How Two Elections Changed America By Robert Parry (A Special Report) Nov. 4, 2009

How Two Elections Changed America
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
November 4, 2009 - http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/110409.html


Two clandestine operations during hard-fought presidential elections of the past half century shaped the modern American political era, but they remain little known to the general public and mostly ignored by historians. One unfolded in the weeks before Election 1968 and the other over a full year before Election 1980.
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Besides putting into power iconic Republican leaders, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, those two elections altered the nation’s course and went a long way toward defining the current personalities of America’s national parties, the anything-goes Republicans versus the ever-accommodating Democrats.

The two cases also demonstrated how Official Washington, including the national press corps, could be convinced to avert its eyes from strong evidence of these two historical crimes, Republican sabotage of both President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and President Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran in 1980.

It was easier for all involved to pretend that nothing happened, with the dirty secrets kept from the public for “the good for the country.”

Yet those two elections had monumental consequences. In 1968, by thwarting Johnson’s nearly completed peace deal, Nixon condemned the country to four bloody and divisive years, with more than 20,000 additional U.S. soldiers dying in Vietnam – along with millions of Indochinese – and a generational divide opening between parents and their children.

The hatreds unleashed by those four years of unnecessary war also led to bitter battles over the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s ouster in 1974, all further darkening the American political landscape.

In reaction to Nixon’s Watergate debacle, the Right began building an infrastructure of hard-line think tanks, anti-press attack groups and ideological media outlets to protect any future Republican president caught in wrongdoing. From the Left’s internal divisions over Vietnam emerged a group of intense intellectuals who shifted right and became known as the neoconservatives.

Nevertheless, in the late 1970s, Democratic President Jimmy Carter took halting steps in a different direction. He called for elevating human rights as an American foreign policy priority and focused on the need to conserve energy and address environmental dangers.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/110409.html

we have found ourselves in. I would look to broader causes such as the lack of a background of members of the loyal opposition. I also would never underestimate the intelligence or intellect of the American public.

As in the apochryphal quotation often attributed to Mencken: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."