The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #3

In my lifetime the Democratic Party -- I'm speaking here of the rank'n'file -- has always shown a concern for peace. I think it's non-controversial to say that Obama won the presidency because he was the only mainstream candidate of either major party to have a public record opposing the Iraq War. Who can deny that Trump's margin of victory in the Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania was due to his running as the anti-war candidate in 2016?

Rank'n'file Democratic Party opposition to war tracks back to Vietnam and the 1968 Democratic presidential primary campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy was assassinated and McCarthy was blocked at the convention in Chicago by the old bull party bosses congregated around Hubert Humphrey. George McGovern became the placeholder for Kennedy delegates after Senator Teddy Kennedy declined to pick up the mantle of his assassinated brother. 

McGovern would go on to lead the McGovern-Fraser Commission which would rewrite the rules on how Democrats nominate their presidential candidate. The work McGovern did on the commission would pave the way for his nomination in 1972. In the general election McGovern would lose every state to Nixon except for the Kennedys' Massachusetts and the Black-majority District of Columbia. Nixon's '72 landslide victory would come to naught as his administration imploded over Watergate. 

Which brings us to Seymour Hersh. I recently finished reading his memoir, Reporter. In it Hersh explains how his reporting on Watergate gave way to the revelation of the "Family Jewels," a compendium of CIA crimes commissioned by agency head James Schlesinger as a response to Nixon's  attempt to deflect White House responsibility for the Watergate burglary by asserting it was a CIA operation.

What struck me about Hersh's account was that after the initial splash the Family Jewels created, along with related followups, there wasn't the interest or support from his editors at The New York Times to pursue more of these national security state bombshells. Hersh mentions that congressional committees, e.g., Church and Pike, would continue the work with subpoena power; so off he goes on vacation and then relocates to New York City where he starts reporting on corporate corruption for The Times.

That's 1975. You have to get all way to the mid-1990s in Hersh's memoir to understand what happened (really, what didn't happen) with the Church and Pike investigations of national security state crimes. Hersh explains that senate leaders were reticent to give Frank Church chairmanship of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities because they knew that he coveted a presidential run as leader of the Democratic Party and they didn't want to muddy the investigation with presidential politics. Church promised that he would not run for president in 1976. He lied.

The result of this lie, according to Hersh, is that the committee's work was compromised and the crimes of the Kennedy administration were obscured or soft-pedaled because Church believed to win the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1976 the victorious candidate had to be perceived by primary voters as the true representative of the Kennedy legacy; to tarnish that legacy was to guarantee defeat.

To correct the record and debunk the myth of Camelot Hersh writes The Dark Side of Camelot (1997).

I purchased a copy of the book as soon as it appeared. In the 1990s I worked nights and spent my free time studying Kennedy assassination literature. I was drawn to the topic because, from college days, I was a Derridean, someone who believed that perception is textual. When it comes to textuality you would be challenged to find a field larger than that provided by the Kennedy assassination. My thinking was -- at the time I was still south of 35 years of age -- that if one could master that mass of literature, one could claim to have mastered perception itself.

But I never finished The Dark Side of Camelot. I think I made it halfway through, and then, because none of the material was what I considered at the time to be of a bombshell nature, since I was so thoroughly immersed in the literature, I set it aside. Hersh was pilloried at the time in the mainstream press for material, forged documents, that never even made it into the book. He was also criticized for getting marginal stuff wrong.

After I finished Hersh's memoir, I picked up the copy of The Dark Side of Camelot I set aside more than 20 years ago.

It's a tremendous book. I truly savored it. Hersh systematically demolishes the Kennedy legacy:

• JFK worked with the mob to win the presidency
• Bay of Pigs is laid at JFK's feet
• JFK/RFK fulsomely supported "Executive Action," a.k.a., assassination
• Cuban Missile Crisis almost led to nuclear holocaust (then Kennedy lied about swapping the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba)
• Kennedy supported the assassination of Diem because Diem was negotiating with the North to end the war

There's much more. Overall the picture -- both of Jack and Bobby -- is of an unhinged presidency. Jack Kennedy was addicted to sex, in poor health, committed to ruthless skulduggery, seemingly always in crisis, and Bobby was his loyal little brother enabler.

If I would've finished the book back in 1990s I could've seen that Hersh basically affirms the hypothesis -- that Kennedy's assassination tracks back to LBJ -- that I was working on. Hersh doesn't make this argument explicitly because he, improbably, accepts the conclusion of the Warren Commission, that there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but Hersh does say that in final months of Kennedy's life the decision was finalized to boot Johnson off the ticket in 1964. The Bobby Baker Quorum Club scandal taken up by the Senate Rules Committee tainted both Jack (because of his affair with German party girl Ellen Rometsch) and Lyndon (because of petty kickbacks, the details of which RFK was surreptitiously feeding to Republicans on the committee). Then Kennedy's brains are blown out in Texas.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that RFK's rebirth as an anti-war politician post-Tet might have been sincere but it was most likely mere crass opportunism. Bobby was no peacenik.

Nonetheless, as decades plodded on after '68, there remained and remains a significant constituency within the Democratic Party which is opposed to the national security state and perpetual warfare. This constituency elected Obama and probably defeated Hillary. 

Russiagate was designed and continues to be used to neuter and bleach this constituency, and in this regard it has been largely successful. The Democratic Party is now just as bellicose as the Republican Party, and for that reason it needs to be destroyed. Because even if the George Floyd Rebellion and the Black Lives Matter renaissance are fundamentally anti-imperialist and pro-peace, a lot of the white liberals who have supported the movement are card-carrying Russiagaters and defenders of the CIA , NSA and FBI.

Errol Morris' Short Film on Josiah Thompson

The best case for the existence of a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, one that deviates from the official version of a lone gunman that is memorialized  in the Warren Commission report, is still the photographic evidence taken that day from bystanders in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, particularly the Zapruder film.

Today on its web site the New York Times publishes a short film by Errol Morris, "November 22, 1963." Morris interviews Josiah Thompson, author of an early and extremely influential book on the Kennedy assassination, Six Seconds in Dallas (1967).

Thompson's argument is simple a one. Look at the pictures -- just look at them -- of the assassination. The conclusion one must come to is that the kill shot came from the front and to the right of the motorcade as it drove down Elm Street, the area that is known as the grassy knoll. This means that the conspiracy theorists are correct because the Warren Commission's official conclusion is that the only gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald who made an impossibly difficult kill shot with a junk Italian rifle from his perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

I immersed myself in the Kennedy assassination for a couple of years. I did so from the perspective of Deconstruction and the idea that everything is textual, everything -- for us to know it -- is written. So what was the "Moby Dick" of all that Kennedy assassination literature trying to say?

The photographic documentation alone compels one to accept that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. After spending time with the literature I arrived at the working hypothesis based on the simple but necessary question "cui bono?" that LBJ was involved in the conspiracy. LBJ handpicked the Warren Commission. The Warren Commission relied on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for its research and documentation in formulating its lone gunman theory. LBJ and J. Edgar were good buddies whose careers both benefited from Kennedy's departure. Both were buddies of proto-Tea Partier Texas oil mogul Clint Murchison, Sr.

To flesh out the nature of the LBJ "cui bono?" I looked at the TFX contract investigation. All the major Congressional investigations of the Kennedy administration -- Billie Sol Estes, TFX, and Bobby Baker -- track back to LBJ. The answer to who benefited with Kennedy out of the way is obvious.

Check out Errol Morris' film on Josiah Thompson. It's dynamite.

Uncanny Avengers #4

I am an adult who reads comic books. For some reason there is opprobrium attached to this distinction. But comic books are no longer the juvenile media they were when I read them as a child. The superhero titles published by the two industry giants, Marvel and DC, are for the most part morally complex, well written and aimed at an adult audience; if they are targeting juveniles, they're juveniles who can, for instance, stomach abstruse details about Norse mythology and comprehend theoretical physics. I've learned a lot about accepting pain and moving forward by reading The Punisher, Marvel's ongoing saga of nihilist vigilante Frank Castle.

But before I say anything else, check out this page, written by Rick Remender with art by John Cassaday, from Uncanny Avengers #4. The Red Skull is breaking it down for Captain America:

This is something that could have only appeared in an underground comic when I was a kid. If the text is too small to read from the scan, here's what the Red Skull is telling Cap:

Seeing your nation with fresh eyes my dear Captain America, I assure you --  

You've lost your war. 

It just happened so slowly you grew accustomed to it.

But if you look to your heart, you will realize the truth. 

You're no longer fighting to preserve this rancid nation -- 

You're fighting to change it back. 

To add some semblance of sanity to an incurably sick culture that breeds only parasites, greedy polluters and psychotic madmen. 

A hopeless struggle you continue out of habit.

You imagine that if you fight hard enough, one day you will wrest control from the bankers who own you and return this nation to its former glory. 

Clean streets. Honest neighbors. Attractive wives. Green lawns. 

But in reality this is, and will remain, your America. 

An uneducated population fixated on competition, material wealth and voyeurism. 

Violent monsters doused in antibiotics to offset their diet of sugary sweet drink and mounds of carcinogenic cow flesh! 

THIS IS WHAT YOU FIGHT FOR!

Damn. That's a fine Marvel comic book.

I started reading comic books again four years ago, around the same time that I started having trouble with my last girlfriend. At first I just wanted to make an inventory of an old comic collection that I had stowed in the closet. I started reading some titles, like the Black Panther vs. Killmonger saga in Jungle Action, that had left an impression on me growing up in the Bay Area in the 1970's. Next thing I knew I was going to a comic shop. As my relationship imploded it was nice to sojourn with the heroes of my youth.

I'm going to try to make Saturday the day I post about comic books. So far we've got a few regular features on this blog. We've got a Friday evening "Hippies vs. Punks" post; a Sunday morning movie review of a recently-released-to-DVD Hollywood film; a Sunday evening archive project, working through letters I wrote soon after being belched from the academy into New York City in the late 1980's; -- to go along with the daily quotidian commentary of reading the news and listening to music and running and going to work.

I recently caught up on all the back issues of Thor and Journey Into Mystery. It chewed up weekend after weekend in February and March, but I'm glad I took the time. Kieron Gillen's run on Journey Into Mystery was impressive; it featured the reborn boy Loki as the protagonist, and it managed to capture the pure-heart mischievousness of youth; it managed to make the star of the comic book the putative prototypical comic book reader, a boy.

Marvel's Thor turned fifty last year. In this fiftieth anniversary year of the Kennedy assassination I will mention that an epiphany I had during the millennium when I was deep in the reeds of the Kennedy assassination literature is that there is a connection between Jack Kirby's "The Mighty Thor" and Jack Kennedy. Thor's face as drawn by Kirby looks too similar to JFK's for it to be an accident. Kirby is saying something. What?

MLK Day Half a Century After Dallas

Diane McWhorter has a great opinion piece in today's paper. Writing about 1963 Jim Crow Birmingham and the banality of evil she reveals how city fathers commonly endorsed the illegal use of electronic surveillance and hatched assassination plots as a means to achieve "racial peace." McWhorter argues that while we might have moved on from the institutional racism of Jim Crow we need to look again at our "new normal" where "assassination by drone" is official unofficial policy and debates about the effectiveness of torture are routine.

What I particularly appreciate about this piece, published on MLK Day in the fiftieth anniversary year of the JFK assassination, is the level of detail it provides of how political threats were handled by power brokers in a sizable Southern city. In 1963, whether Birmingham or Dallas, public safety officers were criminal co-conspirators used to spy and assassinate.