WHAT Morals? WHAT Family Values?
by Connie Cook Smith
-----------
Now that the Bush administration is more outgoing than ongoing, their facade of "morals" and "family values" is cracking. Their blithe acceptance of Mary Cheney's lesbian pregnancy and no censures in the Mark Foley scandal give additional credence to David Kuo's claims about hypocritical White House attitudes, such as "evangelicals are goofy." The administration's much-touted concern about conventional morality has apparently been a charade.
In fact, some of these characters are downright kinky. I'm all for gay rights, but unlike Dick Cheney's wife, I never fantasized about lesbian love and published a novel about it, such as her book, "Sisters." I've believed that homosexuality is nature, not nurture. But ya gotta wonder what influence Mrs. Cheney had on 11-year-old daughter Mary when she published this poor prose in 1981: "The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage -- no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they truly were."
http://www.etherzone.com/2004/stang041604.shtmlThen there's Dick Cheney's former right-hand-man, Scooter Libby. Under indictment now in the Valerie Plame affair and once a key policy player, he published an absolutely sickening novel in 1996 entitled, "The Apprentice." According to quotes in literary reviews, it features obsessive descriptions of pedophilia, incest, and bestiality. You can only wonder if Libby has the mind of a sexual predator.
http://www.nerve.com/dispatches/libby/dirtypolitician/http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2005-11-09-libby-novel_x.htmMeanwhile, the guy who opposed these people in 2000 and won the popular vote, Al Gore, published a visionary and articulate manual about a sustainable future for our children, "Earth in the Balance." His current movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," offers the same genuine concern for our people and our planet.
In all future elections, Americans ought to really look into the people they're supporting, instead of just jumping on a "values" bandwagon and not noticing the tires were flat to begin with.
Connie Cook Smith
"BOBBY" AND AMERICAN VALUES
by Connie Cook Smith
-------
"Bobby," the movie out now about the 1968 assassination of RFK, is introducing a new generation to values we've nearly forgotten: ensuring peace instead of insisting on war, protecting the middle class instead of destroying it, holding corporations accountable instead of putting profits above all.
The Kennedy's (and Dr. Martin Luther King, even John Lennon) were flawed human beings, but they were earnest workers for humanity. What a different world we would have now if they were not eliminated. The recent election indicates the desire to revive lost hope. But why has it gotten so bad?
In the reality of who wins and who loses in highest-stakes US politics, the evidence is that the bad guys killed the good guys again and again over the decades, which enabled the bad guys to entrench deeply into positions of power. I think this is the short version why our country is so messed up and so sad, and why people are so demoralized and so shallow.
We have too much of a trivial-minded nation of sports-aholics and shop-aholics, instead of enough of a country of intelligent and caring citizens. At this time in our history, the bad guys and their assassinations have prevailed.
Of course they set up " a lone gunman" story in nearly every case. And their puppets ferociously ridicule all who demonstrate that the "loners" often had direct connections to the people in power.
But the genuine investigative reporters who discover these direct connections get fired from their jobs. Some have been killed, such as prize-winning journalist Gary Webb in 2004. The authorities claim he committed suicide by somehow shooting himself twice in the head.
So we haven't been able to read the facts in the newspapers about those in power who are directly connected to the assassinations. And "documentaries" that wipe out legitimate suspicion with false computer graphics and disinformative data are regularly fed to the public like poisoned treats.
Fortunately it's all becoming more visible, especially regarding how bad the winners can be: No qualms about torturing others to death, no qualms about invading and destroying other countries, no qualms about outlawing our constitutional protections such as habeas corpus.
Thanks to that, to the Military Commissions Act signed in October, this means that you and I can now be thrown in jail on trumped-up charges and denied a lawyer for as long as King George likes. No rights! If this is acceptable to any Americans, I don't see how they have the nerve to call themselves Americans. This is fascism and dictatorship -- far worse than anything Al Qaeda can do to us.
Too many Americans are being every bit as compliant with evil as were German citizens in the 1930's. How did that happen? As Dr. King pointed out, "Remember, everything Hitler did was legal." Every atrocity he committed had been signed into law, like the draconian bills in America over the past 6 years.
Concurrently with the "Bobby" movie, there is a video and written report that are getting around the Internet. Thoroughly researched for three years and now being broadcast at England's BBC2, the photos and evidence reveal that three men who were connected to the covert Bay of Pigs operations in the early '60's were on the scene in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel when RFK was killed.
It's so simple to connect these dots. Certain American corporate leaders and politicians and gangsters wanted Castro eliminated, not just because he was communist -- that was emphasized mainly to rile up the rest of us -- but because Castro had seized Pepsi and other corporations, as well as off-shore drilling rigs, and the Mafia's casinos and brothels. Cuba has been a turf-battle for power and profits, more than an ideological clash.
To make it even more simple, consider that Nixon was on the board at Pepsi, George H.W. Bush ran Zapata Off-Shore drilling rigs, the Mafia ran the others. When JFK stopped the Cuba invasion from succeeding, did he not infuriate -- among others -- Nixon and Bush Sr and the mob? They had a lot at stake there.
JFK also enraged the Joint Chiefs. In 1962 they officially proposed to hijack and blow up American airliners, blame the deaths on Castro, and thus justify an invasion of Cuba -- thereby pumping up the Pentagon budget, enriching armament corporations, and ensuring military careers. You can look it up under "Operation Northwoods." But JFK stopped that scheme, too.
The bottom line here, as far as a specific power-struggle is concerned, is that the Bush dynasty and the Kennedy dynasty were rising at the same time in history. Not knowing in the 1930's that Hitler would go quite so bonkers, both Joseph Kennedy and Prescott Bush had backed that horse financially -- had literally bankrolled and money-laundered for Adolf HIter -- congressional records prove it. Wall Street was looking for big profits in Germany's post-World-War-One recovery, and it looked like Adolf was their boy.
But after World War Two, the Kennedy clan and the Bush clan headed in opposite directions. The Kennedy's saw the light between 1962 and 1968 and opted to openly enforce equal rights. But the Bush family clung to the racial supremacy ideas that Hitler had championed, which many elite American families also supported.
On September 4, 1969, George H.W. Bush and the two "race scientists" he sponsored are in the Congressional Record arguing for birth control programs for African-Americans -- because "they are down-breeding the quality of the U.S. population." Martin Luther King had been eliminated the year before.
Add to that, Richard Nixon was a nervous nobody until Prescott Bush and fellows grooomed and funded him to an unusually rapid rise as U.S. Vice-President. But what happened? JFK beat out this Bush-boy for President in 1960. Then when Kennedy thwarted corporate profits and military expansion in Cuba, and was about to do the same in Vietnam, he ended up dead. And when another Kennedy was about to beat Nixon again in 1968, that Kennedy, too, ended up dead -- along with others who have opposed the corporate-military agenda.
Then it's not much of a stretch to consider this: Just as the Joint Chiefs were quite serious about hijacking and blowing up American airliners in the 1960's and blaming another -- to goad Americans into the war and invasion they wanted -- why not give it a try in 2001? This time, there was no Kennedy to stop it. This time, there was in place the Bush faction, which the records show have always supported such clandestine operations.
And we are left to ponder the fact that President Eisenhower actually warned us about the military-industrial complex taking over our nation. I would say they have largely done so. It is most astonishing that some Americans actually support this fascism which is destroying our values, our soldiers' lives, and our planet.
Nearly dead along with all the gunned-down humanitarians are indeed the values that Americans should be representing and benefiting from, and which the current movie stunningly reminds us of: avoiding war, affirming equality, and putting people before profits.
It's time to understand FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's dramatic statement: "The individual seeking the truth is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous, he convinces himself that it could not possibly exist."
Monstrous, indeed. But only when we accept this truth, can we stop the real evil-doers and restore our humane, constitutional ideals.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/11/who_shot_bobby_kennedy_1.htmlConnie Cook Smith
