The blogs won’t let it go. Nor will the army of blog readers –– not on this site; we have a very select audience –– who for the most part are expressing, loudly, a sense of having been betrayed by Senator Barack Obama over the F.I.S.A. legislation.

It is, of course, a matter of moral high ground: the Senate, with considerable assistance from Democrats, has now granted not only civil immunity to the telecom corporations for their complicity in widespread criminal behavior but retroactive authority to a criminal gang which initiated it. Not only that. It also purports to legalize behavior which is manifestly illegal under the Fourth Amendment.

This is extremely serious business.

For much longer than the nearly-eight years of the current regime, the U.S. Constitution has been hacked at by the government. As a direct product of the last four administrations, the First, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments have been systematically broken. No free country can survive the ruination of its founding documents.

Obama knows this.

Had I been in the room for the conversations, had I been consulted for my opinion in the discussion about the impending F.I.S.A. bill, I am not at all sure what I would have advised.

Obama could have stood against the bill. He could have expressed in eloquent terms the danger to the nation of any further erosion of the Constitution. In terms of the affect of this on the legislation itself, it is unlikely that a majority would have stood with him. Passage would be likely in any event. But a strong stand, if coupled with a fight to prevent imposition of cloture, might have enabled other Senators to hold the floor in successful filibuster.

Obama would then have been in the position of participating in, perhaps leading, the filibuster itself. Whether this would have killed the F.I.S.A. bill is not clear. Maybe. But what then?

What then might have turned out to be a McCain election in November.

That is not a small matter, either.

Speaking only for myself, I do not need to see more of the kind of politics which buries truth beneath expediency and which elevates rationalization to the level of character. Unfortunately, however, living as I do in America, I am unable to avoid the view. And it seems evident that there is only one real-world chance, perhaps only this single election, to bring the country back from what appears to me to be the very brink of disaster.

The transferrence of power in America to a ruling group which excludes both the people and their congressional representatives, abetted by a mass media which censors dissent as it whores for empire, is now a genuine possibility. It must be stopped, if that is possible.

I don’t personally know Barack Obama, have never met him, and I base my sense of him, his heart and his character, on his first book, “Dreams From My Father”, and on his speeches. If, as I believe, Obama and his advisers are fully aware of what’s at stake, then they must win. We’ve run out of symbolic ‘victories.’

We are already seeing the early stages of what will likely be the dirtiest campaign in a century. Major “news” organizations have so far tried to kneecap Obama with Jeremiah Wright, the flag pin on a lapel, a “terrorist fist-bump” (F*x News), a former Weather Underground leader named Ayers, and the rumor that the candidate is really a Muslim.

Lots worse garbage than that is already flying around the internet. ‘Jokes’ about race and assassination. Watermelon patches. Every remaining trace of the country’s worst shame is coming out now, all the ‘nigger-haters’ set free to spill poison into the national bloodstream. Equal rights never happened, and we know it.

Obama is not naive. This particular moment in history may offer an unlikely window to an unlikely candidate. Antipathy to George Bush and the Republican Party makes possible not only an Obama victory but a landslide in Congress. But there will be no Obama victory if the subconscious fears of most voters can be made to override their better hopes.

John McCain is, in truth, a crazy man. But the degree to which he is well-regarded and protected in the mainstream media has been revealed recently when General Wesley Clark’s hardly controversial comments were met with such a ludicrous firestorm. Clark merely said that being shot down during wartime does not qualify a person to be President. He was pilloried by everyone, charged with “demeaning” McCain’s war record. Several “commentators” tried to parallel his remarks with the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry.

That is the “news” environment in which this Presidential campaign is being fought.

With McCain’s only hope the possibility of sowing doubts about Obama’s “capacity” to “keep America safe,” and Hillary Clinton’s helpful “Commander-in-chief threshold”, Obama would be foolish to hand any ammo to that crackpot or his friends on television.

In my opinion, Obama did not betray anybody in voting for the odious F.I.S.A. bill. Legislation can be changed; in fact, the only prospect for criminal investigations is in an Obama Justice Department, and as the Senator remarked about this bill in April, it contains no immunity to criminal prosecution. Were he to lose the election over the F.I.S.A. bill, there would be no way back.

The reason I am still not sure how I would’ve advised him is that there appears to me the possibility that in standing against the F.I.S.A. legislation he may have enhanced his electoral appeal. McCain would’ve been able to use the issue, but Obama would’ve established a stronger profile.

You may find this quite cynical, but I suspect that option was thoroughly discussed in that meeting, among those people, and ultimately considered too great a risk.

Look, I’d like to live in the America I was raised to believe in. When you’re raised to think highly of your country, it’s natural to develop expectations. I haven’t been able to expect much in maybe forty years. The political “center” in my country has gone, in the words of John Mitchell, “so far to the right” I do “not even recognize it.”

And if all of the above isn’t enough, we’ve had two straight presidential elections stolen, the last one using electronic means which still exist four years later.

That’s the real situation. Obama’s campaign has to deal with it. I’m not sure which direction he ought to have taken with the F.I.S.A. bill, but I am very appreciative that this campaign is serious about winning.

It figured that Brad would come up with the expression.

Brad’s the kind of poet who when you first read the lines you think maybe he can’t quite spell words in the english language and when you read them again you realize he’s just providing us with slightly broader applications,. He’s got that sort of mind.

We were discussing hazards the other evening, on account of his recent flirtation with trying the remainder of his planetary voyage on two thumbs and seven fingers. It might be that we’re getting older, and it might be that the hazards are increasing. He’s been driving a lot of highway to his work, Napa to the east bay and back, and it’s his opinion that drivers are getting crazier.

He calls them monkeys on meth.

I think it’s the times. The nation’s in a bad fix, and it seems to be finally dawning on a large number of people, probably a majority. The voters blame Bush for this, and there’s a bit of truth there, but on a deeper level they probably know that the system itself has spun out of orbit.

What we read in the paper and see masticated on television are the surface crises: Iraq’s a disaster, there is widespread fraud in mortgage banking, the market’s tanking, the health care system is broken, and nobody can afford to buy gasoline. People are pissed. Monkeys on meth.

And no matter how good you think Obama is, and I think he’s better than anybody I’ve seen in forty years, it’s not very helpful to expect him to save the nation by himself.

Even if he stays alive, even if his people are smart enough to avert the probable attempt at electronic vote theft, even if he beats that whacked-out goat McCain like a gong... even if he brings with him to Washington a tide of new Democrats and a working majority, even then it won’t be enough.

Iraq didn’t rise from a vacuum. The mortgage bankers knew they could get away with it, just as the Savings & Loan guys had. There is little discernible difference any longer between the federal government and multi-national corporate empires. These are dangerous conditions, as anyone with even a passing glance at history can affirm. It’s trouble.

I would bet you a new set of Mizuno irons against a Roosevelt dime that Obama and his people know this. They know what they’re up against.

As the campaign progresses, there will be times when the candidate takes positions which run against not only my fervently-held beliefs but, arguably, his own. The F.I.S.A. bill is an obvious example. Obama knew he probably could not stop it; he also knew that in trying to do so he would be handing a club to McCain on the “issue” of “national security” –– precisely the weapon McCain desperately needs.

I’m glad he’s running his campaign with sufficient seriousness to dodge the traps being set out for him. He’s no Michael Dukakis, who ruined himself on capital punishment and a hypothetical question. He knows what’s at stake here.

I’ve read his first book, “Dreams From My Father.” In my opinion, the depth, character, and wisdom of the man who wrote those words is impossible to fake.

But he can’t do it alone, even as President. The roadways are crammed with monkeys on meth, a national illness and systemic breakdown. Every hole anyone could discover in the social, political, and economic fabric of America has been exploited with no concern over consequences. The world is changing, and our country’s found itself with a failing economy and trapped in a stupid, crazy war in the middle east. That is what happened to the Soviet Union, of which there ain’t one anymore.

It seems to me that it’s everybody’s job now. For those of my generation, we learned some things in the sixties and after, and it’s time to make use of them.

As spectator sport, politics is way ahead of football, with bone-crunching realism and as much sleight-of-hand as God grants the average mortal of marginal intelligence.

Just like sports on the national level, the figures who dominate are subject to endless analysis, prognostication, and the projection of our innermost fantasies. The highly-paid commentators, usually washed-up figures in their field, blather on about minutae as the crowds cheer and catcall. Vegas will take your money on shifting odds.

The above is by way of preface to a few observations. I am a washed-up figure in the political realm myself, although no one is paying me, and am therefore as qualified as, say, your average hack. But as John Cusack remarks in “Must Love Dogs,” we will press on.

I have been enjoying the controversies of the past week concerning several moves or non-moves of Senator Barack Obama. There seems to be vast confusion in the media and on the blogs. People are outraged, or disappointed, or I-told-you-so-ing all over the place. Everybody who thought they had a handle on this guy who figures to be elected President.

Over the recent past, Obama has:

* declined to participate in public financing, turning down the estimated eighty-four million in taxpayer funds in favor of raising a couple of hundred million on his own.

* supported the Supreme Court decision on guns and the Second Amendment.

* asked his backers to help retire Hillary Clinton’s multi-million-dollar campaign debt, much of it in loans she made to herself.

* bailed out on the FISA bill, with its telecom legal immunity and its nullification of the Fourth Amendment to the constitution which used to protect the people from unlawful searches and seizures.

* delivered a fawning, militaristic speech to the largest pro-Israeli lobby in the U.S.

One could be forgiven for interpreting these developments as evidence that the candidate, whose central message of hope for a much better country has galvanized millions, is actually a slick, standard-brand pol no different in personal architecture than, say, one of the Clintons.

The Chronicle editorially chastised him for his public finance renunciation, pointing to a statement he signed about ten months ago in which he promised to accept it provided the opposition did the same. Now that McCain was signing up for the cash, the story went, Obama ought to do the same. The mainstream media have been unanimous in this opinion. Omitted from most such discourse have been the following points:

1. Public financing, as it stands, limits the candidates but not the national committees. The DNC has about forty million in its coffers; the RNC has eighty million more than that. Also not limited: the ‘independent’ groups, including the guys who paid for the swift-boating of John Kerry. Hundreds of millions, used to go after Obama, and not enough bucks in the treasury to effectively fight back. If Obama agreed to the system as it is, he would be agreeing to get outspent by around two hundred million dollars.

2. McCain, who last year agreed to public financing but did not sign the document, later changed his mind and tried to opt out of it after using his public dollars as collateral for private loans. He did this because he realized that he could raise more outside of the system as soon as he became the presumptive nominee. This opt-out was and is of questionable legality. In March, he went private anyhow, with no constraints, and was able to begin his campaign against Obama while the latter was still using his resources to fend off Clinton all the way into June. McCain’s position now is, obviously, baldly hypocritical, something the media never touched on.

So, as to the public financing flap, Obama did the right thing. I do not want a fool for a President, and neither do you. We’ve had plenty of that and don’t need any more.

The candidate’s statement on guns and the Supreme Court is, of course, a flatly-political position. It may also be reflective of his true opinion to a degree; we don’t really know. But as a political position, considering his interest in carrying Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, not to mention Virginia and a few Rocky Mountain states, it is absolutely right.

Then there’s the matter of the Hillary bailout. This, which hasn’t been subjected to any criticism in the media, as far as I know, is of course commonplace. Losers are in debt because, having lost, they have a lot of difficulty attracting money from their old backers. Deals get made.

Personally, I’m appalled, even though I get the politics of it. As a practical matter, Obama had no choice if he wants to win in November. He needs some things from Clinton; the Clintons need some things from him. The reason it pisses me off this particular time is that I’ve made a couple of (small) contributions to Obama’s campaign. I did it for the same reasons more than a million other folks did. To be asked now to contribute more so that we can help retire the Clintons’ debt to themselves –– which means that we have sponsored Clinton’s attacks on our candidate, as well as paying for his necessary defense –– is pretty outrageous.

I expect the next President to negotiate with people around the world who have interests inimical to those of the U.S. He might as well have started with Hillary.

The other items cited above, the FISA bill and the Israeli pandering, are more disturbing to me, as is the candidate’s generalized saber-rattling when it comes to Afghanistan and executing Bin Laden. These are fundamental matters.

There have certainly been discussions within the Obama campaign about each of these things. What are you going to do? What are we going to say? I have zero doubt that on FISA there is unanimity, including the candidate, to the effect that the legislation is awful. Obama is a constitutional lawyer and a community organizer. He does not support an abrogation of the Bill of Rights. The retroactive immunity for telecoms is also very dangerous in a free society because it endorses making corporate entities arms of the state. Without immunity, corporations can’t safely conspire with the government in violation of our rights; they are held accountable just as is every citizen. With it, another legal barrier to fascism is removed.

The righteous anger on some blogs over this issue, Obama’s failure to take the Senate lead in trying to stop the bill, even to join Feingold’s incipient fillibuster, has a very deep moral basis. As pointed out elsewhere, Obama might have earlier informed Speaker Pelosi that he would stand against the bill in the Senate and that he expected the party’s House leadership to help defeat it before it reached him. He might have had a chat with Steny Hoyer, the useless gasbag majority whip. He might also, still, join with Feingold and take a stand against invoking cloture, the 60% vote to end debate. Arguably, his stature, party leadership, and oratorical skills might be enough to avert passage.

For Obama to do this, of course, would be dangerous to his campaign. McCain’s only chance to beat him is on phony arguments centering around ‘national security.’ If Obama were able to stop the FISA bill, the national debate would swing in the direction McCain wants, away from the war, the economy, and the pillaging of the public treasury by the already grossly wealthy. Obama would be portrayed as ‘weak’ in the ‘war on terror’.

The other issues, Israel and Afghanistan, that’s only talk. FISA is a different proposition because it’s real. It’s a real law with real consequences. The parts of the bill which abrogate the constitution would probably be confirmed by the current and future Supreme Court, stuffed as it is with idiots and liars.

But I have hope, still, even with FISA and all of the above, and here’s why:

In 1960, a young, Catholic, marginally-experienced Senator from Massachusetts, took campaign positions which were alternatively moderate (on civil rights) and pro-military (Taiwan, Cuba, a mythical “missile gap” with the Soviets). There was plenty of suspicion on the left at the time, supporters of Adlai Stevenson, including Eleanor Roosevelt, expressing serious doubts about him.

JFK was not an ideologue. He was a practical, pragmatic politician with a ton of money. He knew he had to protects himself on issues that Richard Nixon might use against him, and he out-flanked Nixon on foreign policy. At the time, America had never elected a Catholic President and some believed it would never happen. Had Kennedy taken more ‘liberal’ positions, he might easily have lost. But he didn’t. And the fact that he, and not Nixon, occupied the White House in October of 1962 almost certainly prevented a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

Kennedy not only inspired a generation to believe in a better world, he had begun to move decisively toward civil rights and disarmament by 1963. His foreign policies got him killed, but those he inspired, including many young people, kept going.

You and I don’t know Barack Obama and most likely never will. I am guessing. I might be wrong. But there’s one thing about all of this, whoever he is, whether he can win, whether he can stay alive, that looks harder to stop than a candidate, and that’s the power of a mass movement. Change doesn’t come from cynicism or despair but from a belief that the world can be made better.

After twenty-eight years of crap, that belief is almost astonishing. Think I’ll enjoy it for a while.

I had hoped that we could get on with it, the presidential campaign between Obama and McCain. I understood that there’d been plenty of bruising all around, that there were hurts and disillusionment, anger, the sense of betrayal, not to mention the sort of emotional exhaustion which misplaces human kindness and empathy. Okay.

But the fact that the Obama candidacy wrested away a nomination Clinton and her supporters had taken for granted, and in so doing opened a lot of very deep wounds, is not the same thing as the Obama candidacy causing these wounds. It’s not a small distinction.

Last Friday, I had a long conversation with a campaign worker for the Democratic National Committee. She was going door-to-door in my hilly neighborhood on a very hot day. It was her birthday. She was 38.

We stood around the car deck, next to my cool ‘07 Madza convertible which the bank is letting me drive in exchange for interest payments. She said she was encountering resistence to Obama among women from my generation, women in their late fifties and early sixties, and she didn’t understand why.

We talked about our respective generations. She was 38. She hadn’t known the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. She also hadn’t known the feminist movement in the late sixties and into the seventies. She had no personal memory of how the Equal Rights Amendment failed ratification, of reading the “Sisterhood Is Powerful” anthology and being stunned. I had.

Clinton’s candidacy embodied for millions of women a way to finally break through in a society which has systematically made things much harder for them because of their gender. I know we’re all post-modern, or whatever the fuck we are, but there are aspects of the feminist movement which did not get addressed by the affirmative action shell game, and these are the wounds this election campaign has opened.

America’s answer to feminism was to invite a few women into the club. There are women Senators now, and CEOs. A woman is Speaker of the House. These are fine things, no question about it. But women in general are still paid less than men for doing the same work. And women are still subject to gender-related insults pretty much on a daily basis, at least in the general population.

Women are still beaten and raped.

So I think it’s fair to say that a lot of women, especially from my generation, carry some justifiable anger around. Hillary Clinton was a way to fight back. Of course, not being a woman, I don’t have better than a cursory understanding of this phenomenon, but I recall watching Billie Jean King beat the daylights out of Bobby Riggs and being wildly happy about it. There’s a kind of deep satisfaction, however temporary, in nailing the bastards.

Clinton will not be the nominee, and she may never be President, however her campaign, flawed as it was, and her candidacy –– resting upon her most cynical of acts, her vote for war –– necessarily foundered, has changed for all time the prospect of women being serious presidential contenders. That barrier, win or lose, has been shattered.

I hope that those who were dedicated to Clinton because of what she represented for women can now recognize that what she represented is far more likely to come to fruition in an Obama presidency than under McCain.

Personally, Clinton lost me because of the war, not because she is a woman. I knew that she was smart enough to see through Bush’s horseshit, but she felt that a vote against the war would cripple her candidacy. After all, the war was very popular at the time. She was quite sensitive to the “not tough enough” charge any woman would face in a general election. So she set about proving how tough she could be, eventually even speaking of “obliterat(ing)” the entire nation of Iran.

I don’t want any more war Presidents. I’ve had enough. Even though the polls were in favor of the Iraqi invasion, a real leader, the kind America desperately needs now, would have stood against it anyway. And those who realized that they had been mistaken, such as John Edwards, admitted their error, and being able to admit an error would be a nice change from twenty-eight years of lies.

I don’t want Clinton’s supporters to “get over it,” as that disgusting saying goes. I want everyone who hopes to force some serious changes in the inequalities which plague us will continue to fight for them. And I think that in that fight Barack Obama is on their side.

The mainstream news media are calling it a compromise, the House bill just passed on a vote of 293-129 which officially ends America’s 232-year experiment with democracy. Hey, look on the bright side: 232 years is a pretty nice run. We should be grateful.

The House vote, which is designed to retroactively legalize widespread criminal violations by the Bush administration and the telecom giants, is a ‘compromise’ in the sense that it contains the priviso that AT&T (“Your world, delivered –– to the government”) and friends are immune for prosecution or lawsuits of any kind if they can show a court a letter from the feds saying that what they’re doing ain’t illegal.

They already have the letter. The “show a letter” fig leaf is designed to cover the large number of Democrats, including majority whip, Steny Hoyer, who are in bed with the telecoms but want to pretend they’re not. Hoyer and the other swine who voted for this bill wanted their own immunity –– from pissed-off voters. Hence the fig leaf.

I suppose one really could call the thing a compromise along the lines of: hey, we only wiped out the remains of the Fourth Amendment. There are plenty of other ones left.

The constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is, along with freedom of speech and assembly, the cornerstone of the nation. Without it, we may as well be the Soviet Union.

The ostensible reason for the legislation was the government’s claim that it could not fight the “war on terror” within the confines of the Fourth Amendment. It was too unwieldy, maybe even archaic, perhaps even “quaint,” as a former Bush Attorney General described the Geneva Convention rules against torture. We are in a “new kind of war,” the propaganda goes, and we live in a “post-9/11 world.”

Left out of the mainstream media has been any discussion of this fact: the government has applied to the already-existing FISA courts for thousands of warrants. All but two were immediately granted. Current law permits the government to wiretap for a week without a warrant anyhow. In other words, there was no actual need for the law.

Not unless your goal is not wiretapping but the removal of any constitutional restraints to spying on everyone. One nation, under surveillance.

The telecom immunity creates a situation where corporations, if the government authorizes them to do so, may break the law, any law which formerly prohibited any sort of spying on you, with impunity. If enacted by the Senate, which seems likely, the government will henceforth be legally permitted to open your mail, read your e-mail, track your internet usage, bug your phones, and traffic in your personal information, including tax returns, medical record, and more.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is about to become obsolete. I should not have to point out that, historically, rights lost are never regained. It is not hyperbole to say that the country’s flirting with death right now. No Supreme Court would ever before have countenanced this. Never. But this one will.

And all of the hucksters and phonies and useless assholes taking up space in the Congress can pin flags to their lapels now that it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Amy Goodman and ‘Democracy Now’ have long been a source for the kind of information never featured on or by mainstream media, and I’ve been grateful for that, even when I felt turned-off by her relentless, world-class self-promotion. What the hell? Why can’t someone on the left push herself a little bit? As Dr. Laura is well-aware, there’s no scarcity of ego-driven right-wing commentators and columnists, so why shouldn’t we have one or two of our own?

Today, however, in a single shot, Amy Goodman’s credibility with me ran from the mid-nineties to below the Mendoza line. In a ‘special’ program commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s murder, she demonstrated that she is both historically ignorant and evidently unconcerned with learning anything.

Here is how she began:

AMY GOODMAN: Forty years ago today, Robert F. Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel after the Los Angeles primary, the Democratic primary he won. Today on Democracy Now!, we look back at Kennedy’s life and legacy.

His record as a political figure is a complicated one. To many Americans, he came to embody the hopes of the civil rights and antiwar movements. But while serving in government, he played a major role in actions these movements fought against. As a young lawyer, Robert Kennedy was a key aide to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy on the notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. As Attorney General under his brother, President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy signed the wiretap order authorizing the FBI’s spying on Martin Luther King, Jr. On foreign policy, Robert Kennedy played a key role in US efforts to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro and was part of the inner circle of advisers that backed President Kennedy’s escalation of the bombing and destruction of Vietnam.

Consider the following:

* Kennedy had indeed been a staffer to McCarthy, who’d been a friend of father Joe Kennedy’s. No doubt papa Joe got the kid a job with McCarthy. What Goodman fails to mention is: Kennedy quit, denounced McCarthy, and joined the staff of the Senate Democrats. He had been in his twenties.

* Goodman earns an “F” for her essay on the King wiretaps, principally because she either doesn’t understand what happened or chooses to discard it. I regret having to recite this material but Goodman’s failure increases the burden on anyone who appreciates the truth in these matters. First, Hoover had been using blackmail against both Kennedys from the President’s inauguration, mostly over JFK’s various liaisons with women he was not married to. Hoover also hated Martin Luther King, Jr., calling him “the most notorious liar in America,” which was fairly rich coming from him. Hoover used King to “box-in” the President, thusly: there were rumors that King was associated with communist agents; the Director just wanted to warn the President that becoming too close to King would be dangerous. He pressed Kennedy to approve a wiretap; without it, Hoover said, it might be said that the President was not sufficiently interested in possible Soviet influence over King. Kennedy of course knew King better than that, but he also knew Hoover. Audio tapes in the Kennedy Archives record RFK’s private assessment of Hoover as a very dangerous, very sick man. In order to cover their asses, the Kennedys decided to give Hoover a limited-time wiretap, no more than two weeks in duration. The Attorney General expected that Hoover would apply for another one, but they could then turn him down. But the President was killed in Dallas. When that happened, Hoover was able to wiretap King with impunity, he thought, because even if Kennedy discovered the tap was continuing, Hoover would expose his earlier approval.

That’s how politics works, folks. That Goodman doesn’t know the history and is content to repeat what amounts –– given no background or explanation –– to a lie, is very disturbing. But it’s nothing compared with what what follows: the Kennedy/Cuba history, and Viet Nam.

Here we reach the borders of fantasy so profound as to raise questions about Goodman’s ethics, character, intelligence, and/or associations. Something stinks here.

* Here’s what happened with Cuba. The U.S. had broken with the new Castro government of Cuba in 1959. Secret plans were begun under Eisenhower, using Richard Nixon as the ‘action officer’, to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. A new Cuban government, selected by the U.S. from among the exile groups, would be installed. Kennedy, once elected, was briefed on the plan –– and he had serious reservations. There could be no overt American assistance, he said; no air cover, no U.S. troops. The invasion group of exiles would be on their own. The CIA, in the person of Director Allen Dulles, assured him they understood. The generals, as Kennedy ordered, put their own signatures on a document advising the action.

But the CIA had been lying. To the exile groups, the Agency, through liaison E. Howard Hunt, said that Kennedy would use U.S. planes to knock out Castro’s air force on the ground. Kennedy was a new President. He could not afford a failure, the CIA believed. Therefore, once the invasion was underway, they could force him to use U.S. force to avert defeat. The exiles were betrayed by the CIA, not by Kennedy as many still believe. With the failure of the invasion, Kennedy took public responsibility. But privately he fired Dulles (who later sat on the Warren Commission) and threatened to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

The assassination plans had begun under Eisenhower as well, and the Agency had made common cause with the Mafia, which itself looked forward to reopening the casinos after Castro was gone. RFK ordered these plots stopped; he sent Treasury agents to arrest exiles training off Lake Pontchartrain in Lousiana and No Name Key, Florida.

* And then there is Viet Nam. Goodman writes of “Kennedy’s escalation of the bombing and destruction of Vietnam.”

When Kennedy took office, there was already an American presence in Viet Nam, mostly instructors teaching the South Vietnamese to operate the military equipment we were giving them. In November of 1963, just a couple of weeks before his murder, Kennedy issued his last two National Security Action memoranda. One was an executive order withdrawing the first 1,000 troops; only 14,500 would remain. He planned to complete withdrawal following his re-election the following year.

Kennedy did not escalate bombing or destruction. In fact, he did not order ANY bombing of Viet Nam. American troops did not lead any combat missions. How Goodman could get this wrong is mind-blowing. Has she no knowledge of the Tonkin Gulf? The Pentagon Papers? Doesn’t she even know what happened?

To describe JFK and his brother as wiretapping, war-making politicians is so utterly crazy as to discredit Goodman for me, probably permanently. This is not a small error but one central to the issue of who runs America and what has happened to it over the past forty-five years. And to get this so grievously wrong is to obscure the reasons for the deaths of these two great, decent, visionary men.

In the words of someone I know, Amy Goodman is dead to me. A lot deader than Robert Francis Kennedy.

George Joannides, David Morales, and Gordon Campbell were long-time CIA operatives and close associates. Joannides was himself Chief of Psychological Operations (PsyOps) for the CIA in Miami in the sixties. Morales was a CIA assassin. The three played significant roles in Agency black operations in Southeast Asia and in South America. Black Ops includes political murder.

As now established by photographs taken on the evening of June 4, 1968, these three men were present in the Embassy Ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, talking with one another in the crowd awaiting the appearance of a victorious Robert Kennedy.

The CIA’s PsyOps program included intensive use of psychoactive drugs and other mind-control modalities beginning in the 1950s and continuing to the present day. See “Acid Dreams” by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain.

A key player in the mind-control experiments undertaken in secret and using unaware citizens during the 1960s was William J. Bryan, a hypnotist who worked closely with Joannides.

During the relatively brief period of congressional curiosity about the CIA’s unlawful domestic activities, there was an inquiry into the assassinations of the Kennedys and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The liaison between the House Committee and the CIA was George Joaniddes, who acted as “gatekeeper” for CIA documents. Committee staffers have since stated that the Committee was unaware of Joannides role in PsyOps.

Friends of Morales have said that Morales boasted to them of his “presence” in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and Los Angeles on June 4, 1968. Morales died one week before his scheduled testimony before the House Committee on Assassinations in 1978.

Numerous witnesses have confirmed that Bryan bragged to them that he had been the “programmer” of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who was arrested, tried, and convicted for killing Senator Kennedy.

There is no conceivably innocent reason for the presence of Joannides, Morales, and Campell at the RFK victory rally at the Ambassador Hotel.

It’s been forty years since Robert Kennedy was murdered. Joannides, Morales, and Bryan are dead. Campbell’s whereabouts are unknown.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it is widely believed –– and promoted as the official story by the media –– that Sirhan Sirhan was a lone assassin and that there was no conspiracy involved in the murder.

Those who believe this cannot, however, answer or dispute the following facts:

* Sirhan’s .22 caliber Iver-Johnson held eight bullets. Kennedy was hit three times. Five others were wounded. The best available evidence, accounting for the known wounds, bullet holes, and the bullets actually recovered from ceiling panels and the center post between the kitchen doors, is that eleven bullets were fired in the kitchen that night. The photographic evidence, including FBI documents showing circled bullet holes in the door post, and the statement of FBI agents who witnessed the removal of slugs from these holes, has been ignored. The post, as well as pertinent ceiling panels, removed by the L.A.P.D., were destroyed two weeks before Sirhan’s trial in 1969. This wasn’t known until 1988, when the archives were opened on the case. The L.A.P.D. said that it didn’t have enough room to store the materials and so had destroyed them. Missing were more than 1,400 exhibits.

* The only person who took still photographs in the kitchen that night and who was taking photographs of Kennedy at the time he was shot, was then-15-year-old Scott Enyart, who had gained access using fake press credentials. Enyart got twenty-six exposures, including 10 in the kitchen area. Immediately after the shooting, Enyart was stopped by police outside the Ambassador Hotel and taken into custody. He was held for the entire night. In the morning, he was told that his film was evidence and would be used in the subsequent trial. It was therefore confiscated. The film was not used at the trial. Enyart received from the L.A.P.D. 16 negatives, none of them of his exposures in the kitchen area. Enyart has said that he was at all times behind Kennedy in the crowd and never saw Sirhan (who was in front). The exposures he got were of the back of Kennedy’s head and of anyone else nearby.

* After a lengthy autopsy, L.A. Coroner Thomas Noguchi reported that Kennedy had been shot from behind, with the fatal bullet fired within an inch of his skull, behind his right ear and at an upward angle. He determined this by the powder burns on the Senator’s ear. Noguchi was approached by a deputy district attorney who asked him to change his testimony to say that Kennedy had been shot from a distance of three feet. Naguchi refused.

* Surhan’s attorneys did not question the discrepancy between Noguchi’s report and the fact that Sirhan had himself been firing from in front of Kennedy, and that the muzzle of his gun at no time came closer than three feet from Kennedy (most witnesses put the distance at six feet). After Noguchi refused to cooperate with the D.A., he was suddenly subjected to accusations of incompetence and charges that he was joyful at Kennedy’s death since the autopsy would crown his career; he was fired. Subsequently, he filied suit for reinstatement and won.

* Sirhan was tackled immediately after opening fire. He continued to squeeze the trigger but after the first –– and conceivably the second –– shot he could not aim.

* The L.A.P.D. had jurisdiction over the investigation, collecting original evidence, interviewing witnesses, and conducting the ballistics tests on what was purported to be Sirhan’s gun. The department structured its investigation to funnel all materials through two men who were designated to act as gatekeepers, controlling what would become part of the record and what would be discarded.

* The two L.A. cops who thus controlled the investigation were Lieutenant Manuel Peña and Sergeant Enrique Hernandez. The investigation was named ‘Special Unit Senator’ or SUS. The unit was created by Chief of Detectives Robert Houghton, who picked Hugh Brown, Chief of Homicide Detectives as the overall head of it, but specified that Peña was to control the daily flow and direction of the investigation.

* Peña had ‘retired’ from the L.A.P.D. in November of 1967, in order to “accept a position with the Agency for International Development Office in the State Department. The newspaper article covering his retirement party, presided over by Houghton, noted that as a “public safety advisor, he will train and advise foreign police forces in investigative and administrative matters.” It also noted that he spoke fluent Spanish and French.

* According to FBI agent Roger LaJeunesse, Peña was assigned to a “special training unit” at a CIA base in Virginia, one described by then California’s Chief Deputy Attorney General, Charles A. O’Brien as a “Department of Dirty Tricks,” which specialized in teaching foreign “intelligence apparats” the techniques of assassination.

* While still with the L.A.P.D., Peña had worked simultaneously with AID for more than ten years before the 1967 assignment. He subsequently ‘returned’ to the L.A.P.D. shortly before the June, 1968, assassination of Senator Kennedy.

* Hernandez, meanwhile, was by his own subsequent admission a CIA operative within the L.A.P.D. and had been among a group of “about 50” from a dozen U.S. urban police forces to receive “special training” from the Agency in the early and mid-sixties. He played a key role in “Unified Police Command” training for the CIA in Latin America in 1963.

* The ballistics evidence introduced at Sirhan’s ‘trial’ was cooked. The .22 Iver-Johnson admitted into evidence bore a different serial number from Sirhan’s gun, and the claim that all spent slugs recovered from victims, including Kennedy, had been fired from a single weapon, Sirhan’s, has since been flatly refuted in forensic examination by experts.

* Photomacrographs of the slugs taken using a revolving camera show that the striations –– barrel markings –– are identical in those taken from the other victims, yet do not match the one recovered from Kennedy. William Harper, a veteran criminalist, who was able to examine, but not remove, the slugs in L.A.P.D. custody, took the photos using a portable Balliscan camera he had helped to develop. Harper, who had worked in the field for three decades, including seven years with the Pasadena Police Department as a forensic consultant, said of his comparison of the Kennedy bullet with one taken from ABC newsman William Weisel, “I can find no individual characteristics in common between these two bullets.” This finding was later verified by the President of the American Academy of Forensic Science.

* Countless reports from eyewitnesses to the assassination and events surrounding it were deep-sixed by Peña and Hernandez, including numerous accounts concerning a “girl in a polka dot dress” sighted in Sirhan’s company earlier in the evening and at the moment he stepped out in front of Kennedy in the kitchen. Several, including kitchen employees, reported that they had the impression that she was actually “in control of him.” Yet a police request for an APB based on witness stories, phoned in by Sergeant Paul Shraga from the Ambassador, was abruptly cancelled, and his written report simply gone from the files (he kept a copy). Peña and Hernandez systematically abused all such witnesses and berated them until many ‘recanted.’ There is an audio tape available on the internet in which Peña, ‘questioning’ a key witness named Sandy Serrano, subjects her to the ugliest, most malicious half hour of her life. It is quite clear, listening to it, that Peña’s only goal was to force Serrano away from the account she gave immediately after the shooting, tearfully describing what she’d seen and heard to a television audience of millions. She had to be discredited or destroyed.

* Interestingly, the last thing Sirhan recalls before the shooting –– which he cannot remember –– is that “a girl asked me to pour her some coffee.” This may have taken place in an adjacent press room, where coffee was available, because he was seen there as well, along with the girl in the polka dot dress.

So, what does all of this tiresome jabbering get us? I’d say it provides the first pieces to a very interesting puzzle. Since the physical evidence is essentially unassailable –– mis-matched bullets, powder burns, a second gun being drawn (and three witnesses swearing was fired), and the damage being caused by at least ten bullets and probably eleven –– the fact of Sirhan’s technical innocence of Kennedy’s murder, although he did shoot five others, begs the question.

At least, I think it does. If we’re not willing to look at this as a country, we will never recover the grace and the promise we once expressed. Many of the conspirators who killed Bobby are dead by now; forty years has passed. What difference does it make?

I hear that question from some of you, and I know that others ask it, too. I wish to say in all kindness that you may want to re-examine what your country asks of you.

Because if it is so, this conspiratorial history I write about, this persistent twitch that I am fully aware annoys plenty of people, then the implications for who we are right this minute in America, how things are done, who fixes what, are of the most critical importance.

We can complain all we want to about the warfare state and the borrowing of billions from China, thus indebting the American people to the Chinese for at least a hundred years, and we are losing jobs and the dollar’s in near free-fall against the euro, and the housing bubble’s gone, and the government has simply taken hundreds of billions out of OUR pockets to pay to Bear Stearns, because the powerful are not permitted to go under. We can carp about the compliant media, those toads who never get it right and never take any responsibility. We note with increasing alarm the use of torture as a policy of government, the use of tasers by police with almost NO public argument about it, and the establishment of “Free Speech Zones,” although the last time I checked the country itself is a free speech zone, or used to be.

But unless we come to terms with how we got here, we’ll never unscramble it. As disgraced Attorney General John Mitchell predicted in the mid-’70s, America “is going to go so far to the right you will not even recognize it.”

In 1963, Frank Sinatra starred with Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate.” In the film, an American taken prisoner during the Korean War is subject to brainwashing which makes him a ‘sleeper’ agent of the reds inside the U.S. He is then placed in position to assassinate a presidential nominee.

For many years after the death of JFK, the film was not shown. Now it’s available, and in fact there’s been a remake. The author, Richard Condon, had not invented the concept; he had learned from his intelligence sources that the CIA had been working on such a program for years. Fanciful?

In July of 1975, Naval Lieutenant Commander Thomas Narut spoke at a NATO-sponsored conference of 120 psychological researchers in Europe. During the Q-and-A session which followed, he told of taking part in a Navy program in which “potential assassins” were computer-slected and then trained for placement in U.S. Embassies around the world, ready to kill should the need arise. “It’s happened more than once,” Narut admitted. He then described training in Naples and at a neuropsychiatric lab in San Diego. Gruesome films of bloody incidents were shown to trainees to rid them of qualms about killing, he said. The Navy then summoned him to its European headquarters in London. Narut never said another word about it.

The journals Sirhan filled with repeated lines such as “RFK must die!” suggested a form of automatic writing, according to experts, including the psychiatrists who examined him in prison. Dr. Bernard Diamond said that Sirhan slipped into a hypnotic trance so deeply and immediately that it was obvious he had been hyponized many times before. Diamond thought that Sirhan had hypnotized himself, but was unable to explain how he might have hypnotized himself to forget.

At San Quentin Prison, Sirhan was examined by prison psychiatrist Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, who immediately suspected that something unusal was going on. The convicted assassin spoke as though “reciting from a book,” and Simson-Kallas came to believe that he had been hypnoprogrammed. “He was prepared by someone. He was hypnotized by someone. He was there to draw attention, to be the obvious, simple explanation so that people wouldn’t ask questions.” Simson-Kallas was removed from the case by then Associate Warden James Park and resigned in protest. “He’s (Sirhan) not lying,” Simson-Kallas later said. “There’s no question of that.” Park was then promoted.

Critics of conspiracy theories, at least those who go beyond the plainly corrupt position that such theorists are prima facie whacko, often raise two objections. First, they argue, how come we don’t know who was involved? Second, why hasn’t anybody talked?

The thing is, we do know who was involved, and plenty of people have talked. That this has been so systematically ignored not only by most politicians but by the entirety of mainstream media is probably the greatest scandal in American history and poses its most grave challenge to national survival.

Forty years ago, Bobby Kennedy was murdered to prevent him from becoming President. He was fighting to stop a war and to heal the divisions in the country. He was speaking for those who had no voice. We owe him the truth.

Forty years ago, on June 4th, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot in the head in a narrow room adjacent to the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just won the California primary election and was now the probable next President of the United States.

Yesterday, I awakened from a late-afternoon nap and switched on MSNBC for the day’s latest political news and saw –– as did many millions of Americans –– Hillary Clinton speak about the possible assassination of Barack Obama.

She and her campaign staff then tried several times to ‘explain’ what she said, although as Eugene Robinson pointed out what she in fact said admits of no such possibility. In law school we learned a few handy Latin legal terms, one of which was ‘res ipsa loquitur’. The thing speaks for itself.

Across the mass media and spreading through the internet are choruses of professed shock, disbelief, anger, and self-righteous idiocy, not limited by political party or ideology but sharing one unifying characteristic: denial.

Denial: that Clinton had in mind the possibility that Barack Obama would be assassinated.

Denial: that political candidates ever entertain such thoughts, nor discuss them with close advisers.

Denial: that discussion of political assassination has a ‘proper’ place in political discourse in the United States.

There are two salient facts here. One is that Clinton has certainly considered that her candidacy, having failed electorally, remains viable only if Obama dies. One would have to cling to a naivete bordering on the comatose to believe otherwise. She is not the only candidate ever to think such dark thoughts.

The second is that the prospective assassination of a political candidate in America is based in the even darker reality of our political life and history, not because we have been robbed of two Kennedys by crazed lone gunmen but because by this time we surely know that these murders were motivated by power, and carried out by people in a position to plan and execute them.

America in 2008 presents a political context notable for its similarity to 1968. Forty years ago, with a failed war and domestic unrest giving rise to a popular movement for change, there were three serious candidates for the presidency. These were Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and Robert Kennedy. (McCarthy’s candidacy was never a legitimate prospect; if necessary, I’ll explain that some other time). The forces which had executed John Kennedy were untroubled by Nixon and Humphrey, each of whom had long since whored themselves out. But Bob Kennedy was dangerous. Not only would he reverse America’s war policies, threatening the vast financial windfall being gathered by Brown & Root (precursor to KBR, which is today Halliburton), and the arms merchants, he had confided to his closest friends that he would go after the men who had killed his brother, and those people knew it.

In 2008, we are witnessing the first populist insurgency in 40 years in the candidacy of Senator Obama. His principal opponents, McCain and Clinton, are both creatures of the country’s ruling corporations and its military/security apparatus. Obama is therefore at risk. He knows it; his people know it; the media know it; Clinton and McCain know it.

The American people know it, too. Millions are aware of what actually happened forty years ago –– not the made-for-TV, officially-sanctioned fantasy –– and understand therefore that there are forces in the country who regard an Obama presidency as personally dangerous. This is not only a matter of political and economic power, the loss of jobs or the billions of dollars in graft currently being siphoned from the treasury through fraud and war profiteering. It is a matter of prison terms.

The reason the media don’t want to talk about assassination and the reason politicians, though they all think it, are not going to say so, is that what really happened in 1963, and again in 1968, has never been admitted, nor the perpetrators exposed or prosecuted. There has existed for forty years the worst conspiracy of all, the conspiracy of silence. It is the conspiracy of silence which makes possible further horrors, and it is the conspiracy of silence which makes of us all accessories both before and after the fact.

Hillary Clinton’s great crime is that, tired and running out of rationales, she blurted a reference to what no one is supposed to mention. Her ‘great crime’ is nothing in comparison with our own.

I’ve had this theory for a long time about how people can wind-up worshipping at the feet of an evil empire while continuing to believe that they’re free. I think it happens in much the same way the nation no longer knows what a strawberry tastes like but still thinks that’s what it’s eating.

My earliest years in this happy incarnation were spent in Madison, Wisconsin, that mythical town where a lot of progressive impulses have flourished for better than a hundred years and where both Robert LaFollette and Wayne Morse were born. My immigrant grandfather owned a very large shipping operation for fresh produce, and I used to hang around the warehouses on Saturday mornings while my Dad did whatever dads do as maybe heirs-apparent at the in-laws’ operations. There were guys carrying enormous loads of bananas on their backs and the air was one part fruits and vegetables and one part cigar and cigarette smoke.

One of the many perks in this situation was the opportunity to ingest pretty much as many strawberries as I could manage, which was a lot. God, they were sweet.

But those strawberries are mostly gone now. Sure, you can locate the real thing at a farmers’ market, just as you can locate the last vestige of free and independent media if you’ve got two hundred channels, or navigate the web, and happen to catch Rachel Maddow or Gene Robinson or Keith Olbermann.

People still think they are buying strawberries at Safeway, and they think they’re getting a spectrum of political news from networks like CNN, where Wolf Blitzer and other assorted airheads give viewers an entire range of opinion, from conservative to fascist. Ann Coulter. I mean, what’s missing? A fireside chat with Adolph Hitler?

If you take a color, say ‘blue’, and change it a little bit each day, just a little, hardly noticed by a distracted, gullible citizenry, eventually ‘blue’ will be solid red. It might be called ‘democracy’ instead of ‘blue’.

Okay, you know all of this. You also know that the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Hillary Clinton have each been run by people whose profession is that of lobbyist. Well, what’s so strange about that?

Presidential campaigns have changed through history. Until the mid-nineteen hundreds they were run by party hacks, the Karl Rove types who knew how to apply a bit of muscle when and where required. JFK’s manager was his brother, Robert, and his top guys were personal friends such as Larry O’Donnell. Nixon’s races were run by public relations experts. Jimmy Carter had his own people, Hamilton Jordan, and pollster Pat Caddell.

In the 1980s, beginning with Reagan, big money began to assert itself. The people running campaigns became, transparently, the interface between money and operations. We own you, the corporations were saying, and we’re putting our own people in charge.

Now we’ve got lobbyists running campaigns whose agencies received payments –– from Lockheed-Martin, pharamaceutical and insurance companies, telecommunications giants such as AT&T –– in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Let that register for a minute...

Then consider that the way it works is that a corporation will expect to receive through these lobbyists government contracts or tax breaks worth maybe a hundred-times that much. You need not apply advanced arithmetic to the situation.

There is only one possible interpretation of this. And yet Americans, blinded by the media’s bullshit and their own laziness, will have voted in the millions for candidates who are in bed with corporate criminals such as Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and AT&T.

It’s crazy, but people keep calling these things ‘strawberries’.

“It never would’ve happened,” Bobby Kennedy famously said, “except we were all so tired that night.”

What Kennedy was referring to was the nomination of Lyndon Johnson as his brother’s running-mate in 1960.

The background was this:

The race for the nomination had been modestly contentious among JFK, Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey (with Adlai Stevenson’s loyalists aligning with LBJ to try to stop JFK). LBJ was the Senate Majority Leader and an immensely powerful, suitably corrupt man. He and the Kennedys despised each other.

The Kennedys knew the race against Nixon would be close, and the electoral maps they were working with indicated that they would have to carry Texas in order to win the general election. JFK decided that in order to insure the active support of Johnson he would offer the vice presidential nomination to him.

At that time, the vice presidency was an office accurately described by a former V.P., John Nance Garner, as a “bucket of warm spit.” It held no power and was largely ceremonial; V.P.s were kept out of the policy loops. JFK was certain that Johnson, if offered the job, would decline it. But the offer itself would demonstrate good faith and help assuage Johnson’s supporters.

RFK tried to talk him out of it, without success. Then Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House and Johnson crony, convinced LBJ to accept.

The electoral map broke the way Kennedy had predicted, and Texas gave him a narrow victory over Richard Nixon.

The deal with Johnson, the offer of the second-spot on the ticket, was a fatal error for Kennedy.

No one speaks of it but it is nonetheless on a lot of minds. Barack Obama, for reasons some might find appealing, is an obvious target. If any person or group of persons are so endangered by his election that they feel warranted in going after him –– a clear possibility –– it would do him no harm to protect himself by selecting as his running-mate a vice president whose views, idealism, and toughness approach his own.

Barack Obama is young, brilliant, and guided by a strong moral compass. He is a very real threat to some very powerful people.

To offer the job to Clinton would therefore be a serious, perhaps dangerous, mistake.