Monday 30 September 2013

"Because I Might Die" : The Art of Making Vice-Presidential Picks


"Now, why don't you just leave me and Vice President Santiago to our own devices?

Right, Santiago..?"

"Si!"

-  Dave Chappelle, 2003





I contend that the art of making a Vice-Presidential Pick lies in choosing someone without Presidential ambitions of their own, who will do exactly what you will have made clear you wanted to do prior to being shot, thereby eliminating any perceived gain to be had by shooting you.

And on that basis, in spite of his accident-prone tendency to find himself in unfortunate situations (almost to the same extent as any black politician in that regard.... Or Bill Clinton), Joe Biden is and always has been perhaps the genius Vice-Presidential pick of all time.

Although he frequently does get fucked by events. Or members of his Secret Service detail.



"When in doubt, steal from the best!" - Quentin Tarrantino.

Or, Neil Kinnock:



“I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? [Then pointing to his wife in the audience] Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?”

- Joe Biden, 1987

I Quote The Enemy:

"Following the Kinnock attention, reports came from the San Jose Mercury News of Biden giving a February 3, 1987, speech to the California Democratic Party that reused without credit passages from a 1967 speech by Robert F. Kennedy, and of Biden giving 1985 and 1986 speeches that did the same with a passage from a 1976 speech by Hubert H. Humphrey.

In the Kennedy case – which got the greater attention, since there was film footage of both versions that television news programs could play side-by-side – Pat Caddell stated that the reuse without credit was his own fault, and that he had never informed Biden of the source of the material.

It was also reported that the California speech had taken a short phrase from the 1961 inaugural address of John F. Kennedy.

After Biden withdrew from the race, it was learned that he had indeed correctly credited Kinnock on other occasions. But in the Iowa speech that was recorded and distributed to reporters (with a parallel video of Kinnock) by aides to Michael Dukakis, the eventual nominee, he failed to do so. Dukakis, who disowned any knowledge of the Kinnock video, fired John Sasso, his campaign manager and long-time Chief of Staff, but Biden's campaign could not recover.

Meanwhile, Biden and Kinnock had become close friends after the plagiarism incident. Meeting in August 2008, after Biden had been chosen by Democratic nominee Barack Obama as his running mate, Biden introduced Kinnock to his Senate staff by saying: 

Hey, you people! Do you know this guy? He used to be my greatest speechwriter.”

Biden's 1988 campaign lapses were never a significant issue in the race, and Biden invited Kinnock to the inauguration."





Curiously, Republicans do not seem to factor in death or incapacitation when factoring in their Vice-Presidential picks - just pure politics.

Perhaps it's since there hasn't been a credible attempt on the life of a Republican President (ignoring the hit on Reagan, since it originated inside the White House) since 1901.

How else do you explain some of these picks...?

This man cannot spell "potatoe"



This man had had four heart attacks and a quadruple bypass.




Smile for the cameras, Dick.





George H.W. Bush was the model of a working Vice-President.

However -


Now, this is interesting; the official caption for this DoD picture, taken with hours of the first inauguration reads: 
Description
English: Vice President George Bush and other VIP's wait to welcome the former hostages to Iran home.
  • Location: ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE
  • VIRIN: DF-SC-82-06566

Which is interesting - since other sources cite the port of entry for the returned hostages was Stevens Air Force Base in upstate New York - which has, to say the least, an interesting pedigree.

You may remember it from 9/11 and the Northwoods plan; thusly -
















Shutdown



Lessons from the great government shutdown of 1995-1996

By Glenn Kessler

"There's a very good possibility that government will shut down. I know the Democrats have their talking points lined up. They'll blame us for everything. What will we do?"
--Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), Feb. 22, 2011

"Clinton's trump card was the veto. Under the Constitution, Congress must muster a two-thirds majority to overcome a presidential veto. So Gingrich had loudly proclaimed that he had a tool to confront the veto: the government shutdown.

"He can run the parts of the government that are left, or he can run no government," Gingrich told Time magazine reporters six months before the first shutdown. "Which of the two of us do you think worries more about the government not showing up?"

That was the first mistake the Republicans made: They appeared to be too eager for a confrontation, while Clinton constantly emphasized he was willing to compromise within reason. Then Gingrich told reporters he stopped funding the government in part because Clinton made him exit from the rear of Air Force One when they returned from attending the funeral of slain Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. That comment just made Republicans appear petty.

In the end, after weeks of turmoil, the Republicans meekly gave up and eventually cut a deal with Clinton that was not much different than what they could have gotten before the shutdown.

Clinton used the episode as the springboard for his successful reelection campaign, and he humiliated Republicans for it during his 1996 State of the Union speech. He singled out for praise a man seated next to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton -- Social Security Administration worker Richard Dean, who had survived the Oklahoma City bombing and rescued three people from the devastated Murrah Federal Building.

As Republicans stood and applauded Dean's heroism, Clinton pulled out the knife, recounting how Dean was forced out of his office during the first shutdown and had to work without pay in the second one. 

"Never, ever, shut the federal government down again," 
the president scolded.

After that, Clinton never lagged in the polls again.

When a balanced-budget agreement was finally reached a couple of years later, it was almost entirely on Clinton's terms. It is remembered as his achievement, not that of the Republicans who had pressed so hard for it."






"For most of the world, a government shutdown is very bad news - the result of revolution, invasion or disaster. Even in the middle of its ongoing civil war, the Syrian government has continued to pay its bills and workers' wages.

That leaders of one of the most powerful nations on earth willingly provoked a crisis that suspends public services and decreases economic growth is astonishing to many.

American policymakers "are facing the unthinkable prospect of shutting down the government as they squabble over the inconsequential accomplishment of a 10-week funding extension", Mexico's The News wrote in an editorial."



Sunday 29 September 2013

Iran/Kenya/Somalia "I Can't Believe It's Not a Pax Americana...?!"



"Of course, conservatives absolutely lost their minds. Predictably, the reaction has been bitterly partisan, completely ignoring the fact that this is the most significant and tellingly positive development in our Middle Eastern foreign affairs in decades. Instead, they are angry that President Obama is talking on the phone to Iran, but not to his own Congress.

The quintuplet of derpitude known as The Five on Fox “News” was just as appalled and “flabbergasted” as you’d expect them to be. Eric Bolling, who is always good for a clueless, pedantic and histrionic sound bye or two also did not disappoint. “I’m flabbergasted the president made the phone call to Rouhani after 33 years or so,” Bolling said. Continuing his point, Eric then went on to imply that all Iranians are terrorists. “There’s a reason we haven’t negotiated with Iran, because they’re state-sponsored terrorists.” "

NOTE: There is NO evidence, real or forged, linking Iran to the funding of 9/11, none, nada, not one scrap, not one shred, not one digit scribbled on the back of a discarded napkin, not to Iran, not to Hezzbollah, not to Hamas, Iraq, Syria, Canada or anyone else. You know why?

Because in its investigative proceedings, the 9/11 Commission did not look into the question of who funded the attacks, as such information would be of 


"little practical significance".

They were ready to talk in 1981, they were ready to talk in 1999, 2001-2003 and 2006 - the 1999 window of opportunity came SO close to happening, but the Kosovo War happened (triggered by the Zionists in the Clinton Cabinet, not Clinton himself), and not only ruined that opportunity but brought the world to the brink of World War III with the standoff between NATO and the Red Army at Pristina Airport.

In his FIRST Press Conference in 1981, Ronald Reagan declared that with the return of the hostages and the culmination of October Surprise, all debts were repaid and the slate wiped clean - there was absolutely no reason not to restore at least a basic diplomatic mission in Tehran, and we KNOW that they were supplying arms to Iran throughout the 1980s at that very time, via Israel, so its all a total sham that there is any kind of unbridgable divide.

There are a few home truths about Syria that all concerned in Washington have neglected to mention, for good reason;

1) Bashar Assad was and is the most popular and progressive Arab leader and the best friend the US (and Israel) has in the region). He was also a very great and personal friend to the late Ambassador Chris Stevens.

2) Darryl Issa is a Syrian Mormon and a Zionist Arab who grew up hanging out with Rabbis. He also appears to have had the leaders of the Jewish Defence League killed for attempting to kill him in the immediate wake of 9/11 (he is the only Arab American Congressman)

3) Irrespective of who fired them (it was the anti-government forces - I refuse to call them "rebels", since they are foreign fighters), Syria's chemical weapons are not Bashar Assads' he does not want them and could not use them even if he wanted to - most were stockpiled by his father, a few may have been transferred from Iraq at some point - either way, they are a liability to him and is desperate to get rid of them.

4) The conflict in Syria is not a new war - this is the same Saudi-backed Sunni insurgency that was in Iraq from 2004 onwards, with Sunni Death Squad militias trained and armed by David Petreaus and veterans of the US Contra war in Central America - what the CIA calls "The Salvadoran Model". This is not a Syrian Civil War - this is the Iraqi Insurgency transplanted to Syria, where they actually have a large, well-equipped and well-motivated conscript army and a strong sense of secular national identity to fight it.

5) The US could not win in Iraq. But Syria can win in Syria. And the next step for the Sunni Death Squads once they achieved victory in Iraq, or were pushed back by the Iraqi Shi'ite controlled government forces would be to move on to Syria anyway, since the border is a largely irrelevant line in the sand in any case.

6) Syria will have known that in 2011, when the Syrian conflict formally got underway. In fact, that has been going on to a greater or lesser extent since at least 2005, when Petreaus was placed in charge of the Iraqi transitional command and began replicating the strategy he had been applying in his sector in Mosul of arming Sunni Death Squads. Diplomatic exchange between Syria and the West between 2005 and 2011 was, and is, excellent.

7) What Assad, and anyone paying attention at the time would have known was that by ignoring these people, they were not just going to go away.

Syria's army is a conscript army and therefore enormous - were there a serious desire to do so, they could stand elbow to elbow along the Iraqi and Turkish borders and completely seal them, blocking off the flow of fighters and material coming in.

9) That particular area of the world and the UN Missions to there are well-experienced to the practicalities of accommodating sizeable populations in refugee camps, and the climate is unusually conducive to extended periods of outdoor living in encampments.

Therefore...

The White House & State and the McCain/Graham Axis in Congress have been Good Cop/Bad Copping this one from the start.

It's just a hunch, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that the casualty figures from Syria turn out in the aftermath to have been grossly over-inflated, and most of them turn out to be foreign fighters backed by the Saudis and Petreaus to go in there, martyr themselves and cause carnage.

Syria isn't that big - it makes no sense that this is an inconclusive struggle after nearly 2 1/2 years, that the Syrian Army have been unable to decisively put down the insurgency with their massive numerical and material advantage in a fight conducted on home soil.

It's also hard to believe that thousands of heavily armed foreign fighters could have all gained entry into Syria unnoticed and unchallenged, when they had been successfully blocked for the previous half decade.

Unless they were intentionally allowed in over the border...

This is my speculation, but it makes sense of all the facts as we know them;

The facts are, all able bodied Syrian men of fighting age have been called up to military service to fight the insurgents. And it's certain that they will eventually win, it's just a question of time.

In areas of conflict, the local women, children and elderly have been evacuated away from the combat zone for the duration and accomdated in the adjoining Arab States (Israel, naturally, has refused such a courtesy, presumably citing "Security" concerns).

I would speculate, perhaps, given the nature of the Assad relationship with the West, that perhaps,this was the plan all along - Syria volunteered to absorb all the mad-dog Jihadi Death Squads, and deal with them militarily, whilst drawing in any nascent cells in the West and elsewhere to join the Jihad and providing a pretext to decommission Syria's unwanted and unusable Chemical stockpile in the process (Assad can't just hand it over in the face of external pressure, his support in Syria would collapse overnight, the Russian plan allows him to save face by appearing to stand up to the West and cause them to back down and blink first).

I suspect that this may have been the plan all along - all all the while, it prevides perfect cover for Obama to conduct his back-channel detante with Iran behind the backs of Israel and the Joint Chiefs, which was the ultimate goal all along.

Now, this is my speculation, and I label it as such - but ask yourself, really - what is the likelihood that Bashar Assad, commanding the miltary power that he does, and with the people behind him, couldn't manage to effectively secure his own borders to the North and to the East for the purposes of civil defence..?

I makes no sense, on the face of it,

Then ask yourself why this highly locallised explicitly Sunn Islamist insurgency of doctrinaire 7th Century Whabaists has held it's own for well over two years now without either side gaining any significant ground in achieving their respective, fairly basic goals...?


How is it the flow of arms and foreign fighters has more or less continuous during this entire period, and at points has shown signs of increasing significantly, wherever victory or total defeat seemed to be right on the brink of coming to pass...?

And why has Israel, thusfar, other than for a few sneering asides and the usual mistrustful broadsode of mudsligning, how is it only now, at this lace stage in the game, the Prime Minister and Knesset of the Apartheid State of Isreal only this year, in the most recent last few weeks has come out and made any form of open acknowledgment of the reality of the Israeli State itself having any form, infulence or interest of role, be it active or by clandestine means in the ultimate outcome of the insurgency in Syria, most progressive, "West-leaning", most militarised, nationalistic and socially social liberal of all it's Arab neighours....?

This man who swaps email exchanges with both Barbara Walters and Sy Hersh - at least until relatively recently, at any rate.











A Couple of Slaveholders


These men owned negroes.



"Determined to start living a normal life as much as possible, the brothers settled on a plantation, bought slaves, and adopted the name "Bunker". 

On April 13, 1843, they married two sisters: Chang to Adelaide Yates and Eng to Sarah Anne Yates. This made their respective children double first cousins. 

In addition, because Chang and Eng were identical twins, their children were genetically equivalent to half-siblings.

Their Traphill home is where they shared a bed built for four. 

Chang and his wife had 10 children; Eng and his wife had 11. 

In time, the wives squabbled and eventually two separate households were set up just west of Mount Airy, North Carolina in the community of White Plains – the twins would alternate spending three days at each home. 

During the American Civil War Chang's son Christopher and Eng's son Stephen both fought for the Confederacy. 

Chang and Eng lost part of their property as a result of the war, and were very bitter in their denunciation of the government in consequence.

After the war, they again resorted to public exhibitions, but were not very successful. They always maintained a high character for integrity and fair dealing, and were much esteemed by their neighbors.

The twins died on the same day in January 1874. Chang, who had contracted pneumonia, died rather suddenly in his sleep. 

According to the Travel Channel's "Mysteries at the Museum", Chang suffered a stroke the night that he died. Eng awoke to find his brother dead, and called for his wife and children to attend to him. 

A doctor was summoned to perform an emergency separation, but he was too late. 

Eng died three hours later."



That is just the oddest damn thing I have ever heard in my entire life...


Crazy-assed Crackers...

Memorandum of Understanding Between NSA and Israel Pertaining to Protection of US Persons

The State of Israel shall:











"Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified, I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information,"

- Senior Federal Investigator

"According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the U.S. of any U.S. ally."

- General Accounting Office (GAO) report.

"[The State of Israel has a]voracious appetite for information... The Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every facet of their political and economic policies.

It aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target.

Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives."

- Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report.

The Israeli based Amdocs Ltd. firm handles most records of telephone calls and billing in the US since it has contracts with the 25 largest phone companies across the US. As such, it has a record of most calls made in the US. The FBI has over past years investigated Amdocs on several occasions.

In 1999, the National Security Agency (NSA) issued what's called a Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, (TS/SCI) warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands, in Israel, in particular.

Saturday 28 September 2013

Kenya/Somalia: The BBC Calls for the Reconquest of Africa - A New World Order




"Afrika is under attack...."


- Bro. Steve Cokely, 1993.


"After consulting with my advisers, with world leaders, and the congressional leadership, I have today told Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali that America will answer the call. I have given the order to Secretary Cheney to move a substantial American force into Somalia.

As I speak, a Marine amphibious ready group, which we maintain at sea, is offshore Mogadishu. These troops will be joined by elements of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, based out of Camp Pendleton, California, and by the Army's 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York. These and other American forces will assist in Operation Restore Hope. They are America's finest. They will perform this mission with courage and compassion, and they will succeed. "

- President George H.W. Bush, 1992

“The youth [al-Shabab] were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and [would] after a few blows run in defeat. And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda… about being the world leader and the leader of the New World Order, and after a few blows they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”

- Usama Bin Laden, 1997









"For the first time, turning this global vision into a new and better world is, indeed, a realistic possibility. It is a hope that embodies our country's tradition of idealism, which has made us unique among nations and uniquely successful. And our vision is not mere utopianism. The advance of democratic ideals reflects a hard-nosed sense of our own, of American self-interest. For certain truths have, indeed, now become evident: Governments responsive to the will of the people are not likely to commit aggression. They are not likely to sponsor terrorism or to threaten humanity with weapons of mass destruction. Likewise, the global spread of free markets, by encouraging trade, investment, and growth, will sustain the expansion of American prosperity. In short, by helping others, we help ourselves.

Some will dismiss this vision as no more than a dream. I ask them to consider the last 4 years when a dozen dreams were made real: The Berlin Wall demolished and Germany united; the captive nations set free; Russia democratic; whole classes of nuclear weapons eliminated, the rest vastly reduced; many nations united in our historic U.N. coalition to turn back a tyrant in the Persian Gulf; Israel and its Arab neighbors for the first time talking peace, face to face, in a region that has known so much war. Each of these once seemed a dream. Today they're concrete realities, brought about by a common cause: the patient and judicious application of American leadership, American power, and perhaps most of all, American moral force.

Without a doubt, there's going to be serious obstacles and setbacks ahead. You know and I know that we face some already. Violence, poverty, ethnic and religious hatreds will be powerful adversaries. And overcoming them is going to take time, and it's going to take tenacity, courage, and commitment. But I am absolutely convinced that they can be overcome.

Look to Europe, where nations, after centuries of war, transformed themselves into a peaceful, progressive community. No society, no continent should be disqualified from sharing the ideals of human liberty. The community of democratic nations is more robust then ever, and it will gain strength as it grows. By working with our allies, by invigorating our international institutions, America does not have to stand alone.

Yet from some quarters we hear voices sounding the retreat. We've carried the burden too long, they say, and the disappearance of the Soviet challenge means that America can withdraw from international responsibilities. And then others assert that domestic needs preclude an active foreign policy, that we've done our part; now it's someone else's turn. We're warned against entangling ourselves in the troubles that abound in today's world, to name only a few: clan warfare, mass starvation in Somalia; savage violence in Bosnia; instability in the former Soviet Union; the alarming growth of virulent nationalism.

It's true, these problems—some frozen by the cold war, others held in check by Communist repression—seem to have ignited all at once, taxing the world's ability to respond. But let's be clear: The alternative to American leadership is not more security for our citizens but less, not the flourishing of American principles but their isolation in a world actively held hostile to them.

Destiny, it has been said, is not a matter of chance; it's a matter of choice. It's not a thing to be waited for; it's a thing to be achieved. And we can never safely assume that our future will be an improvement over the past. Our choice as a people is simple: We can either shape our times, or we can let the times shape us. And shape us they will, at a price frightening to contemplate, morally, economically, and strategically.

Morally, a failure to respond to massive human catastrophes like that in Somalia would scar the soul of our Nation. There can be no single or simple set of guidelines for foreign policy. We should help. But we should consider using military force only in those situations where the stakes warrant, where it can be effective and its application limited in scope and time. As we seek to save lives, we must always be mindful of the lives that we may have to put at risk.

Economically, a world of escalating instability and hostile nationalism will disrupt global markets, set off trade wars, set us on a path of economic decline. American jobs would be lost, our chance to compete would be blocked, and our very well-being would be undermined.

Strategically, abandonment of the worldwide democratic revolution could be disastrous for American security. The alternative to democracy, I think we would all agree, is authoritarianism: regimes that can be repressive, xenophobic, aggressive, and violent. And in a world where, despite U.S. efforts, weapons of mass destruction are spreading, the collapse of the democratic revolution could pose a direct threat to the safety of every single American.


Address on Somalia (December 4, 1992)

George H. W. Bush




Welcome to the Future


So, POTUS calls him on the phone - PoI (@HassanRouhani) ReTweets it.


Front Row, first from left.


On Wise Men in White Who Wear Beards

I quote The Enemy:

"In Greco-Roman antiquity the beard was 
"seen as the defining characteristic of the philosopher; philosophers had to have beards, and anyone with a beard was assumed to be a philosopher."

While one may be tempted to think that Socrates and Plato sported "philosopher's beards", such is not the case. Shaving was not widespread in Athens during fifth & fourth-century BCE and so they would not be distinguished from the general populace for having a beard. The popularity of shaving did not rise in the region until the example of Alexander the Great near the end of the fourth century BCE. The popularity of shaving did not spread to Rome until the end of the third century BCE following its acceptance by Scipio Africanus. In Rome shaving's popularity grew to the point that for a respectable Roman citizen it was seen almost as compulsory.

The idea of the philosopher's beard gained traction when in 155 BCE three philosophers arrived in Rome as Greek diplomats: Carneades, head of the Platonic Academy; Critolaus of Aristotle's Lyceum; and the head of the Stoics Diogenes of Babylon. 

"In contrast to their beautifully clean-shaven Italian audience, these three intellectuals all sported magnificent beards."

Thus the connection of beards and philosophy caught hold of the Roman public imagination.


Epictetus stated he would embrace death before shaving.

The importance of the beard to Roman philosophers is best seen by the extreme value that the Stoic philosopher Epictetus placed on it. As historian John Sellars puts it, Epictetus 

"affirmed the philosopher's beard as something almost sacred...to express the idea that philosophy is no mere intellectual hobby but rather a way of life that, by definition, transforms every aspect of one's behavior, including one's shaving habits. If someone continues to shave in order to look the part of a respectable Roman citizen, it is clear that they have not yet embraced philosophy conceived as a way of life and have not yet escaped the social customs of the majority...the true philosopher will only act according to reason or according to nature, rejecting the arbitrary conventions that guide the behavior of everyone else."

Epictetus saw his beard as an integral part of his identity and held that he would rather be executed than submit to any force demanding he remove it. In his Discourses 1.2.29, he puts forward such a hypothetical confrontation: 

"'Come now, Epictetus, shave your beard'. If I am a philosopher, I answer, I will not shave it off. 'Then I will have you beheaded'. If it will do you any good, behead me."

The act of shaving 
"would be to compromise his philosophical ideal of living in accordance with nature and it would be to submit to the unjustified authority of another."


This was not a theoretical in the age of Epictetus, for the Emperor Domitian had the hair and beard forcibly shaven off of the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana "as punishment for anti-State activities."

This disgraced Apollonius while avoiding making him a martyr like Socrates. Well before his declaration of "death before shaving" Epictetus had been forced to flee Rome when Domitian banished all philosophers from Italy under threat of execution.

Roman philosophers sported different styles of beards to distinguish which school they belonged to. 

Cynics with long dirty beards to indicate their "strict indifference to all external goods and social customs";

Stoics occasionally trimming and washing their beards in accord with their view "that it is acceptable to prefer certain external goods so long as they are never valued above virtue";

Peripatetics took great care of their beards believing in accord with Aristotle that "external goods and social status were necessary for the good life together with virtue".

 To a Roman philosopher in this era, having a beard and its condition indicated their commitment to live in accord with their philosophy."

1976



A slice of life frozen moment of history, trapped in aspic, from the golden years that fell between the exposure of COINTELPRO and the formal imposition of NOINTELPRO

By Richard Sprague, 

To dramatize what might happen and probably did happen in 1976, this chapter has been prepared by assuming the attitude typical of today's innocent Americans. A new disease is sweeping America. No, it's not the flu; it's conspiracy fever.

 People afflicted by the disease imagine conspiracies everywhere. They believe, for example, that the CIA arranged for the takeover in Chile and the assassination of Salvador Allende. They even think Henry Kissinger had something to do with it. These poor feverish devils have the strange idea that J. Edgar Hoover was a fiend rather than a public hero. They imagine that he ordered a vicious campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King and a conspiracy against most of young America called Cointelpro. Some even think Hoover had King killed. There are some Californians with the west coast strain of this bug who imagine that the FBI and the California authorities created a conspiracy in San Diego and Los Angeles against black citizens. The California group also think there was something strange about Donald DeFreeze and the Symbionese Liberation Army. They suspect an FBI or California state authority conspiracy, complete with police provocateurs, double agents, faked prison breaks, and a Patty Hearst, alias Tania, all thrown in by our own government to create a climate that would make the public accept the prevalence of terrorism and demand a police state. 

The disease spread to Congressmen as well. It does not seem to be limited, as it was before Watergate, to people under the age of 30. There are even Congressmen with a more virulent form of the malady who are convinced their telephones are still being tapped. They, along with thousands of others who suffer, no doubt reached this conclusion just because they were told by a CIA-controlled media that hundreds of telephones were tapped a few years ago. 

Early forms of conspiracy fever are no longer considered to be dangerous. For example, all those sick citizens who imagined conspiracies in the incidents at Tonkin Gulf, Songmy, Mylai, the Pueblo and the Black Panther murders are now considered to be more or less recovered, since it turns out it was not their imaginations working overtime after all. Even the special variety of the fever which caused the impression that the CIA murdered a series of foreign heads-of-state is no longer on the danger list. 

There is still one form of the illness, however, that is officially considered to be very dangerous, virulent, and to be stamped out at all costs. It is the version producing the illusion that all of America's domestic assassinations were conspiracies. Those infected believe the conspiracies are interlinked in a giant conspiracy to take over the electoral process in the United States and to conceal this from the American people. Some citizens are known to have this worst form of the fever. They include a Congressman or two. Others have come down with a milder form in which they imagine separate conspiracies in four assassination cases (John and Robert Kennedy, Dr. King, and the attempted assassination of George Wallace). 

 Members of the Ford Administration, particularly David Belin, Mr. Ford's staff member on the Rockefeller Commission, went along with an analysis made by Dr. Jacob Cohen, a professional fever analyst, that the disease has been spreading rapidly because of a small group of "carriers" traveling around the country who are infecting everyone else. Some of these carriers, called assassination "buffs", were thought to have contracted the fever as many as twelve years ago. 

In the disease's worst form, the patient imagines that there exists a powerful, high level group of individuals, some of whom have intelligence experience. The highest level of fever in these patients produces the idea that this high level group, usually called the PCG, will eliminate presidential candidates not in their favor or under their control. Others imagine that Jimmy Carter has been brought into the PCG by threats against his children and careful briefings by George Bush. 

 It is worth analyzing the sick people with this domestic assassination conspiracy fever to see how far their imaginations take them. They calculate that the PCG, fearing exposure if any president is not under their control and influence, will go to whatever lengths are required to insure the election of the man they do control. The idea is that Gerald Ford was nicely in the PCG's pocket because he has been covering up for them ever since 1964. He has continued to help them through 1975 and 1976 by maintaining a steady cover-up effort on all four cases. Jimmy Carter was perhaps brought under control. The feverish "buffs" figure that the PCG would have been sure to eliminate Jimmy Carter unless he could be controlled. 

The scenario continues into the future. The more control exercised by the PCG, the stronger they become and the more people in the executive branch become beholden to them to continue covering up the cover-ups. 

So, wake up America. Wipe out this disease. It's just as dangerous as Communism, if not more so. Like the general in Z, Americans must realize that such a disease has to be eliminated whenever and wherever it appears. 



"Conspiracy Fever" is derived from an article with that title by Jacob Cohen, a psychologist, in Commentary magazine, October, 1975.