(George) Wallace and his third wife, the former Lisa Taylor, meet with Vice President George Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton at a lobster bake at Bush's residence at Kennebunkport, Maine, July 30, 1983. The third Mrs. Wallace, whom the governor married in 1981, was 30 years his junior and half of a country-western singing duo, Mona and Lisa, who had performed during his campaign in 1968.

CREDIT: AP/Birmingham Post

SOURCE: http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/george-wallace/13/

Helps me understand why the rich keep getting richer off wars without end and the rest of us are "free" to pick up the tab.

1980, Detroit GOP convention...



George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’

By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58

A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.

During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.

Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.

The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.

SNIP...

Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.

SNIP...

NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985

The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.

[font color="red"]The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.

The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.

Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.

CONTINUED...

CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.

Their faces are totally distorted. Junk that POS!

http://www.cah.utexas.edu/photojournalism/detail.php?nickname=reagan&picid=1

they really looked.

... 41's NSDD 159 reminds me of what another administration did. As in 43's VP, Dick Cheney. Is this the doc that allowed Darth Cheney to do what he did as VP? We don't know much yet about 43's inner workings yet, do we? I'll be dead by the time we learn anything about Darth's inner office workings. Snap.

Powerful and untouchable. Evil and shameful. Wonder who's waiting in the wings ....

How the Doomsday Project Led to Warrantless Surveillance and Detention after 9/11

Nov 13, 2014 by Peter Dale Scott

EXCERPT...

Since World War II, secrecy has been used to accumulate new covert bureaucratic powers under the guise of emergency planning for disasters, planning known inside and outside the government as the “Doomsday Project.”

Known officially (and misleadingly) as “Continuity of Government” (COG) planning, the Doomsday Project, under the guiding hands in the 1980s of Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others, on 9/11 became the vehicle for a significant change of government. The extreme repressive powers accumulated under the guise of the Doomsday Project were first developed to control the rest of the world. Now, to an unprecedented extent, America itself is being treated as an occupied territory.

In 1994, Tim Weiner reported in The New York Times that “The Doomsday Project” had “less than six months to live.” (1) Weiner’s language was technically justifiable, but also very misleading. In fact COG planning now simply continued with a new target: terrorism. On the basis of Weiner’s article, the first two books to discuss COG planning, by James Bamford and James Mann, both reported that COG planning had been abandoned. (2)

What Weiner and these authors did not report was that in the final months of Reagan’s presidency the purpose of COG planning had officially changed: it was no longer for arrangements “after a nuclear war,” but for any “national security emergency.” This was defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” (3)

In this way a totally legitimate program dating back to Eisenhower, of planning extraordinary emergency measures for an America devastated in a nuclear attack, was now converted to confer equivalent secret powers on the White House for anything it considered an emergency.

Cheney and Rumsfeld in from the Start

From its beginning in 1982, two of the key planners on the secret COG planning committee were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the same two men who implemented COG on 9/11. (4) The committee had been established by Reagan under a secret executive order, NSDD 55 of September 14, 1982. Despite what Weiner implied, the committee continued to meet without interruption until the George W. Bush presidency in 2001. (5)

An expanded application of COG was apparently envisaged as early as 1984, when, according to Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan,

Lt. Col. Oliver North was working with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency… to draw up a secret contingency plan to surveil political dissenters and to arrange for the detention of hundreds of thousands of un-documented aliens in case of an unspecified national emergency. The plan, part of which was codenamed Rex 84, called for the suspension of the Constitution under a number of scenarios, including a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. (6)

1In other words, extreme measures, designed originally to deal with an externally directed and devastating nuclear attack, were being secretly modified to deal whenever desired with domestic dissenters: a situation that still pertains to today. (7)

CONTINUED...

http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/11/13/doomsday-project-led-warrantless-surveillance-detention-911/

Anyone got Lexis/Nexis might want to call up:

William Neikirk, "Bush to be exempt from House's hostage probe," Chicago Tribune 8/8/1991.

https://twitter.com/beschlossdc/status/275941914182828033

our USA. And the fix is still in. The War Party of Washington D.C. in betting on the Jebb.

WIN/WIN either way.

Exactly,

Exactly.

She's not one of our hopes, she's THEIR backup plan.

Off to the greatest page.

That Carlin rant should be played 24/7 on DU. Brutal, absolute truth.

It's a big club, and any way you turn they still win.

I might anyway.

and it is a game they play at our expense...

and most accurate.

Convince Sanders and Warren for 2016! Help us Obiwan, they're our only hope!

Poppy Bush, whose own father was tied to the Smedley Butler-busted plot to overthrow FDR, blamed the Rodney King LA Riots on the failed "Great Society" programs. Clinton ended welfare as we know it and signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which kept banksters from betting taxpayer-insured deposits at the Wall Street casino. Racial segregationist George Wallace ran for president with Gen. Curtis LeMay, who was insubordinate to JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as his running mate.



Incredible times these, beyond Gangster Times. Nixon tried to have the Democrats blamed for the assassination attempt on Wallace.

https://m.


One Party, Two Faces...

I can haz spaceship to 'nother planet pleez?

It was the Bush spread in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Carlin was dead right and that has to be coming up on a decade ago that he wrote that piece...can't believe he died in 2008.

named for banks and corporations? Have a BAC Blue Party, and a BAC Red Party. Easy, still has some illusion of a choice. This thread has been very illuminating..

In support of Haiti earthquake relief



Hillary's contribution greeted lovingly as she came in

And the same on her last day


We should put this one in there for good measure too.


The Clintons are great people, admired here and throughout the world, just as the Obamas are. You can paint them in a negative light and you can hate them all you want, but you cannot change how people admire their hard work and the causes they champion.

I may not always agree with them but I like them and want her to be president.

Look who's not in the loop, our favorite Georgia peanut farmer...

Smirko McCokespoon's lie-bury open house hit almost all 14 points.

Way too much.

Where did you dig that top one up at? Never seen it before.

Just having Bill sit at the same table with George Wallace and GHW does not mean Bill endorses what they represent politically & economically.

I say this as someone who has no love for the Clintons.

Bush the lesser described him as a sort of 'brother' or something. I suppose not all family members agree on everything, but it sure would make me uncomfortable to be so loved by any member of the Bush clan.

As for the Bush clan, anything they say shouldn't be taken at face value.

on his behalf. Taught me a lesson for sure, when I saw him try to rehabilitate Bush after Katrina where instead of rehab, Bush should have been prosecuted for his criminal negligence that caused the deaths of so many people.

But how Bill treats the Bush family when they happen to be at the same social occasion has pretty close to zero relevance or impact on important issues. Also I'm a bit confused about the time frame in which you were doing battle with Bush supporters on Bill's behalf. Bill Clinton left office when GW Bush became president.

And FWIW, I think GW & Cheney should have been impeached for the systematic campaign of deceit leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then brought to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes.

with Clinton, for years. I am talking about from 2000 on. Limbaugh et al could not stop talking about Clinton and Monica and if you weren't online at that time, then it's hard to describe what it was like.

I remember telling one of them that when they were on their deathbed they would be muttering 'clinton' they were so obsessed.

We of course fought back on his behalf, unlike you I really did support Clinton so I was angry at how he had been portrayed.

But I definitely felt like a fool years later when I saw how close a relationship the Clintons had with the Bushes. It was a shock.

And no, he didn't just appear at a function where Bush was present. He took over the rehabilitation of Bush personally after his image was shattered, deservedly by his criminal mishandling of Katrina. He was popular himself with the African American community. Needless to say, Bush was despised. So Clinton took him with him to 'raise funds' for NOLA victims. It was insulting and a real slap in the face to the victims and those of us who had so strongly defended him.

The Bushes were also despised in Haiti, where Clinton was more popular. Bushes ousted Aristedes, first the father then the son, Clinton had helped reinstate him.

But Clinton brought Bush with him on a visit to Haiti hoping to get the people of Haiti to view him differently. It didn't work, if Clinton thought WE would be influenced to view Bush as a nice guy because HE liked him, the exact opposite happened, now I have little respect for Clinton and realize we were fooled. Which is why I will never again treat any politician as someone I need to defend. They are not our friends, they work for us. They will get credit when they earn it. When they betray promises, as Clinton did but we overlooked that out of loyalty, they will not be protected or defended anymore.

Not because I agreed with him on everything, but because nearly all the attacks coming from the right were utter BS (just like the attacks against Obama now). As far as defending Clinton post-presidency, I always try to set the record straight when confronted with BS and wrongheadedness. None of which has much impact on Bill, since he doesn't have the responsibilities of the presidency and is pretty much on easy street.

I didn't realize Clinton had made such efforts to rehabilitate GW's image, and I appreciate you taking the time to spell all that out for me. It adds context to the photo which was lacking in the OP. William Jefferson Clinton is a very intelligent and knowledgeable person. I find it hard to believe he's not aware of the egregious lies that took us into Iraq and the related war crimes. As for Katrina, Bush downgraded FEMA and put an unqualified crony in charge, resulting in tragedy for many NOLA residents. In that context, Bill's efforts to help GW with his image is perplexing and disgusting.

Peace,
M.E.

He stopped being a racist and moved strongly to the left.

As for the Clintons and Bushes, fuck them.

Wake the hell up, America.

and every time I see this monolog by george carlin, I am reminded of this fact, I will never be in it and neither will 99% of the people. Yet until the system is changed by us, this is what we have. Just on principle, I have scar on the side of my head from a police billy club, fighting/agitating/demonstrating to have the right to vote in amerika, so holding my nose I will vote for hillary unless we get someone not in the "club". Will TPTB allow that"someone not in the club"? We'll see if that someone comes on the scene. Politic from the greek politikos: meaning of, for or relating to citizens. Lost are the 99% of citizens from that definition. It's up to us, to make it about us and not the 1%

Is it that we should never speak to people on the other side of the aisle? They are plotting against the rest of us? We elect them and they really all work together?

That oft-quoted George Carlin statement sounds whiny and martyred. We are always gonna be the victims of these awful people and we elect them ourselves! A mere negativity that brings us down and doesn't give us any energy to elect better people (how do we always pick these opportunistic people then?) or advocate on any issue.

All the POTUSes in the WH is a matter of history - people like to see that. It does not mean they are all in some secret club plotting to keep us down. It is that at this point in history, these persons who held the office are all alive. Geebus on a trailer hitch!

Poor Geebus.

An absolute BULLSHIT hide.

We had a good run. We're not that special. Just a species who blew it all on fear, ignorance and crotch-play. Even now, we're too stupid and too afraid to admit and acknowledge what's killing us.

- Because if we did see it, we'd all be in the streets. And we'd turn all these motherfuckers out.

K&R

Looks that way to me. And I don't see all that well.

Or their direct relations.

I don't get it.

Geebus.