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saganite writes: "What’s left unsaid is why the CIA would want to bring about a US defeat in Vietnam."

I touched upon that topic in some previous columns:

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.