I don't know about you, but since I first heard the use of the phrase, "The War on Terror", I've had this weird deja vu about having heard it before.... it was so familiar, but not distant... A war against an emotional reaction has always seemed, well, a little silly, but in a darkly fantastical way. After all the years with this nagging feeling pulling on my subconscious, I finally happened across this piece by Stephen Lendman which brought it all flooding back. The French Revolution was never really a favorite period for me, but this is a solid piece of scholorship noting the amazing similarities between the NeoCon agenda and that of the post-Revolutionary Jacobins.
The second weirdness came up in the wake of Gerald Ford's wake. The era and events that unfolded around Ford's pardoning of Nixon was, for a lot of folks like myself, a history that is almost mythological. I was truly surprised after reading this piece from Slate. Who knew that Veep Agnew resigned just eight months before Nixon with the threat of prosecution on his heals. Ford's decision to protect America from "our long national nightmare" now seems quite quaint, as anyone that was exposed to the Lewinski scandle would attest to. I find myself leaning towards the idea that the Nixon pardon - for crimes not even defined at the time - established a bad precedent that has rippled through time, corrupting as it aged. Bush I's pardoning of key players in the Iran-Contra scandle rushes to the front of the line, particularly the pardon of Cap just 12 days before he was to go on trial for purjury, a case where H.W. could have found himself a material witness... Connecting the dots was supposed to be fun and informative, but it's really just informative.
No comments:
Post a Comment