Is Anyone Surprised that Nixon's Treason Has Finally Been Revealed?

 

Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California

The Neo-Classic front, with all those pillars, is eerily fitting for Nixon's administration.  All hail Caesar!*

Anyone who was still in denial of the treason of  our 37th president (like most of the mainstream press) should have had their delusions pierced this week as the BBC (doing actual stupefyingly arduous work that is unimaginable from US media -- well maybe from unpaid interns) listened to recently released tapes made by the Johnson Administration that reveal FBI tapping of then candidate Richard Nixon's phone (which was illegal and possibly due to a treasonous order from the Johnson administration itself). The BBC is apparently the source that broke this latest news on presidential phone tapping according to various sources though their piece didn't actually take credit they don't identify another so I'm guessing ground zero was at that news service, possibly a audio or video report.  Here's an online printed version: The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'

No one is in love with the late President Johnson who greatly enhanced our involvement in Vietnam killing tens of thousands of Americans. But, as others have pointed out that peace talks looked like they would be successful near the time of the 1968 election (if only to keep the White House in Democratic hands).  Ending the war in late 1968 or early 1969 could have saved up to twenty-two thousand American lives and possibly a million or more lives in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Most news sources are using the innocuous term "untold" because no one has bothered to find out how many, and yes, it would be an arduous task  (At least Nick Turse has researched and told the story of what happened to some Vietnamese families in "Kill Anything That Moves", while a diary of a North Vietnamese's doctor in their military Dang Thuy Tran's "Last Night I Dreamed of Peace" has also been published.  Search your favorite book seller for those or other books on the Vietnam War for more information.)

And now we are more aware than ever that wars are started or kept alive to get the citizenry to forget problems,  and or, to ensure a place in history for a leader or a wannabe leader, though we shouldn't have been surprised that actual treason does go on in and around government after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq both of which wars were prosecuted for political purposes of the lowest degree. No administration should be immune to historical review, something so many on the inside think is necessary to allow the president to do what he or she will.  Funny, but a little bird keeps cheeping in my ear about how, maybe a president should be forced to face history's ire in 10 years time, not 45.  Maybe the constraint placed on a Commander in Chief through disclosure would be good for the nation.  As it is, if it's really bad the US press with not even want to check into it.  That may be why we have to rely on the BBC to tell us what.

But running around in the streets will not do anything to help.  Strong concerted action probably could, but no entity is actually doing that.  All our activists on the left are most active in collecting and siphoning money for themselves out of those collections.  The good news is that the other side does the same thing as does the "middle".  The bad news is that the latter two types of groups have a lot more money they can collect because they feed the billionaires coffers, and with your tax dollars and are, lately, looking to throw in your earned benefits called Social Security and Medicare. 

Front side of White House

It's nice to see that the BBC has gotten some of its fire back.  The run up to the Iraq War turned it into a kitten that could do little more than to offer news blurbs and opinion after the suicide of a man who wrote a piece for the news service against invading Iraq because the real reason was about securing new sources of product for various American and British oil companies.

I think I almost heard a roar from our old friend the BBC lion in this article, or at least a long hungry growl. 

White House From Ellipse

*Yes, I understand that one could call the front of  the library also neo-colonial reminiscent of the portcullis in front of the White House. (You see the back of the White House from Constitution Avenue) American colonial architecture in the warmer summer regions was somewhat based on classical designs because days in summer in both Rome and Southeastern North America are hot and long so an adaptation of classical design was popular.  The RMN library is even more Roman than colonial though, ergo my description though I doubt I can't be schooled by a well informed architect.  So I rest on my "less informed opinion but that's what I see" rights, and they seem to be borne out by Internet searches. Think Lincoln Memorial for purer Neo-Classical architecture.  For living quarters the pure form of that might be a bit much, these days. Since the removal of hand for simple theft fell out of favor, other forms of protection had to be developed.  Even the library is enclosed in glass.

Picture above used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to their various posters at Flickr none of which have any connection to this blog or our bloggers,

Top from site of Flickr user StuSeeger.  White House front from Flickr user Brent Rostad. White House from Ellipse (my description) from foxypar4

Romney Demonstrated For War and Draft, Then Refused to Serve

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Kinda Weird and creepy, but somewhat in line with what Dubya did, jumping in front of other eligible applicants in the Texas Air National Guard so he didn't have to go to "Nam".

Video: Why Students at Stanford Shunned Young Mitt Romney

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And how and why Romney avoided the draft though he believed the Vietman War was good.  (He even demonstrated against anti-draft demonstrators.)

Still he refused to go and deferred until he had a high lottery number.  (The draft lottery was based on your birthday. So there were 366 choices. You stood for it for one year, at which time a new lottery was held for the next batch of eligible young men who would stand for it, and usually no one with with a birthday that ranked over 150 were required to report to the enlistment center.)  Bill Clinton did the same, using deferments based, not on his powerful and wealthy father, but on his brainpower that got him scholarships (Clinton's parents were not rich and, in fact, his mother had left his step-father I think by that time. Clinton's own father died in a car accident in the months before he was born, IIRC.).  But Bill Clinton was against the war on moral grounds.  Mitt Romney was for the war, and would have gotten a relatively safe, assignment, like Al Gore's (who was the son of a Senator), but dodged, just like Cheney and other Chickenhawks.

Even at that though, the unauthorized use (or claim thereof) of a troopers uniform is creepier still.  As others have pointed out, the Washington Post article that exposed Romney's known bullying past also relates a tale of Romney in collusion with two friends, staged the governor's son dressing in  trooper uniform arresting the young men on a double date an leaving the two young women apparently stranded in the middle of the night by the side of the road.  The article does report though the young women were back in their dorms by 11:00 pm.

When Nick Ut Saved the Naked Running Girl

I don't mean to be as flip as that title might suggest.  The photograph shows children, one a naked girl running down the road.  You can't see how badly burned she is from the front, but the children from a South Vietnamese village had been caught in a napalm attack from their people's own military. 

First lets have an definition of Napalm from Wikipedia:

Napalm is a thickening/gelling agent generally mixed with petroleum or a similar fuel for use in an incendiary device, primarily as an anti-personnel weapon.

It makes the burning fuel stick to the human or other body so it burns more effectively.  This is what the South Vietnam army was dropping on the people of the village that you will see in the video.  That kind of horrific tactic is why many Americans didn't feel bad that South Vietnam and their allies, er we, lost the war. .

More importantly, this is a look at what was allowed in those days, and may still be allowed in the theater of war.  It is cleaned up and removed from sight of people back home.  We saw the still at the time.  Everyone most likely remembers it, and I read a report of what happened once in the 80s.  But I never saw the video before, never saw Kim Phuk's back with it's horrible burn before I saw this report.

The report will tell you that Nick Ut works in LA now as a photographer.  I have seen his name on many photos, including ones that people might call paparazzi shots.  He was the guy or one of the photographers who caught Paris Hilton crying as she was driven back to complete her sentence of incarceration a few years back.  We all have to get by somehow.

(The people in fatigues were all photographers and reporters, not military.)