The American Spectator : So Long, Suckers

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So Long, Suckers

By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 8.26.10 @ 6:09AM

Those '60s radicals are beginning to die out, or at least to retire.

WASHINGTON -- They are beginning to die out, or at least to retire. So long, suckers. Surely the Clintons, Senator Jean-François Kerry, Al-Gore, and dozens of others who presented themselves as reasonable alternatives to the radicals of the 1960s thought they were suckers. I thought about all of them this week as problems mounted for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks thief.

Late in June death took Dwight Armstrong, the anti-Vietnam War protester who blew up a building at the University of Wisconsin, killing an innocent graduate student, Robert Fassnacht. I have always wondered about Fassnacht. He supposedly was opposed to the Vietnam war too. I wondered what his life would be like if he had not been in the building at the time the bomb went off. Armstrong and his accomplices were eventually caught. None had much promise, but there was a tremendous legitimacy to them at first, at least in comparison to those of us who favored the war.

Armstrong was sentenced to concurrent seven-year terms in prison and was paroled in 1980. On a less idealistic note he was later apprehended for running a methamphetamine lab in Indiana and sentenced to ten years in prison. He lived his last years driving a cab and caring for his mother. "My life," he told Madison's Capital Times,"has not been something to write home about." Well, maybe at the end the light began to dawn.

Then there was Fritz Teufel, who turned room temperature on July 6. He began his career less spectacularly. Auspicating it as a "fun guerrilla," the German equivalent of Abbie Hoffman (a suicide) and Jerry Rubin (death by jaywalking) demonstrated against the shah of Iran and planned to ambush Hubert H. Humphrey with cake-mix "bombs." His politics were one part Maoism and an equal part psychoanalysis. He claimed to resent his parents' softness toward Nazism. It led him to softness toward Mao. In time he moved to Munich and joined a radical commune, eventually enlisting in the Red Army Faction, which carried out assassinations, bombings, and kidnappings. He spent a couple of years in prison in the 1970. In 1975 he spent another stretch in prison. He devoted his last years giving interviews to journalists nostalgic for the 1960s and 1970s, but first his guests had to play him in table tennis.

Now we are told that Bill Ayers is going to retire from the University of Illinois' Chicago campus. Ayers was a co-founder of the radical -- today we would say terrorist -- Weather Underground, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s engaged in quite a lot of political activism that involved bombs, but also street demonstrations and other acts of violence. Ayers was involved in blowing up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, twice. I take that personally, for my great grandfather was, for many years, the sole survivor of that riot. As a little boy I was chosen by the Chicago Police Department to place a wreath on the monument. Today, I have a splendid picture of the monument in my office.

Ayers went on to other bombings, for instance at the New York City Police Department, the United States Capitol, and the Pentagon. He recalled these acts and others in a spectacularly ill-time memoir, Fugitive Days, which came out on September 10, 2001. We all know what happened a day later. When the New York Times quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough," he relied on his formidable gifts at obfuscation to argue that he was talking about peaceful ways to end the Vietnam War, though what they might have been is unclear. All we know is that he relied mostly on bombs, and several of his colleagues blew themselves up making them. Perhaps in retirement he will explain.

Which brings me to Assange. He published last month 76,000 documents classified by the U. S. military about the war in Afghanistan. The left views this act as hugely legitimate. Undoubtedly soldiers and other friends of democracy have been killed and will be killed because of it, but Assange promises more documents. Also, he says this talk of him molesting women is a dirty trick and he hints darkly at the Pentagon. Will Assange come out of it looking like a Dwight Armstrong or a Bill Ayers? Will he perhaps manage to appear reasonable and go into legitimate politics? It is too early to tell. All we know is that history works in mysterious ways. Some become footnotes, others presidential candidates.

About the Author

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. His new book, After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery, was published on April 20 by Thomas Nelson. His previous books include the New York Times bestseller Boy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton; The Liberal Crack-Up; The Conservative Crack-Up; Public Nuisances; The Future that Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failure in Britain; Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House; and The Clinton Crack-Up.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (253) | Leave a comment

Appleby| 8.26.10 @ 7:06AM

I recall Arthur C. Clarke, the dean of hard science fiction, remarking once that the only way scientific progress could be made was to wait for the current crop of scientists to die off. That is, once cemented into their beliefs, scientists do not change regardless of new evidence.

My experience, trying to get an education in spite of the Hippie Scum that infested the University Campus in the Sixties, is that Old Hippie Scum is the same. As their attention turns from terrorism to Viagra, they weaken in influence, but they are a danger as long as there is anybody who seeks them out and pays attention to their old time whine.

Alert1201| 8.26.10 @ 8:06AM

The problem with education is that the Hippie Scum's protégées are now filling their places. I was looking for a place my son could take a dual credit history class and I had a hard time finding one that did not use Zinn's piece of trash as the text book.

Anastasia Mather| 8.26.10 @ 11:32AM

Hillsdale. Totally conservative.

Occam's Tool| 8.26.10 @ 5:21PM

Possibly George Mason?

JF| 8.26.10 @ 9:55PM

Only the economics department at George Mason is conservative. Hillsdale is traditional through and through (they also offer generous scholarships.)

Matt| 8.29.10 @ 9:21PM

Not GMU - it is a completely PC campus. Has to be as it seeks to make a name for itself in academia.

Paul| 8.30.10 @ 2:13PM

College of the Ozarks aka hard Work U

Walter| 8.26.10 @ 1:12PM

I think that the protegees are worst than the originals. They hear of all the romance of the old days without having to do the intellectual work that the old masters did before they came up with the wrong answers.

Who is worse? Those who arrive at a conclusion somewhat rationally or those who take it on faith?

Don Carlson| 8.27.10 @ 7:29AM

No! Not Really?! Some supposed institutions of higher learning are actually using the 'People's History' as a textbook? God save us.

MAJ Mike| 8.27.10 @ 3:46PM

A college that uses a dishonest, poorly researched, jeremiad as a textbook is not educating, it's indoctrinating. The people who graduate from such a place are in need of saving.

sly311| 8.27.10 @ 5:02PM

Hillsdale!!!!!!

Dwight| 8.29.10 @ 3:10AM

Sheltering your child or yourself from alternative points of view like Zinn's only create a false sense of security and an uninformed public. Whether you (or I) don't believe in the policies of the left you must not try to suppress them or hide from them as that goes against everything that is American and is self defeating.

Let your kid go to the college of his choice and if you taught him well he will follow a healthy path.

Seek| 8.26.10 @ 11:51AM

"Hippies" aren't the same thing as Leftists. Many among the former either are apolitical or libertarian/decentralist ("granola") conservative.

Bill Ayers wasn't a hippie. He was a hardcore politician in service to a distinct brand of violent radicalism. As a conseravtive who has cultivated a certain "hippie" style, I resent the idea of being lumped in with hard Left provocateurs.

Appleby| 8.26.10 @ 1:47PM

I was specifically referring to Hippie Scum, of which you were clearly not one. You were in fact what we used to call a "plastic hippie" -- one who adopted The Look and to a degree The Walk, but who generally adopted it only on weekends and holidays. :)

Margie| 8.26.10 @ 2:44PM

Seek & Appleby,

LOL. Good stuff. Especially the "granola" conservative.

And Appleby, you've got it down pat, I knew it well.

point00| 8.26.10 @ 6:52PM

Appleby, I don't want to be disagreeable with someone with whom surely I mostly agree, but Seek is right and you are wrong. For example, this hardcore, 60's, Bay Area street hippie, panhandler, etc., who often slept in the Berkeley hills (above the stadium and under the eucalyptus stand) and spent my days on Telegraph Ave and in the Haight while, of course, frequently inbibing the strongest concoctions of the underground laboratories of the day, could not even then stand the Weather Underground/SDS campus poseurs. They were the folks who became the leading lights of the tediously conventional left--Hillary Clinton, Ayers, etc., and even then it was obvious they were future tools of the establishment. However wrong-headedly, me and my sort sought freedom and liberation--the Weathermen et al sought control, always control. I still want liberty, so I am now a libertarian-leaning conservative, and they are what they always were: earnest little pseudo-revolutionary dictators who never showed their faces on the street when the riot police came out.

Virginia11775| 8.27.10 @ 9:53AM

William Ayers' father Thomas Ayers was the wealthy CEO of a Chicago energy company and a prominent member of a radical community with mob ties. It is hardly a surprise that his son became involved with the NBP and the WU. In fact, some have postulated that the son was not rebelling but carrying out the father's work and with the help of rogue (communist) factions in our own government. These 60s radicals became the leaders of this modern progressive movement, but they were not the flower children or the civil rights activists. They killed that dream as surely as heroine killed so many musicians back then.

blackwatch| 8.26.10 @ 4:10PM

I hope you learned to bathe. "Hippies stink" is one of my favorite bumper stickers.

JF| 8.26.10 @ 9:59PM

I respectfully disagree. All hippies started out as Leftists. You grew up and, like David Horowitz, saw the flawed thinking of the rest of your peers. You may live a laid-back lifestyle, but deep down you resonate more closely to Ward Cleaver than you do to Mackenzie Phillips.

Everette Hamilton| 8.26.10 @ 1:49PM

Thanks for the encouraging statement. I have a 17 yr old son ready for college in another year and dread this process of finding an institution to keep away from these Hippie Scum. I am 62, so know all about this garbage. Generational Dynamics perhaps.

John II| 8.26.10 @ 7:42PM

Try:

Hillsdale
University of Dallas
Thomas Aquinas College
Franciscan at Steubenville
Wyoming Catholic
Baylor University
etc.

For the "etc." see National Review Guide to Colleges that Still Educate (or some such title--I lent my own copy out a few years ago). Of the 3000 or so colleges and universities nationwide, well over a hundred are still tolerable. And most of the others have chunks of the tolerable embedded in them more or less surreptitiously--but THAT kind of discernment is REALLY a pain, without insider knowledge.

Margie| 8.26.10 @ 9:09PM

And Hillsdale sends out a fantastic little publication free each month and it has writings by great conservatives in it. You can probably subscribe online. We look forward to it.

Vern Crisler| 8.26.10 @ 9:42PM

Trivia dept: I believe the "old guard must die off" before progress can be made was first said by Planck. It's a reference to the wandering Israelites who had to die of so that the new generation could conquer the promised land.

Dave| 8.29.10 @ 6:22AM

As a gizzled vet who's old enough to have been through the barn and around the block a few times, the term "Old Hippie Scum" wasn't nothin' more than simple redefinition of what my Illinois granddaddy used to scrape-off the bottom of his boots after the early morning ritual of walking the pen and feeding his hogs.

It was the same "stuff" my grandmother steadfastly refused to let him track into the house - but the aroma was the same as that Old Hippie Scum. Which if nothing else proves what a very wise teacher tried to tell me in high school history class: "You can put fresh lipstick on a hog -but at the end of the day, it still the same ol' pig.

Say goodnight, Hillary.

Works for me.

Dai Alanye| 8.26.10 @ 7:16AM

Ayres name should never be mentioned without pointing out that he is nothing but a failed terrorist. His last bombs were intended to hit a college library and a dance at an army base. Had the terrorists led by Ayres not blown-up themselves while making one of the bombs dozens of civilians as well as military enlisted would have been killed.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:12PM

Could he still be prosecuted? I know he got off on a technicality, but is it possible there is new evidence (assuming no double jeapordy)? I firmly believe 99-year-old Nazis, dying in bed, should be executed (assuming they themsleves murdered) before drawing their last breath, and I don't think this form of attempted murder is any different.

For that matter, can we prosecute those "anti-war" activists who incited the enemy to torture our boys? Or at least, can they be sued? (The latter might have a statute of limitations.)

Average Infidel| 8.26.10 @ 7:20AM

Why yes indeed, you can take the bomb away from the terrorist, but, he's still a terrorist with the (mind) bomb. Perhapes time is the enemy of your disdane of humanity, but in the end it will be the guy upstairs that will judge you for not what you did for humanity, rather what you did against humanity. Now that's payback. Yes good bye sucker.

Stephanie| 8.26.10 @ 7:24AM

So Mr Ayers is retiring. Perhaps he has a job waiting for him at the White House.

Redstateboy| 8.26.10 @ 1:54PM

No... unfortunately.. he'll retire with a nice pension.. how Bourgeois..

UpChuck.Liberals| 8.26.10 @ 3:02PM

There is a bright spot, most people die within 5 years of retirement. May his be sooner rather then later.

Deborah D| 8.26.10 @ 8:16AM

If fate had a sense of humor, Bill Ayers would have been in one of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. Now that he's retiring, he and his wife can continue with their support of attempting to break the blockade of Gaza. I'm sure they won't be on the boats, however, they've probably learned it's better to get some useful idiot to do their dirty work.

Virginia11775| 8.27.10 @ 10:08AM

Maybe fate has a sense of humor but takes longer to play out. Time is infinite. There is still much we have yet to learn about 911, but I doubt Ayers' book date was a coincidence. I think there were conspirators with ties to our own government, as well as Middle Eastern terrorists involved. Ayers is obviously aligned with both; he undoubtedly cheered on that tragic day. It will be the undoing of the Democratic party, and the Republicans are cleaning house, too, in these primaries.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:16PM

I know God does, and the fact that the NYT published on 9/11 shows it.

You can add that to the scheduling of Chaplain to answer for his "war-mongering" to right around December 8, 1941, and the group of leftists whose ad condemning the claim by a defector that Stalin was planning to join with Hitler came out when the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed.

WRTolkas| 8.26.10 @ 8:27AM

Dear Miss Stephanie,

You all forgot that piece of trash that Ayers is shacked-up with - Bernadette Dohrn. Now that is a piece of work. I will not get into her history. I last saw her smiling face on my issue of AARP. I ripped the magazine to shreds, wrote a letter explaining what I though of the editors, AARP, and Mzz Dohrn, and then canceled my subscription forevermore.

I have a goal in life, to outlive these radical bastards. I want to send a bag of peanuts to each one of there funerals. I want that bag on the box or in the box with them.

No retreat, no forgivness.

Wow, Mr. Tyrrell hit my hot button this morning.

Best regards,
WRTolkas

WRTolkas| 8.26.10 @ 8:30AM

Ops:
peanuts to each one of THEIR funerals.

See how upset I am?

Stephanie| 8.26.10 @ 11:14AM

Dornn on the front of AARP? Are you effing kidding me? Outrageous!! Whenever I receive trash from them, I send it back in their post paid envelopes with a note telling them I am NOT interested because of their backing of the obamacare bill. They keep on sending.
We are a nation divided now because of obama. My mother in law called us last night screaming that Glenn Beck is a Nazi and is destroying Martin Luther King's memory. Do I need to tell you that she gets her news from the dying, foaming at the mouth, tingle up my leg MSNBC? We are a nation divided. But we will be in Washington on Saturday and I will have my camera and my cell phone to record should things go south, if the black panthers come to cause trouble. In MY nirvana, it would be wonderful if we could all come together for this event for a common goal for America. But alas, I don't think that will happen.

Richard2010| 8.26.10 @ 12:15PM

Stephanie... I chuckled at your mother-in-law story. Love Beck...

KC| 8.26.10 @ 1:04PM

Stephanie

Shout it out for me, too, while at the foot of Lincoln Memorial! I'm a native California, old enough to remember the beauty and glory of this state, and understanding my individual responsibility. My teachers actually reinforced that standard! But alas, my funds and time are short, and there are no 8-28 buses leaving this state!

My heart, sole an intellect support you and all who Restore Honor!

California70| 8.26.10 @ 3:07PM

to: KC

I'm a Californian too, and agree with your statements hole-heartedly. Wish I could be in Washington on 8/28 also. Hope it is a wonderful success.

California used to be the greatest place on earth. NOW.....The libs have ruined it. The only thing we have left is the terrific weather.

the friendly grizzly| 8.26.10 @ 6:36PM

That will soon be taxed.

WRTolkas| 8.26.10 @ 2:46PM

Dear Miss Stephanie,

I kid you not. To make matters worse, that issue of the AARP rag with Mzz Bernadette's smiling mug was darn near the date of 9/11. My wife just received an invitation to join AARP. This invitation was returned with our invitation to cram their invitation where the sun don't shine.

I was born and grew up in Washington D.C. and have many good childhood memories around the Lincoln Memorial. Please be safe and have an enjoyable time.

BTW: the best place to eat downtown is the cafeteria underground near the Museum of Art. The cafeteria has a view of cascading water. Don't eat at the Air & Space Museum. The fast-food items sold there are leftovers from past Space Shuttle/Apollo missions.

Wish I could attend with you,
WRTolkas

Tom Beebe| 8.26.10 @ 3:43PM

I once heard that postage prepaid mail committed the provider of such to pay postage due on anything received back. Like a brick, taped to the next prepaid card received from AARP?? :-)

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:21PM

Would you believe that recommendation was in Abbie Hoffman's work: Steal This Book? I was disgusted at my classmates for buying it for fun, and doubted Hoffman would take kindly to people actually doing that.

Turnabout is sweet (to mix a metaphor), but I think you can no longer drop something like that in the mailbox.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:22PM

Sorry - to people actually stealing the book

JDBlues| 8.26.10 @ 3:02PM

I hope you people haven't actually joined AARP and sent them any money. It should have been obvious where those clowns stood just by their postition on gun control. They've been hostile to our right to protect ourselves from our government for years.

ExPat| 8.26.10 @ 9:27PM

Back when I lived in the States I used to get AARP membership invitations every couple of weeks even though I wrote to them to say I disagreed with their politics and stop. From then on I just returned their postage paid envelopes stuffed with waste printer card stock. They're nothing more than a front group for the Democrat party.

WillyB| 8.26.10 @ 6:16PM

Way to go WRT, yes those a-holes get my dander up!

JimH| 8.26.10 @ 8:32AM

One can only hope that at the least Mr. Ayers has to nervously pause a bit whenever a package is delivered to his door.

Mike| 8.26.10 @ 9:16AM

Now that's an interesting idea - how about we send "food" parcels to Ayers, containing marzipan? (In the days when his cohorts were making bombs, us civilians were warned to look out for packages with greasy spots, or a smell of marzipan - smells a bit like plastique, you see.)

Joe Oliva| 8.26.10 @ 1:03PM

If anyone can come up with his address, post it. We can flood his home with all sorts of good smelly stuff.

Anthony| 8.26.10 @ 1:36PM

I doubt you'll find the cowards address. I suggest you send them to the White House,Obama will then send a taxpayer paid for plane to Chicago and have the packages hand delivered to his ghost writer pal, Bill.

soljerblue| 8.28.10 @ 11:21PM

why not send him a ticking alarm clock in a carefully wrapped box? Wouldn't that be a hoot?

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:26PM

Bitter almonds? (Cyanide is supposed to smell like that.)

Unfortunately, this is probably all highly illegal, and you might scare some poor postal worker. They suffered enough with the anthrax.

Still, they will get theirs. Before or after death.

Louis Jenkins| 8.26.10 @ 8:45AM

What is amazing is that each of these fools received light sentences in my opinion. They should be in rock pile making little ones out of big ones. But even I have a tripping point.

Alert1201| 8.26.10 @ 9:42AM

Light or no sentences. Didn't Ayres say "guilty as sin, free as a bird"?

Ned the Red| 8.26.10 @ 8:46AM

Ah, you forgot, the most deadly or certainly damaging bomb Bill Ayers ever had a part in constructing is now going off every day as President of the United States.

Mimi| 8.26.10 @ 9:20AM

Ah... But NED...History will not be kind to Ayers creation.....Barack Obama...( The Democratic embarrassment) will go down to infamy as the one President who tried to destroy AMERICA!!!

Chalkdust| 8.26.10 @ 9:25AM

Ned The Red:
Nice connection. Even if it could be augured that Bill Ayers didn't build this intra-culture bomb, at the very least he down-loaded his guidance system.

Ned the Red| 8.26.10 @ 11:14AM

This "smart" bomb (Obomba) seems to have only the ability to fix on one preprogrammed target at a time and head directly for it, despite any mitigating factors.
Perhaps we could mess with the targeting system and set up some friendly fire incidents

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:29PM

Could you please aim him eastwards? I live in Haifa (a.k.a. ground zero), and he's done us enough damage.

Purple Lips| 8.26.10 @ 9:13AM

If one reads history, one will notice that most revolutionaries come out of the comfortable middle class and the the proletariat to whom they pay such homage. Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, as well as Ayers, Hayden, Dorhn all hailed from the bourgeousie. And the more bourgeois thier upbringing the more the hatred festered.

For the 60s radicals (at least the majority who survived), comfortable gemutlichkeit as tenured professors, pundits, community organizers, and politicians of all stripes was much more preferable than the musty safe houses, and urban jungles. Ayers is no different. I'm sure he has a swell brownstone, expensive foreign car, and summer vacation home. And like most retirees he will worry about his health and ruminate about the Good Ol' Days.

Most of the radical Boomers are just bourgeoisie at heart. They love kitsch as much as the people they detest. And I bet when you go past some gated community in Coral Gables or Tampa you will pick up the occaisonal whiff of pot as it floats out of a bong pipe.

Bill| 8.26.10 @ 9:22AM

For verification of the comment that radical Boomers were no different from the mainstream, just holding themselves out as superior, read the book Farm Friends. Very revealing. "I'm a lawyer, but I still believe in the values I said I had before I went to law school."

Purple Lips| 8.26.10 @ 10:09AM

Good point. Many radicals were and are true believers. But those that remained faithful to the Cause now live in rotting double wides, festering crack houses, or decaying inner cities.

Others like the Clintons gravitated towards respectability, politics, and eventually money. The Clintons and Gores now have net worths measured in the hundreds of millions. And that radical poser Michelle Obama, as it turns out, cannot get enough of the trappings of money (at least taxpayers money). Many of thse successful hedge fund managers on Wall St (some are now billionaires) once led riots at Columbia, Cornell, and Yale.

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 12:29PM

So true, PL. So true. Perpetual bourgeois adolescents rebelling against their too permissive parents who listened to Dr. Spock. I hope they all finally grow up and realize what awful human beings they have been, and then drop dead before they can have an 11th hour conversion.

Redstateboy| 8.26.10 @ 2:04PM

that is the perplexing part.. I can see when you're young and filled with an idealism and vitality that you can change the World.. but old Liber-uls???
"When I was a Child, I spoke as a Child, thought as a Child but when I became a Man; I put away childish things."

JF| 8.26.10 @ 10:11PM

The "adult" liberals that I know all have unresolved issues with their parents and show a marked pattern of 1) blaming everyone else for their failures (and not learning from them), 2) never wanting to be held accountable for anything they do. In short, they are 12 years old emotionally regardless of their chronological age.

Anonymous| 8.29.10 @ 6:44PM

It took my father years to get over Bob Dyaln going electric. Finally got a haircut and started wearing a tie about five years back. Turned 65 last month. (Go figure.)

Bill| 8.26.10 @ 9:17AM

Some years ago some musicians, including members of the now-defunct Grateful Dead that made a pithy comment on the rebels of the 60s in the title of an album called Old And In The Way.

Clinton nee Publius| 8.26.10 @ 9:28AM

Thank God. It could take generations to heal the destruction my generation has caused us to suffer in the name of selfishness. Now we see whole new generations of losers who believe they are entitled to the spoils of America simply because they exist.

Interested Conservative| 8.26.10 @ 9:32AM

Alas, Mr. Tyrell, not all of the U W Madison bombers were caught. 40 years on from yesterday, one of them remains at large, as far as the cold case investigators are concerned.

Another one gone| 8.26.10 @ 9:45AM

Another nail was driven in to the Sixties' lid when "gonzo journalist" Hunter Thompson blew his brains out during a phone call.

Petronius| 8.26.10 @ 9:46AM

Ole Scratch always gets nostalgic when one of that lot shows up down here in Hell. And they get their tails twisted when they discover our R & D Dept. managed to clone the late George Wallace and they all get their very own copy as their supervisor for the duration. Sure, life sucks. But there is eternity....

Lawler Nicoteri| 8.26.10 @ 10:16AM

Dirt bags then; dirst bags now. Dying out? Cannot happen fast enough. Rot in Hell.

wodiej| 8.26.10 @ 11:18AM

couldn't have said it better.

Robert Pinkerton| 8.26.10 @ 10:50AM

The only problem is that they won. Their victories in the political and cultural skirmishes of the 1960s have sufficiently foreshortened the life of our Body Politic, the United States, that it will not endure until its 250th birthday 4 July 2026.

I regret that, because I did truly believe in this country. I still do, but this country's political behavior as a result of its morbid senile dementia, tries that belief, as we seem to be circumscribing liberty at every turn. Even so, the final deliquium of this country will be a world-historic tragedy.

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 12:32PM

New smaller versions of the U.S. will emerge from the apocalypse you describe, so all is not lost.

Robert Pinkerton| 8.26.10 @ 1:27PM

Sir, from your typing finger to the Gods' Eyes.

The optimal outcome of the pending dissolution of the United States, is that the several regions become the separate regions, independent polities not only de facto but also de jure.

Unfortunately the more likely outcome will be the handing up of the husk of the United States to some supra-national entity. That would compound the initial tragedy of the death of the U.S. Body Politic, exponentially. (This implies, and I affirm, that I unconditionally distrust any and all supra-national political entities. Or, rather, I trust them unconditionally for indecent designs on individual Americans' liberties.)

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 1:47PM

An interesting take. Please expand on why you believe that a supra-national entity will emerge as opposed to smaller independent states.

Thanks,

JimP

Jay| 8.26.10 @ 4:01PM

I'm going to disagree that the 60s nit-wits are the culprits in the country's current predicament. FDR gave us entitlements.

Margie| 8.26.10 @ 5:17PM

Jay,

They're the 60's nitwits that didn't come to their right minds, and they definitely make up the current admin.

“If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” Winston Churchill.

Howard| 8.26.10 @ 10:54AM

What was the name of the movie from the late 1970's or early 1980's staring Richard Dreyfus? He plays an ex-radical, now a private investigator. It had some hilarious scenes where the ex hippies and radicals were now middle class jerks still thinking fondly of their radical past. It sort of exemplifies the Ayers of the world.

Seek| 8.26.10 @ 11:54AM

It was called "The Big Fix." It came out in 1978 and was based on a novel by Roger Simon, the same guy who started Pajamas Media. Go figure.

Bill| 8.26.10 @ 12:32PM

Just for the record, Richard Dreyfuss was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, along with Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Granny3| 8.27.10 @ 2:10PM

Roger is a recovered liberal.

Pete| 8.26.10 @ 11:00AM

They are/were not radicals, but criminals. Allowing the left to paint them as idealistic heroes who are somehow justified in the pursuit of what they thought was "right" was and is a losing strategy.

Anthony| 8.26.10 @ 11:02AM

You go Bob!! This is a subject near and dear to my heart; the fading Woodstock generation, of which I am one in age, but not in politics.
Howie Carr, the witty and ribald Boston radio conservative, has a segment of his show dedicated to a death watch, in which "bets" are taken by his listeners, which aging celeb(s) will "not be coming down for breakfast this morning".
I have my own version of Howie's macabre but delightfully funny gig; when certain lefty children of Woodstock Nation, such as Marxist professor emeritus Howard Zinn, "fail to come down for breakfast", I join my dog in our evening stroll in the woods to commemorate the happy occasion.
I look forward with anticipation, when Dr. Ayers finally goes green for the last time, and is composting in God's rich earth, to my evening stroll in the woods, with or without my dog, with or without my walker, I'll get there!!!

Anthony| 8.26.10 @ 11:19AM

P.S. Almost forgot to thank you Bob for the updates on Messrs. Armstrong and Teufel.
Guess I better start drinking lots of water.

SF_Exile| 8.26.10 @ 12:21PM

Amen! These blowhards and crybabies can't go soon enough.
As someone on the older end of Generation X I've watched these Woodstock Washouts as they've bred a replacement generation (God help us!) and and passed their self-preening habits on for us all to endure. Watching Nancy Pelosi do her Veruga Salt imitation is just further proof that they will do anything to keep the focus on them.

I know it isn't nice to wish for someone's demise but knowing that more of them will 'not be down for breakfast' as the years go by warms the cockles of my heart. And Howie's Death Pool segment is such gleefully morbid fun. Wonder who'll be next - we're really overdue.

Jay| 8.26.10 @ 4:04PM

A watch list would be nice ...

Wee Willie| 8.26.10 @ 11:06AM

Algor mortis it the medical term for assuming room temperature. I prefer correct medical terms.

Humphrey Dumfries| 8.26.10 @ 3:19PM

Not to be confused with AlGore mortis, eh?

LaMessuesee| 8.26.10 @ 5:19PM

That would be Viagramortis, wouldn't it?

the friendly grizzly| 8.26.10 @ 7:01PM

Only for Barney Frank.

Bubba| 8.26.10 @ 12:50PM

as a 1959 so called baby boomer I have eaten their dust for decades, arrogant, narcissists, ME generation, now old people make me sick.

They mostly aren't bad people or nothing like that, they where just like a pack of locusts and stripped the country clean from coast to coast as they pillaged & plundered it for everything they could get for themselves leaving nothing but their bills for future generations.

I live in the woodstock camp ground called vermont where lots of them settled down to spend their families money. It's hysterical watching them go at it in this state, bunch of old stoners dreaming of some utopia.

I think they are going to be in for a big surprise here in vermont come november because even though Obomba got 70% of the vote in 2008, a republican won the govenors office, the dem finished 3rd and her and the second place progressive didn't have enough votes between the 2 of them to beat the republican and now lots of the old hippies at the state capitol have already jumped ship.

It would by funny to see the republicans make huge gains in this hippie haven.

"gunner"| 8.26.10 @ 5:20PM

@ bubba,
you got that right neighbor, all the granola addicts and birkenstock shufflers infesting burlington, middlebury and montpeculiar. there's a whole state out here full of sane people, and we're sick and tired of living in hippy heaven, and we're going to take our state back. one of these days pat leahy won't make it for breakfast. i plan to pour a quart of cheap whiskey over his grave, after first straining it through my kidneys. hopefully i'll also last to see howlin' howie dean, red bernie sanders and a few more scalawags and carpetbaggers join them in the great dumpster in the sky.

Bubba| 8.26.10 @ 7:00PM

Hopefully Act 250 and Act 60 get dumped for starters and they change the land use rules so the phoney farmers evading real taxes get run off their country estates.

I'm over near Ludlow, vacation home buyers vanished, tons of high end real estate forsale and few rich flatland yuppies looking to buy.

Springfield & Bellows Falls are like ghetto towns.

the friendly grizzly| 8.26.10 @ 7:04PM

"They mostly aren't bad people or nothing like that, they where just like a pack of locusts and stripped the country clean from coast to coast as they pillaged & plundered it for everything they could get for themselves leaving nothing but their bills for future generations."

That sounds more like the gimme generation, that is, about 1910 through about 1925. They gave us Roosevelt, they gave us social programs, affirmative action, government that grew like cancer, and a regulation society that makes virtually everything illegal. They sit, or sat, in their retirement communities, voting ever more programs for themselves, and saddled the boomers and generations thereafter with the bill.

soljerblue| 8.28.10 @ 11:31PM

not all of them did. About 12-million of them helped defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:41PM

Are you sure about those dates? The voting age was 21.

RCV| 8.26.10 @ 12:51PM

You left the self-centered Mark Rudd off the list, with his appalling memoir "Underground" laying bare the narcissism and amorality of the Weather Underground.

Anthony| 8.26.10 @ 1:57PM

Dare I ask, what institution of higher education did Mr. Rudd's butt find a cushy chair, complete with tenure and a 6 figure salary?
Too bad he didn't end up at Uof Ill at Chicago with Ayers, they could have held seminars on bomb making as a 3 credit course.
Reminds me of the internet joke that recently went around about the terrorist giving a lesson on suicide bomb making, "Now I'm only going to demonstrate this ONCE". BOOM!!

RCV| 8.26.10 @ 2:35PM

Alas, Mr. Rudd spent 26 years as a math instructor at a community college in New Mexico, until his reitrment in 2006 to write his nauseating book.

Anthony| 8.26.10 @ 3:36PM

Good God, I'm going to be sick.

The One We've Been Waiting For| 8.26.10 @ 9:20PM

We're buying shrimp, RCV. Stop cutting down my white friends and stop inviting comparisons between his book and my nauseating books. Actually Mark wrote one of my books and it sold better than the one Bill wrote for me.

Bill| 8.26.10 @ 4:02PM

That would be Mark Rudd, the real estate- or stock broker, right?

Even back at the time of the Columbia strike, they thought Mark Rudd was a jerk. When he joined the Weather Underground, lots of us laughed.

wayne| 8.26.10 @ 1:06PM

One of the things that is starting to arrive as an epiphany to me (and I still have a bit of research to about it) is that it is appearing more that most of Alinsky's ideals (and virtually all of the Weather Underground's) were merely modernizations of "community organizer" tactics described in the Qu'ran - which would explain much of the extreme left's empathy to the Islamist ideals that were re-energized when Sayyid Qtub and the other Muslim Brotherhood founders came to America for an education.

I think Qtub must have realized where the left's tactical ideals came from and prepared his followers to works towards maintaining a close alliance with them decades ago.

jake1492| 8.26.10 @ 1:06PM

Some off the content that the author expounds upon obviously has merit. Those "radicals" had no more right to be bombing people than any other ridiculous violation of law and other people's rights (like invading another country for example). But the author seriously marrs whatever valid point he may be making with his typical meanness and ugliness.

Bilwick| 8.26.10 @ 2:18PM

Such as?

Rick| 8.26.10 @ 1:09PM

Ah, boomers. The generation that never grew up is now terrified of growing old.

Ranger| 8.26.10 @ 1:43PM

Et tu, Rick... can Gen X, Gen Y and the Millenials be far behind?

It is hillarious to see old hippies, gray pony tails, wearing 'grannie' glasses because they NEED glasses now, paunchy, reading New York Times and perhaps fixated wistfully on their hell-raising days in the fast lane.

They were young once... telling each other 'Trust no one over 30...'"

And now the flower children and anarchists of the 60s are in their 60s.

Redstateboy| 8.26.10 @ 2:39PM

and........... they're in between their 3rd Marriage, in need of Viagra, have kids with noses permanently glued to their I-phones, have 4 Cats and live with their Mom.

Petronius| 8.26.10 @ 2:51PM

The few remaining tie-dyed relics still on campi here finally quit complaining about the unavailability of good weed since they can no longer tell the difference.

the friendly grizzly| 8.26.10 @ 7:10PM

I'm a boomer. I grew up, and did fine. I am growing old, and yes, I fear it because I will be denied medical care when no longer an asset to the state.

For the record, what generation are you, Rick? My generation's children, with their self-centered, snotty, f*ckyou attitudes and lack of manners? Or are you my generation's grandchildren, ever glued to the DVD player in the back seat of the family's no-doubt-imported car or SUV, or working their thumbs down to nubs typing in text-speak because they can't compose declarative sentences? Who scream and cry for everything and don't even know what it is to help with the family laundry or house cleaning?

See? Stereotypes of the generations are easy.

Tim| 8.26.10 @ 1:09PM

Sure many among the hippie generation became violent nihilists and narcisists but given the dishonesty and corruption of our federal government, their anti-authority attitudes were generally healthy. The national security state that emerged from the Second World War supplanted the what remained of the Old Republic and leak of the Pentagon Papers exposed the lies told to the American people by four presidential administrations regarding the Vietnam War.

Blackwatch| 8.26.10 @ 4:33PM

TIM,

So if I don't care for Obama/Pelosi/Read's corrupt and dishonorable government authority its understandable if I blow up a bus of school kids or libtard SEIU members AND that's a "generally healthy" attitude.

It's evil to hurt innocents. Is Al-quieda justified for their crimes too because they clearly don't like our past/current governments?

your thinking sir is "generally NOT healthy."

William W. Wexler| 8.26.10 @ 1:17PM

Must be a slow news day, huh?

This Saturday is the 47th anniversary of MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech and the memory is being sullied by Glenn Beck and his parade of fools.

MLK was a radical. This would be a good opportunity for you to write an "article" gloating about he was shot to death with a legal weapon.

-Wexler

PS I only post once in each thread here due to the fucktard posers who are suffered by the board instead of being banned like they are everywhere else. Oh, and Ted Nugent fans... he'll be in Boise on Saturday, not in Washington DC as announced earlier. (LOL suck on THAT, Ted!)

Rick| 8.26.10 @ 1:29PM

WWW, what a nightmare it must be to live in your shoes.

Nancy in NC| 8.26.10 @ 1:35PM

I will be there with Glenn and the other fools.

Did it ever occur to you that Glenn maybe celebrating MLK's speech? His niece (MLK"S that is) will be there with Glenn.

I will be there because content of character does matter...not skin color. Sincewhen does one need to be black to appreciate character? It would be apparent to some that character was not all that important when Obam was elected.

Petronius| 8.26.10 @ 3:09PM

Bravo Sierra. Dr. King's goal was to gain acceptance and access to mainstream America through and by accomplishment and natural acculturation to society at large. The implication that Glenn Beck or any in his audience sought or revel in the assassination of Dr. King is well beyond the pale. Our brief is specifically with those who usurped his leadership and are an affront to the memory of his true vision by turning the civil rights movement into a vehicle of vengeance and political reprisal. And complexion has no bearing on personal desire to be a heel grinding S.O.B.

Anthony| 8.26.10 @ 3:50PM

Yes, Wexler, but as you are apparently too stupid to comprehend, we conservatives stood and still stand shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King.
Perhaps you might recall it was Dr. King who famously intoned that "One day I hope my little children will be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character".
Hmmm...care to take a guess Wexler, what political party and philosophy stood Dr King's words on their head??
Care to also guess what political party is and has been engaged in American racial apartheid?
I suggest fool, you re-read Dr. King's speech, you and every other Leftist that has sullied Dr. King's great words and vision for America.

Charie| 8.27.10 @ 12:02AM

WWW, I suggest your take that up with MLK's niece who was on Glenn Beck's show today. She's going to be right there beside him at the Lincoln Memorial.

The 47th one is the big one, huh? Who knew?

I never saw any bad language or attacks on this thread until you decided to enliven our dull lives.

You call MLK a radical? Are you nuts? He only wanted people to be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skins.

Democrats may call that radical, we Republicans call it equality.

Dave Williams| 8.26.10 @ 1:18PM

My personal hope to croak soon is Noam Chomsky...what a loathsome bag of anti-American pus HE is!

dawsonkid| 8.26.10 @ 1:26PM

I is a real treat to read posts to an article without a single deviant logging in to insult the group intelligence.

dawsonkid| 8.26.10 @ 1:28PM

I should proof read better. "It", not "I."

Dave| 8.26.10 @ 1:31PM

The mention of Bill Ayers role in the ascendency of Obama reminds me of Dietrich Eckart's role in another disaster in Europe in the 1930's. I hope this one turns out better.

Oldefarte| 8.26.10 @ 1:31PM

Bob, I truely enjoy your writings, but I must disagree with your conclusion in this piece. Radical extremists liberals are not dying out and disappearing, but, if anything, are amazingly increasing in numbers. They are doing so because of our liberal university professors/teachers brainwashing/indoctronating our young people and thereafter sending them out into the world to apply their taught destruction. As teachers, lawyers, government administrators,etc they are akin to sleeper-celled domestic terrorists. They simply wait for their opportunity to strike and/or perform their acts of domestic terrorism. They may not throw bombs [as did their predecessors] or commit acts of physical violence; but they effectively promoted, campaigned for, and voted into office the likes of Nancy Pilosi, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, Charlie Rangel, John Conyers, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Barack Obama, Cynthia McKinney,etc again and again and again. If/until we conservative taxpayer-voters begin to use any/all legal means available to surpress these liberal domestic terrorists through financial, economic means from becoming effective; we will be subjected to their subversive existence and potential political power!!!!

Mr. Elite| 8.26.10 @ 1:44PM

Oldfarter is right.
Anywhere people are exposed to a lot of education-BOOM-A liberal is born.
We've got to stop smart people from teaching our children & get back to pre-Renaissance thinking.
No more scientific methods-proving evolution, global warming & the like.
If this country is to get a Republican majority,
it will start w/ less logic & reason in our schools!

Redstateboy| 8.26.10 @ 2:47PM

ah............ but there is Hope.. I, who is every bit as Conservative as the most Conservative here, was at one time a Flaming Liber-ul. I was a product of the SUNY (State Univ. of New York) system... but look at me now. I've grown, I've matured and believe Hussein should be one Impeached Mo-Fo!

Oldefarte| 8.26.10 @ 3:28PM

Your sarcasm is an example of 'ACTING STUPIDLY'; and proclaims the typical liberal lunacy of equating EDUCATION with LIBERALISM, to the exclusion of CONSERVATISM. That is the reason why education is becoming more and more worthless and useless. Disregarding the piss poor economy effected by EL CHOSEN ONE, corporations hiring college graduates usually exclude liberal arts graduates from their selection process, since these companies do no have the need/desire to have to educate the ABC's of business that would be necessary upon hiring them!!!!!

Petronius| 8.26.10 @ 3:45PM

Almost nothing one learns in any classroom has any value in real life. During K-12 students are force fed excrement. Back in my days with the nuns it was horse. Now it's chicken. Academic progress is measured by how many inches are consumed and social advancement now as then is conferred upon those who acquire the taste.
I'm much happier having dropped out of college, pitched the screeds of libtard hacks from my library, traded off the 60's folk LP's, and lived a little.
So get this Mr. Elite and co. The middle class bears the total cost thrust upon us by all of the predators, perverts, and parasites in our midst. And if imposing traditional morality and societal norms upon them to change their behavior results in prosperity for honest productive people, so be IT!!

Jay| 8.26.10 @ 4:16PM

Mr. E, here's hoping you miss breakfast soon ...

the friendly grizzly| 8.26.10 @ 7:18PM

Not everyone is going to keep drinking that professorial koolaid. I had one or two really radical instructors at San Diego State. Jerry Farber for English, and Roy Madsen in one of my cinema courses. It took me about 15 minutes after the close of the semester to shrug off Farber's propaganda, and never really bought into Madsen's. Madsen was not as forceful about his socialist message, but it was there.

Trust me: most of the kids will outgrow this stuff. Especially if YOU PARENTS provide your children with the proper foundations of how to think. My folks did. I grew up in a home where Franklin Roosevelt was a god, and Adlai Stevenson was looked upon as a possible savior. I outgrew that crap by age 25, and am 61 now.

the friendly grizzly| 8.26.10 @ 7:20PM

I left this out: as much as my folks embraced FDR and AJS, they still taught me to think things through. My late and beloved stepfather later gave me a good grounding in logic.

John II| 8.26.10 @ 7:56PM

ONE of your cinema classes? Wasn't one enough? What's to learn after a decent introduction to filmmaking and the basic techniques of film criticism? The rest of it you learn in a lifetime of viewing.

And now back to "Foyle's War" reruns.

mzk1| 8.31.10 @ 1:34PM

You've already stopped smart people from educating our children. The only way you can prove evolution with the scientific method is to redefine the scientific method.

Goldwater Guy| 8.26.10 @ 1:44PM

It is instructive to examine whatever hard-core Left documentation remains from the 1960s that reveals their ultimate plans for American society. Many dreamed of being commissars in a soviet-style society (Inner Party members in the “workers’ paradise”). Bill Ayers & cohorts speculated about the need for massive “re-education camps“, gulags where many opponents would be educated about the undesirability of continuing their lives. Now a radical residue of the 60s survive as ageing parasites on a quasi-capitalist economy.
One can only hope that the more subtle Alinskyite wing of The Movement is currently experiencing a last gasp of nostalgia with their Man in the White House.

Chicagoray| 8.26.10 @ 1:56PM

"They are beginning to die out, or at least to retire."

God help us the sooner the better. You'd think all those decades of heavy drug use would shave some years and save America some years of destruction.

Jordan| 8.26.10 @ 2:04PM

The charges against Assange have already been found to be fabrications and dropped and yet you repeat the smear.

Are you misinformed? Or do you enjoy actively lyimg to your readers?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/.....y_id=70624

mzk1| 8.31.10 @ 1:36PM

The charges that he endangered the lives of our soldiers?

Dernon Ruton| 8.26.10 @ 2:04PM

Good riddance to the crooked miscreants mentioned in the article. Assange ain't going nowhere. But the odious Bill Ayers is already in politics, high-level if not "legitimate". That is as Chief Puppeteer to President Hussein, the latter every bit as empty a suit as ever clothed airhead, and as very much the dedicated charlatan communist knave.

ONTIME| 8.26.10 @ 2:09PM

"Hippies still suck, communist always lie and a terrorist will kill anyone, anywhere, anytime just because."....Axiom

We in this era are paying for not enforcing the law and bringing terrorist, hard core communist and those who committed treason to the courts to be prosecuted as they should have been. We now allow them in our midst as socially acceptable and they in return have used their abilities to infiltrate, sabotage and corrupt our infrastructure and institutions, they have spent untold hours planning to poison the next generations. We can see what they have done, are doing and watch them working towards a end and still we fail to put them in prisons, stop their treason and dennounce their corruption of the country. Time is growing short and your freedoms is what they want most.

RE-PARE AMERICA'S GOVERNMENTS....Enforce the Constitutional law and bring back civility.

Skep41| 8.26.10 @ 2:11PM

Assange for Senate 2012! All we need is for Bernie Sanders or Carl Levin to think about retirement and this dream could be a reality. I think these charges of molesting females is due to Islamophobia. If these strumpets didnt want to be molested then they would have covered their heads and been accompanied by a male relative. The dying out of the hard-core sixties types is very interesting. Is it possible that drug use is bad for your health, just like the lame teachers and counselors in high school told us? Nah! Thats just narcophobia. You right wingers are riddled with phobias.

reasonable doubt | 8.26.10 @ 2:38PM

They've never built anything or made anything more durable than a tie dye shirt. They are the perpetually complaining class ...complaining about the capitalist endeavors that give them the middle class lifestyle they enjoy. They are social theroreticians who cannot acknowledge history's lesson : that their theories are what you sometimes have to scrap off the sole of your shoe.

Downie| 8.26.10 @ 2:58PM

Lest anyone wax romantic about the privileged dope smoking punks who were one shade away in rhetoric and tactics from the Mansonz, consider this.... the military definition of a bomb is,
A NON DISCRIMINATORY
anti personal device
that is what they employed
I find it difficult to believe anyone over say...15
could not understand the consequences of Bombs to make political statements
General question
What don't we think of Bill and Bernardine as psychopaths?

cuban pete| 8.26.10 @ 3:23PM

I'm not a medical professional so I can only speculate but a psychopath would be a person with a medical condition over which he had no control.
These two examples of human offal knew exactly what they were doing and what they continue to advocate and yet they have not only been excused but are celebrated in the academy and Chicago politics.
One of the sad aspects of my generation- No consequences for reprehensible let alone illegal behavior.
Thanks for your thoughts, Downie.

Occam's Tool| 8.26.10 @ 5:30PM

On the other hand, I AM a medical professional with great expertise in dealing with psychopaths. While there are medical aspects to the situation (lowered fear response, need for stimulation), the control issue is quite non-problematic. There are not driven forward by urges, but rather are not restrained by the absence of inhibitions. I haven't examined Bill or his execrable wife. But neither of them can be eliminated from the consideration of the psychopath label simply because they understand why they are swine.

gene hauber| 8.26.10 @ 3:01PM

There's no retirement for these enemies of the state; there is only being kicked upstairs to one level , then another where their loudspeaker gets larger commensurate with their failing mental and physical health.

LET US ALL, WHO LOVE THIS COUNTRY, HOPE THAT DEATH OVERCOMES THEM SOONER THAN LATER, BUT ALAS, THAT SEEMS NEVER TO BE THE CASE..........................then it's the never ending funeral.

Jeffrey| 8.26.10 @ 3:13PM

All of these terrorist b@stards will pay for their deeds one way or the other. For now their open shame before the whole world is their nakedness as we reveal by the grace of God their true nature. Disgusting I know but it has to be done.

davod| 8.26.10 @ 3:38PM

The retirement of Ayers is nothing to write home about. This will give him and Dorne more time to pursue their radical activities, the latest of which was being overseas supporting those trying to break the maritime blockade of Gaza.

Occam's Tool| 8.26.10 @ 5:31PM

When are the Israelis going to use depleted uranium shell gatling guns to deal with the blockade runners? Turn them to pulp, I say.

mzk1| 8.31.10 @ 1:42PM

I'm afraid we are even more liberal (= suicidal) than the U.S. Plus the U.S. wouldn't let us.

I want to make this clear. WE EVEN RELEASED THE SCUM WHO ALMOST KILLED OUR BOYS! Boy, it must be fun to live in an independant coutry.

MX1336| 8.26.10 @ 3:48PM

I suspect Mr. Obama will pardon Assange on his way out the door JAN. 19, 2013.
The stage will then be set for Mr. Assange to begin his stint at The University of Chicago.

Blackwatch| 8.26.10 @ 4:44PM

Mr. Assange is going to have blood on his hands.

A death for death as they say in Arabia.

Laine| 8.26.10 @ 3:58PM

The author has mixed up Old Reds like Ayers who never say die, whatever their change in careers and useful idiots (mostly young at the time of their idiocy) who get blown up or caught and punished for doing the dirty work of the Old Reds. Ayers can only be retiring in order to devote himself full time to mischief making through his surrogate Obama while raking in an over-generous pension from taxpayers that the silver spoon socialist doesn't need and will use to further the ruinous policies that put more taxpayers out of work.

Petronius| 8.26.10 @ 3:59PM

And Bill Moyers will fete him as 1st guest come the new season. Then there's Charlie Rose, NPR, The View, CNN, the red diaper lecture circuit, Washington Press Club, Vanity Fair and award dinners with the Hollywood crowd. I'm waiting for him to turn down interviews with Rolling Stone and Village Voice: too de classe'.

Marc Jeric| 8.26.10 @ 4:01PM

I escaped from a communist hell in 1957; after 5 years of waiting and working in France I finally got a conditional immigrant visa for political refugees and arrived here in 1962. Tired of explaining my engineering degree from Europe I spent 6 years studying at UCLA to get my MS and PhD degrees - while working, of course. Imagine my feelings looking and listening to criminal idiots shouting "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Min", burning universities and libraries, and reading complete works by Lenin for $1/tome.
And now they have absolute power under Abu Hussein al-Nairobi (or Mombassa? - who knows?), our Community Organizer-in-Chief. Observe that in Russian "community organization" spells "soviet".

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 4:32PM

Yes, Marc, but you must remember all those protestors were for the troops, while being against the war. They never favored communism, and the South Vietnamese government was morally equivalent with the communist North Vietnamese. It was a civil war in which we should not be meddling and the unification of Vietnam was inevitable like Korea..... um nevermind Korea, back to American imperialism and no one approved of Jane Fonda posing in her infamous NVA triple A battery pic. Your experience with communism/socialism was an anomaly. The American socialists/communists- aka: Democrat Party- will do it right. /sarc!

"gunner"| 8.26.10 @ 6:00PM

i read obumble's "czars" as the equivalent of the soviet "commissars" whom you're likely more familiar than you wish to remember. its sad to see them becoming part of american speech, and government, usurping authority that does not exist in law. can we hope that when the empty suit leaves office each and every on of the "commissars" he appointed will be brought up on charges for any misfeasances and malfeasances he or she committed while in office, and be summarily fired with no severance pay or pension.

Bill| 8.26.10 @ 4:08PM

Whatever happened to Sarah Jane Olsen, the gal who helped murder the Nyack cops in some sort of stick-up, and then got caught sometime in the 90s, made a plea bargain and then bragged about what a dupe the judge was, then got called back by the judge and had her plea bargain revoked?

Is she still in the slammer?

Bydand76| 8.26.10 @ 4:31PM

Bill,
That scum bag Sarah Jane Olsen still lives up here in MN as far as I know. If I remember right, she changed her name and fled to the relative safety of her rich husbands house in suburbia!

If I remember right.

Pro Libertate!

Bill| 8.26.10 @ 4:11PM

Wait, she was a complicitor in the killing of Myrna Opsahl during the robbing of the Crocker National Bank, and I seem to remember something about her kicking a pregnant women in the stomach at some point, inducing a miscarriage.

Ah, the revolution will bring love, love, love...

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 5:09PM

We are in the middle of an economic distaster, a climate disaster, the relics of two failed wars, and a whole host of other existential threats, and you guys are railing about hippies???

I can only say, WTF.

mzk1| 8.31.10 @ 1:45PM

Thank you for the humor.

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 5:24PM

Now let's try a gedanken experiment. Suppose some real left-winger managed to get elected as President (no, I don't mean Obama. I mean someone as far to the left as Reagan was to the right).

And let's suppose he (or she) were a true believer in, oh, let us say, (a) global warming and (b) the threat that wealth inequality poses to the stability of our beloved nation.

And let us further suppose, that, acting on these beliefs, he (or she) was able to get through Congress laws which (a) allowed the feds to seize any private cars getting less than 35 mpg and (b) allowed the feds to seize 90% of the assets of anyone whose wealth was in the 90th percentile.

Now ask yourself, would some people resort to violence (or, as Emmett puts it, "terrorism")?

And what would you do? What would you do?

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 6:02PM

"Right Thinker": if you don't think Obama is a "real left-winger" and you do think Reagan was way far to the right, you are either a communist or crazy. Reagan was only way over to the right in the eyes of communists/socialists. In the span of American history, Reagan was in the middle basically and essentially in line politically with the Founders.

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 6:08PM

Jim - No, you are quite wrong. In the context of 1980, Reagan was way to the right. The era was defined by Johnson, Nixon and Carter.

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 6:42PM

No TR, you are quite wrong and not reading what I wrote correctly. You missed the words "in the span of American history". I guess your tinfoil hat interfered with proper reception.

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 6:53PM

Yup, you got me there. Now are you able to justify this rather extravagant claim that "Reagan was in the middle ..."?

By the way, nice tactic of changing the subject. You have avoided my question altogether. What would you do?

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 7:15PM

Nope. Wrong again. Nice bait and switch tactic attempt. I didn't take your 'bait' of "what would you do" because it is a gotcha hypothetical question based on a bogus hypothetical scenario. Bougus how? The premise that Obama isn't a "real leftist" and Reagan is waaaay over to the right. It seems that your leftwing intellect isn't up to factual real world standards.

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 8:35PM

JP - Do us all a favor, child, and go back to playing your video games. Your ignorance is apalling.

emo| 8.27.10 @ 7:57AM

you lose

RCV| 8.26.10 @ 7:49PM

"The Founders" - however one defines that term - were themselves a broad array on the political spectrum. They ranged from committed Federalists who favored a strong central government and who distrusted power in the hands of the people (Hamilton went even further, and favored at one point a Monarch), to agrarian democrats who wanted no central government or standing army whatsoever, to radical revolutionaries like Tom Paine, who favored redistribution of property to compensate the poor for the born advantages of the wealthy. Reagan had not much in common with any of them, like virtually all 20th century political leaders. He was certainly on the right in the 20th century American spectrum.

The One We've Been Waiting For| 8.26.10 @ 9:24PM

We're buying shrimp, RCV. Stop talking about this stuff. They know more than you which isn't saying much. Stick to the script we gave you.

JimP| 8.27.10 @ 1:57PM

You are quibbling and being disingenuous ... again, RCV. Yes, we all know Hamilton favored a King and most of us have heard of Paine’s desire for an estate tax to fund old age pensions, as well as the fact that the Founders were a “broad array of the political spectrum”, etc. Yet the Constitution didn’t provide for a Monarch and Hamilton signed on to it, and there was no Agrarian Justice article included in the Constitution and presumably Paine favored its adoption. The 13 States adopted it without these things. It wasn’t until the 1930's that redistribution of wealth for old age pensions became a law along with the ever growing list of Federal agencies, and well over 100 years before federal income tax law was passed. So basically, for half the country’s life span we had none of the nanny state taxes/programs that exist today

Even a cursory reading of Reagan’s beliefs shows that he was very much in line with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin and the Constitution the other 35 signing Founders gave us. Reagan said many times that government is not the solution, it is the problem, as just one example. This sounds to me quite like Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin et al and the Constitution as followed for half our countries history. So the Founders adopted a Constitution that didn’t include the fringe elements you mentioned. That puts Ronnie pretty much in the middle. Yes Reagan was on the right of 20th century politics, but I said in the “span of American history”.

RCV| 8.27.10 @ 3:01PM

I genuinely don't mean to quibble with you, only to make the point that we have always had -- from before the founding of the Republic up until today -- a broad array of views on the proper role of government. Jefferson and Hamilton were not of one mind; Reagan's views were certainly more Jeffersonian on many issues than they were consonant with the strong central government views of Hamilton, Washington and Adams. On the other hand, on the culture wars (French revolution vs. British stability), I'd wager a guess that Reagan would have sided with the Federalists.
The Constitution was a compromise -- a great and enduring one, and a brilliant structure that has served us well, as did President Reagan.

JimP| 8.27.10 @ 6:15PM

OK, I accept you at your word that you aren't trying to quibble. Nevertheless, you keep posting replies to my comments that do not address what I have actually said or the points that I have made by using inaccurate/incomplete history or superfluous information. Therefore, it sounds like you are quibbling.

Re: Reagan for example. Think Right said he was waaay over to the right. I was addressing his comment, and as you have pointed out, but not directly, way over the right would be having a King as Hamilton initially wanted. Further as you have pointed out, Reagan may have felt differently re some aspects of the culture wars and the French revolution and British stability. All of which supports my comment to Think Right that Reagan was pretty much in the middle. Refering to all the info regarding the broad array of political beliefs etc and saying Reagan was not like the Founders is argumentative, and raises trivial distinctions and objections to the point(s) I was making in a brief comment. Reagan was a 20th c. conservative, as you pointed, but a in the span of our history, he was a classical liberal who maintained fundamental libertarian beliefs and instincts. For someone to describe him as waaay over to the right, even in the 20th c, is ludicrous. He was only waaaay over to the right to people who are waaaaay over on the left. Which obviously TR is.

mzk1| 8.31.10 @ 1:50PM

OK, what did Reagan do that was equivalent (at the other end) to what you described? Execute all of the adulterers and practicing homosexuals? Blow up all of the abortion clinics? Ban all of the unions? Let's look at the actions rather than the politics. (And if Reagan was so far to the right, how did he carry so many states?)

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 5:25PM

It was the hippies that gave us the financial disaster we're in, and who give aid and comfort to the existential threat of Islamofascism. As for the 'failed wars', that remains to be seen. However the current resident of the WH is the spawn of communists and perfectly in sync with Bill Ayers, who is a personal friend of the POTUS, btw. Also, the hippies control Congress. Therefore, railing about hippies is relavent.

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 6:20PM

Jim, if you give me your address I can send you a tinfoil hat.

JimP| 8.26.10 @ 6:40PM

Send me YOUR address and I'll swing by and pick it up.

Granny3| 8.27.10 @ 2:36PM

I think it's only leftists who wear tinfoil. So TR should put it on instead.

Seek| 8.26.10 @ 8:07PM

Hippies control Congress and caused the Wall Street meltdown in 2008? Huh? If only. Whatchu you been smokin' mon?

JimP| 8.27.10 @ 2:00PM

A valid point. I used the term 'hippies' much to broadly in this comment. The Democrats et al who gave us the bad policies that led to our current economic problems are people who come from the the political left and share the same general philosophy as the 'hippies'. In my mind they are all hippies, but I should not have used the term in this case.

Thanks for the correction, Seek.

Michele San Pietro| 8.26.10 @ 5:30PM

It's certainly better for America and the whole word if such suckers disappear.

TomB| 8.26.10 @ 6:11PM

Years ago, as a counselor at a drug treatment facility, I was exposed to lots of old hippies. I noted that they tend to create a rule ("Always wear green on Friday - for the cause, man!" for example) and then build on that rule ("but never wear a hat with green, no matter the day - because that just isn't right") until eventually no one really knows what rules apply anymore.

I suspect it's the same progression from organize to protest to aggressively protest to bomb something is part of the same behavioral pattern. That is, at some point a line is crossed but everyone was too focused on the cause to notice.

BTW: Some of the patients may have engaged in this behavior as well.

Dr J| 8.26.10 @ 6:34PM

The problem is not the old hippies. The problem is that the university system is now taken over completely by these radicals. No one is allowed on the faculty who is not ideologically correct. Our school system is all about indoctrination into leftist thought. Any idea how we are going to fix this?

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 6:38PM

Yes, Dr J, I'll tell you how to fix it. Let the right wing produce intellectuals who are up to academic standards, and the problem will solve itself.

TR| 8.26.10 @ 7:08PM

There are plenty of right wing intellectuals. You fail to read what Dr J said...the power structure in the univ. system is controlled by marxist and NO conservative thought is allowed. They hold the keys to the door, and only open it for like-thinking radical liberal mindshapers.
How are we going to fix it? The coming second American revolution will eliminate these elitist marxists real quick. They are chickencrap and will either run away while pissing themselves or assume room temperature.

Fairbanks99| 8.26.10 @ 7:31PM

"Academic standards" like the kind Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann and Phil "Hide the Decline" Jones adhere to? "Intellectual" is a misnomer when applied to the Left. How "intellectual" is it to believe in an idea (collectivism) that has proven to be a failure every time it has been tried?

Granny3| 8.27.10 @ 2:40PM

"Right wingers" are too busy building things including families! They are doers - and they've done an amazing job for this country and themselves. Intellectuals are funny - and some of them are afraid to talk to their plumbers (as if they're some kind of scary human). When I was young, I thought intellectulas were exciting; now I just thing they're mostly narcissists who like to listen to themselves pontificate.

Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 8.26.10 @ 6:50PM

Seventy two cents.

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 7:13PM

Sure there are "plenty of right wing intellectuals". The only problem is, they are not up to academic standards. Perhaps you don't realize it, but most academics deal with nonpolitical subjects. For instance, there's nothing political about the sciences. It's the right wing ideologues who are inserting politics where it doesn't belong.

If someone is sufficiently competent in their field, their private political views won't keep them out of academia.

John II| 8.26.10 @ 8:01PM

"If someone is sufficiently competent in their field, their private political views won't keep them out of academia."

Been in academia myself nigh on to 40 years, and I don't know which is worse: your naivete or your grammar. Maybe they're related, I dunno.

Thinker Right| 8.26.10 @ 8:32PM

John II. Stop pretending. You have never seen the inside of a university.

John II| 8.27.10 @ 2:00AM

"You have never seen the inside of a university."

That's true, come to think of it--probably because there's nothing inside to see.

When you get right down to it, there's no there there. The students can be okay, even great individually, and the "administrative assistants" (i.e., secretaries who laugh at such bloated titles) are generally wise and good-hearted--and the first source to turn to if you really want to know what's going on. And they're the ones who, with a wink, give you the straight low-down, which is to say: nothing at all is going on--because, as I said, there's apparently no there there, in the inside.

I worked eight other jobs before I settled in academe at the age of 29, almost 40 years ago, and I can attest with great probability that academia is the only place on earth in which people who don't know what the hell they're talking about are lauded and advanced for talking.

Present company excluded, of course. I think. I'm alleged in the idiot student evaluations to be a good teacher, and I get charming emails now and then from grateful former students whose names I had nearly forgotten, but as I approach retirement and a dreamily garrulous old age, I can no longer think of any other excuse for staying there year after year after year. It's not a particularly dignified way to make a living.

Yes, I have never really, really seen the inside of a university. Remarkable insight on your part.

mzk1| 8.31.10 @ 1:28PM

Although I went to a University which was small enough and sectarian enough not to have those issues, you are correct about the secretaries. The Dean's secretary was certainly where the buck stopped. I recall once when no one could figure out who should administer a special exam to me, so she administered it.

John Bailo| 8.26.10 @ 8:23PM

Here's what I don't understand about these dimwits. Many of them come from the elite families who are supposedly the "evil doers". So, all this time, they're sitting at the dining table with their biggest foes. Yet, when they "take action", they usually end up killing some poor middle class guy, or a cop, or someone who really has almost nothing. It seems like we regular folk are more like the "oafs" who get the paddle because some Lord's son was miffed by Duddy.

Mark Anderson| 8.26.10 @ 8:57PM

R. Emmett, I would like to buy your book Social Democracy's failure in Germany. How many years before it comes out?

L7squared| 8.26.10 @ 11:01PM

I really hope ayers and his type intend on cremation.

I'd hate to think what I might do if I stumbled across one of their graves.

Tim| 8.27.10 @ 1:30AM

The violence practiced by Sixties radicals was blowback for the violence committed by the US government. Americans have many virtues, but introspection is not one of them. The nation supposedly mourns the loss of 59,000 men in the Vietnam War but those are only American lives. What about the 2 million Vietnamese who lost their lives during America's war? The secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia contributed the rise of Khmer Rouge who would go on and kill a quarter of that country's population. And even after their atrocities were known the CIA supported Pol Pot's regime because it opposed the Vietnamese communists. The Weather Underground deserved to be ridiculed and punished. What they did was criminal. But what punishment should there be for the men in the White House, Pentagon, and CIA who committed far greater crimes in the name of "national security?" You say they were only doing their duty and protecting their country. Was North Vietnam planning to invade California?

TKP| 8.27.10 @ 6:32AM

Wow, even if one accepts your incredibly oversimplified, totally without context version of Vietnam your logic is non-existent:
1. What possible good did all that self righteous campus "unrest" ever do for some poor rice farmer near the ho chi mihn trail
2. Those that didn't simply use the "unrest" as an excuse to cut class, spend Mommy & Daddy's money, and engage in "free love" (that turned out well) - were radical leftists who supported the very cult of collectiveism that resulted in the killing fields.
You can't have it both ways, no the US is not always the white hat good guy, but you have to accept that the other guys might just be worse, but I'm sure that is because we made them that way.

Fact is the domino theory was true. The greatest crime the White House and Pentagon commited was engaging in a war with no strategy to win and waste the lives of those on the wall. Unfortunately MacNamara and the "best and brightest" will have to get justice from thier creator, not all scores can be settled on earth, but that is what Pol Pot tried, turns out a few innocents (maybe 2 million) got caught up in it. Is that what you would prefer? Tribunals of self righteous know italls with AK47s?

Liberalism - the triumph of emotion over reason. It "feels" good, but never seems to work as planned.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 4:44PM

Oh, please! To the other side, it was ALWAYS the "Indochina war". They are the ones who invaded and destabilized Cambodia. The people who championed the other side cchampioned the Khmer Rouge, until we finally gave in and played along. At which point it became our fault?

The other side is explicitly quoted as saying that if had not been for cynics like yourself, they would not have won. Explicitly.

An interesting thing about the Viet Nam war was that all of the classic anti-war icons (tiger cages, destroying the villiage to save it) were either apocryphal or outright lies.

And, BTW, I grew up expecting to be drafted into Viet Nam, and had no problem with it. The only thing immoral about Viet Nam was our withdrawing our support, a truly shameful act.

sans| 8.27.10 @ 4:46AM

You persons should look at your food intake - I think it is creating abnormal paranoic fantasies. Eat well and you may feel better.

ZZMike| 8.27.10 @ 5:26AM

Trivia Dep't #2: "Teufel" is "Devil" in German. I'll bet that's an assumed name. Chances are pretty good that Fritz got to meet his namesake.

AARP was - and still is - a big supporter of Obamacare. They're just happy as clams that it got passed. There's an alternate organization - I don't know what it is.

Tim| 8.27.10 @ 9:05AM

As the Pentagon Papers made clear, the successive US presidents lied to the American people regarding the Vietnam War. So when the government drops millions of tons bombs on poor rice farmers it's "complicated" but the individual radicals perpetrating violence is simply evil? And given the existence of programs of like COINTELPRO, you should ask yourself how much of the violence supposedly committed by radical leftists was actually perpetrated by the US government.

Purple Lips| 8.27.10 @ 10:17AM

And please quote paragraph and page of the evidence to back up your allegations. Perhaps you should actually read them, read the retort Kissenger provided in his memiors as well as Generals Abrahms and Westmoreland (both decorated WII combat vets with more honor in thier pinky than the entire Sixties Generation combined). Then we will talk.

Tim| 8.27.10 @ 9:11AM

Yes Pol Pot's regime was certainly evil. So what are we to make of our government which gave him support?
The United States should have stayed out of Indochina's civil war. The US had no business reinstalling the French after World War Two and it was that meddling which made Ho Chi Minh an enemy. Tens of thousands of American boys and millions of Asians died so a few American presidents could save face. No one wanted to lose Southeast Asia to the Reds. But it wasn't our's to lose.

John II| 8.27.10 @ 10:02AM

"No one wanted to lose Southeast Asia to the Reds."

On the contrary, Timmy, the creeps who are the topic of this thread very much wanted the Reds to take over Southeast Asia. And they mostly got their way. Didn't they?

Western Europe wasn't ours to lose either. But at colossal expense amid the intermittently flaky governments of many Western European nations and their own creepy-left offspring, we did indeed keep the Reds out. Ditto for South Korea and Japan and the Philippines and Central America and . . . well, you get the drift.

Or perhaps you don't.

Tim| 8.27.10 @ 11:08AM

Many people went crazy during the sixties. This is not an excuse. We are personally responsible for our actions. But our own government was not immune to the Great Derangement. If we are shocked and outraged by the violent nihilism of the Weather Underground or the Bader Meinhoff gang, what should we make of people like Curtis Lemay, LBJ, Herman Kahn, Allen Dulles? Government's often believe they hold a monopoly on violence. Your problem isn't with violence per se, it's that some wackos decide to go freelance.

Tim| 8.27.10 @ 11:34AM

It was the lawlessness of our own government which allowed Ayers to walk free. Hoover's FBI committed more crimes than entire Weather Underground in its pursuit of "justice."

How many innocent civilians did LBJ, Nixon, and Kissinger kill? Too many to count. But we disregard foreigners who are obliterated by our bombs as "collateral damage." The Pentagon has such a way with words.

Nowhere did I suggest the ideologies embraced by radicals like Ayers were coherent nor did I justify their tactics. But if not for the war, the US would have been spared the deaths of tens of thousands of young men, much of the social and political unreset of the era, and the economic turmoil of the following decade. Most of the Vietnam War was financed by inflation and it was a major factor in Nixon's decision to close the gold window in 1971.

JimP| 8.27.10 @ 7:13PM

OK Tim. Back up your claim that the FBI commited more crimes than the Weather Underground. Show us the citations please. The Weather Underground didn't play fair, so the FBI didn't either. Big whoop. It's not like the Weather Underground was a bunch of old ladies who got together to have a garden club and the Bureau railroaded them with false charges.

Yeah LBJ, Nixon and Kissinger "killed" innocent civilians. War is hell, ya know. The communists killed ten times (at least) the number of innocent civilians as your terrible trio. Why aren't you bellyaching about that? We, the West, were content to let the commies have N. Vietnam. But nooooo. They wanted it all and murdered innocent people who wanted to live in a free society. Why must the tyrants always have their way, Timmy? Why is it ok for them to go to war to force people to give them what they want, but it is not ok for us to try and stop them from imposing tyranny. We tried to prevent the tyrants from winning for a number of reasons. So who are the real villains, Tim? As TKP pointed out, America ain't perfect. It never was, never will be. We're still better than the rest. Find a perfect country Tim and move there. As soon as you do, that country will not be prefect anymore.

I'll be looking for those stats on FBI 'crimes'. Please send them ASAP.

TKP| 8.27.10 @ 12:25PM

OK Tim - enough with the obtuse conspiratorial refernces and hand wringing - we have established that the Vietnam era was not this country's finest hour on many levels. I suspect we can agree on that but likely draw very different conclusions. Bottom line - what would you have us do to rectify all the real and imagined transgressions you have deliniated? FDR & Truman "lied" during WW2 all the time, they had to, are they war criminals?
Today's reality is that as a super power we need to deal with assymetrical warfare (terrorism by another name when civilians are diliberately targeted) against us. Vietnam and to an extent Korea before was the beginning of that, and was sponsored by USSR & PRC. It's ugly, it sucks, and it requires that we engage in many of the same activities as our enemies. The difference is not our tactics, but what we do after victory.

This is the funadmental point that you blame America types simply do not acknowledge. We are not perfect, and war sucks. What we leave behind is the real measure of our character as a people. One only has to look at Eastern / Western Europe divide, and compare Japan to the PRC after Mao.
Bottom line - what is your answer?? You seem to be great at pointing out flaws but have provided not one hint of a solution. The world is full of critics, it's easy.

Tim| 8.27.10 @ 1:16PM

Who's being obtuse? You write off the mass slaughter of civilians in Vietnam as "not this country's finest hour." I suppose it's easy being obtuse when one is an Olympian safely ensconced in the White House, Langley, or the Pentagon, or an American whose only exposure war is campy Hollywood movies or Fox News.

Yes, being a superpower requires our leaders to make difficult choices and to go to the "dark side" every now and then. But who ordained that America must be a superpower? It is this presumption of American global hegemony among our governing and media elite which prevents any real debate from occurring.

Ah, what about American exceptionalism and indispensibility?

This country was born in a rebellion against an empire which entertained similar notions of exceptionalism and indispensibility. That empire has since entered the dustbin of history, and our's soon to follow.

Americans have been repeatedly dragged into crusades by mendacious politicians and it is only after the dead are buried and forgotten and monuments are erected that the truth is revealed to the public. Wilson's war to make the world safe for democracy gave birth to National Socialism and Communism. The crusades against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan created resulted in the Cold War and ushered in the era of nuclear terror. Our current crusade against terror is blowback from the Great Game scheming by mandarins who thought it was a nifty idea to stir up Islamic radicalism.

They never learn because they never suffer the consequences of their actions. It's always somebody else's blood and treasure.

TKP| 8.27.10 @ 5:58PM

Once again a diatribe of half truths and no thread of a positive suggestion or solution. I ask for the 3rd time - what is your answer? You live in a truly dark world, I feel sorry for you. Perhaps had you been born a Jewish kid in USSR about 1940 you'd see things a little differently. But you are fortunate enough to benefit from the very country and traditions you clearly dispise. You see all the bad and can't torture yourself to see historical miracle that this albeit imperfect nation is.

Your complete lack of any grasp of history outside the snippets you select is breathtaking - are you aware the US was not the aggressor in WW1, WW2, or the cold war for that matter? Have you heard about Pearl Harbor, or was that a staged conspiracy as well?

Done - this blog is a waste of time. I love a good debate, but your last posting with comments like "...crusade against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan..." is so ridiculous any further attempt to actually deal with facts is fruitless. I suppose the people at Auschwitz "asked for it", should have minded thier own business right?

We are all the same, no nation better than another, the despots and the democats morally equivalent.

With all your comments, I suppose you would be a libertarian ultra small government states rights guy, maybe a right wing survivalist? Something tells me you vote D however. I don't expect you see the irony, but then again someone who thinks we should have stayed out of WW2.... oh thats right, it was the right wing fringe that believed that.

I here the Taliban is recruiting - you may have a place after all

Kenny| 8.27.10 @ 2:11PM

We had Bill Ayers on our Radio show this Wednesday and asked him a couple tough questions regarding his approach to the education system. His involvement with Shore Bank and his opinions on Obama and Glen Beck.

Here is a link to the podcast.
http://thewallstreetshuffle.co.....0-Seg1.mp3

The Radio show is The Wall Street Shuffle featuring Dan Cofall & Dan Stewart. Weekdays from 4-6pm on CNN 1190 AM Dallas Fort Worth.

Tim| 8.27.10 @ 11:14PM

Talk about half truths and ignorance of history.

The United States entered the Great War on behalf of the Allies to satisfy Wilson's megalomania and to bailout the Morgan banks which had underwritten much of the Anglo-French war effort. British and French defeat would have resulted in a default on all their war loans. America's entry was a way of socializing these risks. Yes it pays to have friends in high places.

US entry tipped the scales in favor of the Allies and secured victory by November 1918. But German defeat paved the way for Hitler. Wilson and the Allies also pressured Russia to stay in the war even after the Tsar's abidication in March, 1917. The stress of waging war undermined the Provisional Russian government and enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power in October 1917. Lenin and his gang came to power promising "land, bread, and peace." If not for US involvement in that war, Europe would have likely been spared both Hitler and Stalin.

As for the Japanese, it is now widely accepted that FDR deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor so as to provide a backdoor to the war in Europe. The US government had cracked Japan's diplomatic and naval code and was tracking their every move by 1941. FDR's policy regarding Japan was to doing everything possible to undermine the peace party in Tokyo and guarantee a conflict. Henry Stimson, FDR's War Secretary, confided in his diary after a cabinet meeting on November 25, 1941: “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

I suggest you read Robert Stinnett's Deceit at Dawn and George Victor's The Pearl Harbor Myth. These books will disabuse you of the notion that the United States was a victim of an unprovoked attack on December 7, 1941. But I have to warn you these books have many pages with some big words, and very few pictures.

JimP| 8.28.10 @ 6:35AM

"As for the Japanese, it is now widely accepted that FDR deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor so as to provide a backdoor to the war in Europe. "

Widely accepted by who? 9/11 Truthers?

JimP| 8.28.10 @ 6:56AM

I forgot to add Tim that there is a sucker born every minute. And you obviously got suckered by the two authors you cite. I hate to tell you, but trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt that FDR masterminded manuevering the Japanese to attack PH has been going on since 12/8/41 and there has never been a scintilla of concrete evidence to support the claim. It's all supposition, faulty logic and paranoid conspiracy thinking. The same goes for your theory that 'but for Americas entry into WW I the world would have been spared the Russian revolution and WW II etc'. This kind of thinking also completely ignores the free will of the other bad actors and their actions. In your illogical mind, everything rests on America's actions only and nothing anyone else ever does is their responsiblity. It ALL is America's responsiblity. In your mind, America is the parent and the world is the child and America is responsible for everything the child does and if the world misbehaves America is to blame for bad parenting.

As for your authors, they most likely are just out to make a buck on the credulous folks like you.

Tim| 8.27.10 @ 11:32PM

Why is it incumbent upon me to provide a "solution?" What makes you think there is one? The world is complicated and messy place. Our government's meddling only makes things worse. Which happens to be good for business at Langley and the Pentagon.

John II| 8.28.10 @ 1:45AM

To quote the Kingfish, "Your Honor, I not only deny the allegations; I resent the allegator."

JimP| 8.28.10 @ 6:33AM

Yo, Tim. You didn't provide the data on FBI crimes I asked you to produce. Show me the data. You also did not answer my questions. Let's hear from you on these matters. Since you are the one whining about all this stuff, you should also provide suggested realistic solutions. Otherwise you just sound like an adolescent complaining that Mom and Dad haven't provided a perfect world for you and a brand new shiny Corvette to tool around in. Oh the horror. You poor dear.

Tim| 8.28.10 @ 8:13AM

It is interesting you'd compare the federal government to Mom and Dad.

Denying the crimes of the FBI is like denying the existence of the Grand Canyon. What do you think COINTELPRO was? Do a little research. Google "Hoover, FBI, crime, violation, constitution" see what you get. Heck, you might even learn something.

BTW, there are conspiracies occurring everyday. What do you think politics is? Your not willing to enteratain them because they would upset your view of the world is which pathetically naive and sadly ignorant.

JimP| 8.28.10 @ 10:43AM

Come on Tim, your response is a kopout, man. I didn't compare the Feds to Mom and Dad. I referenced America and your attitude about it. I didn't deny FBI 'crimes', I said "big whoop". Sure there are conspiracies occuring everyday, but I was referencing FDR and the PH attack in a general way. I was not denying that conspiracies do exist sometimes. See how faulty and illogical your reasoning is, Tim? You are the one who should do more research so that you will learn. Start with thorough research on logic. Getting your logic straight is the first step of your recovery.

Now, back to your answering the questions. Please provide specifics other than COINTELPRO. Give me the balance sheet on the Weather Underground and the FBI. How many crimes did each commit? Also answer my questions regarding why it's ok with you that tyrants can make war to force people into unfree societies but no ok for us to resist the tyrants. Let's start with just that one question. After you answer that satisfactorially, we'll move on to the other questions you have avoided answering. Come on, Tim, man up, and answer the direct questions with direct answers.

Tim| 8.28.10 @ 11:35AM

The reason William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were able to walk free despite being "guilty as sin" was in the course of pursuing them, the FBI had committed crimes.

As a part of COINTELRO, the government infiltrated radical groups with agent provocateurs who institigated criminal activity in an effort to disrupt and discredit them. Such domestic "false flag" operations were common and it is a tactic the government still uses today. I'm not gonna do your research for you. You have a computer just do a Google search. The information is at your finger tips.

There is more than enough evidence to indict and convict FDR. I suppose you can dismiss it as "conspiracy theory" but that really doesn't address the issue. How does one explain Henry Stimson's November 1941 diary entry? And there is the Eight Point Action Memo written by Navy intelligence officer Arthur McCollum instructing the FDR how to provoke a Japanese attack. We now know FDR implemented McCollum's recommendations almost to a point. And what about the open sea order to Admiral Kimmel? We now know that Washington was well aware of an impending Japanse raid but no warning was issued to military commanders in Hawaii. Why? Most likely FDR feared any counter measures would disuade the Japanse from carrying out the attack thus foiling his plot to get America into the war. You really should do some more research on this topic.

As for the balance sheet , the federal government has committed far more crimes and killed far more innocent people than the Weather Underground.

Recently, it was revealed the FBI had illegally issued tens of thousands of "national security letters" without following the proper rules. Each of these incidences was a crime. Has any FBI agent been charged? Not yet and they won't be because the Feds pretty much do want they want. What about NSA warrentless wiretapping scandal? This was a direct violation of FISA yet no one was charged. Not only did Congress ignore these violations, they declared them "legal" in subsequent legislation, a new law which happens to violate the Fourth Amendment. But who in Washington actually abides by the Constitution these days?

JimP| 8.28.10 @ 3:04PM

Blah, blah, blah. You aren't answering the questions, Tim. Blathering on in your op-ed isn't answering the 'produce the data question' or any of the other questions you continue to avoid answering. The Weather Underground were/are criminals. They murdered people and destroyed property in an ongoing criminal conspiracy (see I do know conspiracies exist) to overthrow the lawful government of the U.S. during a time of war. Why aren't you groaning on about them too. But for them doing what they did, the FBI would not have been investigating Bill and Bernadine et al. Don't they have any responsibility in your opinion? You never complain about the bad actors in the world. You only want to complain about America and the FBI. Why is that, Tim?

JimP| 8.28.10 @ 3:32PM

Additionally: you keep expanding the scope of your original comment and you continue to argue as if I said the FBI/Congress/et al did not ever commit any crimes or have any ethical lapses. I didn't. Your hysterical Pollyanna reaction to the fact that people in government are crooks at times is further indication of your naivete and that you need to become more widely read regarding history. It has ever been thus. That does NOT make America the most evil nation blah, blah.

Recent release of national security memos by the FBI doesn't belong on the balance sheet between the WU and FBI. So, I conclude you cannot produce the data because it does not exist. Which means you are 'talking through your hat.'

Regarding your PH attack 'proof', I'll pick just one of the flaws in your evidence. "We now know that Washington was well aware of an impending Japanse raid but no warning was issued to military commanders in Hawaii. " This is a false statement, and it's exactly how guys like you get suckered. It has been known since 12/8/41 that Washington knew of an impending attack. Commanders at PH WERE warned along with commanders in the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island and other Pacific outposts. They were told to be on alert. There is NO evidence that Washington knew the raid would be on PH. What specifically be on alert meant was left to the discretion of the commanders in HI. I can pick apart the rest of your 'evidence' just as easily, but I'll save space and time. You've been suckered. Your paranoia and naivete just makes it that much easier for the Flim Flam men to draw you in.

Tim| 8.28.10 @ 11:42AM

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."

~ Gustave LeBon

JimP| 8.28.10 @ 3:09PM

"Paranoid conspiracy theorists and perpetual adolescents never thirst after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions that America is the biggest evil and capable of controlling everything is easily their master: whoever attempts to explain away their paranoid delusions and get them to grow up is always frustrated."

~ J. Edgar Hoover

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 4:03PM

Wow! Thanks for the confession.

Clyde Mitchell| 8.28.10 @ 4:21PM

All those radicals who raged against the injustices of the world were themselves guilty of many injustices against the innocent. Solomon saw such for what it is. (Ecclesiastes 12:8) Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.

Tim| 8.28.10 @ 10:04PM

I provide details and your response is "blah blah blah" Obviously your ossified brain cannot process the information. You're the ideologue.

You asked me to elaborate on the charges that FDR intentionally provoked and knew of the impending Pearl Harbor raid and you simply ignore the evidence I provide. There's a lot more evidence if your care to actually take the time to read about it.

The federal government doesn't destroy property and kill people? I suppose the Plains Indians, several hundred thousands Filipinos, the unfortunate folks at Ruby Ridge, Waco, Diego Garcia, and Baghdad might not share you benign view of the federal government.

My original point was that when it comes to violence and illegality, no entity is more guilty than the federal government.

JimP| 8.29.10 @ 1:18PM

No, Tim. I didn't ignore anything. Your "evidence" is bogus, as I said. And yet again, you continue to argue about the wrong doing of government as if I did not acknowledge the same. At the same time you deliberately ignore my points and questions to you. You have not provided a balance sheet of WU and FBI crimes. You also tacitly approve of the wrongs of WU, Imperial Japan, Hitler, Stalin, N. VN et al by completely ignoring their wrong doing and focusing only on America and holding America to a higher standard of behavior than truly evil people and regimes and stating that America is responsible for the world's bad actors.

Oh, btw, thanks for all your responses. I am sure by now the FBI has YOU under surveillance.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 4:11PM

Actually, I suspect the folks who are actually from Baghdad do in fact share that few. The people coming in from outside are another matter.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 4:23PM

view

Sorry, it's midnight here.

Tim| 8.28.10 @ 10:07PM

Just how do you think J Edgar Hoover compiled his infamous files? By following the letter of the law? Hoover broke more laws than Al Capone. And what about the CIA's cooperation with the Mafia in their scheme to kill Castro? I suppose that's just conspiracy theory too. Or what about the NSA's illegal interception of Western Union telegrams in the 60s and 70s?

JimP| 8.29.10 @ 1:11PM

Again, I am not agruing that the FBI never commited any wrongs. How many times do I have to say it? Can you read, Tim? Duh.

The HappyUndertaker| 8.29.10 @ 4:04PM

It does my creepy heart well -to hear of these dead losers. Many of them FAVES of PREZ IMAN OBEANHEAD. Put that in your Heroine and smoke it . My they burn in Hell.

Tom in Michigan| 8.30.10 @ 8:39AM

Good riddance to each and every one of them.

Bill Ayers and his equally vile wife, Bernadine Dohrn are truly despicable as were their 60s rat tovarishchi. For example, here's a Dohrn quote about the Manson murders, "Dig it... First they killed those pigs then they ate dinner in the same room with them then they even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild!" Now, this sick twist is a professor at Nortwestern.

These two are FRIENDS of Obama.

Tim| 8.30.10 @ 9:51AM

You say you read but you don't respond. You ask a question but dismiss the answer without challenging its assertion. You cowardly retreat from the debate.

Okay, so you admit the Feds have committed "many wrongs" like murder, extortion and kidnapping, But how often have they been made to answer for these wrongs. Never. Did the agents at Ruby Ridge or Waco ever "do time?" How about the agents who forced 125,000 Japanese into concentration camps during World War Two? Have the men who ordered the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos been held to account for their crimes? Sure, blowing up a bank was a crime but what about Operation Rolling Thunder, or Dresden, or Hiroshima? Not only do we not punish these war criminals and government goons, we name buildings after them and erect monuments in their honor.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:49PM

OK, let's take Hiroshima. Have you ever read an account of what was going on then? Teen-age girls were praticing to attack our troops with sharpened sticks. Can you imagine the slaughter if we invaded - and we were sure as hell going to, no question about that. People a mile from the bomb survived. Likely more Japanese would have been killed in Hiroshima alone if the bomb had not been dropped than if it had.

Dropping the bomb was a praiseworthy act. NOT dropping it would have been racist.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 4:22PM

Planting a bomb in the Pentagon is not "a crime". It is treason, under the strict definition in the constitution. And that is the worst of all crimes.

You have a very narrow view of history, from the luxury of living in the country with more liberty than any that ever existed. (And I don't live there, so I do have a small basis for comparision - and history provides a lot more.) The most tyranical government (and the U.S. is far from that) is still better than none at all.

"Pray for the welfare of the government, for if not for its fear, people would swallow each other alive." At least they now bother to kill you and cook you first, which gives you a fighting chance. The man who said that was referring to what we Jews call the Evil Empire of Rome, to which he himself fell victim.

Tim| 8.30.10 @ 12:30PM

FDR was anxious to get US into the war raging in Europe but the American were skeptical. They had been lied into the Great War twenty years earlier.

FDR's domestic problems were piling up. America was still mired in depression so, like so many presidents, he looked overseas for salvation. Dr New Deal became Dr Win-the-War.

FDR violated the Neutrality Acts and got Congress to pass Lend Lease. Although he sold the measure to Congress as way to avoid war, it was actually a prelude to war. During the Battle of Atlantic FDR desperately tried to provoke a fight with the Germans by ordering US ships to pursue and fire upon U-boats. In 1941, he lied to American public regarding the Greer and Reuben James incidences. He also worked closely with British Intelligence to spread propaganda. He evened claimed during a radio address that he had evidence of German invasion plans of the United States by way of South America via Africa. The claim was as mendacious as it was ridiculous. The Germans couldn't even get across the English Channel.

Whatever one believes about the necessity of US intervention to stop Hitler, it was still incumbent upon FDR to make that argument to the American people. After all, as president his primary duty was to faithfully execute the laws.

But war was also raging in Asia and it was there that FDR sought the open the backdoor to war. Japan was on the move in China and Southeast Asia. But it was unclear how Japan's asquitiveness threatened the US. After all, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was nothing more than Japanese analogue to the Monroe Doctrine. The US had accepted and encouraged Japanese power in the region since 1905. Sure, Tokyo had imperial ambitions and it often pursued them ruthlessly but how was that different than what the French, Dutch, British and even the Americans had done in Asia?

Just because the Japanese fired the first shot many Americans have accepted the narrative of the war in the pacific as a defensive crusade against expansionist fascist militarism. This is a crude oversimplication. The Japanese-American war was struggle for imperial dominance. If you look at a map, you will see where the battles were fought. They were all in Japan's neighborhood. Hawaii, Guam, the Phillipines were all possessions seized by the United States under circumstances that where just as objectionable as the one's employed by Japan to acquire her empire. Indeed, Japanese imperialism can be considered blowback from American Imperialism. Prior to appearance of Commodore Perry's gun boats in Tokyo Bay in 1853, Japan had been an insular, benign island nation. But they looked at what the European powers were doing to China and decided they needed to modernize and develop the means for modern warfare lest they too fall under foreign domination.

You see history didn't begin on December 7, 1941. The war was a culmination of events and largely the result of FDR's uncompromising and provocative diplomacy. The bottom line is in 1941 FDR wanted war and he eventually got it.

FDR was one of many US presidents who have lied this nation into war. Despite his manifest crimes against the country and humanity, we honor his memory with a grotesque memorial.

Now you may ask why concentrate on this particular issue. After all, it has very little to do with Billy Ayers and the Weather Underground. But it does speak to my point regarding the mandacity, corruption, criminality of our own government.

mzk1| 8.30.10 @ 3:59PM

You remind me of leftists (I didn't say you were one) decades ago glossing over communist crimes by the use of what Wikipedia calls "weasel words" (no offense intended).

"Ruthless" is a rather interesting way to describe what the Japanese did to the Chinese. Kind of like saying Charles Manson was unrefined. So defeating Hitler was a crime against humanity? And please don't ask me to shed any tears for Dresden (a legitimate military target, BTW).

Tim| 8.30.10 @ 5:10PM

You're just sadly misinformed and this leads you to support actions that were barbaric and in violation of every decent moral standard. Even our own government admitted in its Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 that terror bombing campaign was unnecessary and actually prolonged the war. That same survey also conceded the atomic bombing of Japan was not necessary to win the war. The survery read: "Even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

Admiral William Leahy, Truman Chief of Staff, condemned the atom bomb as a "barbarous weapon" that provided "no material assistance in war against Japan." Leahy continued:
“My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

How did Nazi or Japenase brutality justify Allied brutality? If it was wrong for the Nazis or Japanese to deliberately kill civilians then what should made of the Allies destroying entire cities with incendiary and atomic bombs?

Total war corrupted all sides in that conlfict and just as the Nazis found themselves committing genocide as the war dragged on, the Allies leadership found themselves doing things no one thought acceptable only a generation before.

TKP| 9.1.10 @ 8:27AM

All these days later and I check in and the same Oliver Stone, moral equivalency paranoia from our friend Tim.

Two simple questions, the first of which I know you will not answer as this is the 4th time:

1. We all know what you criticize and your righteous moral outrage at the great Satan - What do YOU Tim actually support? What is your answer as you seem to have all the reasons why the USA is evil.

2. Without debating your "proven facts" for why the US got into WW2, what do you think would have resulted if the US had stayed out of the war completely, never started lend-lease? stayed isolated?

Tim| 9.1.10 @ 11:23AM

Proponents of America's second Great Crusade always engage in lurid speculation on what would have been had FDR not deceived the country into war. Why can't critics of American entry do the same? After all , American involvement in both world wars resulted in a world more menacing and unstable. Moreover, if it can be established that American entry was secured by our leaders engaging in treasonous, illegal, and mendacious activity, shouldn't we at least be skeptical regarding the narrative of the American Century.

You dismiss my factual assertions as paranoia and "conspiracy theory." Well, there was a conspiracy within the Roosevelt administration to drag the country into a war in which the country had no vital interests. The same can be said of the Wilson administration in 1917. And since the Second World War was merely a continuation of First World War, the entire enterprise of the American Empire should be brought into question.

What do I support? I support the idea of a government actually abiding by the Constitution and not lying the country into unnecessary wars and getting millions of people killed. I support the idea of a government not engaging in mass slaughter.

In name of peace the US must be always be at war. US is everywhere manace by "evil doers " Talk about being paranoid. But this combination of fear and vaunting is good for the State. As Randoph Bourne observed "war is the health of state." Conservatives should be as skeptical of the Pentagon and CIA as they are of HUD and DOE.

HL Mencken wrote "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. "

Well, I'm not sure if all them are imaginery but they are blowback for the US government meddling abroad and doing things it ought not to be doing.

Tim| 9.1.10 @ 11:51AM

I am always amused by the knee jerk interventionist's definition of isolationism. To them an "isolationist" is one opposed to invading and bombing foreign nations. Most opponents of interventionism support voluntary and peaceful commerce not foreign aid, CIA orchestrated coups and assassinations, or not so covert aid to terrorist groups our government calls "freedom figthters" ie Contras, Mujhideen, MEK, Jundullah, MEK, PKI etc).

What comes around, goes around. The least our government should do is come clean and admit their awful deeds so the American people know why they're being targeted by the "evil doers."

TKP| 9.2.10 @ 8:06PM

Wow - so Hitler was our fault, Tojo was our fault, Mussolini was our fault, Lenin and Stalin somehow were our fault and all those centuries of war in Europe and Asia were somehow our fault. I suppose the Depression was a convenient excuse conjured up by Hoover in conjunction with FDR.

So when are you leaving for Fantasy Land? as that would be the only place that could possibly meet the self righteous world of purity in which you live.

If you really believe all this you write - how do you continue to live here. Do you walk around pissed off all day, or perhaps work at the DMV ? that would explain alot

Tim| 9.3.10 @ 12:39AM

"Our" falt? No. You and most other crackpot rightwingers have annoying habit of conflating the America with the US government. The US government is bundle of bureaucracies carrying out policies determined by who? Who knows? I'd say we're actually ruled by an oligarchy made up banksters, merchants of death, and various clandestine agencies who reserve to right to lie, cheat, and steal. Popular opinon plays some role, I suppose, but it is easily manipulated. The Constitution has been a dead letter ever since our rulers declared it was "living."

Criticism of the US government can be most patriotic especially when you consider how it so often is working against the genuine interests of the American people.

The First World War was a tragedy made much worse by US intervention. US aid to the English and French only prolonged the conflict and therefore contributed to the post war turmoil that engulfed Europe in 1920's and 30's. Taken in its entirety, the 20th century is a cautionarly tale about the perils of American intervention abroad.

But I take it you're not too interested in cause and effect. After all, real history can get really complicated. It is so much easier to uncritically accept textbook platitudes and embrace the narrative of American Century. Most Americans are not willing to accept truth about their own government.

Yes, we certainly live in a perilous world. And our government adds to those perils.

TKP| 9.9.10 @ 1:09PM

Clearly no one on this blog or any or the accomplished TAS contributors, can match your inside knowledge of how things "really work" nor your insightful analysis of world history. All hail Tim,

and say hello to Rev. Louie when you see him on the great wheel circling the earth

Abu Nudnik| 9.5.10 @ 1:07PM

I wouldn't count on his retirement meaning anything other than endless lobbying to get his Maoist textbooks mandatory reading in primary schools. He'll be education czar when King Obama wins his third term in 2016.

Joanna| 6.6.11 @ 5:15AM

Thats a scary notion
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