Listen to the hand! Let's get Real! The Truth. Moue Power!
I voted for Nixon. It was the the first vote that I cast as a citizen. I was a sophomore at Loyola University which meant that, like my schoolmates, I took the L from 63rd & Ashland ( Englewood & Howard) and got off at Chicago and walked to Lewis Towers Campus on Rush Street. Loyola was rigorous. The professors were dead-on serious and exacting. Everyone had a job outside of taking classes and many had two or three. If you were late for a class you often found yourself locked out of the room.
I helped out with the 18th Ward Regular Democratic Organization. 1972 was a very weird election. In the Illinois Presidential Primary votes were cast for individual delegates to the convention. They were not tagged as generic McGovern, Humphrey, Kennedy, or Ribicoff delegates.
A particularly oily gent by the name of Ald. Bill Singer, who won his Progressive spurs with Abner Mikva's imprimatur and would later rat-out Dr. Scholl Land Deal partners and avoid a Federal Time-out, was feeling his youthful oats and leagued up with the to-be Dean of American Shakedown Artistry, Rev. Jesse Jackson in voiding all of Illinois's duly elected delegates to the convention.and grabbing political power from the clutches of people who actually knew what they were doing.
I was young and disgusted with National Democratic Party. If George McGovern needed to steal the convention in order to get elected, why would I vote for someone with such low self-esteem? I held my nose and down my lunch and voted for Tricky Dick Nixon. Shortly, I began reading excerpts from the Washington Post's reports about Cuban burglars, black bags of dough, a crash near Midway*, CREEP, and GOP rat-sex-ting.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Woodstein, took Nixon to the woodshed. Shoe-leather reporting and pains-taking attention to facts and numbers unmasked a self-serving phony. Journalism became a sacred institution.
Oddly enough, the same institution that feted Woodstein would become the mask-manufacturers of self-serving phonies from the Chicago Wards all the way to the White House.
The 1972 Democratic Convention and its bloody Irish-twin Roe v. Wade (1973) was the nativity of the national and local idiocies identified as Progressive/Liberal Democrat policy. The term Liberal Democrat has faded into history and Democrat is too often associated with the power mad folly that is American Progressive thought. If it is Progressive it either encourages State-sponsored murder (abortion/euthanasia) or manages to screw up everything from budgets to traffic.
I am a Democrat; same as I was in 1972. 98% of the votes that I have cast have been for Democrats. I can not vote for a Progressive; especially after having voted for Pat Quinn and Toni Preckwinkle, as part of doing a solid for some pals.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is what being a Progressive is all about. He'd burn a library full of pre-schoolers to teach them a lesson about reading the fire code. Most Progressives in public office and appointed pay-rollers are "ain't she/he greaters" wealthy dopes with nothing much else to do - you find them running the CTA, serving as Lieutenants Governor, manning the seats on paid commissions, getting facetime on MSNBC while screwing up things in Congress, or at the Department of Education, or building a Sequester.
Half of Woodstein, 50% of the guys who brought down Nixon, Bob Woodward has gotten himself in the jackpot with the Obama White House for getting his facts straight. President Obama talks out of whatever side of the mouth Val Jarrett tells him to use and it seems to me does not fully understand what he puts out from that side of his oral cavity. Rahm Emanuel became Mayor of Chicago, because he could no longer even suggest a moue from the President. Bill Daley found that out too. What's the point of being a progressive when you are not allowed to at least torch a village or two.Progressive is all about power.
Hence Mayor Rahm. Last night, true to the Progressive Code of Etiquette introduced Mr. Woodward at a Holocaust Museum event at the Hyatt with an attempted Hyde Park Pimp Slap. The Mayor made reference to the e-mails from Gene Sperling at the White House, warning Woodward to beware his 'Obama moved the goal-post' on Congress remarks.
I am a reactionary. I am never pre-emptively snotty. However, once the crack against me or mine is made for no other purpose than to denigrate, I am more than happy to oblige. e.g. A Progressive is the loudmouth who tries to embarrass someone -
- Mr. Sumner Quickbritches of the IVI -"Hey, everybody here comes the Biggest Fat-assed Catholic, Racist Homophobic, Wrong Side of History, Breeder Loser in the world!"
- Me, All of the Above- " Runner up."
- Sumner Quickbritches of the IVI - " Hateful! Hateful, on so many levels . . .and sad."
Progressives never learn the sobering and wholesome effects of a slap in the puss, when an off-hand remark, fib, gross-exaggeration, lie or calumny gets blown forth. Most other folks learned the lesson early often that it does not cost you nickel one to be a good guy.
In response, Robert Woodward offered this salient truth - that Rahm was a player and his play helped cause the division in our nation. Here is nugget of Woodward's wisdom - “There is so little focus on what’s real, what’s true.”
From the 1972 Democratic Convention, to the Watergate burglaries, to Roe V. Wade, through Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Surf-Dog Millionaire John Kerry, Hillary's Benghazi, and Obama's moues, America lost much of its greatness to play the Progressive.
What's real - America is broke and it is being bullied by a fat kid in Korea and a hillbilly with a Koran in Iran; what's true is we can do so much better, but we will not for at least three more years.
* Down the block from my cousin Larry Hickey's home in Queen of the Universe parish - watch the neighbors help the firemen:
It was at 2:29 PM on Friday, December 8, 1972, during the height of the Watergate scandal that United Airlines flight 553 crashed just outside of Chicago during a landing approach to Midway Airport. Initial reports indicated that the plane had some sort of engine trouble when it descended from the clouds. But the odd thing about this crash is what happened after the plane went down. Witnesses living in the working-class neighborhood in which the plane crashed said that moments after impact, a battalion of plainclothes operatives in unmarked cars parked on side streets pounced on the crash-site [High Treason 2 (1992, Carroll and Graf); Harrison Livingston; p426] . These so-called 'FBI types' took control of the scene and immediately began sifting through the wreckage looking for something. At least one survivor recognized a "rescue worker"--clad in overalls sifting through wreckage--as an operative of the CIA [op. cit.; p428]
Nixon whitehouse asserts control of Investigation
One day after the crash, the Whitehouse head of Nixon's "plumber's" outfit--Egil Krogh, Jr.-- was made undersecretary of transportation, a position that put him in a direct position to oversee the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Agency which are both authorized by law to investigate airline crashes. Krogh would later be convicted of complicity in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's Psychiatrist's office along with Hunt, Liddy and a small cast of CIA-trained and retained Cuban black-bag specialists.About a month after Krogh's new assignment, Nixon's appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, was made an executive in the Chicago office of United Airlines [op. cit.; p429], where he threatened the media to steer clear of speculation about sabotage in the crash. On December 19th--eleven days after the crash--Nixon appointed ex-CIA officer, Alexander Butterfield, as head of the FAA. Students of Watergate will remember Butterfield as the Whitehouse official who supervised Nixon's secret taping system and who exposed the existence of the infamous tapes that ultimately would force Nixon to resign.
Ostensibly traveling with Mrs. Hunt on flight 553 was CBS news corespondent Michelle Clark who, rumor had it, had learned from her sources that the Hunts were about to spill the proverbial beans regarding the Nixon whitehouse and its involvement in the Watergate burglary; Clark also died in the crash.
A large sum of money (between $10,000 and $100,000) was found amid the wreckage in the possession of Mrs. Hunt. It was during this time that Dorothy Hunt was traveling around the country paying off operatives and witnesses in the Watergate operation with money her husband had extorted from Nixon via his counsel, John Dean. Hunt had threatened Nixon and Dean with exposing the nature of all the sordid deeds he had done.
Could it be that the fuel for Hunt's blackmail of the president had little to do with the so-called "third-rate burglary" of the Democratic headquarters? Could it have had more to do with the fate of John F. Kennedy and of Nixon's awareness of who was really behind the planning and deployment of his demise? In the Watergate tapes, Nixon displays a malignant paranoia to his chief-of-staff, H. R. Haldeman, concerning E. Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs operation. He decides to use this paranoia to force the CIA to help cover up the Watergate affair:
"...just say (unintelligible) very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much, if he was involved -- you happen to know that? If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate - both for the CIA and for the country..."In his memoir, The Ends of Power (1978), Haldeman claims that all the references in the tapes to "The Bay of Pigs thing", were coded references by Nixon:
In those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs [in the White House tapes] he [Nixon] was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination...After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic cover-up...The CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy's assassination and the CIA...in fact, Counter Intelligence Chief James Angleton of the CIA called Bill Sullivan of the FBI (Number Three man under J. Edgar Hoover, who later died of a gunshot would) and rehearsed the questions and answers they would give to the Warren Commission investigators."
In The Haldeman Diaries (1994), editor Stephen Ambrose wrote that Haldeman, in the latter years of his life, attributed the above revelations to his ghost writer, Joseph Di Mona; by 1990, Haldeman was repudiating the entire book. One must remember that from the time Nixon fired Haldeman (1973) until December 1978, the two men were not on speaking terms; it was during this time--coincident with his prison term--that Haldeman released his book.
