John McCain’s BFF Almost Puts Fantasy Into Practice

Years ago, when Tim Leary and G. Gordon Liddy were doing their tandem “debate tour” of the nation, I asked Liddy if he had ever killed anyone. “No,” he said, adding, “But, if I had, I wouldn’t tell you.”

Believing what you’re told by intelligence agents is foolish business.
Posted by: Meteor Blades at December 4, 2003 08:28 PM | PERMALINK

Liddy wasn’t joking:

I was so confident of the ability of the [dirty tricks] group recruited that when I happened to meet Bud Krogh on the steps of the Old Executive Office Building, I thought of a proposal I’d made months before. I’d asserted that key foreign drug-smuggling operatives, who were well known should be recognized as killers of American children and subject to being killed themselves. By us. State had been horrified at the idea of such direct action as assassination and the suggestion had gone nowhere, but Bud had not seemed to object in principle. He had been traveling abroad quite a bit and had an appreciation of the difficulties involved in combating the drug barons with mere diplomacy. I was also very grateful to him for all he had done to advance me in the administration. I patted him on the back and said, “Bud, if you want anyone killed, just let me know.” He smiled and said, “I will.” I reacted to his smile by saying, “I’m serious.”

“I know you are,” said Krogh, his smile gone. “I’ll let you know.”

Long before Ann Coulter expressed the wish that al-Qaeda had flown jet airplanes into The New York Times building, Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt actually planned, themselves, on murdering an American journalist, Jack Anderson. Small wonder that John McCain, and the wingnutosphere which seeks to elect him, has little problem with Gordon Liddy, one of the first of the Army of Davids to think (albeit in Liddy’s case literally) about slaying the great monsters of the wingnut imagination, the much-hated Goliaths of the “MSM.” Showing how little things have changed over the years, Liddy always maintained that his scheme to murder Jack Anderson was “not retributive” but preventative, that it was a matter of principle — similar to how, nowadays, wingnuts insist their crusade against the press is not because of venal or vindictive reasons, but because of a disinterested desire to correct “bias.” In point of fact, both Liddy and his admirers (WFB found the assassination story “riveting“) are full of shit.

First for Liddy’s own account of how he planned to murder Jack Anderson. Here’s the version he told to Playboy magazine:

LIDDY: We worked out a plan, but it was ultimately never approved by our principals. Hunt and I started the ball rolling by meeting a physician from the CIA, who was introduced euphemistically as a specialist in “the unorthodox application of chemical and medical knowledge.”

PLAYBOY: Meaning an expert in killing people.

LIDDY: Crude but not inexact. Anyway, we had lunch over at the Hay-Adams across from the White House and discussed various methods of killing Anderson, including coating the steering wheel of his car with an LSD solution sufficiently potent to cause a crash, which we rejected as too chancy, and “aspirin roulette”, which we also turned down.

PLAYBOY: Dare we ask?

LIDDY: Aspirin roulette is intelligence jargon for a rather common assassination technique, which entails the substitution of an ordinary aspirin or other headache-remedy tablet in the target’s medicine cabinet with a look-alike that is actually a deadly poison.

Incidentally, “aspirin roulette” is a method by which the CIA tried to murder Fidel Castro. Proving the adage that wingnuts — even the novelists among them — are the most unimaginative lot, also involved in that project (“Track II”) was Liddy’s co-conspirator, E. Howard Hunt. Anyway, the version in Liddy’s memoir, Will (in which Liddy himself notes Hunt’s tendency to keep recommending the same method of murder over and over), is consistent with the above, only more detailed:

On a brisk February day shortly thereafter, Howard Hunt and I had lunch with a man he introduced to me as Dr. Edward Gunn, a physician retired from the CIA and an expert on “the unorthodox application of medical and chemical knowledge.” I took “retired” to be in quotes since that is standard technique and Hunt introduced me under my operational alias, “George Leonard.”…

The purpose of the luncheon, Hunt explained to me previously, was to take advantage of the expertise of Dr. Gunn in preparing, for the approval of Hunt’s “principal,” a plan to stop columnist Jack Anderson. Even with each other, Hunt and I often, when discussing the most sensitive of matters, used the term my principal rather than identify our superiors. I, at least, had several. Hunt, to my knowledge, had only one: Chuck Colson.

Anderson, Hunt reported, had now gone too far. As the direct result of an Anderson story, a top U.S. intelligence source abroad had been so compromised that, if not already dead, he would be in a matter of days. That was too much. Something had to be done.

The conversation at lunch was in the hypothetical terms usually employed in such circumstances. We did not mention Anderson’s name explicitly. Hunt urged the use of LSD on the steering wheel of the “target’s” automobile to cause him to hallucinate at a public function and thus be discredited. Dr. Gunn shot down that idea on the ground that CIA experience with the drug had demonstrated the unpredictability of individual reaction.

I took the position that, in a hypothetical case in which the target had been the direct cause of the identification and execution of one of our agents abroad, halfway measures were not appropriate. How many of our people should we let him kill before we stop him, I asked rhetorically, still not using Anderson’s name. I urged as the logical and just solution that the target be killed. Quickly.

My suggestion was received with immediate acceptance, almost relief, as if they were just waiting for someone else to say for them what was really on their minds. There followed a lengthy discussion of the ways and means to accomplish the task best. Hunt, still enamored of the LSD approach, asked Dr. Gunn whether a massive dose might not cause such disruption of motor function that the driver would lose control of it and crash. Dr. Gunn repeated his earlier negative advice on the use of LSD. Besides, though LSD can be absorbed through the skin, our hypothetical target might be wearing gloves against the winter cold, or be chauffeur-driven. The use of LSD was, finally, dismissed.

Previously, Hunt and Liddy had conspired to spike Daniel Ellsberg’s drink with LSD before he gave a public speech, so that Ellsberg would, it was hoped, freak out and say or do something to discredit himself. Crazy as that scheme was, it was still only dangerous to Ellsberg himself. But giving someone LSD who is operating a motor vehicle, well… that could be dangerous to a great many people in traffic and Liddy and Hunt obviously don’t care.

Hunt’s suggestion called to Dr. Gunn’s mind a technique used successfully abroad. It involved catching the target’s moving automobile in a turn or sharp curve and hitting it with another car on the outside rear quarter. According to Dr. Gunn, if the angle of the blow and the relative speed of the two vehicle were correct, the target vehicle would flip over, crash, and, usually, burn. By this time I was sure Gunn had guessed the identity of the hypothetical target, since he asked whether he was local and suggested, if he was, that we use the method he had just described at Chevy Chase Circle, a route Anderson did travel. Chevy Chase Circle, he pointed out, is notorious as the scene of fatal auto accidents and its configuration ideal for use of the technique.

I argued that Dr. Gunn’s method would require the services of an expert to ensure success, and one might not be available to us. Dr. Gunn looked surprised, as if it had not occurred to him that we would not have available all the resources of the CIA.

Other methods were discussed and discarded. “Aspirin Roulette,” for example: the placing of a poisoned replica of the appropriate brand of headache tablet into the bottle usually found in the target’s medicine cabinet. That method was rejected because it would gratuitously endanger innocent members of his family and might take months before it worked.

I came up with the suggestion we finally agreed upon as the one to be recommended. It was a lethal adaptation of a technique long in use by the FBI during surreptitious entries. When an embassy safe, for example, is to be penetrated so that crypto material for use by NSA, everyone who might have access to the office is followed while the penetration is in progress. It is not begun unless a wiretap or other positive means has been established that the embassy personnel will be away for a sufficient period. Should someone return unexpectedly, however, he would never get into the embassy door. He would be assaulted, his wallet and watch removed, and, while he was unconscious as the latest victim of the outrageously high rate of street crime in Washington (which is not within the jurisdiction of, and therefore not the fault of, the FBI), the entry team would make good its escape.

Oh, so now they care about “collateral damage” as far as worrying about someone else in Anderson’s house taking the poison.

Also, it is interesting that Liddy, a law and order guy who came to Washington full of typically rightwing impatience with bureaucratic laxity (and excuses for that laxity), has just gleefully recommended perpetration of street crime, and neatly shifted the blame for it on a rival government entity, the Capitol Police. Thus the would-be murderer is also a bureaucratic weasel of the shiftiest sort.

I submitted that the target should just become a fatal victim of the notorious Washington street-crime rate. No one argued against that recommendation and, at Hunt’s suggestion, I gave Dr. Gunn a hundred-dollar bill, from Committee to Re-elect the President intelligence funds, as a fee for his services. I took this to be to protect Dr. Gunn’s image as “retired.”

Afterward Hunt and I discussed the recommendation further. It was decided to include the suggestion that the assassination of Jack Anderson be carried out by Cubans already recruited for the intelligence arm of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

“Suppose,” said Hunt, “my principal doesn’t think it wise to entrust so sensitive a matter to them?”

Obviously, this is pretty detailed. It also leads to still unanswered questions. Given the enthusiasm Hunt displays for the LSD method, one is reminded of Miles Copeland’s educated guess that Edmund Muskie had been given a dose of the drug before his public emotional crack-up derailed his campaign. Did Liddy and Hunt make a trip to Maine at about that time? Also, one wonders to what extent Richard Helms’s notoriously corrupt CIA was involved in all this. Even Liddy didn’t believe that “Dr. Gunn” was really retired. The CIA — probably through General Cushman — had indeed helped Liddy and Hunt with other schemes, the former with professional-looking charts for presentation of the “GEMSTONE” scheme, the latter with a professional disguise for an undercover trip to Dita Beard’s beside (about which more later).

Whenever Liddy tells the story about conspiring to kill Jack Anderson, he’s accustomed to the horrified gasps he hears in response; therefore, he’s taken a lot of time to craft an excuse. As you might guess from its coming from a Nixonite, the excuse is based on that traditional catch-all, “national security.” First, Liddy’s Playboy interview:

PLAYBOY: And yet your book abounds with plots to murder opponents of and defectors from the Nixon adminstration, ranging from Jack Anderson to E. Howard Hunt —

LIDDY: None of which came to fruition.

PLAYBOY: Do we detect an unspoken “alas” at the end of that statement?

LIDDY: If you’re a mindreader, you tell me.

PLAYBOY: Why in God’s name did you want to murder Jack Anderson in the first place?

LIDDY: I’d prefer to call it justifable homicide, since murder is a legal term for a specific type of homicide that by its very definition is unjustifiable…

[snip]

Anderson is one of those mutant strains of columnist who are half legitimate, because he passes off biased interpretations and selective information as straight reporting. At one point, Anderson’s systematic leaking of top-secret information rendered the effective conduct of American foriegn policy virtually impossible…

Now to Will:

I am asked frequently whether I believe in “blind obedience” to orders from legitimate authority, the code that permitted many Germans to carry out genocide. I do not. While there is a presumption of regularity that must obtain in any orders from legitimate superiors without which no government could function, I believe in individual responsibility, free will, and the rule of reason. There is a point beyond which I will not go, and that is anything my conscience tells me is malum in se (evil in and of itself) or my judgment tells me is irrational. I have no problem with doing something that is malum prohibitum (wrong only because of the existence of a law prohibiting it).

An example of malum in se would be the sexual assault of a child. In every society such a thing would be recognized as wrong. It would require no act of the legislature forbidding it to inform people that it was wrong.” An example of malum prohibitum, on the other hand, would be the statute prohibiting driving through a stop sign without coming to a complete halt. Absent such a law, to do so would be a morally indifferent act.

Common sense tells us that minor problems require and justify but minor responses, and only extreme problems require and justify extreme solutions. In the case of killing it is well to remember that the Ten Commandments, translated correctly from the original Aramaic [sic — I think he means Hebrew; Aramaic would be correct for some of the New Testament], do not contain the injunction “Thou shalt not kill.” It reads, “Thou shalt not do murder.” Quite another thing. There are circumstances that not only justify killing but require it (when one is charged with the safekeeping of a child, for example, and the only way to prevent its death from another’s attack is to kill that other person). These are all situations that require informed and responsible judgments.

There are other ethical doctrines that may be applied. In World War II some bomber pilots were concerned when they knew that, for example, the ball bearing factory that was their target was across the street from an orphanage and their bombing altitude meant that it was very likely the orphanage would also be hit. In such a situation the principle of double effect comes into play; the unintended secondary effect of the destruction of the orphanage is permissible. The classical example is that of the driver of a loaded schoolbus [sic] going down the one-lane mountain road with a sheer thousand-foot drop one either side rounding a turn to see a three-year-old girl on a tricycle in the middle of the road. He is going too fast to stop. The choices are go off the road and take thirty-five children and himself to certain death to spare the three-year-old, or run over the three-year-old and save the thirty-five. I’d run over the three-year-old. I also fail to see any distinction between killing an enemy soldier in a time of declared war and killing an enemy espionage agent in a “cold” war, or even killing certain U.S. citizens. For example, were I back in my ODESSA position and were given the instruction from an appropriate officer of the government, I would kill Philip Agee if it were demonstrated (as it has often been argued) that his revelations have led directly to the death of at least one of his fellow CIA officers, that he intended to continue the revelations, and that they would lead to more deaths. Notice that this would not be retributive but preventative. It is the same rationale by which I was willing to obey an order to kill Jack Anderson. But I would do so only after satisfying myself that it was: a)an order from legitimate authority; b)a question of malum prohibitum; and c)a rational response to the problem.

I thought about the damage Anderson was doing to our country’s ability to conduct foreign policy. Most of all, I thought of that U.S. agent abroad, dead or about to die after what I was sure would be interrogation by torture. If Hunt’s principal was worried, I had the answer.

“Tell him,” I said, “if necessary, I’ll do it.”

Actually, Anderson at worst blew the cover of an asset, not an agent. Back to the Playboy interview:

PLAYBOY: Casting Anderson as a villain who caused the death of a U.S. Agent is an effective rationale for silencing him, but the fact remains that his removal would have spared Nixon considerable political embarrassment. Wasn’t that the real motive?

LIDDY: No, it was not, though I recall George Bernard Shaw’s observing that assassination is the extreme form of censorship. [Liddy goes on to deny a political motive, saying that if the Nixon cronies had tried to whack every journalist who had it in for Nixon, the National Press Club would be full of wall-to-wall memorial plaques. Hah fucking hah.]

PLAYBOY: Anderson strenuously denies having done such a thing.

LIDDY: No, he doesn’t. What he does do is say over and over… that he never “revealed or identified a CIA officer.” Anderson desperately sticks to that tortured formulation, because it’s not a technical lie. Just like that other secular saint of the American liberal establishment, old Maximum John Sirica, he’s scared of getting his halo tarnished.

[…]

PLAYBOY: …What did you finally decide on?

LIDDY: A simple if un-James Bondish method… we merely decided to make it a lethal mugging.

PLAYBOY: Who would have done the job?

LIDDY: It was initially decided to assign it to some of our Cuban-exile assets, but then Hunt began to worry that our principals would deem it too sensitive a matter to be entrusted to them. So I volunteered to do it myself.

[…]

LIDDY: …We didn’t want to make it look like anything more than another Washington street-crime statistic, remember, so no sophisticated weaponry could be employed.

PLAYBOY: How would you have killed him?

LIDDY: Oh, I would have knifed him or broken his neck, probably. One of us would have died, no doubt about it. But, as I say, we never received the final green light.

PLAYBOY: Were you relieved or disappointed?

LIDDY: I was neither. I was acting on the instructions of my principal, and I was prepared to follow those instructions either way they went.

PLAYBOY: You really see nothing anomalous, much less frightening, about two aides to the President of the United States cold-bloodedly plotting to assassinate one of the country’s leading reporters?

LIDDY:I know it violates the sensibilities of the innocent and tender-minded, but in the real world, you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you’re violating.

PLAYBOY: Including murder?

LIDDY: Drastic problems sometimes demand drastic solutions. Look, let me give you an example. Philip Agee, the CIA defector, has effectively exposed and compromised dozens of our intelligence agents around the world, and one of his revelations led directly to the assassination of the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch. This one man has done untold damage to the worldwide security interests of the United States. And what have we done about it? Nothing. Fifty years ago, Harry Stimson scuttled an effective American intelligence effort on the grounds that gentlement don;t read other gentlemen’s mail. The pendulum seems to have swung all the way back to that position, and the Russians couldn’t be happier. They’ve tried to destroy American intelligence capability for thirty-five years, and in five years we’ve done the job for them, with the help of demagogues like Frank Church. I just wish someone would point out to the good senator that the world is not run by the League of Women Voters.

PLAYBOY: Returning to Philip Agee for a moment, how would you deal with him? Would you, in CIA parlance, “terminate him with extreme prejudice”?

LIDDY: You’re damn right I would. If I were back serving in some capacity in the American intelligence community and I found Agee living comfortably abroad, outside the reach of our law and continuing his relevations, I would strongly recommend that he be assassinated. And were I given the task, I would undertake it, and feel completely justified in so doing. But let me stress that his killing would not be retributive but preventive… same rationale I employed in the case of Mr. Anderson.

PLAYBOY: You’d be willing to kill a man you’ve never met solely because he was on the opposite side of the political and ideological fence?

LIDDY: No, my friend, because he’s on the opposite side of the trench, in a political-military war between the United States and the Soviet Union that is crucial to our survival as a free nation…

PLAYBOY: And you’d feel no qualms, much less remorse, about liquidating someone like Agee?

LIDDY: No more than swatting a fly…

Ultimately, Liddy doesn’t give a shit about “national security” per se; he just, like many a wingnut (or mafioso, for that matter), wants to lethally enforce his own definitions of loyalty and treason. How can I say such things? Because Liddy has also shared his thoughts about killing John Dean and Howard Hunt after they went ‘dolchstoss’ on Liddy’s Fuhrer, Richard Nixon. In Liddy’s mind, any obstacle to Richard Nixon was a threat to “national security.”

There’s a lot of hypocrisy here to deal with. For one thing, there’s Liddy’s sneering remark that Anderson is making a distinction without a difference with regard to the outed asset. Liddy counts on the reader’s naivete of CIA lingo, hoping that the reader doesn’t catch Gordo’s very deliberate conflation of agent and contact or source or asset. One is an American citizen in the pay of the American government, acting — or supposed to be acting — in his country’s interests; the other, usually a foreign national and often a citizen of a belligerent country, is a source of information to the former, and this is exactly the type that was ‘outed’ by Anderson. As such, Anderson was doing exactly what… many CIA agents, in fact, do: burn sources. Come on, anyone who’s watched Spy Game knows how this works. Anyway, another giveway to the bad faith in the “national security” rationale is the sudden ambiguity of it. Notice how Liddy, just a minute before being so detailed in his examples (sharing the school bus parable with obvious relish), suddenly falls back on Anderson’s damage to the ability of the Nixon Administration to make foreign policy. See? Any dissenter could be guilty of that; the elasticity of the rule can stretch to the size of Daffyd ab Hugh’s waistband, allowing a great many of Liddy’s (and Nixon’s, which is the real point) political enemies to qualify for liquidation at the hands of Liddyan thugs.

For those who still like to think that Liddy’s just being protective of CIA agents, his remarks on the outing of Valerie Plame (an actual agent as opposed to asset or source or contact) are instructive:

MATTHEWS: Why shouldn‘t this guy do time?

LIDDY: Because I did time because I really did something.

Bear in mind that Mr. Fitzgerald, when they started this, knew who the leaker was, and knew it was not Scooter Libby.

MATTHEWS: Well, Libby was one of the leakers. He just wasn‘t the first.

LIDDY: No, he was—he was not the one who, you know, did the deed.

Secondly, he knew that there was no violation of either the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act.

So, what does he do? He goes and starts asking questions of people in and around the administration, and he gets a conflict between the recollection of Tim Russert and Scooter Libby.

He chooses to believing Tim Russert, rather than Scooter Libby, and he

and he prosecutes him.

(CROSSTALK)

LIDDY: Obstruction of justice? Obstruction of what? There was no crime.

[snip]

LIDDY: OK.

You—you left out one of the key elements of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. And that is that the person has to have been posted within the last five years abroad in a covert position. She was not. So, there wasn‘t any question about the violation of that. And there wasn‘t any question about any potential violation.

And:

Liddy claimed that the reason McClellan is being circumspect is because the special prosecutor has specifically asked that he not comment on it. Then Liddy tried to make the argument that the outing was really no big deal. He said Plame was not an undercover operative operating in the field, the kind of person the statute seeks to protect. (Comment: Then why is there such a lengthy investigation about the leak? Why did George Bush say he would fire the leaker? And why haven’t the Republicans made this argument in a big way up until now?).

Liddy also said that Plame’s name was made public by Novak, not Cooper, that Rove was just trying to help Cooper because he was “about to embarrass himself” by publishing that Vice President Cheney who had sent Ambassador Wilson to Niger. According to Liddy, Rove – in an uncharacteristic act of media altruism – said it wasn’t Cheney, it was Wilson’s wife “who apparently, he said, works over there at the agency. That is not violating the statute and he didn’t name her.”

And:

To Liddy, Rove’s perjury (if that’s what it was) was just “an act of omission,” no biggie.

And:

G. GORDON LIDDY, CONSERVATIVE RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: . Mrs. Plame, or Ms. Plame, whatever — however she calls herself — was not part of the DDO. She was not posted abroad. And so far as I know, she was not undercover.

Plame was part of the DO (the Directorate of Operations); the DDO is the Director of the DO, as somebody claiming to be G. Gordon Liddy, noted G-Man and Watergate felon, should know. I think this man is an imposter!

Anyway, as a NOC, Plame was part of the DO, both while she was assigned overseas, and while she served at CIA Headquarters. And of COURSE she was undercover, or the CIA would never have sent a Crimes Report to the FBI, and DOJ would have never opened a criminal investigation. G. Gordon, you’re such a moron. (And I mean that in a good way.)

And here’s some more from Liddy:

LIDDY: Look, the point that should be made here is that Mr. Rove did not disclose her identity. He attempted to keep Mr. Cooper from embarrassing himself by putting out a false story.

Isn’t it nice that a big shot like Karl worries about the tender feelings of reporters, and wants to save them from the embarrassment of putting out false stories?

LIDDY: The woman was not what is known in the trade as an operator. She worked at headquarters, probably doing some kind of research on WMD. She sent her husband, a former ambassador over there, who, according to his account, sat at a swimming pool drinking green tea talking to some people.

And then he came back and said that there was no attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium ore from Niger. The fact is, they did.

G. Gordon, nobody “in the trade” calls Case Officers or NOCs “operators.” That’s just something you read in a Matt Helm novel.

There’s always the possibility, of course, that Liddy excuses the outing of Ms. Plame on the basis that she’s just a hot chick, and everyone knows that the only thing they’re good for is display in the latest Gordon Liddy “Stacked and Packed” calendar. So what about CIA male assets (not even CIA agents, as was Ms. Plame) who’ve been outed? Let’s take, for instance, the case of Ali Hassan Salameh. Salameh, mastermind of the Munich Massacre was (wait for it)… a CIA asset in the Middle East, almost exactly like the one Anderson outed, though probably far less important. Consistency would require Gordon Liddy to at least denounce the Israeli government generally and Mossad in particular, since they were responsible for not merely outing Salameh, but assassinating him. But, as you might imagine, Liddy has nothing but praise for the Israeli intelligence apparatus.

Similarly, Liddy, in discussing the planned assassination of Anderson, always cites the case of Philip Agee: He considers them equivalent, and says he’d have killed Agee, too, if he’d had the authority, because Agee allegedly outed several CIA agents including Richard Welch. This, too, is not exactly true:

When a CIA station chief, Richard Welch, was assassinated in Athens, his outing was blamed on the Church Committee, despite the fact that the Church Committee had nothing to do with his outing. The Church Committee had named no CIA agent, and hence the allegation was absurd. At the same time, Philip Agee, a renegade CIA agent, published a list of CIA agents using diplomatic cover (one of whom was not Richard Welch [*]). According to several sources, including Christopher Hitchens, Welch had been identified by N-17 because he was careless about his place of residence. Indeed, it seems incredible to me that anyone would suppose otherwise. In Greece, the CIA was regarded as the de facto ruler of the country between 1967 and 1974 (I disagree, but my point is that the Greeks naturally assume the despicable regime that ruled their country was a puppet of the USA; the opposition, of course, would have made it a top priority to know who the US “procurator” was in Greece, and in 1975 the CIA knew they had succeeded.

I submit there is a reason why these names, especially Jack Anderson and Philip Agee, are linked in the giant clusterfuck in Liddy’s head: because, ultimately, the targeting of Jack Anderson was done out of nothing but political motivation. Anderson had broken stories on the corrupt quid pro quo between the Nixon Administration and ITT, mobster Johnny Roselli (who was part of “Track II” in Cuba, a subject Nixon was terribly paranoid about), and the loan Howard Hughes had given to Donald Nixon. Anderson was a thorn in Nixon’s side, thus, in Liddy’s eyes, a traitor worth assassinating. Liddy’s association of Frank Church (and his committee) with Philip Agee, apropos Richard Welch, is also “logical” on grounds of perceived treason to Richard Nixon and therefore to America, because of the fact Church was onto and Agee (at least in Liddy’s mind) was close to blabbing, that the Greek junta laundered CIA money into Nixon’s election campaign coffers. Remember, if you’re not with a wingnut you’re against him, and if you were important enough, that was plenty enough reason for a toy fascist like Gordon Liddy to plot your murder.

John McCain approves!

 

Comments: 49

 
 
 

“A simple if un-James Bondish method…”

Yeah right. This guy so totally thinks he’s James Bond.

Of course, he’s really more like Col. Flagg from M*A*S*H.

 
 

I still think it’s more damaging that he’s a Hitler admirer. I wish Letterman had asked McCain if he agreed with all the great stuff that his BFF said about Hitler… The freak-out potential woulda been colossal…

 
 

Yeah, the Naziphilia thing is next, and that’s about all I’ll be able to do for a while.

 
Rugged in Montana
 

With Barack Obama recently calling for the formation of a civilian security force, I am more than a little nervous about the prospects of an Obama Administration. Not because in am in fear for my life, but I am in fear for my constitutional liberties, namely my right to free speech (which I have been exercising on this blog as I’m sure all you liberals will agree, even if you personally find my opinions repulsive.) and my right to keep and bear arms. According to Obama, the militia and the National Guard isn’t good enough to provide security, now he wants a civilian security force. And who exactly will be responsible for leading and training this “civilian security force”? Bill Ayers? Adolf Hitler believed the same thing. He thought the German military wasn’t good enough to defend the Fatherland, which is why he formed the Brown Shirts. Josef Stalin also thought that the Soviet military wasn’t good enough to protect his nation, which is why he formed the Cheka. Every dictator forms a secret police, to crush dissent and establish absolute rule. John McCain MUST BE ELECTED PRESIDENT. Otherwise we may possibly be headed for a communist dictatorship. Why else would Obama need the secret police, oops, I mean, a “civilian security force.”

 
 

What a psychopathic idiot.

 
 

When an embassy safe, for example, is to be penetrated so that crypto material for use by NSA, everyone who might have access to the office is followed while the penetration is in progress.

Let’s see if I am following this. Having explained that assassination is the proper course of action when a journalist exposes CIA secrets, Liddy went on to describe a practice that at the time was more classified than I care to think about. SCI stuff. To add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing memoir, he included information that could let non-US readers know that their crypto systems have been compromised.
Hello?

Nevertheless, it’s apparently the journalist who’s “one of those mutant strains of columnist who are half legitimate, because he passes off biased interpretations and selective information as straight reporting.”

The war on irony must continue. Otherwise the irons will win.

 
 

New Zealand radio personality Lindsay Perigo has come out on his extremist blog, Solopassion.com (solo passion, hmmmm, has a certain implication of wet messes on kleenex).

Apparently, Obama is a Nazi and should be shot and hung upside down in public, a la Mussolini. See here . . .

Now, I should suggest to Mr Perigo that he hire up Mr Liddy to do the dirty. But then Liddy is an anti-Nazi, no? Um, no . . . but I get confused, because Mr Perigo considers Obama to be a Marxist too. The only Marxist/Nazi on the ballot.

It’s very confusing to be an Objectivist wingnut these days.

Currently touring California in the company of other confused Objectivists, Mr Perigo is reportedly bemused by the reaction of other Objectivists to his assassination call

If Obama makes it to Innauguration day, one imagines there will be a fair number of exploding Objectivist heads.

WSS

 
 

“Adolf Hitler believed the same thing. He thought the German military wasn’t good enough to defend the Fatherland, which is why he formed the Brown Shirts. Josef Stalin also thought that the Soviet military wasn’t good enough to protect his nation, which is why he formed the Cheka.”

This is, sadly enough, another example of right-wing home school idiocy at it’s best. The Brown Shirts were created to carry out the right wing fascist agenda for Hitler as the military would not stand to line up innocent civilians and march them into concentration camps. It was also created as a way to divide and lessen the chance of coup by the German High Command against his dictatorship, As for the Cheka, they were around long before communism as the secret police for the Tsar, then changed names to Cheka, MGB, KGB, different names, same folks. They didn’t have a role in protecting the motherland against invaders, they protected Stalin and the Politburo against the military and the people inside Russia, among other things.

You know, it’s really not done to make up history to serve your interests as you see fit. I realize that education has a liberal bias, as does reality, but you really must learn the actual facts before displaying such inane comments to your readers. I hope that you will reflect on this and all of your other transgressions while chopping trees in malaria filled swamps in the Louisiana gulag just as soon as Comrade Obama’s “Civilian Security Force” rounds your pasty white ass up!

 
 

OK, here’s the secret about Gee Gordon: He’s a pathetic fucking poseur who only remains in our faces because he lacks the sense God gave most ex-cons. You’ll note that most ex-cons don’t dance around singing Lookit me! I went to jail!

The only reason he’s allowed to talk so much is because there’s absolutely no chance he can divulge anything of any import.

 
 

PLAYBOY: Meaning an expert in killing people.

LIDDY: Crude but not inexact.

That’s a well-honed monster.

 
 

“Let’s see if I am following this.”

No, you’re not. There was nothing revealed about the NSA being in the business of codebreaking, the interception of cyphers and use of embassies by intelligence agencies occurring at any time Liddy has been on this planet.

 
Rugged in Montana
 

Tarheel, son, Obama just made that shit up about a “civilian security force” being needed to defend America. And if you actually read my above comment in context, instead of taking bits and pieces of it, you would realize that was my thesis. It isn’t needed for that at all, the military and the militia are more than capable of defending the homeland.

Do you really think he would win the election if he told the truth, that the “civilian security force” is actually going to be a secret police force, which will be used to round up and imprison all those who oppose Obama’s plans for communism?

If Obama is elected President, it is highly possible that this “civilian security force” he recommends will be used by Obama in the same manner Hitler used the Brown Shirts, or Stalin used the Cheka.

He knows that the U.S. military wouldn’t be willing to implement communism, which is why he needs a secret police, just like any other aspiring dictator.

 
 

Given that even Deborah Coddington couldn’t stand being in the same party as Lindsay Perigo, I can’t say I’m surprised he finally thrown his hat into the “so insane it’s funny” ring.

All we need now is for Ian Wishart to do an “expose” on the Biblical prophecies that prove Obama is the Anti-Christ.

 
 

Masterful, HTML. Every time a question bubbled up, you addressed it. Thanks for this.

 
Rugged in Montana
 

And yet another example of Stalinist tactics from the left. A leftwing San Francisco Radio Talk Show Host calls for the death of Joe the Plumber.

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=211483

 
Rugged in Montana
 

NO, YOU’LL NEVER MAKE ME TAKE MY RISPERDOL AGAIN. GO AWAY YOU BASTARDS!

 
 

And yet another example of Stalinist tactics from the left.

Tactics generally do not involve “oops, live mic”.

 
 

Bravo, HTML. I especially liked the bit about L&O Liddy wanting to mug and kill people. I’ll believe that he wants order. Law, not so much.

 
You Can't Put Lipstick On A Repig
 

That solopassion.com website has a “Contribute” link.

I thought the idiot nutjobs who fancied themselves “intellectual” like this nutcase does removed all “Unintentional Irony” traces from their sites.

The imminent election of Hussein X has made them all jumpy and stuff.

 
 

Liddy is all talk. He wants you to be intimidated; to think he’s a killer. The guy tried to arrest Tim Leary once and blew it, he then blew a pretty basic burglary and that’s how Watergate was exposed. He’s not a killer, he’s a putz.

 
 

If Liddy was pulling his bullshit today, he’d end up on “News of the Weird’s” list of “Least Competent Criminals.”

 
Smiling Mortician
 

Oh, yeah. Like one of those Morning Edition stories that take up 30 seconds on the half hour. Only, y’know, really fucking creepy.

 
 

Geez…If Obama’s a Marxist AND a Bolshevik, he’ll have to shoot HIMSELF and then hang himself upside down. As for the whole “civilian security force” thing… It’s hard to tell just what the hell Obama was talking about from the 21 second bit on YouTube, and it doesn’t seem that anyone has asked him to explain the concept further. What I thought he was proposing was putting together teams of civilian experts in technical and civil administration that would accompany military units in the event that they were deployed overseas, so we wouldn’t have to rely on the military do do things they weren’t trained to do, like managing the post war screwup in Iraq. Of course, my paranoid bedwetting sensibilities aren’t as highly developed as they are in your average wingnut (yes, Rugged, I’m looking at YOU), and I’m almost positive that, if Obama had plans for a Blackwater-like civilian security force to enslave us all, he probably wouldn’t telegraph his intentions by allowing his speeches to be recorded and put up on YouTube. So, sleep well tonight, Rugged…if you’re not guilty of anything, you have nothing to fear.

 
 

Or…make that a NAZI and a Bolshevik. Fixed it

 
 

Of course, he’s really more like Col. Flagg from M*A*S*H.

He’s a joke. When Robert Conrad portrays you in a TV movie, you’re pretty much fated to being a joke. I’m guessing that roughly 90% of what he says is pure fantasy.

 
 

Liddy is all talk. He wants you to be intimidated; to think he’s a killer. The guy tried to arrest Tim Leary once and blew it, he then blew a pretty basic burglary and that’s how Watergate was exposed. He’s not a killer, he’s a putz.

Right. I do think this is a great achievement of research, but it’s worth remarking that just like a comprehensive illustration of what a fascist dip-shit Jonah Goldberg is, it would have to be balanced by the understanding that he’s using spycraft’s equivalent of Harry Turtledove novels for historiography. He’s an enthusiastic impotent loon; the enthusiasm goes a long way, but not long enough to be too far removed from ‘pathetic’.

And against my better judgement:

With Barack Obama recently calling for the formation of a civilian security force, I am more than a little nervous about the prospects of an Obama Administration.

You, nervous about a black man being President? How surprising.

Not because in am in fear for my life, but I am in fear for my constitutional liberties, namely my right to free speech (which I have been exercising on this blog as I’m sure all you liberals will agree, even if you personally find my opinions repulsive.) and my right to keep and bear arms.

Ought to learn to bear arms before you get so het up about keeping automatic ones. Guns ain’t toys, son.

According to Obama, the militia and the National Guard isn’t good enough to provide security, now he wants a civilian security force.

‘Militia and National Guard’? Any legally-constituted militia falls under the dominion of the National Guard. The distinction is about as useful or sensible as “cattle and other holsteins”. Anyhow: the need for a “civilian security force” (nice scare phrase, by the way – the force is much more ‘civilian’ than ‘security’, and will be on the balance around as menacing as the Peace Corps) is pretty simple – the National Guard has been compromised by a generation of misuse. What was once a purely domestic force to be used by the military only in cases of grave domestic danger is now routinely thrown into foreign engagements and has been so militarized that its domestic use would be dangerous. What you’re asking for is that we treat Billings the way we treat Fallujah.

And who exactly will be responsible for leading and training this “civilian security force”? Bill Ayers?

One assumes that Mr. Obama would consult the hundreds of active or retired leaders and planners of the Peace Corps, USAID, and the redevelopment efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan long before a college professor who used to be a member of the Weathermen. If I wanted to be glib, I would say Larry Grathwohl, the ostensible ‘informant’ and sometime violent provocateur without whom the Weather Underground would never have had the knowledge or wherewithal to build or set explosive devices.

Adolf Hitler believed the same thing. He thought the German military wasn’t good enough to defend the Fatherland, which is why he formed the Brown Shirts.

Not quite: the Nazi Party formed the Sturmabteilung (‘Shock Battalion’, the German equivalent of ‘elite corps’) in order to fight communists and the law during their violent revolutionary phase, mostly emulating the squadristi, or ‘blackshirts’, in Mussolini’s Italy. Unlike Italy, however, Weimar Germany was functional enough that the monarchist and conservative parties were uninterested in bringing fascists into coalition to defend the fatherland from communism and the Beer Hall Putsch never gained the momentum the March on Rome did, leaving the SA simply the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
It wasn’t until the formation of the SS (at least partially because Hitler was convinced, maybe rightly, that the SA was more loyal to Ernst Rohm than himself) that Hitler had any military forces under his personal command with the ostensible aim of protecting Germany from external forces. And in that case, there was a specific reason: the Wehrmacht had been explicitly limited by Versailles to 100,000 troops; the SS was among many paramilitary groups set up to shell away additional forces illegally. The US lacks any such stricture.

Josef Stalin also thought that the Soviet military wasn’t good enough to protect his nation, which is why he formed the Cheka.

Stalin did not form the Cheka; Stalin was arrested by the Cheka in 1905, and even the NKVD (established during Stalin’s early tenure by the initiative of security head Felix Dzerzinsky) was primarily aimed at crushing internal dissent. The analogy to either the SS or the SA is flawed, incidentally – the equivalent of the NKVD in Nazi Germany was the Gestapo – short for Secret State Police, which had been a continuation of pre-war institutions similar to the NKVD’s institutional evolution from the Tsar’s Cheka. In neither Stalin’s nor Hitler’s case did the dictator produce internal security forces from whole cloth, and in neither case was the justification at all similar to Obama’s – they were openly aimed at crushing dissidents, and neither had any interest at all in infrastructure or foreign development (per Obama’s national service scheme).

Every dictator forms a secret police, to crush dissent and establish absolute rule.

Producing a secret police force requires absolute rule. And you labor under the delusion that ‘to crush dissent’ is a part of what makes them secret; what makes a secret police force secret is its immunity to transparency or oversight.

John McCain MUST BE ELECTED PRESIDENT. Otherwise we may possibly be headed for a communist dictatorship. Why else would Obama need the secret police, oops, I mean, a “civilian security force.”

If Obama had suggested he intended to build an internal security force to deal with dissent and the possibility of uprisings, that would be germane. He did not. His proposal mostly entailed infrastructure and development aid and is designed to ensure the large population of young men and women who would normally join the military are not driven permanently away from national service by the grisly tendency of the Republican Party to treat the armed forces like tin soldiers.

That same tendency is directly responsible for the National Guard not functioning as an internal security force – but even in that case, the overlap between Obama’s national service scheme and the National Guard is slim; the National Guard is ultimately designed to be an armed police force, where the national service is not. The distinction is critical; either you understand this and you’re lying or you don’t and you’re an idiot, and considering that you managed to confuse the SA for the SS for the Gestapo and suggest that Stalin invented the Cheka, I’m willing to buy the second of those.

 
Rugged in Montana
 

It looks like ACORN is at it again, this time in New Mexico. If Obama wins this election, it will be because of voter fraud.

http://www.palestra.net/blogs/read/18025

 
 

ACORN? seriously? is that all you got?

Of all the boogey-men cooked up by the rightwing in this country, I’m pretty sure this is the most pathetic. Tell us more about the second amendment. That part was fun.

 
 

Careful, RiM. Palestra causes anal leakage.

 
 

alec has knocked rugged senseless — all rugged can do is gibber “acorn, acorn — help me — I’m being attacked by a seed!”

 
 

Obamamania sweeps Vancouver: Vancouverites selling Obama finger puppets and planning victory bashes

 
Rugged in Montana
 

Near the top of my laundry list of reasons for hoping McCain wins this election, is to snub the rest of the world, especially Europe, for not minding their business and giving their worthless support to Obama.

I for one am looking foward to the reactions of the eurotrash when McCain is elected, and the American people finally once and for all show them what we think of their worthless opinion.

 
 

Geez…If Obama’s a Marxist AND a Bolshevik, he’ll have to shoot HIMSELF and then hang himself upside down. As for the whole “civilian security force” thing… It’s hard to tell just what the hell Obama was talking about from the 21 second bit on YouTube, and it doesn’t seem that anyone has asked him to explain the concept further. What I thought he was proposing was putting together teams of civilian experts in technical and civil administration that would accompany military units in the event that they were deployed overseas, so we wouldn’t have to rely on the military do do things they weren’t trained to do, like managing the post war screwup in Iraq. Of course, my paranoid bedwetting sensibilities aren’t as highly developed as they are in your average wingnut (yes, Rugged, I’m looking at YOU), and I’m almost positive that, if Obama had plans for a Blackwater-like civilian security force to enslave us all, he probably wouldn’t telegraph his intentions by allowing his speeches to be recorded and put up on YouTube. So, sleep well tonight, Rugged…if you’re not guilty of anything, you have nothing to fear.

My understanding, or at least the understanding I took away from the 30 minute clip, is that he wants to create a civilian disaster response organisation to reduce the demand on the military having to respond to disasters like Katrina and 9/11.

 
 

Near the top of my laundry list of reasons for hoping McCain wins this election, is to snub the rest of the world, especially Europe, for not minding their business and giving their worthless support to Obama.

What RIMjob meant to say was: “I’m not going to address Alec’s post, since he is clearly my intellectual superior. I will not try to refute any point he made, because I have been exposed as a dumbass.

Now, Europe blah blah blah ACORN communism Obama blah blah blah…dictatorship…”

 
Rugged in Montana
 

There’s nothing in alec’s post worth refuting. He thinks that because I made the simple mistake of confusing the SA with the SS and the Cheka with the KGB, that my point is somehow invalid.

And, btw, if Obama meant for this “civilian security force” to merely be a domestic version of the peace corps, than why did he call it a “civilian security force?” Why not call it the domestic peace corps? He shouldn’t have thrown the word security in there if this new agency wouldn’t have any police powers.

 
 

Ya know, it is quite distressing to think that a significant amount of America’s foreign and domestic policy has been orchestrated and carried out by “people” like Liddy. I read Philip Agee’s book while serving overseas in the mid 70’s and it seemed like a pretty righteous revelation at the time. I was young and naive then so I can’t say I’d feel the same knowing what I know now.

Anyway, it all seems rather pathological that we humans invest so much time, effort, and money into ratfucking other people, or trying to avoid being ratfucked by other people. What a silly way to live.

 
 

Of all the places in the world to shake your righteous fists at for not minding their own business, you pick on Europe.

Trying to remember what they did to us that might warrant some legitimate self-righteousness about “minding their own business” …

 
 

There’s nothing in alec’s post worth refuting. He thinks that because I made the simple mistake of confusing the SA with the SS and the Cheka with the KGB, that my point is somehow invalid.

You’re making sweeping historical analogies to hot-button policies. It’s a miracle you managed to actually keep straight which was which.

Can you tell me what the Gestapo actually did? Can you tell me who headed it, what its relationship was to Hitler, the Nazi Party, the German federal police – hell, what the German federal police were called?

Can you even tell me what year the SS replaced the SA? You seem to believe it was part of a continuous perfidious plot by Hitler to seize absolute control over a supremely unwilling Germany; that Hitler had already (a) won enough elections to dominate the governing coalition, (b) been awarded sweeping powers by the Imperial holdovers on the German right who were supposed to uphold democratic institutions; and (c) used the Reichstag Fire as a pretext to place the entire German state under his personal control long before the SS even overtook the remainder of the SA is unimportant to you, nor is sorting out that the ‘secret police’ in Germany weren’t even the fucking SS.

Go on, tell me who the secret police were in Germany, who formed them, and how they did it. The answer is not “the SS, Hitler, Bolshevism”. It is not even close.

You can futter with ideology all you like, but you’re dealing with actual, documented history. You’re subject to the tyranny of fact over ideas; mistaking the SA for the SS is middle-school-level shit and mistaking either for the Gestapo – let alone presuming that Stalin established the Cheka (or had anything to do with ‘the KGB’ – which has an organizational history beginning several years after Stalin’s death) – is pretty fatal to your argument ‘community organizer + black = Marxism’. Doesn’t fucking work that way.

And, btw, if Obama meant for this “civilian security force” to merely be a domestic version of the peace corps, than why did he call it a “civilian security force?”

Who said it was a domestic version of the Peace Corps? The ‘civilian security force’ suggested is a product of the United States’s continuing engagement with forces outside of our borders; besides a modern equivalent of the NRA – a well-documented campaign plank, entirely separate from the purely peacekeeping and exterior force brought up under ‘civilian security force’.

Besides which, you know what? This is asinine. The United States has the largest internal black budget on Earth. The CIA has been operating within our borders for decades and the formation of the DHS has completely compromised whatever institutional integrity the FBI had left. You want to talk about a fucking secret police force? Your golden boy produced one. No oversight – no financial stricture – and increasingly minimal legal limits.

Oh, but when Bush asks for unlimited power to spy on people within the United States, he’s fighting terrorism, right? When Congress repeatedly denies even the most threadbare openness provisions, that’s making the tough calls we need to keep safe. Hiring a bunch of kids who no longer want to join the army to plant a few trees, now that’s tyranny!

Jesus Christ. You have no idea what you’re talking about – you don’t even have the basic beginnings of an idea you suggested you had when you threw around borrowed acronyms. They got libraries where you come from? I’d recommend you pick up where Daddy left off. Hop On Pop would be a good start.

 
 

There’s nothing in alec’s post worth refuting.

What he meant to say was, “I’ve had enough of playing Randall “Tex” Cobb to Alec’s Larry Holmes, so instead I’ll pretend like I’m too “above it all” to debate with him. Hopefully a few new threads will start and all of this ugliness will be forgotten.”

 
 

Oh no, Rug — alec is YOUR MOM and he just TOOK YOU TO SCHOOL in the CAR OF PAIN.

SAY IT.

 
 

Because I admit my mistakes: the Cheka was in fact established by Bolsheviks during the Revolution, although they garnered some cooperation from Okhrana careerists and certainly used Okhrana resources – and it took literally decades for the routine savagery of the Okhrana to be equalled by Dzerzinsky’s leather-jacketed toughs.

In fact, it was the Okhrana that essentially produced the Western concept of domestic police limitations – importing Okhrana methods for interrogation, agent-breaking, and other nasty shit essentially destroyed the moral legitimacy of the reaction against women’s suffrage and unionization, and one of the few remotely admirable planks of the capital-P Progressive movement involved lumping torture, disappearing, and other routine Okhrana-style practices into ‘corruption’ which they sought to eliminate from the domestic bureaucracy. The FBI was, in great part, established under the conviction that the Union could handle major interstate crime without replicating the secret police of the Tsar or the Kaiser; it was basically the first federal police force that acted like a federal police force rather than behaving like a special brigade of the Army.

 
InsaneInTheCheneyBrain
 

Liddy is guilty of treason, in addition to a whole lot more.

 
 

Excellent stuff, HTML. I was following your entries on Liddy’s book on Elementropy and had wondered if that was leading to a post on McCain’s insane buddy.

 
 

You do know that G. Gordon is a self promoting blowhard and always has been?
Making him out to be somekind of right wing boogieman is much like screeching about the horrors of Bill Ayers.

But of course both sides of the political spectrum need their faux villains to scare up the ignorant.

 
 

Is a rugged trick better or worse than a rough trick?
I apologize to all the humans, but that was too easy to pass up.

 
 

According to a Watergate documentary that aired on the Discovery Channel shortly after Nixon’s death, the idea to kill Jack Anderson originated from an off-hand remark by Jeb Stuart Magruder, in his office with Liddy present. (I recorded all five hours of the documentary, and I still have the tape, so the quotes are exact.)

“Wouldn’t it be good if we could get rid of Jack Anderson,” Magruder said.

Liddy immediately charged out of Magruder’s office, and ran into Magruder aide Rob Reisner, who asked Liddy where he was going in such a hurry.

Cut to Liddy, who told the filmmakers, “Jeb just told me to take care of Jack Anderson. I am to kill Jack Anderson. I am on my way to kill Jack Anderson!”

Reisner went straight to Magruder and asked him, “Did you just tell (Liddy) to rub out Jack Anderson?”

Magruder: “(Liddy) came back in, and I said, ‘Gordon, I was just talking off the cuff. I wasn’t serious.’ Liddy looked at me with that sort of macho look and said, “NEVER GIVE AN ORDER YOU DON’T MEAN, ‘CAUSE I’LL DO IT!”

That was Magruder’s story, anyway.

 
 

Magruder: “(Liddy) came back in, and I said, ‘Gordon, I was just talking off the cuff. I wasn’t serious.’ Liddy looked at me with that sort of macho look and said, “NEVER GIVE AN ORDER YOU DON’T MEAN, ‘CAUSE I’LL DO IT!”

It would seem the only language our enemies understand is passive aggression.

 
 

Responding to continuation of one epic-ass post!

A timely reminder that the GOP being the “Eats-Babies-Alive-&-Giggles-About-It Party” wasn’t invented by either Pappy OR Junior Shrub, nor by Ronnie Raygun.

Straight truth – these scum thought that anybody “corrupting American children” via bags of weak weed, or via letting some of America’s vast collection of ugly historical/political skeletons out of the closet … or simply via being in the way of business-as-usual “Anti-Communism” at the wrong time … was Unlebenswerten, & thus as disposable as used Charmin.

Classic nativist fascism in action: in the world of Nixons, Bushes, Norths, Liddys & Cheneys, laws are simply customized choke-chains for the Tribe Of Just Plain Folks – whereas we are above such trivial matters, being chosen by destiny to hoard the one true virtue, Power.

The consistently shite track-record of an ideology modeled after a ziggurat means nothing to them, because the media is a docile bitch who’ll give reality an extreme makeover that’s just convincing enough for just long enough for just enough of the Tribe Of Just Plain Folks to forget just enough of it for them to recycle it.*

Liddy’s reaction to Valerie Plame’s outing proves that he has no more claim to worthwhile ethics than any child-pimp. Blowing her cover very likely lead to deaths, both foreign & American – up to & including deaths of CIA staff, & that bloviating old cretin knows it.

Liddy believes he’s a neocon Ninja, when in fact he’s more like Barnum’s Wild Man Of Borneo, glad to bite the heads off of chickens (or set himself on fire) … just as long as his handlers keep him relatively well-off.

————
* Yikes! Does the bottom half of this sentence crawl up its own hole hard, or what?

 
 

Hmph. Gonna go all grumpy-old-man on ya here…

Granted, G. Gordon Liddy is an unrepentant asshat and deserves to be buried upside-down in a vat of his own horseshit.

That doesn’t make McCain any more of a traitor for having known and used him for self promotion than Rev. Wright makes Obama a black separatist muslim whitey-h8ter.

Politicians crawl into bed with all sorts of seedy characters. It doesn’t pay to get your knickers in a bunch over a 40-years past his prime pseudo-nazi. Want to bash McSame? Pick any of his policy positions and go to town. Start with how he wants to put us further into hock with China or wants to stay in Iraq until “victory”, whatever that is, is achieved or how he was against financial industry before he was for it or…

You get my drift. Liddy’s a sideshow, a distraction, at best. Eyes on the prize, please.

 
 

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