ENEMIES FROM WITHIN

Do you have the feeling that something is wrong with this country?

A lot of people seem to feel that THE government is no longer OUR government.

WE THE PEOPLE are supposed to be in charge. But it feels like WE are ignored, patronized, used.

It's no wonder a lot of people feel this way. We have been betrayed.

An arrogant elite has seized the powers of government, and used those powers shamelessly for their own secret purposes, and for their own fantastical enrichment.

Fortunately, we got rid of many of them by electing Barak Obama in 2008.

But they are still ravenously seeking new prey, and they are a deadly threat to our democracy.

Some people call them NeoConservatives, which apparently means FakeConservatives Who Lie and Steal a Lot.

Perhaps you've wondered where Dick Cheney and his buds hung out after that nasty Bill Clinton made George Bush the Older move out of the White House. Well, part of that time they were flying high with Billy Kristol over at his Project For a New American Century. This was a little think tank where rightwingers could dream big dreams and giggle all day long.

You see, Communism had died. It was buried on August 13, 1961, the day that East Germany began construction of the Berlin Wall. There aren't many walls constructed by a state to keep its own citizenry from escaping. Can you think of any others? Me neither.

In 1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected President of the Russian Federation. He had disappeared from public view during the final week of the election campaign. Many Russians believed he had died of a heart attack. But they elected him anyway. The Communist on the ballot finished third, behind the apparently dead Boris Yeltsin. In Russia. Where Communism had ruled since 1918.

With the demise of Communism, some folks got the notion that this was a great opportunity to reduce defense spending, and pay ourselves a Peace Dividend. But the NeoCons had another idea. They had a dream. The big one. World Domination.

If we sent in our Marines to a bunch of Third World regimes, and set up our own friendly regimes, who could stop us? Nobody! This was a priceless opportunity!

And so was born the NeoCon vision of world domination. (1) Get back into office by any means. (2) Terrify or deceive the electorate to gain unlimited powers. (3) Send in the Marines wherever we can get away with it. (4) Make sure we end up with a docile foreign state and sweet deals for our buddies.

You can read about it at http://www.newamericancentury.org/ , Billy Kristol's Project For A New American Century. Names on the site? Dick Cheney. Donald Rumsfeld. Paul Wolfowitz. Jeb Bush.

Be sure to check out page 63 of the "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document (http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf). It says this:

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

Yes, they did steal an election, letting the Scalia slimeball cast the only vote that counted in putting Bush the Clueless into the Oval Office and Dick Cheney into power.

Bu they still needed a catastrophic and catalyzing event. So they demoted Al Qaeda expert Richard Clarke from the National Security Council and waited. When a CIA officer visited Bush the Dumber in Crawford in August 2001 to tell him that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent, Bush responded "Now you can say you covered your ass." and did nothing. When an FBI office in Arizona identified 9/11 hijackers who were learning to fly but not to land, they did nothing. And guess what? They finally got what they wanted. A terrified American public. And unlimited power.

So what happened next? Absolute Power.

THIS SPECIAL PLACE

The United States of America has been and can be a great nation.

We are unique in all of human history because we are where the world met.

Our first immigrants arrived from Asia, before civilization existed. After thousands of years in the Americas, native populations numbered in the millions when Christopher Columbus arrived. The next century brought them horrifying devastation, as infectious diseases like smallpox killed nearly 90% of the first Americans. Some echoes of this past survive in the remaining tribal nations.

Waves of immigration from Europe helped to grow this country, as famine and persecution and war and poverty drove people across the ocean to seek a better life.

The brutality of slavery brought millions of Africans to our shores. They have not had an easy road. Over 200,000 fought for their freedom with the Union Army in the Civil War, and to some extent that fight against racism continues today.

Modern times have brought immigrants from every nation on Earth, seeking opportunity and freedom.

We are a special place because of the people who came here. They were visionaries, who left home to search for a brighter future. They were survivors, who endured peril and hardship and became stronger and tougher from it. They were determined idealists, who crossed oceans in wooden boats rather than compromise their religious beliefs.

And, most importantly, we are a special place because we have chosen a path that values individual rights and liberty above all else.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

If we can manage to live in peace and prosperity among ourselves in this nation, based on these principles, we can and should lead the world into a better future, because of who we are and what we believe.

But each generation of Americans has had to face enemies of one sort or another. We face new enemies today, dangerous ones. Enemies from within.

LINDA TRIPP RETURNS

Do you remember Linda Tripp? She was a Bush 41 administration employee, who kept her Defense Department job into the Clinton administration. She met Monica Lewinsky when Lewinsky was transferred out of the White House to the Defense Department. Tripp then learned details of Lewinsky's sexual activity in the Oval Office, secretly taped Lewinsky's conversations, tried to get a book deal from gossip specialist Lucianne Goldberg, and finally turned over all the dirt she had scraped up to political hack prosecutor Ken Starr.

I hate to remind you of all this. People remember the Clinton scandal. They don't remember the perverse abuses of power that the GOP used to attack Clinton. They don't remember that the Newt launched politically motivated special counsel investigations of Whitewater land deals, the White House travel office, White House requests for personnel files, and Vince Foster's suicide. No crimes had been committed; nothing improper had occurred; all of this was deception.

Clinton was finally impeached and acquitted, for giving deceptive answers to Starr about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. There was no crime to investigate here; consensual sex between adults may be sleazy but it is completely legal. The "crime" Clinton was impeached for was giving misleading answers to an unprincipled, corrupt, right wing hack who was abusing his official authority for GOP political gains.

But let's remember that Linda Tripp played a key role in the attack. Essentially she was a right wing subversive, working from within the Clinton administration to bring it down.

Obama does not have to deal with the nightmare of a corrupt, unprincipled GOP Congress yet. For the sake of this country and the future of the world let's hope he never has to.

But he may need to deal with the problem of right wing partisans infesting federal agencies at high levels.

Do the recent actions of the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service seem a little odd? Have you noticed the Obama Administration announcing one thing - like a drilling permit moratorium - while Interior Department underlings announce something else?

This may be just the normal operation of a large bureaucracy, and a difficulty of coordinating the efforts of thousands of civil service employees.

But there may be more than a few Linda Tripps out there. And the Obama Administration had better beware of the dangers of fanatical subversives working to bring them down.

IT AIN'T OVER TIL IT'S OVER

It was a wonderful thing for this country to reject the incipient fascism imposed by Bush and Cheney, by turning away from McCain and electing Obama.

Some of us might feel that this was inevitable, because the disasters and disgraces of the Bush years were things we needed to put behind us.

But not all of us. Those horrible Bush years weren't so bad for some. The rich didn't just get richer - they got way richer than ever before. They did this in part by corrupting our political system to work on their behalf. So, lower taxes for the rich, dismantling of public interest constraints like environmental protections, and incredible boondoggle porkbarrel projects like Star Wars. They got way richer. We got shafted.

You might think that electing Obama fixed things. But it wasn't enough. The people in the shadows who put Reagan into power, who profited so handsomely from the reckless deficit spending he and Old Bush produced, who created and unleashed a right wing propaganda plague against the Clintons, who stole the 2000 election and then nearly destroyed the world economy - they're still out there. And they're still greedy for more.

You might think that electing Obama fixed things. But the people who created the mess we are suffering through right now are eager for more.

If you don't vote against them, they're going to come back.

Please be sure to vote on June 8 and in every election.

It ain't over.