“The Nixon administration (which unsurprisingly Cheney and Rumsfeld were also involved with.” Yes, and so was, Karl Rove, learning his dirty tricks from the master, Lee Attwater, and Richard Armitage. Those found guilty of Watergate crimes (including the Attorney General John Mitchell) were Nixon’s campaign aide Herbert Porter. Nixon’s personal lawyer Herbert Kalmbach. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, Kenneth Parkinson, WH Counsel John Dean, Jeb Magruder and others. The grand jury also secretly named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. The CIA was also implicated. At the time Dick Cheney was a Congressman—livid that his hero Nixon was forced to resign. And Hillary Clinton was one of the attorneys working for the prosecution. In 2004, Nixon White House Counsel, John Dean, wrote a book about the current Bush-Cheney Administration, “Worse than Watergate,” stating they should be impeached. In the earlier Reagan-Bush administrations (and many directly or tangentially involved in GWB’s) were Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Poindexter, Andrew Card, James Baker, Colin Powell , George Schultz; and those indicted for the Iran Contra crimes, DoD Sec. Caspar Weinberger, National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams; and Alan D. Fiers, Jr., Clair E. George, Duane R. Clarridge, Felix Rodriguez [all CIA] plus Oliver North, were pardoned on Christmas Eve, 1992, before Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial and George Bush, Sr. would turn over the presidency to Bill Clinton. William Casey, CIA director and former Reagan campaign manager died of a brain tumor before he could reveal much, but Oliver North testified he took most of his orders from Casey. The special counsel, Lawrence Walsh, stated that Reagan and Bush, Sr. had broken laws but he was reluctant to indict them. Against the laws of the US Constitution, International Laws, and Congress, the Reagan administration conspired to sell arms to our enemy Iran [that Reagan called a terrorist country] in its 7-year war against Iraq [we also armed Iraq]. Funds from the arms sales to our enemy funded Reagan-Bush’s secret illegal war to overthrow the democratic Nicaragua government for the benefit of US corporate interests. Iran-Contra: In 1981, days after taking office, Reagan ended aid to Nicaragua, and committed to regrouping the Nicaraguan National Guard and the CIA backed and funded ‘Contras’ to fight against the democratically elected Sandinista government that’d rid their country of the generations of Somoza family dictatorship installed and supported by the US since the 1930s. Except for the US, most countries in the Americas and Europe cut ties with the Somoa regime. The US-backed Contra wars against the Nicaraguan people was to protect the economic interests of US oil, sugar and fruit cartels to rape Nicaraguan resources continued. 50,000 Nicaraguans were disappeared, brutally tortured, raped, and killed, another 50,000 made refugees. Reagan constructed bases for Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica. The civil war between the Contras and Sandinistas intensified after Daniel Ortega (current Nicaraguan President, reelected in 2006) won fair elections in 1984. In 1985, the US implemented a full economic blockade, including food and medicine. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Ortega called for elections to be held in 1990, and Violete Barrios de Chamorro became the first woman head of state in Central America in 1990. The US ended the embargo, but the country was demolished. Chamorro’s replacement was a Arnoldo Aleman, voted one of the world’s 10 most corrupt politicians by the UN Human Rights Subcommission. Aleman stole $100 million from the government. Enrique Bolanos took office in 2001 and put Aleman in jail. In 2006 Daniel Ortega was re-elected. The nation of just 5.6 million (3M less that NYC) and with a GNP of $15.8B (little more annually than what the US is wasting each month in Iraq) is still struggling from the devastation of (mostly US-backed) civil wars, Hurricaine Mitch that killed 4,000 and wrecked 70% of the infrastructure, plus the rampant thefts under Aleman.

“They didn’t write kiss ‘n’ tells. They didn’t spill the beans. They didn’t tell tales out of school. They kept their counsel, and went to their graves with the stories that gentlemen simply did not tell. Good-bye to all that.” Sheesh.. Is WoW having a contest to insert as many cliches in writing as possible? OK. I’m in. Yeah, Scotty really let the cat out of the bag, in the nick of time, to come just under the wire, so we could chew the fat, it’s been a long row to hoe, and a laugh a minute—but—Rome wasn’t built in a day, there’s only 24-hrs in a day, and no time like the present, to say what goes around comes around, and that Scotty-Come-Lately just hopes that Bush Inc gets their just deserts.

“I wish these people had the courage to write this when it was happening so it could have been prevented…” People were writing/talking…this documentary filled with hi-level CIA, weapons inspectors, US Ambassadors, including to Iraq, was out in 2003 and updated later. Their words couldn’t get through the corporate media—who want $War$ and esp Fox News 24/7 drumbeat FOR IT and characterizing anyone against it as a Traitor etc. Here’s the video…I saw it in 2003 and rewatched a few nights ago. Still extremely powerful and amazing. thank god for filmakers like Robert Greenwald who did other excellent films like OutFoxed. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid= 7371253996117324045&q=uncovered%20the%20whole%20truth%20about%20the%20iraq%20war

Always OUTSTANDING….Frank Rich’s NYT Op Ed: “McCain’s McClellan Nightmare”, excerpt: “Americans don’t like being lied to by their leaders, especially if there are casualties involved and especially if there’s no accountability. We view it as a crime story, and we won’t be satisfied until there’s a resolution. That’s why the original sin of the war’s conception remains a political flash point, however much we tune out Iraq as it grinds on today. Even a figure as puny as Mr. McClellan can ignite it. The Democrats portray Mr. McCain as offering a third Bush term, but it’s a third term of the war that’s his bigger problem. Even if he locks the president away in a private home, the war will keep seeping under the door, like the blood in “Sweeney Todd.” link to entire piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01richedit.html?em&ex=12124656…

MaryPage- Wow…you’re 79! Neat! My Dad is too and also very activist on Internet, unfortunately he’s been in ICU for quite a long time. But, loved you story re Miss Lillian. I got to meet President Carter and he was so warm, friendly, amazingly fresh skin and twinkling blue eyes, nice smile. He loves to chat. Rosalynn was standing behind him and said under her breathe, “Move it along, Jimmy.” I thought that was hysterical. She seemed to wear the pants in the family.

On “The Age of Unreason” [stating the obvious] Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “Inspired by Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 cultural analysis Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Jacoby,…dismayed by the average U.S. citizen’s political and social apathy and the overall crisis of memory and knowledge…. argues that the nation’s current cult of unreason has deadly and destructive consequences and traces the seeds back to post-WWII society…singles out mass media and the resurgence of fundamentalist religion” OK, nothing revolutionary there. In her interview with Bill Moyers [on link provided] she states that we get lost in personal minutiae instead of the BIG picture; then wonders off in a convoluted personal minutiae tour of FDR’s era, and her wish for his return. Some factoids from FDR’s1935: U.S. population then: 127 million. Now: 300 million. Unemployment: 20.1%. Key events: Nazis repudiate Treaty of Versailles and enacts Nuremberg Laws against Jews for “racial pollution, and starts a “Aryan super race” breeding program. Mussolini invades Ethiopia. Persia becomes Iran. Huey Long assassinated in Louisiana. Best Picture Oscar: It Happened One Night. George Gershwin writes Porgy & Bess. The neutron discovered. Du Pont creates the first 100% synthetic fabric-nylon. Aircraft-detecting radar is pioneered in England. My problem with her book and talk on Bill Moyers: 1. She didn’t present a clear premise in a historical frame and offer key solutions. PW’s criticism was academic/convoluted writing. 2. She failed to state that historically the pendulum swings from dark to enlightened times [until some gomer like GWB finally pushes the red button] And that dark eras share the same societal blueprint. Enlightened eras share the same societal blueprint. That’s basic and should have been point #1 like stating if you take-in more calories than expended you’ll be fat. The math is simple: If a nation becomes militaristic it will become dark. 3. That “The Age of Unreason” has always been institutionalized by what we in the US call the Radical Right in every culture: deeps cuts to education and infrastructure, militarism/privalized prisons/creation of mercenaries/cronyism, loss of true Free Press, religious fundamentalism, cultural promoting of Neanderthalism/ditto-heads: i.e. The European witch hunts that left entire villages with few women left and when the Church insitutionalized their torture and murder and then seized their personal estates and that of their family as ‘payment’ for their ‘trials.’ 4. Since she sees the seeds of today in Post WWII, hopefully she elucidates Operation Paperclip that brought Nazis into the US, including at the Univ of Illinois where many of today’s Neocons studied under Leo Strauss and believe in a society based on perpetual war, in an entitled self-appointed ruling elite that lies as a matter of form, uses religion to control the masses, and shifts rights from the people to corporations: ie Neo-Fascism, which is of course based in “unreason.” 5.She failed to state what sparked EVERY era shift from darkness to light: Nearly supernatural individuals arrive on the scene who articulate visions that reinvigorated the masses, and reawakened and redirected energy: King Pericles, Plato, Pico della Mirandola, Good Kind Rene, Saint Joan of Arc, Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, FDR, JFK, Obama. While she is a smart, nice lady writing to the choir is affirmative but doesn’t help all that much. The same message with pop-culture appeal gets to the people who NEED it. i.e. Thomas Paine’s short pamphlet “Common Sense” had as much weight in shaping the U.S. as anything. Certainly her premise of a scary lack of memory and knowledge is true.

Susan McDougal went to jail for 18 months because she refused to lie about the Clintons and Ken Starr abused his power like a modern-day Torquemada, threw her in jail for ‘contempt’ trying to psychologically break her including locking her in a glass cell devoid of any sound, lit 24/7, and under guard, with her view onto the mental ward where the inmates are housed worse than animals. She wrote about her experience in “The Woman Who Refused to Talk” —-an impossible to believe story except that she has total credibility. The GREAT Helen Thomas wrote the forward to her book. Here’s is the description of her captivity FOR REFUSING TO LIE FOR KEN STARR who she said regarded her as ‘road kill’ in his quest to ruin Clinton because he hated everything he stands for and saw McDoughal as a way to bring him down: “It was complete glass, lit 24 hours a day. And there’s a single guard tower that looks over all the cells. And so no one ever comes by, but the guard can see everything from the tower. And most of the people on that block were there for being mentally ill. And the things that you could see were just unimaginable, unbelievable. It’s one reason that I am really — you can’t say glad, but you can say fortunate — that I was able to see that, because that’s one of the things I really talk about when I go around the country is how the mentally ill are treated in prison.” “They throw a sheet over their heads and knock them into the wall and knock them unconscious, or spray them with gas, because they’re mentally ill and they don’t follow orders and do what they’re told. And these people are just held in the most horrible conditions — naked, starving; they don’t feed themselves. The prison staff goes in with these rubber suits and hoses and washes the feces and urine out of the cells, where these people are housed like animals.” Here’s her entire interview on GOP “justice” at work: http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/02/14_McDougal.html BUZZFLASH: And that’s basically all you had to do.”

Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson are national heroes. Hopefully, they’ll win their civil suit against Cheney et al that was thrown out at the onset—thanks to Bush stuffing the courts. They added Armitage to the suit and filed an appeal 5/6/08…it’s been in the courts nearly two years and Judicial Watch has filed an Amicus Brief: http://www.wilsonsupport.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2…

What????? I’m not encouraging you to do anything, lady. I could care less what you do. Denver. Yeah, that’ll be the day.

“Conservative insecurity syndrome” HA! Yeah, it’s tough to be Scotty Come Lately in the Happy Land of racist, union-busting, woman-suppressing, bedroom-peering, rights-scoffing, warmongering, torture-backing, buccaneering, global warming-denying, privatizing, public land-grabbing, Supreme Court stuffing, empire-building, Constitution-shredding raptors. Maybe he can become best buds with McSame whose newly posted video already has nearly 2M hits. Whoa! And such a long time to election day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

Be sure to viral this McCain Nightmare Youtube to your friends. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

Renata- McCain’s Nightmare Video to viral…pass on to friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

I say let’s ask Senator McCain what he thinks. McCain’s Nightmare YouTube…..going viral. Good Job, McCainy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

Senator McCain’s Comments of the Weeks. Whoa. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

Rupert Murdock also said he is for Obama—paraphrasing, “Very intelligent, rock star, like his plans for education—education in this country is an abomination [Huh? Mr. Man whose middle name is disinformation. Gee.] 80% of people are sick to death of politicians, hurting badly economically and want change. Every one on Hillary’s team is telling her to get out except her husband—she is the past—Obama is the future. He’ll win. I like McCain-he’s a friend-but he has a lot of problems.” When asked if he was responsible for the NY Post endorsing Obama “Yeah.” He said he hopes Obama is as good as his promise and that he wants to meet him. Of course he says all this very genially—with no sense of irony of his enormous weight in the mess we’re in. ie supporting GWB in invading Iraq with this insane sentence. “The world will be awash in cheap oil.” Amazing how can be that rich and myopic enough on so many levels to make that statement. http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid452319854/bctid1579802959