Walter Cronkite and the CIA

If Cronkite was the mouthpiece for the Johnson Administration and CIA Cronkite was merely the tool who relayed the message they wanted the North Vietnamese to hear.

Don't confuse the Johnson administration (or any presidential administration) with "official" Washington. Presidents and administrations come and go like clockwork. Official Washington is permanent -- it stays in the government offices, in the law firms and in the news rooms. They work together, cover for each other, and they are the ones who make or break presidents and policies.

As I recall the intent was for Agnew to get hosed first which he did and then impeach Nixon while the was no sitting VP thus allowing the Speaker of the House, a Democrat, to become president, thus completely overturning the election( a landslide for all those who are not old enough to remember). A coup of sorts. It almost worked.

If you look at some of the old file footage you will see two modern day politicos. Fred Thompson who uttered the famous what did he know and when did he know it line, and Hillary as staffer for the Democrat Watergate committee.

Hmmm . . . though I'm no fan of the Birch Society (having been a member for four years) and its tainted conspiracy theories, this does seem to point in the direction of Establishment control (or at least guidance) of the "anti-Establishment" left. Does this mean it really was David Rockefeller who fired Khrushchev and replaced him with Brezhnev in '64? You know, Communism could be a secret American plot to rule the world, posing as an "anti-American" movement! Yeah! So that's why the US government is the only "reactionary" government in the world the left doesn't want overthrown by an armed uprising! Of course!

Okay, taking the old Birchite tinfoil hat off now!

You know, the ironic thing in all the alleged wars between the "liberal" Eastern Seaboard (especially the Northeast) and the "conservative" hinterlands is that originally it was the other way around. The "liberal Northeast" was in a panic over Jacobinism and was sure Thomas Jefferson, if elected, would confiscate and burn every Bible in the country. Meanwhile, from Jackson to Jefferson to William Jennings Bryan, a leftist populism was endemic to the exact same part of the country we now consider conservative. Maybe this is the reason the colors (red and blue) were switched two decades ago?

As a genuine pre-Goldwater Unionist Southern Republican (and therefore an heir to the Federalist, Anti-Masonic, Whig, and Know-Nothing political traditions) I've always been very aware of this ideological switcheroo and felt a little embarrassed by it. Is modern liberalism really merely Hamiltonian Federalism with a different ideological justification? Why did the Southern and Western populist opponents of the "Wall Street Bankers" support an income tax, railroad nationalization, and property limits in the nineteenth century but turn around and oppose these very things the following century, all the while remaining convinced that those same "Wall Street Bankers" were behind it all?

Weird.

Zionist Conspirator writes: "Weird."

Maybe not so weird. The rich and powerful have always sought the support of the masses through populist appeals. Getting the masses on your side gives you an advantage over wealthy rivals.

Julius Caesar, for example, gained an edge over rival patricians by winning favor with the Roman mob. He accomplished this by making lavish hand-outs of grain and by passing laws which conferred new rights on the masses while curtailing many privileges of the nobility. Caesar's popularity with the mob enabled him to become dictator of Rome. However, his unpopularity with the aristocracy got him assassinated.

Communism is a modern form of Caesarism. It enables rich men to win the support of the masses, in order to rule them.

The kaleidoscope of shape-shifting ideologies you describe results from the fact that, in modern times, Caesarism has been honed and perfected to a science, and employed in many different forms by innumerable rival factions of the power elite. These factions compete for the favor of the masses using a multitude of different appeals. When one sort of appeal stops working, they discard it and try another.

Ultimately, our freedom depends on the ability of the masses to see through these manipulations in the end, and to resist them when they become too burdensome or intrusive. This, I think, is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time".

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