It's amazing that over the span of two decades, America went from this...

[Tommymac]

78. That is GHB. Just Sayin' Other than that pretty good summation of the guy's character.

Won't speculate on the assassination stuff, but GHB was senile old Ronnie's Raygun's Cheney. But a suave charming 'cheney', not a scaremonger, as befits a CIA director, which made him much more dangerous. I have no doubt his behind the scenes work both as CIA director and as Vice President & then President, was largely responsible for the sudden change in direction from the 70's onward.

Rather than speculate on assassinations, perhaps his behind the scenes role in the Iran Hostage October Surprise, influencing the militants not to release the Hostages in mid 1980 as they had planned to do but wait until after the US elections in November should be studied.

Also, how much did GHB use his CIA knowledge and influence to aid his GOP in destroying the reputations of his rivals such as President Carter, VP Mondale and Gov. Dukakis?

I would speculate that GHB may also have been somehow involved in the Watergate shenanigans - but I have an idea that that operation was not his - it was too amateurish and had Nixon's team's incompetent fingerprints all over it.

Watergate was important because it led to Nixon's resignation which in turn made the future neocons pretty damn angry and determined to get back at the liberals at any cost.

One more factor was the many demonstrations of the 1960's scared the shit out of the oligarchy - they determined that they would work to take away the free time and the disposable income the middle class (who provided most of the demonstrators) enjoyed at the time so that in the future such large scale actions would be difficult to achieve.

Finally greed was a huge factor. For example, The modern American Health Insurance death by spreadsheet industry was started by William Kaiser and Richard Nixon. Nixon was looking for a way to relieve the political pressure that liberals were putting on him to establish a single payer Medical infrastructure in the US - Kaiser told Nixon that hell, he could set up a for pay infrastructure that mimicked a national health care system, fool the people, and would make $$$$$billions in profit. (The actual conversation is on the Nixon tapes.)