama should appoint Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) as Secretary of Defense for many reason. He served on Senate committees overseeing appropriations, he's a no-nonsense critic of the the War in Iraq, and he would be a tangible symbol of Obama's bi-partisanship.

As for those who would argue (and I don't know that there are many left) that withdrawal is defeat, they are dead wrong. Withdrawal means victory, because victory is attained when the Iraqi people stand on their own. And it is time to make them stand on their own. The Iraqi army has the training, the national will, and the money (our money, to be exact) to make it happen now. Take the billions we're spending there and use it, instead, to bailout our economy. We can't afford to nation build anymore. It's time to take care of our own.

And please withdraw the Clinton nomination for Secretary of State. Let her stay in the Senate where she can do a good job reforming health care. No need for Obama to have the stench of the Clinton psychodrama hanging over his first term. He 's got a lot of work to do, and the Clintons would be a distraction. Does Obama not realize he has a ready-made cache of goodwill with the rest of the world already? The globe sees America in a new light now that we've lived up to the promise of equality forged by the framers. A person of color running America makes us, again, a beacon of hope and enlightenment for all foreign lands. Obama can capitalize on this by appointing someone who will carry out his policy...not someone with a personal and selfish agenda.

My Blog

2008-11-18T06:16:00.000-08:00

I'll be posting my random thoughts on politics, history, sports, movies, travel and more. I'm also working on a new novel, and occasionally I will post excerpts. Feel free to reply or comment, and I'll reply to any questions.

tf

Discovery Channel's Laughable JFK Re-Do.

2008-11-17T18:34:00.000-08:00

I just got finished watching Discovery Channel's re-staging of the JFK Assassination, ghoulishly titled "Inside the Death Car," and it's filled with so much illogic, distortion, and one-sidedness that its evidentiary value is minimal. It left me wondering what is the purpose of such a program, who really funds it, and why is it being broadcast? If its purpose is to sway the uninformed and uncritical to the "lone-assassin" side, it may have succeeded, but why is this of value? Whose purpose does this serve? Certainly not history's, because the program left out a ton of known facts and happenstances that, if included, would have contradicted the show's obviously preconstrued premise. In other words, in 2008, who is still so avidly invested in covering up the truth?

I perused the credits for funding information, but found nothing. Apparently, it's a Discovery Channel production all the way. I leave it for others to divine why TDC wants so desperately to finger Oswald as the lone assassin, when 80% of America believes he was not.

Anyway, the funny stuff began right away when somebody who contracts with the Australian (did TDC have to go all the way to Australia find an idiot who would agree to do this?) defense industry recreated what was claimed to be an exact replica of JFK's neck and head. Just one problem with that--the fake head swivels and bounces like one of those bobbleheads they give away at baseball games. The brain matter? Oh, they injected that right before the test firing. That's right, TDC hired a world-class marksman to shoot at the replica. But get this, they did not do it in Dealey Plaza, though they had Dallas police close down the Plaza for a limousine run-through; they "re-created" the shooting out in the wilderness somewhere, claiming that it was exact duplicate of Dealey Plaza's dimensions. While the participants admitted it was clear that a shot could have come from behind the picket fence (the most logical locale for the head shot given all the facts) in the Plaza, they had the marksman shoot from what appeared to be a burm in an open field at some undisclosed place. And instead of shooting from the front-right position from which the actual picket fence shooter fired, the marksman shot from a right angle, virtually perpendicular to the JFK dummy. The shot blew a hole through the through the left side of the president's fake head, and the narrator (one Gary Mack, I'll get to him later) gleefully exclaimed, "...this does not correspond to any known wound on the president." Of course it did not, because the marksman shot from the wrong position. Interestingly though, the wound had the exact size and shape as the one Dallas Parkland doctors described the president as having in the back of his head on Nov. 22, 1963! Without realizing it, the TDC bunglers provided substantion for a shot from the front and, thus, a conspiracy.

Other little tidbits that unintentionally prove conspiracy are included. One is the Secret Service agent who wiped off the back seat of the death car at Parkland Hospital. Against all logic, the TDC show tries to convince us that this proves there was only one gunman because the agent wiped away only evidence which would prove that JFK's brain matter flew forward. The agent inexplicably left only the blood, skull and brain matter which indicated a frontal shot. I guess the Secret Service just wanted to make it harder for the Warren Commission to hang it on Oswald? Wow, not even Arlen Specter would lay claim to that one.

To assimilate the 15-20-mile-an-hour winds in Dallas that day, TDC wheeled out a huge fan to blow on the limousine. That one made me howl. An electrical fan duplicating the winds of a city...how scientific!

But the best was Bobby Hargis, the motorcycle cop who was riding to the left rear of the limousine on November 22. Apparently, he is still alive and still breathlessly exclaiming how he was covered in JFK's blood, skull and brains when the fatal shot hit. I guess the producers never considered that this is some of the best evidence of a shot from the front right. The exit wound made by a picket-fence shot would have splattered anyone to the immediate left rear of the death car.

Presiding over this whole mess was Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in the old Book Depository Building. Mack was once sure that he saw a rifleman wearing a badge shoot from the shadows on the grassy knoll. Now he's certain that the kill shot could only have come from behind. I suppose he'll sway with any wind, even one from a giant electrical fan in the middle of nowhere, to drum up ticket sales for his museum.

Tim Fleming
author of Murder of an American Nazi
available on amazon.com