Consider this. The kids who were starting first grade the year Nixon resigned are now 50. That means only those of us over 50, in our 60's, 70's and 80's remember what the whole Watergate thing was about. The rest of you only know what it was about by what you've been told.
We were just coming out of the tumultuous 60's when riots ostensibly inspired by opposition to the Viet Nam war were proven to be calculated propaganda efforts instigated as part of an effort to split the nation, keep us from doing battle with China, the sponsor and real enemy of the Viet Nam War, and eventually to overthrow the entire government. These aren't some far out beliefs, they are the facts of history and the main actors were then the same people who are now the wind beneath much of the Obama agenda.
Many people now under the age of 50 have been taught that Nixon went down for spying. Actually Nixon recognized the presence and activities of subversive communists early in his first term and though tempted to do so actually withdrew his support for more pervasive FBI and CIA spying.
But from 1968 until 1972 he was locked in a battle in Viet Nam, not of his own making, but a war started by JFK and escalated by LBJ. As it turns out, the public had been intentionally misled by both of his predecessors as to the reasons we were at war.
In 1967 then Secretary of Defense under LBJ Robert McNamara commissioned a secret compilation of papers directly from the Pentagon setting out the truth behind the war prosecuted by Johnson. The conclusion of these "Pentagon Papers" was that the real purpose of the war was not the liberation of South VietNam, but rather the containment of Communist China which the USA at the time believed was determined to organize all of Asia against us and begin a much greater war.
Daniel Ellsberg who had worked on the "Pentagon Papers" decided to turn them over to Nixon's administration hoping they would publish them. Nixon declined because he did not want to embarass either Kennedy or Johnson. Ellsberg eventually published the papers in the New York Times.
Nixon's administration sought court orders to prevent their disclosure arguing that they were classified. While granted an initial injunction against the Times the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that they could be published.
The world was really not much different then than now. Communist, socialist and other tyrannical political systems are at work trying to undermine our national identity, destroy our national purpose, call into question our dedication to civil liberties and to eventually rape and pillage our nation for all of it's resources not the least of which includes our people.
So how does the current level of spying square with our historical battle with subversives? Is there a real and present danger that groups of individuals are planning to over throw the government? Is there a real and present danger that there are groups who have been propagandized by those out to over throw our government into thinking that by further dividing our nation they are some how helping to save it?
Or have the really bad guys gotten so close to the levers of power that spying isn't about protecing us at all, but rather just one more way in which the government can be portrayed as evil, conspiring against its own citizens and destroying civil liberty in the process?
Might someone with a desire to cause citizens to revolt first have to get close enough to the power to create the reason for revolution? Could expanding and then defending pervasive government spying be calculated to be the kind of pressure that could cause the whole thing to blow up? And wouldn't that require that the spying be "leaked" after the fact rather than explained in advance?
I keep telling you this, remain situationally aware at all times.
If anything happens in politics, you can pretty well be sure somebody planned it that way.
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