First is the beautifully written Chronicle Of A Death Retold by James Wolcott in Vanity Fair. Echoes from possibly my favorite Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold likely biased my opinion of Wolcott’s essay. However, I have also recently read most of Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History:, as well as countless Warren Commission witness interviews and have concluded as Wolcott has that:
It’s too much and it’s not enough. It will never be enough. Readers will never be sated, because too many hidden dimensions and murky links remain, an atticful of unanswered (and unanswerable) questions, hints of the possible future of which we were robbed. History left us hanging. We will never know the full measure of what was taken from us that day in Dallas, whether J.F.K. would have won a landslide against rock-jawed Barry Goldwater in 1964 that would have given him an F.D.R.-size mandate or if, as his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, did, he would have deepened U.S. involvement in Vietnam and sunk hundreds of thousands of lives into the quagmire. The whiplash trauma of J.F.K.’s death was so transformative that it’s maddening that the perpetrator should be such a piddling figure. It offends our sense of proportion–the Shakespearean scale of the fall of kings–that a president of Kennedy’s ruddy vitality and mental crackle could be brought down by a sullen sloucher named Lee Harvey Oswald, whose photographs suggest a runty version of Ryan Gosling after being smacked around, and who in turn was rubbed out while in the custody of the Dallas police by a local hustler and seedy glory-hunter named Jack Ruby, enabling Oswald to take his secrets with him to the morgue slab. No wonder 50 crazed years later suspicions still flourish and theories abound that there had to be bigger puppeteers operating behind the Manchurian Candidate curtains who set up these patsies as fall guys: L.B.J., the C.I.A., the K.G.B., disloyal factions within the Secret Service, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the gargoyle shadow government later personified by the Smoking Man in The X-Files–pick a perp. Most daringly, perhaps, Mark Shaw points the bony finger of recrimination at J.F.K.’s own father in The Poison Patriarch: How the Betrayals of Joseph P. Kennedy Caused the Assassination of JFK. …
So many tantalizing threads and leads —“too many hidden dimensions and murky links remain” – and none connect to Oswald on that fateful day or the few leading up to it. A seething, roiling cauldron of Kennedy hate existed in Dallas 1963. Maybe it wasn’t a question of whether JFK would be assassinated but who would get there first. Like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express except the death plotters never knew of nor conspired with each other. All acted guilty after JFK’s death because they individually and reasonable thought that it could have been their team that did the deed.
Next Chris Hedges’ The Folly Of Empire
The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the wheelhouse barking ridiculous orders and seeing how fast they can gun the engines. They fight like children over the ship’s wheel as the vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field. They wander the decks giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America is the greatest ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced technology and embodies the highest virtues. And then, with abrupt and unexpected fury, down we will go into the frigid waters.
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Finally, one more smoking gun in the evidence of Bush/Cheney lying this country into war. Fired for Standing in Way of Iraq War: Ousted Director of Nobel-Winning OPCW Speaks Out.
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Former director general José Bustani, now France’s ambassador to Brazil, told the New York Times in an exclusive interview published Sunday that efforts to unseat him date back to late 2001, when Iraq showed interest in joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, which OPCW oversees. As one condition of joining, countries must open their doors to weapons inspection and destruction. Under Bustani, OPCW inspectors made plans for Iraq weapons inspections in 2002.
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Late 2001 would have been when Rumsfeld was busy looking at bombing targets in Iraq. Would also seem to be when they settled on WMD as the casus belli. The SOTU “axis of evil” and Downing Street Memo followed soon after and the rest is history. History that still fills some of us like Charles P Pierce with rage every time we think of it, Bush/Cheney, and all their enablers in the media and Congress.
This means all of you who went along for the ride on torture, and on Iraq, and who hid under the bed after 9/11. This is how the power came to rest with Ted Yoho, who is a fool and a know-nothing. This is how historical inevitability is created. This is how its momentum becomes unstoppable. This is how the wreckage piles up.
“Government is the problem,” said Saint Reagan in his first inaugural. And everybody, all of you sorry bastards, cheered, and made completely predictable the moment in which the power of the government would come to reside in…
Ted fking Yoho.
