Reply #24: This thread has refreshed my memory and opened an old and deep wound.

[Peace Patriot]

If you had asked me, before I read this OP, which election or elections Ted Kennedy had run for president in, I would not have been able to say 1980 against Carter, but now I remember.

It was only 12 years, at that point, from the second Kennedy assassination--of Robert, just as he had won the California primary and was clearly on the road to the White House. One of Robert Kennedy's primary opponents had been Eugene McCarthy, whom I voted for in the California primary because he was the one who had stood up and challenged LBJ on the Vietnam War (early on, in New Hampshire--driving the incumbent LBJ out of the race). RFK had been more cautious, more political about it--gauging his chances. I knew that RFK would win California and go on to the White House. He was as charismatic as his brother John, and was riding a wave of American revulsion at the Vietnam War and an amazing American awakening on social justice. I voted for McCarthy to "send RFK" a message to keep his word about ending the war. I think now that he would have, and that's why...

Bang, bang, shoot, shoot.

Please read James Douglass' book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters." He makes an overwhelming case that the CIA assassinated JFK and the issue was war. JFK was initially a typical "Cold Warrior" but soon began to change as he faced the awful reality of nuclear warfare. He was the first and only president who faced that decision--who came within a hairsbreadth of "pushing the button." The Joint Chiefs believed they had the advantage of Russia on nuclear weapons in 1962 (during the Cuban Missile Crisis) and very much wanted to use them, and angrily pressured JFK to do so. They thought that hundreds of thousands of casualties here would be a 'win' because Russia would be totally annihilated. JFK refused and made his own deal with Krushchev, pulling US missiles out of Turkey, to avoid Armageddon. He opened back-channels to Krushchev and Castro, to get around CIA/Pentagon warmongering. The CIA was meanwhile instigating a proxy war in Vietnam. JFK had sought to counter the CIA after the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, early in his term. He vowed to smash the CIA "into a thousand pieces" after the Bay of Pigs, and fired the CIA Director. To counter the CIA in Vietnam, he began seeking neutral status for Vietnam, like Laos, with the CIA sabotaging him every step of the way. He was also the first president to propose limitations on nuclear weapons (the Test Ban Treaty), again totally opposed by the Joint Chiefs and the CIA.

Bang, bang, shoot, shoot.

JFK had been counting on a big win--the American peoples' desire for world peace--in 1964, to finally deal with the CIA and the war profiteers. And he was not wrong. After he was killed, the American people gave LBJ one of the biggest landslides in history, in 1964, running as the "peace candidate." (Oh God, the bitter memories!) (That was my first vote for president. I voted for peace.)

RFK was his brother's only ally within the top echelons of the US government on the matter of world peace. (I did not know this when I voted for McCarthy in the 1968 California primary.) The American people wanted peace. It was too late. The "military-industrial complex"--which Ike warned about--was already entirely out of control, and assassinated a president and a presidential candidate, to enforce their will. And we have been an increasingly nazified, war-mongering country ever since.

Douglass is a doing a trilogy. His second book is going to be on RFK. And I think he is going to say that the CIA assassinated RFK as well. The RFK assassination was more cunning. The JFK assassination had CIA fingerprints all over it. (Really, the case is shut--they did it.) RFK's murder has more mystery to it, and is much harder to penetrate. (My guess: the CIA learned more about how to create adequate cover within the US, in the five years between the two assassinations.) But the timing of the RFK assassination could not speak more eloquently of the motive and the perpetrators. He was "JFK on steroids" from their point of view.

We were at THE critical juncture in the history of war and peace, and in the history of our country, when RFK was assassinated: Would the American people consent to becoming the new Nazis--the militarized global empire that Hitler dreamed of--or would we fulfill our promise of democracy, generosity and peace, so evidently within our power as the victors of WW II? Would JFK's "new generation of leadership" turn back the monster of war, and seek a world of fair competition, and even some cooperation, between the capitalist and communist systems, and would the US recognize legitimate aspirations for social justice in countries like Cuba and Vietnam (as JFK evidently privately wished), or would we become...?

The Bush Junta, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent people to steal their oil...

1968: Bang, bang, shoot, shoot.

Yup, they did RFK too.

Twelve years later, when Ted Kennedy challenged Carter--whom I viewed as one of the "acceptable" Democrats, like Humphrey, who had resigned themselves to the "US as war machine"--we were a bitter people, with these profoundly disturbing wounds inside of us, of both of our best leaders having been assassinated, and their murders covered up, because the assassins were within our own government. Most of us had not quite made this reality conscious. We were a sick people, in many respects--like individuals in families with covered up secrets. And I remember now that I thought Teddy Kennedy shouldn't run, because he would be assassinated and we just couldn't take any more. Martin Luther King had also been assassinated a few months before RFK (that will be Douglass' third book). Bang, bang, shoot, shoot x 3. All dead.

I may have voted for Teddy in the primaries in 1980. I can't recall. I probably did. (Was he still in the race by the California primary? Memory blank.) I was bewildered and alienated (though I never stopped voting). And, looking back on the events in 1980, from the perspective of post-Bush Junta, I can only figure that the corpo/fascists who now run our government, not yet having the capability to directly miscount our votes with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code throughout an electronic voting system, with no audit/recount controls--as they have now--used all their other powers over us to destroy even a mildly progressive government such as Carter's, in order to begin the Great Looting (Reaganism), which preceded the Great March To Corporate Resource Wars (Bushwhackism). I think Carter's demise was wholly manipulated--by the far rightwing, through the oil corps, the financial corps, the 'news' monopolies and the Pentagon (which permitted Reagan's thugs to commit goddamn treason in Iran--bargaining with the Iranians to keep hold of the US hostages until after the 1980 election). And we must also not forget Reagan's reign of terror in Latin America--which included the slaughter of two hundred thousand Mayan villagers in Guatemala, in addition to the wars on Nicaragua and El Salvador and other "dirty wars." I don't think Jimmy Carter--clearly a man with a conscience--would have let all that happen.

Part of my judgement of how Carter was ousted derives from Carter's activities since 1980. It's hard to see politicians through the thick fog of the corpo/fascist press. Out of the limelight, he has shown some amazing visionary qualities. For instance, the Carter Center's work on honest elections in Latin America has been one of the transformative elements of the region. It has resulted in the present, amazing reality: leftist governments elected in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay (!), Uruguay, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. So, thinking back to why Carter got "rabbited" by the corpo/fascist press (rather like "Swift-boating" or "scream taping"--obsessive focus on irrelevant issues or incidents, to destroy a progressive leader; Carter said he encountered a giant rabbit while he was on vacation fishing--and the corpo/fascist press went wild), it was likely because of this tendency of Carter's to promote good government, with the rich and corporate lusting after the Great Looting, which requires bad government.

In short, I had lost hope by the time Teddy Kennedy ran against Carter in 1980. There were still a few good guys in our government--Teddy was one; and others in Congress (those who did investigations of Iran/Nicaragua, and the banking scandals, or who investigated and debunked the "lone gunman" bullshit about the JFK assassination). But I, like everyone else, was brainwashed into thinking that the American people had "chosen" Ronnie Raygun as president--which just added to my state of depression and alienation. I no longer believe that, after seeing how the corpo/fascist press covered up Bush Jr.'s election thefts. I think Ronnie Raygun's 'election' was as manipulated as Bush Jr's in 2000 (pre-'TRADE SECRET' code voting systems). With the power to "Swift-boat" and to "scream tape," and the EASY power, now, to directly miscount the votes, they don't have to assassinate good leaders. Good leaders cannot be elected here (except for a few tokens) unless they agree to corpo/fascist rule and the Forever War. We are seeing that with Obama (whom I think won by a bigger margin than we know, on the issue of the Iraq War, and also on the projection of hope onto him of real reform, whose mandate was shaved to curtail his reformist tendencies, and who was vetted by the Corporate Rulers and made deals with them in order not to be Diebolded. One of the deals was immunity for the Bush Junta principles. Another may have been giving Clinton and the Bushwhacks a free hand in Latin America, where they are setting up Oil War II.)

By 1980, I and my country's political establishment were at very great odds. I had lost my country by that time, and it was little more than a curiosity to me that Teddy Kennedy was running for president. Why would he do that, and be killed? --I remember wondering. John Lennon was assassinated that year--late 1980. The door on change had closed. We were now a venal, greedy, bloodthirsty, militaristic empire. Our great opportunity to be something better was over.

I am an American patriot. I love my country and its people and our greatest ideals of democracy and social justice very, very much. I think we are the greatest experiment in democracy that has ever occurred, with our astonishing mix of cultures abiding in peace together, across this vast landscape. But I have been in a state of trauma, from all of those assassinations, all these years. Two things have begun to heal me. One is James Douglass' book on JFK, which directly addresses the spiritual wound to our country of that assassination. The other is the heartening success of the leftist democracy movement in Latin America. I am grateful to Carter for his part in that. That is likely among the reasons he was ousted. He wanted peace with Latin America. Another was the peace he brokered in the Middle East. But the main one was the preliminary to the Forever War--destroying the great, progressive American middle class, and utterly devastating the poor--by the Great Looting. On our backs now, from the Great Looting, we have no defenses against the "military-industrial complex." They can do with us as they will. They even achieved direct, 'TRADE SECRET' control of our vote counting system! Obama is out, in case you were wondering. And the next war will be against South America, for their oil.

Unless we rise up peacefully, like the South Americans are doing, and reclaim our democracy.