CapitalistImperialistPig

Were politics more civil in the good old days? Rick Perlstein on the Republican Convention of of 1976 (Ford vs. Reagan): The vice president of the United States had spotted a Mormon preacher from Utah who’d invaded the space of the New York delegation and was bearing a “Reagan Country” sign. “With an adolescent grin on his face,” said Texas Monthly, Rockefeller snatched the offending sign from the minister’s hands. ... The Utah Reagan leader, Douglas Bischoff, chased after Rockefeller to retrieve his placard. He and New York GOP chairman Rosie Rosenbaum scuffled. Rockefeller claimed to have overheard someone say “if he didn’t get that sign back he was going to rip out the phone”— and, presently, the white phone connecting the New York delegation to the Ford command trailer in the parking lot was indeed ripped out while the chairman held the receiver to his ear , surrounded by a crush of reporters attempting to overhear him. “I want that man arrested!” Rosenbaum yelled as Bischof...

All presidents, I suspect, need to do a little lying. It's part of the politicians job description. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton famously came acropper on some of their more outrageous lies. Of course telling a lot of lies doesn't necessarily make one a good liar. Nixon had a way of looking like he was lying even when he accidentally told the truth. Clinton's lawyerly evasions were a give away. In the lying department, no President in my memory could touch Ronald Reagan. His twin strengths were the degree to which he was unconstrained by logic or consistency and his apparent ability to believe utterly in his own mythology. As his daughter (Patti Davis) wrote: ...this “the most aggravating aspect of discussing anything with my father. He has this ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.” Perlstein, Rick (2014-08-05). The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Kindle Locations...

The revelations of the 70's about the lawlessness and incompetence of our somewhat ironically named "intelligence" agencies never seemed to lead to any fixing of the blame - deniability, plausible and implausible being one of the few things they consistently managed. And so, for those few scattered Americans seriously following the intelligence investigations, a fundamental and fundamentally disturbing question lingered: Were our presidents lawless and wicked? Or just bumbling nobodies, Gerald Fords, every last one of them— dumb, ignorant pawns of secret police agencies? To ask the question was to stare into an abyss. So Senator Church papered over the abyss. Perlstein, Rick (2014-08-05). The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Kindle Locations 10810-10813). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

...Americans tired of scandal and muckraking. Perhaps even more importantly, so did the establishment press. The Washington Post and The New York Times adopted policies of studied indifference or overt hostility towards the Congressional committees that revealed layer after layer of CIA and NSA lawbreaking and incompetence. Glamorous, globe-trotting Henry Kissinger had weathered his own Watergate storm— for bugging reporters and his own staffers— and remained the punditocracy’s beau ideal. He was fresh from his latest triumph in “shuttle diplomacy,” securing a preliminary peace framework between Israel and Egypt, when the indefatigable Otis Pike had the temerity to demand from him a memo by a State Department staffer named Thomas Boyatt that had apparently criticized the CIA’s poor intelligence regarding the crisis in Cyprus, where the U.S. ambassador, Rodger Paul Davies, had been machine-gunned to death the previous August. The Pike Committee’s chief counsel soon received a thunder...

Many have been disturbed - rightly, I think - by the revelation of the immense amount of spying on Americans by the NSA and other agencies. I don't care for it either, but we should not lose track of the fact that this is nothing new. The hearings of the 1970's on the CIA conducted by Frank Church's Senate committee and Bella Abzug's House Committee had revealed that the NSA had already been monitoring the phone and telegraphic traffic of Americans for forty years. It had also, Abzug revealed, been monitoring both the phone calls and the telegrams of American citizens for decades. President Ford had persuaded Church not to hold hearings on the matter. Abzug proceeded on her own. At first, when she subpoenaed the private-sector executives responsible for going along with the programs, the White House tried to prevent their testimony by claiming that each participating private company was “an agent of the United States.” When they did appear, they admitted their compan...