6 coups d'etat - 3 successful: all done by repugs on dems (oh yes)

[donsu]

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/082004Saunders/082004saunders.html

Praetorian coups d'état

Within living memory, the United States has suffered six cabals designed to seize the presidency from the voters. Three succeeded, three did not. Five are known, one is not. All are (officially) denied. And all were instigated against Democrats by a Republican Praetorian Guard that believes only they should control the country.

The first cabal was unsuccessful. It was initiated against FDR in 1933 with a failed assassination. A group of wealthy power brokers—Morgans, Mellons, DuPonts, etc.—then tried to talk retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler into leading a force of 500,000 disgruntled veterans in an attack on Washington to replace Roosevelt with a Secretary of General Affairs, whom they would select. The venture failed because Butler refused to cooperate. He also told the sordid story to Congress. For his honesty he was denounced by those who would have used him. Similarly today, John Kerry is being condemned for his honesty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.

The second coup was successful, the 1963 assassination of JFK. Dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission's report has produced a profusion of conflicting studies and reports about who was really responsible. Some claim LBJ, Kennedy's successor, was. I tend to believe that Richard Nixon was a prime mover. He was a vindictive man and the heir apparent to the White House in 1960, but Kennedy squeaked past him in the election. Whatever the truth, Johnson may have believed that Kennedy's death was a warning that he could be next. He did rachet back Kennedy's more progressive programs and ramp up the Vietnam War.

Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968 was the third, and it, too, was successful. Kennedy was by far the strongest presidential candidate that year. Nixon could never have defeated him. Then Kennedy was shot, (officially) by a loner with a disturbed past—just as (officially) had Martin Luther King, Jr., a month earlier, as had his brother, and as Roosevelt would have been had a woman not shoved that would-be assassin's arm.

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( the 4th unsuccessful coup is the unknown one - the 5th unsuccessful coup was the investigations on Clinton. the 6th successful coup was the 2000 election)

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This brings me back to the fourth cabal, which also involved postponement of an election, Nixon's 1972 re-election. It also echoed the '30s plots against Roosevelt because both involved assassination attempts and the use of disillusioned veterans.

The unsuccessful assassination was of Alabama Governor George Wallace, who posed the biggest challenge to Nixon's hopes for re-election. Wallace was shot (officially) by a disturbed loner who fit the pattern of the other (official) shooters.
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the article ends thus:

If the Bush administration is not plotting an attack with the terrorists to cancel the election, it is certainly doing nothing to dispel the appearance of doing so.

[Name removed]

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[indepat]

2. Provocative, but leaves unanswered the attempts on the lives of President

Ford and President Reagan.