Our Man in Vienna

The Meaning of Life to Our Chieftains

Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign undermined Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to initiate peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in order to improve his chances of winning the election.[1]

Just to be fair, Kennedy initiated the war, Johnson escalated it, but Nixon prolonged it.

Conservative icon Ronald Reagan, initiator of the Iran-Contra Affair sold the Iranians weapons and used the proceeds to fund the Contras, formerly Samosa’s National Guard, a marauding soldateska whose mission was to free Nicaragua. Their pillaging and raping was exemplary. Another Reagan Administration gambit was the mining of Nicaragua Harbor, a country we were not at war with.

Ronald Reagan’s assessment: “The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” Guess our founders, according to him, were coked-up mass murders, rapists and torturers.

Question: What does human life mean to those aspiring to gain power or to retain it?

Answer: Not a whit!

No matter how good the governing system, and the Founding Fathers established a damn good one, it cannot cancel out human iniquity.

And no system is foolproof.

 
The Undoing of Richard Nixon

Nixon explains how he undid himself:
“Always remember, others may hate you,
but those who hate you don’t win
unless you hate them,
and then you destroy yourself.”

Wise words from a prime hater.
Here he is to Henry the Kiss (of Death):
“You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians,
and I don’t give a damn.”

And Henry, not to be outdone chimes in:
“Why should we flagellate ourselves
for what the Cambodians did to each other?”

Those wise words were said
after the fact.

Nixon had pulverized George McGovern
in the ’72 presidential election,
but instead of using his mandate to govern,
he went about trying to pick off his opponents
and to finish off the vanquished political party.

However, Nixon’s negative emotions
brought humiliating disgrace for the former victor.

Land Mines, Cluster Bombs and the Clintons

The Clintons favor land mines and cluster bombs.
Over 150 nations have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.
That year President Bill Clinton refused to sign that treaty.
After his election, President George W. Bush declared that the United States
would never sign.

In 2006 Senate Amendment No. 4882 would have banned the use of cluster bombs
in civilian areas. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois voted in favor of the ban.
Senator Hillary Clinton of New York voted against the ban.
Congress rejected the amendment.

 

Saying it

Sometimes those who have not learned the art of rhetoric can say it best.
There can be such an eloquence in words that are spoken by those
who do not have the lingual finesse that a formal education can bring.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, alleged anarchists, were condemned to death for robbery and murder
in a rigged trial in South Braintree, Massachusetts in August of 1927.

Vanzetti: I did not spittel a drop of blood, or steal a cent in all my life….I wish to say to you that I am innocent. I have never done a crime, some sins, but never any crime. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only this one, but of all, all. I am an innocent man. I now wish to forgive some people for what they are doing to me…..If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words – our lives – our pains – nothing! The taking of our lives – lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us – that agony is our triumph.

Police: Do you believe in this government of ours?
Sacco: Yes; some things I like different.

A poor man can become a star in Spanish-speaking nations by goading and killing
an animal in a ring. The animal does not volunteer for battle.

Elsewhere a poor man can become a star by defeating another poor man in a ring.

 

School in the Art of Torture

What‘s all the fuss about torture? Haven’t we been training South American surrogates in the art of torture for decades on American soil? “The US Army School of Americas (SOA), based in Fort Benning, Georgia, trains Latin American soldiers in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. Graduates of the SOA are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America. Among the SOA’s nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians.”[1]

 

Conservative Pundit

Here’s Ann Coulter on treason: “During the Vietnam War, New York Times scion Arthur „Pinch“ Sulzberger told his father that if an American soldier ran into a North Vietnamese soldier, he would prefer for the American to get shot. „It’s the other guy’s country,“ he explained.[2]

I would prefer no one to get shot, but Pinch is right about whose country it is. Yes, we were the invaders. We had no business being there.

Ann takes a jab at wiseacre ladies:
“Feminists don’t care about Saddam’s rape rooms.”[1]

It’s nice of “non-feminist” Coulter to be concerned about rape. Remember the four nuns who were raped and murdered in El Salvador in 1980!

And dear Ann, the United States supported a bevy
of Right-wing Latin-American rapist dictators,
mostly under Republican administrations.

Reagan’s Secretary of State Al Haig explained it in Congress this way:
“They drove through a ‘legitimate’ road block.”(!?)

Saddam the Middle-East rapist used to be our friend. And if a woman is raped in the lands of our present-day friends, she’s lucky if she ends up in the clink. Some of our friends in that area think nothing of rape, flogging, amputation and stoning.

Ann Coulter is a best-selling author. If her columns were not so outlandish she’d be nowhere..

– Herbert Kuhner

[1] BBC Prime, History.
[1] School of the Americas Watch Online.
[2] Human Events, Jan. 3, 2007.