Did You Ever Have Any Doubt That Nixon Was A Traitor To America?

He was-- but "traitor" is a more appropriate description

Writing for Common Dreams, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman assert what many people long suspected. The first paragraph of their piece has only 5 words: "Richard Nixon was a traitor." Right-wing clown George Will was the source of their information, which also points to Kissinger's complicity.

Nixon's newly revealed records show for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon's interference with these negotiations violated President John Adams's 1797 Logan Act, banning private citizens from intruding into official government negotiations with a foreign nation.

Published as the 40th Anniversary of Nixon's resignation approaches, Will's column confirms that Nixon feared public disclosure of his role in sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace talks. Will says Nixon established a "plumbers unit" to stop potential leaks of information that might damage him, including documentation that he believed was held by the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank. The Plumbers' later break-in at the Democratic National Committee led to the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.

Nixon's sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks was confirmed by transcripts of FBI wiretaps. On November 2, 1968, LBJ received an FBI report saying Chernnault told the South Vietnamese ambassador that "she had received a message from her boss: saying the Vietnamese should "hold on, we are gonna win."

As Will confirms, Vietnamese did "hold on," the war proceeded and Nixon did win, changing forever the face of American politics-- with the shadow of treason permanently embedded in its DNA.

The treason came in 1968 as the Vietnam War reached a critical turning point. President Lyndon Johnson was desperate for a truce between North and South Vietnam.

LBJ had an ulterior motive: his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, was in a tight presidential race against Richard Nixon. With demonstrators in the streets, Humphrey desperately needed a cease-fire to get him into the White House.

Johnson had it all but wrapped it. With a combination of gentle and iron-fisted persuasion, he forced the leaders of South Vietnam into an all-but-final agreement with the North. A cease-fire was imminent, and Humphrey’s election seemed assured.

But at the last minute, the South Vietnamese pulled out. LBJ suspected Nixon had intervened to stop them from signing a peace treaty.

In the Price of Power (1983), Seymour Hersh revealed Henry Kissinger-- then Johnson’s adviser on Vietnam peace talks-- secretly alerted Nixon’s staff that a truce was imminent.

According to Hersh, Nixon “was able to get a series of messages to the Thieu government [of South Vietnam] making it clear that a Nixon presidency would have different views on peace negotiations."

Johnson was livid. He even called the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to complain that “they oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.”

“I know,” was Dirksen’s feeble reply.

...In the four years between the sabotage and what Kissinger termed “peace at hand” just prior to the 1972 election, more than 20,000 US troops died in Vietnam. More than 100,000 were wounded. More than a million Vietnamese were killed.

But in 1973, Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the same settlement he helped sabotage in 1968.

According to Parry, LBJ wanted to go public with Nixon’s treason. But Clark Clifford, an architect of the CIA and a pillar of the Washington establishment, talked Johnson out of it. LBJ’s close confidant warned that the revelation would shake the foundations of the nation.

In particular, Clifford told Johnson (in a taped conversation) that “some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have [Nixon] elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s best interests.”

In other words, Clifford told LBJ that the country couldn’t handle the reality that its president was a certifiable traitor, eligible for legal execution.

Fittingly, Clark Clifford’s upper-crust career ended in the disgrace of his entanglement with the crooked Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI), which financed the terrorist group Al Qaeda and whose scandalous downfall tainted the Agency he helped found.

Perhaps it was this Nixon maneuver that inspired Ronald Reagan to make almost identically treasonous moves to sabotage the Iran hostage crisis solution President Carter had worked out.

Senile Traitor and War Criminal to Endorse Jeb Bush?

Henry K: Remember the last time he picked our next president?

by Noah

The New York Observer, a Manhattan-based weekly newspaper, is reporting that Henry Kissinger will be throwing his weight behind the candidacy of Bush Crime Family member Jeb Bush by endorsing his candidacy for president tomorrow at a fund-raiser being held by Bush's interestingly named "Right to Rise PAC." It's a move that should forever be known as the political equivalent of syphilis endorsing gonorrhea.

Bush, whose real name is John Ellis Bush (the name "Jeb" should be considered a bit of marketing or branding designed to give Bush appeal to neo-confederates), has not yet officially declared his candidacy, but all indications are that he will run and ask America to play Russian roulette again by voting for a Bush.

Kissinger previously got involved at an early date with the 1968 presidential candidacy of Richard "I Am Not a Crook" Nixon nearly 50 years ago and should be most notably known for his role in blowing up the 1968 Paris peace talks that were being conducted by the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in hopes of bringing about a truce in the Vietnam war. How devious is Henry Kissinger? He sabotaged the talks while he was Johnson's lead negotiator. Evil does walk the Earth.

It was Kissinger who told Nixon, during the 1968 campaign, that a truce agreement was imminent. Nixon then, in a clear violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from interfering with official negotiations between our government and any foreign nation, had his own liaison with the South Vietnamese government, Anna Chennault, tell the South Vietnamese that they should put off reaching a deal with Johnson -- that Nixon would give them a better deal once he was elected.

That sabotaging of the peace talks resulted in years of continued war in Vietnam and tens of thousands of U.S. casualties (20,000 U.S. dead, 100,000 wounded) and Vietnamese casualties (1,000,000 dead). Some dare call that treason. It is. Only recently, has it come out, through the release of Johnson's tapes and FBI wiretaps, that Johnson knew of the treasonous sabotage but did not act because he believed that the revelation of treason by a candidate for president would throw the country into even more turmoil than the war itself had already caused. The year had already seen the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

The sabotage also achieved its goal of narrowly electing Nixon as president over Hubert Humphrey, since America was getting mighty sick of the pointless war and Nixon had announced that he had a secret plan to end it. A truce before the election would most likely have changed the outcome of such a close election.

The war-criminal-traitor buddies back in the day

The corporate news media have remained largely silent about Kissinger's and Nixon's actions for all these decades. In the era of the creation of the Logan Act, 1797, the pair would rightly have been hung for their treason.

To Kissinger and Nixon, the deaths and maiming meant nothing. It was all about power. Nixon rewarded Kissinger by naming him as his own national security adviser. In an example of astounding irony and cynicism, Kissinger was eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1973, for negotiating the same agreement between the parties that he had sabotaged five years and so many lives earlier.

Had Kissinger been exposed at the time, his name, reputation, and opinions would not be highly regarded today, let alone in 1973. However, they are highly regarded, especially by most republicans and much of the Washington establishment.

Bush is not the only potential republican candidate who has sought Kissinger's endorsement.  In recent months neo-fascist Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and America's most obnoxious politician, New Jersey loudmouth Gov. Chris Christie have all knelt before Kissinger to kiss his ring and grovel for his endorsement.

The successful quest for Kissinger's tainted endorsement isn't the only recent indication of Jeb Bush's shady character. As if Jeb Bush's corrupt machinations in the 2000 "election" of his brother and the family name itself were not enough to define what kind of person John Ellis Bush is, there is the hiring of his online media expert, Ethan Czahor, cofounder of Hipster.com.

Czahor ain't exactly the hippest guy around. He appears to be most famous for his habit of tweeting his sexist, racist, and homophobic thoughts to his twitter followers. The tweets are typical republican fare. They are anything one would hear at any time from any republican you have the misfortune to be in the presence of. The tweets recently disappeared, as if by magic, but not before some timely screen grabs were made, and Buzzfeed has a quite magnificent collection of 'em.








Czahor's official title was chief technology officer for Right to Rise. I say "was" because he has just been fired.



Jeb may have loved the guy enough to hire him, but hey, Czahor's actions just don't fit the phony image that Bush wants to present to Americans who are either crazy or gullible enough to vote for him.

Poor Czahor! Someone else will now have the job of putting a voting-machine-hacking team together, unless they just want to fall back on Bush Crime Family capo Karl Rove. Jeb's Florida team also proved very adept at purging certain demographics from the voting roles, so would it surprise anybody but the most naïve people on Earth that Czahor's replacement will be putting his or her hands on that as well? Hey, what's Katherine Harris doing?

The bottom line is that who a candidate for any office surrounds himself or herself with does matter. When we vote for a candidate, we are not just voting for the name on the ballot. We are voting for the candidate's team of people. John Ellis Bush has a track record of surrounding himself with undesirable types. Imagine, though, how Czahor may feel if and when he thinks about Bush firing him one day and two days later officially accepting the endorsement of a traitor and war criminal. Damn, Ethan, it's enough to make ya sour on politics forever, isn't it?

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When Second Biggest Cities Fall To The Bad Guys…

The Military Industrial Complex and its faithful media spokesmen are warning that the only way to stop ISIS from overrunning America and beheading everyone is to spend more money… on the Military Industrial Complex. Martin Feldman, a right-wing kook with a respectable-sounding pedigree, was chairman of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982-1984. This week he was clamoring for more war in the Middle East and demanding Obama "significantly increase military spending." An anti-tax nut, no doubt he would like to see more missiles come at the expense of unnecessary frills like healthcare and public education.

As a result of our defence policies, America’s enemies do not fear us and our friends do not trust us. We have disappointed the Ukrainians, alienated the Israelis and the Egyptians, and left our allies in eastern Europe and in east Asia wondering how we would deal with future threats from Russia, North Korea or China.

Mr Obama is not likely to change his attitude about the effective use of America’s armed forces or his willingness to increase defence spending. But the next president should make it a central priority to rebuild our military budget and use it to strengthen our role in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

ISIS isn on the move. Yesterday they overran a big military base, captured more weapons, sent more U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers running for their lives and threatened Baghdad again. And they still hold the second-biggest city in the country Mosul (ancient Ninevah, the capital of the Assyrian Empire), which has a population of 1,800,000, so a bit smaller than Houston and a bit bigger than Philadelphia.

I'm old enough to remember when the U.S. mission in Vietnam was advising and then training and then full scale war and then training again. All that training lead first to the loss of South Vietnam's second largest city, Da Nang, and eventually to a takeover of the entire country. Back then they were the enemy, Hitler, Satan, the end of civilization; now they're dependable trading partners, good friends and a wonderful place for tourists and investors.

From Rick Perlstein's new book, The Invisible Bridge:

Vessels arrived at their intended destinations, coastal cities like Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa, and Nha Trang; deperate passengers discovered these "safe havens" had already been abandoned to the Communists. Da Nang was the nation's second-largest city, formerly home to the mighty United States air base, once the busiest airport in the world. A mighty battle was supposedly underway to save the beachside metropolis. Lazy American reporters, deployed the usual clichés to describe the fighting: "juggernaut," "blitzkrieg." A skeptical writer, though, quoted a French observer on the scene: "There never was a last battle for Da Nang." Another eyewitness broadened the description: "There is no war." South Vietnam was already lost.

The U.S. trained-- at the cost of hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars-- South Vietnamese army refused to fight. They threw away their uniforms and ran away. Some killed their officers; others went on rampages and murdered civilians. Many pushed civilians aside and grabbed spots on evacuation boats, planes and helicopters and now live in Orange County. When you read about U.S. trained and equipped Iraqi soldiers fleeing from ISIS, remember-- this was hardly the first time the U.S. wasted some much on idiotic, unwinnable strategies in cultures we didn't begin to fathom.

And when Congress votes to spend more U.S. treasure on this vote against reelecting them, regardless of which party they're from. You should start by seeing if your Member of Congress backed the McKeon amendment to train and equip "moderate" Syrian terrorists. 85 Democrats and 71 Republicans voted NO. 273 Members of Congress voted YES. Every single one of them should be defeated in November. My lame warmonger congressman, Adam Schiff, voted for it and there is no way I would vote for him. How about your own congresscritter? Check here and see how he or she voted and take the appropriate action.

Time To Go Back To Vietnam-- But Only As Tourists And Trading Partners

I'm planning a trip to Vietnam. I haven't been there in a long time and I've never been to the northern part of the country. So when someone on twitter recommended a NY Times piece, I grabbed it and saved it for when I'd have some free time to read it. What I eventually started reading was Tuong Lai's OpEd from last week, Vietnam's Overdue Alliance With America, and man, did he sound like a warlike dick! Within two paragraphs I said to myself, "self, if this guy is gay, he's the Vietnamese Lindsey Graham and if he's straight and senile, he's the Vietnamese John McCain. Oh, yeah… John McCain-- that reminded me where I found the tweet.

Tuong Lai's real name is Nguyen Phuoc Tuong and he was an advisor to two Vietnamese prime ministers, Vo Van Kiet and Phan Van Khai (1990-2006). Nearly 80, he's a prominent sociologist in Ho Chi Minh City. There's nothing else I could find out about him… but I suspect he probably has an interesting biography, just as McCain does. "Ours," he wrote, "is a small country. We Vietnamese cannot and must not entrust our future to anyone, but we urgently need strategic allies at a moment in history when our priority is to defeat our present-day enemy: China." Good luck with defeating whomever you want, fella-- you guys are good at it-- but leave us out of it.

China’s move in May, to place an offshore oil rig on the Vietnamese continental shelf, and its arrogant statements in June, at an Asian security summit meeting known as the Shangri-La Dialogue, exposed China’s sea piracy to the world. These developments should alarm anyone in Vietnam who still clings to the myth of brotherly love between our nation and China.

We cannot fight Chinese encroachment alone. Political isolation in a globalized world is tantamount to committing political suicide for Vietnam. And the key ally for Vietnam today is the United States-- an alliance that the Vietnamese liberation hero Ho Chi Minh ironically always wanted.

The Vietnamese people have fought for thousands of years to maintain our culture and independence, in the shadow of a giant neighbor. But continuing blindness and stupidity have poisoned generations of Vietnamese leaders, even when their Chinese “comrades” blatantly started a border war in 1979 and invaded and occupied the Paracel Islands in 1974 and the Spratly Islands in 1988-- which for centuries both belonged to Vietnam. After the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, Vietnamese leaders tried to protect Communism from an embarrassing demise in Southeast Asia. At a now-infamous meeting in Chengdu, China, in 1990, Vietnamese leaders signed agreements that made our country even more dependent on China-- a betrayal of our interests and a national shame.

For personal gain, some Vietnamese have even become traitors, blindly toeing the Chinese line. They are reminiscent of the reviled 18th-century king Le Chieu Thong, the last ruler of the Le Dynasty, who died in exile in China. But the cowardice of Vietnamese leaders has never been so blatant as in the past 25 years. Vietnam’s government has put a so-called communist-socialist bond with China above national interests and the well-being of its citizens. Our leaders have regarded invaders as friends.

Because of China’s recent territorial grabs at sea and its complete disregard for international law, we are now back to square one. Without a major strategic realignment, Vietnam’s island territories will simply be gobbled up by China. Our country must dispose of the myth of friendship with China and return to what Ho Chi Minh passionately advocated after World War II: an American-Vietnamese alliance in Asia.

…The Chinese government’s hypocrisy and double-dealing are well known and well documented. As our prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, recently put it bluntly: “Vietnam has always wanted peace and friendship with China. However, we cannot trade our sacred independence and sovereignty for some elusive peace or any type of dependence.” His strong words heralded a new way of dealing with China. But much more is needed.

Vietnamese leaders need to move decisively by taking claims against China before international courts and once and for all relegating the idea of an ideological bond with China to the dustbin of history. Vietnam must fully implement and follow the true spirit of Ho’s Declaration of Independence in 1945. And that means finally establishing the sort of close economic and military relations with the United States that Ho had wanted after World War II.

That is the only way to defeat the new Chinese expansionism propelled by its president, Xi Jinping, and for Vietnam to join the rest of the civilized world, with its ideals of democracy, freedom and justice for all.

I think we have enough problems fighting our own oil wars without getting between China and Vietnam, regardless of what kind of sabre-ratting crap McCain is peddling this week.

Who Wants War? Who Is Still Part Of Richard Nixon's Tribe?

Although many NeoCons are tiptoeing around it, Cheney isn't. They all want to send American troops tonight for corporate profits in Iraq again but only Cheney is actually saying it on TV-- although 206 Republicans and 44 Democrats voted for it on June 19 when they opposed Barbara Lee's amendment to prohibit the use of funds for newer military operations in Iraq. 142 Democrats voted for the amendment and there were only 23 Republicans with the good sense (or guts) to cross the aisle and vote with them. These are the 23 Republicans:

• Justin Amash (R-MI)
• Dan Benishek (R-MI)
• Paul Broun (R-GA)
• Michael Burgess (R-TX)
• Mike Coffman (R-CO)
• Steve Daines (R-MT)
• Jimmy Duncan (R-TN)
• Chris Gibson (R-NY)
• Walter Jones (R-NC)
• Raul Labrador (R-ID)
• Tom Massie (R-KY)
• Tom McClintock (R-CA)
• Tom Petri (R-WI)
• Bill Posey (R-FL)
• Reid Ribble (R-WI)
• Scott Rigell (R-VA)
• Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
• Mark Sanford (R-SC)
• Dave Schweikert (R-AZ)
• Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
• Steve Stockman (R-TX)
• Ted Yoho (R-FL)
• Don Young (R-AK)

The rest of the House Republicans, in effect, all voted that sending troops back into Iraq, ala Cheney, is just fine. And that made me think back to the war that ravaged my generation, the Vietnam conflagration Cheney was slippery enough to avoid without going into exile or prison. I'm reading Rick Perlstein's incredible new book, The Invisible Bridge right now and all the Republican treachery around the rescue of 5 year American prisoner of war Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl reminded me of Perlstein's retelling of the end of the Vietnam was and the return of U.S. prisoners. Republicans reacted very differently to those returning prisoners. Perlstein points out how the staged propaganda bonanza Nixon tried turning the spectacle into helped drive the country apart.

There were two tribes of Americans now.

One comprised the suspicious circles, which has once been small, but now were exceptionally broad, who considered the self-evident lesson of the 1960s and the low, dishonest war that defined the decade to be the imperative to question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and expose dissembling leaders-- a new, higher patriotism for the 1970s. They lived, for example, in the sleepy suburb of Northern California visited by a New York Times writer who reported back that "people think and feel differently from what they once did. They ask questions, the reject assumptions, they doubt what they are told." They said things like, "Now I'd rather not say the pledge; it has such little meaning to me. The things that are in it, just aren't true." They even included, amongst their numbers, career military men, like the returned POW who told NBC how he appreciated returning to a country finally willing to reconsider it's prejudices-- "shedding its Linus blankets, starting too think for itself." They included officials of the big, "mainline" Protestant churches, who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, on the day the last POW came home, criticizing Nixon for hosting South Vietnam's torture-master president, for whose preservation the nation had sacrificed some fifty-eight-thousand soldiers and billions of dollars of treasure, as "a spiritual disaster for Americaa"; and the American Psychological Association officially proclaimed that the POWs had "been assigned the role of heroes in a war that has no heroes, the central role in an elaborate drama staged to provide justification for the President's policy,to create the illusion of victory and to arouse a sense of patriotic fervor."

And they included Lyndon Johnson's former press secretay, Bill Moyers, whose job at once been to sell America on the nobility of the Vietnam cause, and who was now an avuncular commentator for the Public Broadcasting Service. On TV he grilled General Maxwell Taylor about whether the recent "unworthy and unwinnable war" had made it harder to recruit forces for the new all-volunteer force, now that the draft had ended with the beginning of 1973. The general responded that those who had fought in Vietnam would refuse that characterization. Moyers asked why, if that were so, record numbers of them had deserted. The general insisted that was only because they had been poisoned by the liberal media. Moyers then asked why, if that was the case, so many of our allied European governments opposed the Vietnam War, too. Taylor responded that this was because so many of them read the U.S. press-- which, he said, should have been subject to wartime censorship.

General Taylor had once been favorite general of Kennedy-era liberals. Robert F. Kennedy had called him "relentless in the determination to get at the truth," and named one of his songs after him. Now Maxwell Taylor was the tribune of the other tribe, the one that found another lesson to be self-evident: never break faith with God's chosen nation, especially in time of war-- truth be damned.

This was Richard Nixon's tribe.

Not much changes, huh? It was painful on June 19, however, to see 44 Democrats who voted in such a way as to indicate for anyone who was willing to open their eyes that they were, despite the "D" next to their names, part of the Richard Nixon tribe. Several of them-- Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Streve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- have bought their way into top House Democratic leadership positions and they are making sure that many of these members of Nixon's tribes get nearly all the money the Democratic Party is allocating for incumbents in the 2014 election. Everyone listed below is on the DCCC incumbent protect list and is part of that Nixon tribe that voted for more war in Iraq. Read 'em and weep:

• John Barrow (GA)
• Tim Bishop (NY)
• Julia Brownley (CA)
• Cheri Bustos (IL)
• Bill Enyart (IL)
• Pete Gallego (TX)
• Collin Peterson (MN)
• Raul Ruiz (CA)

Vincent Harding (1931-2014)

"For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep, Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man."

-- Vincent Harding, who wrote MLK's 1967 anti-Vietnam
War speech, to the National Catholic Reporter in 1997

"Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.), who was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, said the speech 'could border a bit on treason.' "

-- from Matt Schudel's WaPo obituary of Dr. Harding

by Ken

No, the name of Dr. Harding, who died from an aneurysm on Tuesday at 83, wasn't familiar to me. It's a shame that an obituary has to be the way we learn about people we should have know about, but better late than never.

In his Washington Post obit, Matt Schudel describes Dr. Harding as "a historian who was an influential behind-the-scenes figure during the civil rights movement and who wrote a controversial speech for Martin Luther King Jr. that condemned the war in Vietnam." That speech, Matt says later, "was seen as bringing together the two major tides of protest in the 1960s: civil rights and the antiwar movement."

Here's how Matt chronicles the speech that, nearly 50 years later, still provided the hook for its author's obit:

Dr. Harding, who said his service in the Army made him a dedicated pacifist, was a lay minister in Chicago when he began working for the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. He moved to Atlanta in 1961, settling around the corner from King’s family.

Soon afterward, Dr. Harding and his wife founded the Mennonite House, one of the South’s first interracial gathering places for proponents of civil rights.

While teaching at Atlanta’s Spelman College in the mid-1960s, Dr. Harding began to explore the moral implications of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He wrote a letter to King and other civil rights leaders outlining a critical stance toward the war, then composed a speech for King that addressed Vietnam in the context of civil rights.

King delivered the speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis. The speech, often called “A Time to Break Silence,” was little changed from Dr. Harding’s original draft.

“A time comes when silence is betrayal,” King said. “And that time has come for us in Vietnam.”

He called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and said it was morally indefensible to send African American troops to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

King concluded that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

An overflow crowd of 3,000 gave King a standing ovation, but his message was not well received in other circles. A New York Times editorial criticized King’s views, and the NAACP called the speech a “serious tactical error.”

Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.), who was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, said the speech “could border a bit on treason.”

It's easy to make fun of Barry Goldwater's "could border a bit on treason" imbecility. But just think how his modern-day ideological heirs would react -- when, for example, it already qualifies as out-and-out treason to show insufficient respect toward an obviously thieving, gun-violence-promoting pile of puke like Cliven Bundy.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," Dr. Johnson said. And the dominant strain of American fake-patriotism, so long so intimately entwined with the scourge of racism, has reached such depths that it has become the worship and practice of scoundreltry.

As for Dr. Harding's life after (and before) the MLK speech:

In his later academic work as a historian, Dr. Harding wrote several books describing the development of radical ideals among African Americans and said King belonged squarely in that tradition.

The 1967 speech condemning the Vietnam War, Dr. Harding said, was not an anomaly but was a pure reflection of King’s evolving views of the role of civil rights on the world stage.

“For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep,” Dr. Harding told the National Catholic Reporter in 1997, “Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man.”

Vincent Gordon Harding was born July 25, 1931, in New York City and was raised by a single mother who worked as a cleaning woman.

He graduated from City College of New York in 1952 and received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1953 before serving in the Army for two years. He received a master’s degree in 1956 and a doctorate in 1965, both in history from the University of Chicago.

A Seventh-day Adventist early in life, Dr. Harding later adopted the Mennonite faith, known for its pacifist beliefs.

After King’s death, Dr. Harding became the first director of what was then the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center and then led the Institute of the Black World, both in Atlanta. In 1974, Dr. Harding moved to Philadelphia to teach at Temple University and later the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the faculty of Denver’s Iliff School of Theology in 1981.

He wrote or edited more than 20 books, including “The Other American Revolution” (1980), “There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America” (1981) and “Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero” (1996).

In the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Harding was a prominent voice in an often-heated debate over the purpose and direction of black studies courses. Although he had been educated at mixed-race or predominantly white institutions from high school through graduate school, Dr. Harding advocated a form of racial separatism in education, at least for a while.

“Those who have colonized us for 300 years are essentially unqualified to educate our children,” he wrote in the Times in 1970.

Dr. Harding believed African American communities should develop “alternatives to white public and private education” and “the means to keep these black experiments in educational creativity under the control of the black community.”

Other scholars, both black and white, criticized his views as polarizing and academically unsound.

It would be “a very serious error,” Michael R. Winston, director of Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, told The Washington Post in 1982, to believe “there’s no room for conventional scholarship in black studies.”

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This Isn't About The Tom Dooley Who Hung Down His Head-- This Is The Other Tom Dooley

Growing up, CBS' weekly game show What's My Line? was one of the most popular shows on the relatively new television machine. It ran from 1950 to 1967 and won a bunch of Emmys and Golden Globes. By the time the above episode ran in 1959, the guest, Tom Dooley, had already had his major impact on the word stage, although in a role that certainly never came up on the show. To John Daley, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, Dorothy Kilgallen-- and their audience-- young Dr. Dooley was a crusading physician running hospitals in the war-torn Laotian jungle.

When I was very young, Dooley had had a slightly earlier brush with fame-- as a tool of the CIA in the lead up to the American invasion of Vietnam. By the time the French were ready to admit they could no longer hold back Vietnamese nationalism and were ready to surrender the country to the victorious Ho Chi Minh, fully delusional right-wing American extremists, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA head Allen Dulles, NY Cardinal Francis Spellman were determined-- with President Eisenhower's backing-- to destroy Vietnam rather than see it fall to "the Communists." But Americans were sick of war-- World War II was still fresh in everyone's mind and the very unpopular Korean War was still smoldering. In his stupendous new book, The Brothers, Stephen Kinzer explains Tom Dooley's entry onto the world stage. The Dulles' man on the ground in Vietnam in the early '50s was Madison Avenue ad man turned CIA operative Ed Lansdale. The U.S. had embarked on a policy of undermining the Geneva Agreements that had guaranteed a free election in Vietnam once they realized Ho Chi Minh would win, according to Eisenhower's own estimates, by over 80%. The Dulles brothers, Lansdale and their teams got busy with a disinformation campaign meant to stir up religious, ethnic and regional strife that would undermine civil society entirely and create despair and panic throughout the country.

Lansdale, steeped in the principles of advertising and "pay-war<' occluded that the story of Operation Passage to Freedom would resonate more deeply if he could find a single figure to personify it. Americans associated the anti-Communist crusade with dour scolds like Foster, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Cardinal Spellman. Lansdale wished to give it a brighter face.

The face he chose belonged to a young man named Tom Dooley, a handsome young Notre Dame graduate [at least everyone thought he was a Notre Dame graduate] who had become a doctor, enlisted in the Navy, and thrown himself into the nobel mission of rescuing Christians from Ho. Within months of his arrival, Lansdale began steering journalists to him. They pounced on the human aspect f his story, and he quickly became a popular hero in the United States.

Americans admired Tom Dooley because he reflected them as they believed themselves to be. He was an idealist… In his best-selling book, Deliver Us From Evil, Dooley described Ho as "a Moscow puppet" who had launched his revolution "by disemboweling more than 1,000 native women in Hanoi." Fortunately for the Vietnamese, "our love and help were available, just because we were in the uniforms of the U.S. Navy." Dooley provided a narrative calculated to move the American soul: Christians in a foreign land were being brutalized by Communists; these Communists also wished harm to Americans; therefore, the United States must act.

"The American press reported on the million-person migration as if it were a spontaneous rejection of communism and the manifestation of a natural yearning of people for freedom," according to one study. "The media ported the typical refugee as a devout Catholic who wished to practice his or her religion freely. Newsreels depicted U.S. naval vessels crammed with hungry and huddled masses being transported to freedom by kindhearted and white-uniformed sailors of the U.S. Navy. Photographs showed the small, stooped, frightened, and bedraggled Vietnamese peasants finding safety in the arms of their big, clean, strong American protectors… What the American public was not told, however, is that much of what they were seeing and hearing was the result of a CIA-instigated propaganda campaign designed to frighten Catholics in North Vietnam and ti elicit sympathy for them in the United States."

The Tom Dooley story was a masterstroke for Allen, Lansdale, and the CIA. It might have been tarnished when Dooley was forced out of the Navy for homosexuality, but the facts were hushed up. A poll in the late 1950s found him to be one of the ten most admired people in the United States. For a time after his death in 1961, the Catholic Church considered canonizing him.

"As a key agent in the first disinformation campaign of the Vietnam War," one scholar wrote of Dooley, "he performed the crucial propaganda function of making the American people knowledgeable of and willing to fight Communism in Southeast Asia."

Over the weekend, when Itay Hod exposed anti-gay hypocrite Aaron Schock (R-IL) as flamboyantly gay himself, on twitter follower of his asked if the media doesn't "have an OBLIGATION to expose his hypocrisy?" It certainly never dawned on anyone to bring it up publicly in regard to Tom Dooley when he was raising buckets of money for his various crusades in Southeast Asia while living high on the hog and seducing any young men he could get his hands on. (It wasn't that much later that the U.S. Army covered up Mitch McConnell's homosexual advances towards a young enlisted man when he was an officer at Ft Knox.) Much later, the NY Times published the first chapter of Dr. America-- The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 by James Fischer. By that time, Dooley was no longer on the track towards Roman Catholic sainthood but his real story never really become as well known as the one the CIA pushed on the AMerican people while they were preparing the country for their war against the Vietnamese people. Dooley was as mentally ill as any garden variety closet case and an inveterate liar, hypocrite and self-promoter.

Between late December 1955 and the first week of 1956, Dr. Thomas A. Dooley III signed publishing agreements with Reader's Digest and the prestigious New York firm of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. To support the massive publicity campaign for his first book, Deliver Us from Evil, Dooley supplied "biographical" materials to his sponsors. His invention as a public figure was launched in these sketchy documents that, among other fictions, reported that he "completed his undergraduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris." For the remainder of his life Dooley revised and rewrote his life story with brazen disregard for consistency, as though his experience was meaningful only as it could be invoked to serve the demands of the moment. Given license to continually reinvent himself, he simply intensified patterns that had marked his earlier years. Between 1946 and 1958, for instance--in completing a series of passport applications--Dooley alternately listed his father's birthplace as Hannibal, Joplin, Springfield, or St. Louis, Missouri (Thomas A. Dooley Jr. was born in Moberly, Missouri, in 1885).

Between Dooley hagiography, timeless and eternal (a cover story in the Liguorian, a Catholic magazine, from June 1991 is virtually identical to devotional works written during his lifetime), and the resentful exposes that emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War, one might hope to discover the "historical" Tom Dooley. But the precelebrity, presainthood version is only faintly accessible to us, due in part to the influence Dooley's public image inevitably exerted on the memory of his friends and acquaintances.

Notre Dame students were not permitted to leave the campus overnight without letters of permission from their parents, yet Dooley frequently spent weekends with his sophisticated friends along the midwestern horse show and fox hunt circuit. He also spent a great deal of time at neighboring Saint Mary's College, a women's school where he played the piano and became a favorite of the college's poet-president, Sister M. Madeleva Wolff. He even made an appearance during 1944 in the chorus line at the fabled Empire Room of Chicago's Palmer House Hotel, where impresario Merriel Abbott booked the nation's most glamorous entertainers. The enormously popular chanteuse Hildegarde was rehearsing one afternoon for a performance when she saw a young man wheeling a piano across the stage of the Empire Room, histrionically wiping feigned perspiration from his brow. She introduced herself to the young collegian and on learning he was a Notre Dame student invited him to accompany her to the 2:00 A.M. "swinger's Mass" at St. Mary's Church in Chicago.

Dooley was able to appear in Hildegarde's chorus line because, while still in his teens, he had become a highly spirited participant in the homosexual subcultures of the American armed forces, the Catholic Church, the hunt circuit, and various urban centers including New York and Chicago. Hildegarde was herself a devout Catholic with a large gay following: her campy nightclub act was rife with allusions to "Kinsey's whimseys" (after 1948) and other euphemisms for homosexuals in currency among entertainers of the period. Allan Berube, the chronicler of gay life in World War II, noted that "although nightclub entertainment was never publicly identified as gay, such performers as Hildegarde and Tallulah Bankhead attracted a devoted gay following, sometimes dropping veiled hints or singing lyrics with double meanings directed at their admirers."

From the time that Dooley's homosexuality was first discussed publicly in 1989, it has been widely assumed that he must have suffered terribly for his sexuality. This view is not wholly unfounded, but it is equally true that from his adolescence onward, Tom Dooley made little effort to conceal his sexuality. He made frequent passes at male acquaintances; according to his classmate Michael Harrington, Tom had a sexual relationship with a young cleric that was anything but secretive, at least so far as Harrington was concerned. A gay friend who served with Dooley as a marine corpsman recalled that far from being confused or tormented by his sexuality, Tom confidently exploited his appeal to gay officers in order to receive choice assignments.

In fact Dooley's precocious talent for trumping military authority and protocol--often a function of his gay connections--may have caused him later to overestimate dangerously his own prowess. In Promises to Keep, Agnes Dooley proudly described Tom's coup in arranging for an impromptu visit by Hildegarde to the U.S. Navy Hospital at St. Alban's, where he was stationed in 1945: "Hildegarde had arrived on schedule, all right, but she refused to budge unless Corpsman Dooley personally escorted her through the hospital. Followed by all the Navy brass--`It was the first time in my life I preceded anyone of rank,' Tom wrote--Hildegarde took Tom's arm, went into Tom's ward, entertained Tom's patients, and then toured the entire hospital."

In 1991, the L.A. Times outed him, posthumously, with a long piece by Diana Shaw, "The Temptation Of Tom Dooley: He Was The Heroic Jungle Doctor Of Indochina In The 1950s. But He Had A Secret, And To Protect It, He Helped Launch The First Disinformation Campaign Of The Vietnam War."

Several months after he had arrived in Laos, Dooley's mother wrote him that Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper and others were making snide allusions regarding Dooley's departure from the Navy. His mother offered to do anything she could to stop the rumors-- including calling the FBI to investigate their origin and arrest the instigators. He fired off a telegram to her, ordering her to do nothing. "This would be gravest error," he wrote. Surely it would; she would learn the truth.

Dooley followed up the telegram with a rambling letter saying he had known all along that his abrupt resignation would start rumors. But, he went on, no one who had read his book or heard him speak would believe such nonsense, implying that everyone knew that to be homosexual was blatantly at odds with being the man of action he was. The "slur on his family name" came with being a public figure; the fact that anyone should even bother to malign him was a measure of how big he had become. "I can take it, mother," he wrote, "and you should buck up and take it, too."

The rumors died before most people heard them, killed off by those who had invested in his image. The Navy issued denials-- restating that Dooley had resigned from the Navy only to continue his humanitarian work in Indochina. And Life ran a three-page spread, replete with photographs of the good doctor at work and at play. Churches, schools, and corporations went on with fund drives for Dooley, while Reader's Digest bid with other publications for exclusive rights to his next piece.

Within a year, Dooley came home, swinging through the country to solicit support. He had it in mind to franchise himself, to set up a foundation called MEDICO (Medical International Cooperation) to sustain a network of clinics throughout the developing world. He also intended to move farther north in Laos, near the Chinese border, so that he would be close to the action-- if any developed.

But during his move north, Dooley fell, knocking his shoulder and raising a lump that wouldn't recede. A few weeks later, he asked a visitor, the late William Van Valin, then a surgical resident, to remove the lump. Van Valin, jittery about operating on the famous doctor, performed the procedure nevertheless. "I did it under local," he said, "and Tom was wide awake and alert when I pulled the thing out of his chest." The "thing" was a wad the size of a golf ball, and pitch black. "Tom knew it was cancer, and that it was malignant."

Dooley dawdled before going home for more extensive surgery, and there are many who interpret the delay as a death wish. After all, Tom Dooley was fundamentally at odds with the very institutions and individuals sustaining him-- the church and the U.S. government. He knew he could count on them only as long as he was useful to them. Dr. Vincent J. Fontana, medical director of the New York Foundlings Hospital, remembers having dinner with Dooley when he came to New York for treatment. "We were sitting in a restaurant, and Dooley said, 'Nobody loves me,' " Fontana recalls.

He reacted with astonishment. "You get letters every day, from all over the world," he says he told Dooley. "Everyone loves you." But Dooley shook his head. Nobody could possibly love him, he thought, because nobody knew him. If they knew him, they would find him loathsome.

"Tom Dooley was never able to integrate his sexuality into his life in the way that many gay men in the professions were able to do back then," Fontana observes. "He gave in to the stigma and isolated himself."

Dooley parlayed his cancer treatment into a public-relations event. He invited CBS News to film his operation at New York's Sloan Kettering Medical Center, and the network dispatched cameras. On film, in contrast to the grave, stentorian CBS commentator Howard K. Smith, Dooley, painfully thin and wearing a bathrobe, was calm and straightforward. He has agreed to have his surgery broadcast, he said, to comfort other cancer victims and to promote MEDICO. The resulting footage, titled Biography of a Cancer, was broadcast nationally on April 21, 1960, and ended on a sanguine note. On television, Dooley's doctor told him he would survive for years. In fact, Dooley knew that he had a year, at most, to live.

In December, 1961, Dooley, emaciated, bent and insensible with pain, checked back into Sloan Kettering, where he celebrated his 34th birthday. According to Fontana, who was Spellman's physician at the time, Spellman went to see Dooley despite warnings from his advisers, who worried that it might lend credence to rumors about the cardinal's sexual orientation. Navy Surgeon General Bartholomew Hogan went to see Dooley as well, bringing with him a copy of Dooley's new discharge. The record would show, he told Dooley, that he had resigned with a grade of "honorable," not his original "less than honorable." And so it does.

On the day Tom Dooley died, his clinic in Laos was overrun by the Pathet Lao.

Thousands turned out for Dooley's funeral, in the snow, in St. Louis. President John F. Kennedy awarded him a posthumous Medal of Freedom. But given the demands of U.S. policy objectives and events in Vietnam and Laos, Dooley's message, that we need "works of peace," would have to be abandoned. The United States was preparing for war. And so he-- or who he was meant to be-- had to make way. He had served his purpose; the public now cared about a part of the world it had known nothing about before Dooley started pleading on its behalf.

Few doubted Dooley's motives as they were presented by him and the press-- the selflessness that made him remain a bachelor so that he could dedicate himself entirely to this cause. It seemed to them it must be a worthy cause indeed that would inspire him to sacrifice a promising career in the military so that he might devote himself to it. "He was a national hero and a national hazard," Lederer says. "It was his mammoth ego, his need for recognition, that helped get us into that mess over there."

Tonight's Random Thoughts... And Our Nightly Contest

Remember when people, generally smitten rather than thoughtful ones, were ordaining Obama a transformative leader? Should dangerous Wall Street shill and empty suit Paul Ryan ever become President of the United States, Obama will have been transformative in the same way Franz von Papen was. Or Kurt von Schleicher, the German Chancellor (and monarchist-- i.e., handmaiden to the elites) between von Papen and Hitler. Von Schleicher sought to thwart Hitler's rise to power, first by putting together a bizarre coalition around a concept of a "non-parliamentary, authoritarian but participatory regime," embracing everything from labor unions to "moderate" Nazis. He failed and, less than 2 months after taking office, was replaced by the elites who felt Hitler had matured and could be trusted-- in much the same way Sunday's Cincinnati Enquirer described their imaginary Mean Jean Schmidt in an endorsement. They fired von Schleicher and put in Hitler, certain they could control him, on June 30, 1933. Hitler had von Scheicher murdered 5 months later when it looked like he was trying to bring back the Hohenzollern monarchy to save Germany from the Nazi scourge. Too late! Be warned I'm writing more about Nazis and completely thumbing my nose at Goldwin's Law in the morning.

Now some more Nixonland; this time a little reflection on war. Our military men and women are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and no one seems quite sure why... or how to make it stop. Back when Nixon was president, it was the GIs in Southeast Asia who were working the hardest and most effectively to end the Vietnam War. Just as I was leaving for Afghanistan in the spring of 1969, Life Magazine started reporting on GI protests and "the terror it struck in the brass."

On March 20, alongside Route 9 by the Laos border, a captain ordered two platoons to wade into heavy enemy fire. They refused to budge: why fight for these cowards who refused to fight for themselves? A lieutenant colonel pleaded, then ordered; fifty-three still refused. They also refused to give their names. No disciplinary action was taken. The brass feared that the mutiny would spread brigade-wide.

The American army was collapsing in the field. "I just work hard at surviving so I can go home and protest the killing," explained one GI. ... In Vietnam soldiers wrote semi-seditious slogans on their helmet headliners ("The unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful...) and, caught in infractions, responded, "What are you going to do about it, send me to 'Nam?"

Reporters were noticing that that soldiers were lamenting "which of them would be the last to die for a war that even the president seemed to admit was a mistake?" Seem familiar?

Mike Pence is certainly the most far right member of the House Republican leadership-- and the most independent, kind a conservative loose cannon. His office called and woke me up a few weeks ago when I exposed him as the surreptitious source of the leak about Boehner's affair with printing industry lobbyist, Lisbeth Lyons, for whom Boehner tanked his own district's once burgeoning paper industry which he helped outsource to China. Many people in Washington think he has been considering challenging Boehner for the Speakership if the GOP manages the seize the majority next Tuesday. Earlier today, though, a less than dependable and certainly less than competent Politico reporter, Ben Smith, claimed that Pence may leave the GOP leadership to prepare for a bid for higher office.

Pence, a former hate talk radio announcer, is an ideologue and purity-queen and he probably doesn't want to be constrained by acting like a semi-adult if leadership needs to act that way from time to time. He joined Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, Sessions and the rest of the House leadership in voting in favor of Chinese currency manipulation, product dumping and job outsourcing although most of the GOP caucus ran from that position and voted with the Democrats. On the other hand, when Boehner, Cantor and Ryan were pimping Bush's 2008 no-strings-attached Wall Street bailout (TARP), Pence drew the line and refused to go along. 91 Republicans voted for the bailout in the House, many feeling strong-armed by Boehner, but Pence was one of the 108 Republicans (and 63 Democrats) who voted NO. Right now his story is that he feels like he can't commit to a two-year term in the leadership, although I've never heard of anyone using that excuse before.

Pence also believes that he can be a more effective conservative voice if he is free of the responsibilities that he would have in leadership of a House Republican majority... Pence was the winner of the presidential straw poll at last month’s Values Voter Summit, showing that he’s attracted a lot of buzz within the social conservative movement.

Last night's contest was for a rare autographed Patti Smith print and our winner, picked at random, was... Hilary in Baltimore, Maryland. Tonight's contest is for a box of 20 new CDs including new releases by Linkin Park, Neil Young, The Offspring, Eric Clapton + Steve Winwood, the Doobie Brothers, Green Day, Andy Bell (formerly of Erasure), The Corrs and others. So how to win the box? Well, just the way we did it last night, except tonight for the Blue America ad for Justin Coussoule. The ad is below. You can contribute to keeping it on the air on this ActBlue page.