Okay, We're Done With The History .......

               Thanks to a half black man from Hawaii who had ties to my old stomping grounds in Chicago, I managed to put a pair of wins on the board in 2008 and 2012, pushing my overall record to a passable 5-7 in Presidential elections.

                Barack Obama had a name that was virtually impossible to elect at that point in history in the United States of America. It just sounded too much like Osama bin Laden, the most hated man in the country because of his involvement as mastermind in the deadly 9/11 attacks in 2001. But miracle of miracles, it turned out that the USA was sick and tired of Republican bullshit after eight years of Bush/Cheney criminal activity and so the voters turned their collective backs on the new GOP candidate, former Vietnam War hero and POW John McCain and his dingbat running mate, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

                Obama surprised us all with his intelligence, sense of humor and overall general bearing. Face it, this guy was really cool. He could sing, he could dance, he had a beautiful wife and a pair of lovely daughters. This was the guy you wanted to have the ball at the end of the game, down by one, ten second left, because you just knew he’d make the shot.

                He inherited a country in total shambles and when he went to work to right the course, he was met by an obstructionist political party that just couldn’t accept the fact that a majority of voters selected something other than an old white man to be POTUS, something they had done continuously, election after election, for over 200 years.

                GOP Senator and closet racist Mitch McConnell of Kentucky stated point blank that the goal of the Republican party would be to see that Obama was a failure and that he was defeated in the next election. Understand dear reader that their goal was not to find and develop beneficial programs to aid U.S. citizens, their goal was to hinder any and all progress in the recovery of the nation because, …. well, …. Goddammit, look at him, he ain’t white!! He’s a you-know-what!! GOP House of Representative leader John Boehner echoed these sentiments like a good little puppy and anything and everything done by Obama and the Democratic Party to make life better for U.S. citizens was met with a negative response by the GOP from day one. Never in the history of the Republic has a POTUS been treated with such contempt and disrespect by members of the government. At times, it has been both embarrassing and shameful to witness.

                Their efforts failed miserably in 2012 when Obama defeated a famous and revered GOP darling, the fabulously wealthy Mormon Mitt Romney and with that defeat, efforts were renewed tenfold to make America under the Obama administration an abject failure. At times, this reached the point of treason. However, in spite of all the obstructionism, the first seven years under the current leadership has been highly successful and recovery from the disastrous previous administration has made great strides. These last few months in office will, indeed, prove interesting and entertaining because Obama has made it perfectly clear to his critics and opponents at this point that they can just kiss his ass. Get ready for some dandy Executive orders.

                I find that I don’t agree with the guy about everything that he’s done, or not done, but we agree about a lot. In fact, he’s my choice as the best POTUS of my lifetime.

                So, with all this background now in the books, we can begin to spend some time examining the upcoming 2016 election which promises to be among the strangest of all time.

                

Just When You Thought You'd Seen The Worst .....

             The United States of America has a long history of producing vile, contemptible politicians and the year 2000 plagued us with a particularly nasty batch. In an election fraught with near comical and unbelievable voter irregularities, especially in the state of Florida, a despicable piece of shit named George W. Bush somehow came out on top. Naturally, I voted for the other guy, a nice enough fellow that I had once worked with way back in the day at a newspaper in Nashville named Al Gore. This loss dropped my overall record to 3-6.

            Nicknamed “Dubya” or “Bush 2” to differentiate him from his father George H.W. Bush, who had been POTUS a mere eight years earlier, “Dubya” and his VPOTUS Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense under Bush 1, did everything imaginable in their eight years at the helm to destroy the U.S.A.

In 1995, Cheney took over the reins as CEO of Halliburton Industries, one of the largest war supporting conglomerates in the world and later, while serving as VPOTUS, used his connections and influence to net billions in profits for Halliburton during the trumped up Iraq war. As the story goes, it went down something like this:

A bunch of crazed Arabs eager for the afterlife under the direction of a disgruntled, and abnormally tall Saudi named Osama bin Laden, very well known to all persons within the international terrorist community, somehow managed to outfox all U.S. intelligence by stealing four commercial airplanes, using two to knock down the twin World Trade towers in New York, another to crash into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and a fourth that was destined for the White House. This last one was thwarted by the plane’s passengers and crashed instead in rural Pennsylvania.

Everyone aboard all four planes, passengers, crew and hijackers alike, were killed along with thousands and thousands more in both New York and Washington in the most horrendous foreign attack on U.S. soil ever, worse even in loss of life than Pearl Harbor 60 years prior.

The Bush/Cheney answer to this tragedy was to declare war on a guy (and country) that had absolutely nothing to do with it. Having unsuccessfully chased bin Laden all over the planet for over a year, the decision was finally made to go get someone they knew where to find, namely Saddam Hussein, the Iraq strongman who had been chased out of Kuwait earlier by Bush #1.

Whereas bin Laden was a ghost that America’s best alphabet soup (CIA, NSA, FBI) couldn’t find, Saddam was easy to find. He lived in a palace in Baghdad. Eager to get a war going to both improve Halliburton’s current financial picture and save some face for the total failure in the search for bin Laden, Bush/Cheney cooked up a story about some mysterious “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of the Iraqi, and the game was on. Over 4,000 U.S. troops and an estimated one million Iraqi’s perished in the conflict. No “weapons of mass destruction” were found. Halliburton made billions. Cheney is, and always has been, a major stockholder in that nefarious conglomerate whose primary product is violent death. And rest assured, Bush got his 30 pieces of silver. This activity, this illegal war, has led directly to the terrorist activity the world endures today as Arab survivors of U.S. worldwide aggression fervently seek justice and revenge wherever they can find it.

This dynamic duo of destruction blatantly cheated again in the 2004 election, this time in Ohio with rigged voting machines, and got re-elected, dropping my record to a miserable 3-7.

 The list of the criminal activities committed by these charlatans would fill a large book and I don’t want to go any further into that long list here. Suffice to say that in the end, with time running out, the Bush/Cheney administration managed to cap eight disastrous years of stupidity by totally collapsing the country’s economy, throwing everyone into a recession. The perfect ending to the worst presidency of my lifetime.

Next: The half-black guy.

Hang In There With Me Reader, There Aren't Many More ....

               In 1992 and 1996, I was finally able to put a couple in the win column with William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, another former governor from a southern state (Arkansas) who came out of nowhere to grab the Democratic nomination in much the same manner as the previous Democratic POTUS, Jimmy Carter. Clinton’s legacy will no doubt include one of the most famous blowjobs in American history which seems to cause incredible moralistic problems for a lot of people, Republicans mostly, as though a bunch of Republican down the line never got a blowjob on Capitol Hill? Really? Seriously?  

                Congress impeached Clinton over the blowjob but it didn’t fly very far; he was in fact acquitted, but answering to his wife Hillary was a whole different matter. History has very little to say as to how that all went down but speculation has it that he was forced to surrender his member, which allegedly bent to the left (of course). Hillary now keeps it safely stashed in her purse and only allows Bill to use it on special occasions.

                The eight years of the Clinton administration were basically peaceful times, other than some minor military participation in Kosovo late in the second term. It has recently been revealed that Al Qaeda, and specifically Osama bin Laden, once tried to kill Clinton when he was in the Philippines by blowing up a bridge while the presidential motorcade was passing by but the attempt was discovered and thwarted. As expected, the incident pissed Bill off to the point that the Arab was removed from the White House Christmas card list.

                The economy flourished under Clinton throughout the ‘90’s largely because Republicans had already stolen anything and everything of any value during the previous 12 years but were unable to continue under a Democratic regime. They would get another opportunity to fleece and pillage the nation later.

                Slick Willie, as he was known in some circles, liked to occasionally show up on late night TV shows and play his saxophone … badly.

                But overall, I kinda liked the guy and still do. He was certainly better than many others, including the guy who came next.

                Next up: Bush the Horrible.

It just keeps on coming .......

George Herbert Walker Bush. You know, I just don’t have much on this guy, I voted for the other guy, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts mostly because he had the balls and good sense to put a woman on his ticket as Vice President (Geraldine Ferraro), but I lost yet another one in 1988, my fifth out of six tries. Not a very good percentage. 

Bush the Elder, as he is often referred to, was VPOTUS under the popular entertainer Ronald Reagan and pretty much rode his coattails to victory when Reagan was no longer eligible to run. Looking back, we have Bush to thank for putting the entire world in peril by taking on Indiana Senator Dan Quayle as his Vice President thereby potentially placing the massive power of the United States war machine in the hands of a babbling imbecile, only a heartbeat away. It provided the greatest possible incentive imaginable to keeping the POTUS alive.

Under Bush the Elder, I first became acquainted with his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, a despicable individual who would come back later to haunt us all. I recall a little intrigue down in Panama when the dictator that the CIA had in place, an acne suffering army general and thug named Manuel Noriega, began to spill some beans about the CIA’s trafficking in drugs, mostly cocaine from Colombia, upsetting the POTUS enough that he sent a bunch of U.S. troops to that country, captured the ungrateful little bastard, brought him back Stateside, then promptly stuck him in a Florida prison. The spill of beans was stopped.

Cheney got to flex his muscle later as SecDef along with padding his Halliburton Industries bank account by rescuing the tiny nation of Kuwait from the invading forces of that evil terror from Iraq, Saddam Hussein. This guy would also pop up later.

But overall, not much happened in those four years except that the economy tanked in the end and George Herbert Walker Bush (what the fuck kind of name is that anyhow?) lost his re-election bid in 1992 to a hillbilly with a saxophone.

Next up: William Jefferson Clinton

Here's Some More of that President Stuff .....

The darling of the GOP for his entire life … and beyond the grave … has been Ronald Wilson Reagan, a mediocre “b” grade actor who stumbled his way to the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 just in time to ruin the careers of 10 Hollywood movie writers, including literary legends Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, Jr., by selling their asses out to the despicable Communist witch hunt being conducted at that time by the paranoid U.S. Congress, and specifically a fat asshole from Wisconsin named Senator Joe (tail-gunner) McCarthy, one of the USA’s most renowned historical embarrassments. McCarthy aside, this was merely the beginning of Ronnie Raygun’s descent into assholery.

Later, the citizens of California stupidly elected him Governor so that he could spend the final few years of the ’60’s turning the National Guard and Highway Patrol loose on all those dangerous hippies that were infecting the world. People died and many more were hurt on both sides because of Reagan’s prevailing gunslinger/macho attitude which has caused many historians to sometimes wonder whether he was truly living in reality or envisioning himself playing a part in a movie in which he saw himself as some kind of beloved hero. Data to support the latter is available by the reams.

He was elected POTUS in 1980 by using the hostages being held at that time in Iran as human poker chips (see previous article – Jimmy Carter) and quickly proceeded to use his new position to begin a reign of terror and deceit reminiscent of the Nixon years.

An example: By explaining to a population comprised of many, many stupid people that giving all of the money to the very few extremely rich people was good for everyone because the money would eventually “trickle down” to all the poor folks. Unfortunately, this concept was an incredible crock of shit that didn’t work very well because a great deal of the money “trickled down” to somebody’s offshore Swiss bank account where it was tax exempt and sheltered while the poor folks waited … and waited… in anticipation.  They’re still waiting, 35 years later.

Reagan and his wife Nancy began the “War on Drugs” (surely you remember, “Just say no!”) in the early ‘80’s which has resulted in thousands and thousands of dead people and trillions and trillions of illegal dollars going in every direction on the planet. How’s that worked out?

He illegally sold weapons to Iran, you remember Iran, that little hostage thing a few years before, which was engaged in its never ending war with Iraq, to raise money to finance an illegal war in Nicaragua, which Congress had earlier snuffed… or thought they had. They were wrong and the end result was over 30,000 dead Nicaraguans in what has come to be known as the Contra War because Reagan had this thing about communism, which when you look at it closely, is nothing more than a governmental structure. Kinda like Don Quixote battling windmills, only a lot of people got in the way.

During his last couple of years in office (he was re-elected in 1984, which I found to be hugely ironic at the time) he developed dementia and could barely find his way to the bathroom … or oval office for that matter. His wife Nancy sprang into action and ran the country for the remainder of his term with the help of her astrologer. Well, that's what I heard .....

After his term, many of Reagan’s administration went to prison for various crimes.

On the Dick Scale, I still give Ronnie a 10, right up there with Richard Nixon as the two most assholery of the Presidents up to that point. But who would have guessed that a third was bubbling under 100, as they say on the record charts.

Next up: Bush, the elder.

It just keeps on coming, this President thing ....

                I was 31 years old in 1976 when the system finally, after more than a decade of my enthusiastic participation, gave me someone I could believe in. Out of South Georgia came an excessively moral peanut farmer who just happened to have a brother named Billy who loved to drink beer (How cool was that?) and the Democrats threw him out there against the GOP incumbent Gerry Ford.

                The peanut farmer won. His name: James Earl Carter, Jr.

                Right off the bat, on his second day in office, Jimmy Carter pardoned/excused any and all of the draft evaders and runaways who opposed and refused to participate in the Vietnam War. With a simple scrawl of his signature, a lot of kids got to come back from Canada or wherever and go home to their families. I thought that was a pretty good start.

                Alas however, Jimmy Carter was not a Washington insider by any means and the powers that be in that horribly insidious environment – those corporate lobbyists, power brokers and party hacks who truly run the U.S. Government – ate Jimmy Carter alive and spit him out like so many watermelon seeds after only one term in office.

                To this day, he gets a bad rap as far as I’m concerned as being one of history’s worst POTUS in many people’s eyes. The truth, to me, is pretty simple: Jimmy Carter was a nice guy in a city full of motherfuckers.

                Toward the end of his term, he was forced to deal with an issue that was far beyond his control and, sadly, would lead to his political demise. Over 50 people at the U.S. Embassy in Iran were snatched and held hostage by a group of militant students for the remainder of Carter’s term, an eventual total of 444 days. One rescue attempt by U.S. forces failed, leaving eight soldiers dead, and, therefore, no other attempt was ever made. Historians (and myself) have expressed curiosity with the fact that the hostages were finally released on the day that Carter’s successor took office but not before. Had these hostages been released prior to the 1980 election, Carter would have been a hero with his re-election assured.

                But the big boys on the Hill made sure that didn’t happen. It didn’t matter to them that these hostages were sick and tired of being held captive in a foreign country by teenagers armed with assault rifles for over a year, they could just hang on as political pawns for a couple more months until they served a necessary purpose. I’m sure money changed hands. Lots of money. It usually does.

                Next: Ronald Reagan.

.... and the President thingie continues ....

     Gerry Ford. I swear, he almost merits no mention at all other than his legacy of having used his newly and suspiciously acquired Presidential powers in 1974 to pardon his predecessor of any and all criminal behavior….. and there had been an incredible shitload of criminal behavior …. before any criminal charges were ever filed. In essence, Ford gave Nixon a “STAY OUT OF JAIL” card which was immediately used so that we all could get on with our lives. 

     Ford, a former lineman on the University of Michigan football team dating back to the days of leather helmets, was never elected to anything other than the U.S. Congress from Michigan’s 5^th district but when opportunity knocked in 1973, the former Wolverine stumbled down the stairs and fell through the GOP’s “patsy” door with a flair. He continues to be the only POTUS and VPOTUS never elected to either position.

     The deal went something like this: Nixon’s Vice President, a psychopath from Maryland named Spiro Agnew was busted for something or other, had to quit, and Gerry was given the job … but, with conditions. Nixon knew his ass was about to be hung out to dry over the infamous Watergate affair and that he would probably be headed out the door himself, just like Agnew, and very soon. So, in order to avoid jail time, Tricky Dick made it clear to Gerry Ford that, if he decided to take the vacant VPOTUS job, he had to make sure that Nixon was never charged with anything when he finally became POTUS.

     Gerry jumped at the chance. And, as promised, as soon as Ford took over the next year, he pardoned Nixon of everything and anything.

     Only 10 years before, he had made his GOP political bones by serving on the Warren Commission investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy where he joined an austere group of other sleazy pols to lie their collective asses off in a large pile of paper, claiming that a deranged Cuban/Russian/Whatever was the greatest marksman of all time and acted alone.

     But after so many years of blatant criminality and assholery, the GOP and their unelected leader, who had a peculiar propensity for falling down, were about as popular in the 1976 election as athlete’s foot. Therefore, they lost to a relatively unknown peanut farmer from Georgia.

     Next: Jimmy Carter.

.... More of the President thing ....

I had turned 23 by the time I was allowed to vote in my first presidential election, and that particular election just happened to involve Tricky Dick Nixon, former VP under Ike throughout the ‘50’s and a miserably failed candidate for Governor of California in ’62 (“you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” he famously said as he crawled under the closest rock, never to be heard from again, I mistakenly told myself) and a fat, clam-faced political hack from Minnesota named Hubert H. Humphrey whose later claim to fame was having a sports stadium which collapsed periodically under the weight of so much Minnesota snow dedicated in his honor. The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, which opened in 1982, was demolished two years ago.  

                It was 1968 and those two choices sucked big donkey balls, an awful introduction into the democratic process for an idealistic and eager new participant but certainly better than the third party candidate, George Wallace, the former Alabama governor and staunch white supremist, who was in there more or less to satisfy the racists and bigots.

                I sucked it up and voted for Humphrey for two reasons: (1) I’m not a racist, so Wallace was out and (2) Nixon visibly dripped slime. History records that my pick lost the election but my honor, although somewhat tarnished, remained intact.

                Before he was even elected, Tricky Dick was living up to his nickname when he violated the Logan Act by sending an envoy to Paris to sabotage the Paris Peace talks which would have ended the Vietnam War. The reasoning behind this act of treason was that the Democratic Party would get credit for ending a very unpopular war and he, Tricky Dick, might lose the upcoming election. End result: Many more dead soldiers.

                I was in college in 1972, writing for the school newspaper when he came up for re-election and I recall reading a little blurb in the “Washington Post” one day several months before the election about a break in at some Democratic headquarters at some place called “Watergate.” It was, like, buried on page 38 at the bottom, but my cynical little mind said, “Hmmm.”

We all know how that played out.

He was re-elected but the shit really hit the fan shortly thereafter. Journalism wasn’t fast enough to get him before he crushed a hapless South Dakota Senator George McGovern to win a second term in a landslide, but journalism got him in the end and Tricky Dick Nixon was forced to resign the presidency in disgrace in 1974. Watching him about to leave the White House grounds that fateful day, when he turned around and flashed his famous “double V” salute and sinister smile at the camera, I remembered what I had read earlier in the White House transcripts documenting the blatant misuse of power and criminal behavior in this whole sordid affair and I thought to myself that I would never again see as corrupt a politician in my lifetime as Richard Milhous Nixon.

                I was wrong again.

                Next up: Gerald Ford 

Continuing with the Presidents ......

Lyndon B. Johnson was a nasty motherfucker who played a major role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On 11/21/63, the night before Kennedy was gunned down, a group of powerful political wheeler-dealers gathered at the Dallas home of Genovese crime family operative and Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison to finalize a plan which had been put into motion shortly after Kennedy made a remarkable speech in which he outlined his goals for the immediate future. These included the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, the downsizing of both the CIA and the FBI, serious alterations to the oil depletion allowance which would cost certain people billions of dollars and a severe crackdown on organized crime. Besides Johnson and Murchison, others in attendance at this meeting included former VPOTUS Richard M. Nixon, the man Kennedy had defeated for the presidency in 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the deranged and power mad homosexual who secretly loved to wear women’s clothes and hated the Kennedy’s with a passion and mega billionaire H.L. Hunt, the absolute sinister power behind the nefarious plot. Later, his son Lamar would own the Kansas City Chiefs National Football League franchise.

According to the woman Johnson was banging on the side at the time, Madeleine Duncan Brown, who saw Johnson immediately following this infamous meeting, he said to her, “After tomorrow, those sons of bitches (the Kennedy’s) will never embarrass me again – that’s no threat – that’s a promise.”

And he was right and, amazingly, they got away with it completely, including the infamous cover up known as the Warren Commission Report, a huge paper pile of bullshit and proven sham that made no sense whatsoever to anyone who ever read it, which I did.

Johnson liked to pick up his pet dogs by the ears, stating that it didn’t hurt them and that they actually liked it, disregarding the obvious fact that the dogs cried out in pain and whimpered whenever he did this. He also liked to hold staff meetings and entertain the media while he was taking a shit.

Rather than withdraw troops from Vietnam, he instead radically increased troop deployments to satisfy his pals in the military industrial complex, drastically expanded both budgets for the CIA and FBI and later participated in the murders of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

Johnson became POTUS when I was 18 and was in office until I was 23. At the time, I thought he was a degenerate asshole unfit for the office he held and history has proven me right. Democracy as defined by the Founding Fathers died in the United States of America on 11/22/63 because of this horrible man and several others just as horrible who committed murder and got away with it. And since then, democracy has never been properly restored.

Next: Tricky Dick Nixon. 

More on the U.S. Presidents .....

     I had turned 15 with all of the raging hormones that go with that awkward age when John F. Kennedy was elected POTUS and I remember being totally enamored with the guy, not so much because of his political prowess, rather his prowess with the women. I mean, at one point this guy was banging Marilyn Monroe in the Oval Office, along with countless others it seemed while Jackie more or less accepted it all as being part of what is was to be married to this guy while at the same time taking us on a televised, and very popular and well received tour of the White House. I half expected her to say, “….and this is the Blue Room where Jack drilled so-and-so and this is the Lincoln Bedroom, God only knows who all he’s plugged in here and this is the East Garden ……..”

                To his credit, he kept us out of WWIII by concocting, with the help of his little brother Bobby, the brilliant plan of blockading Cuba, which was putting up missile sites with Russian weaponry as fast as Ray Kroc was later putting up golden arches. JFK’s generals wanted to nuke the little island which would have ended in disaster because a little roly-poly psychopath named Khrushchev was in charge of the Soviet Union at that time and he was as dangerous to the world as the U.S. generals.

                Clear heads finally prevailed and Camelot was restored until the following summer when he made a speech at somebody’s graduation commencement outlining what he intended to do during his second term in office, after he was re-elected in 1964. Numerous factions inside and outside the government did not like what they had just heard one damn bit (diminish the powers of the CIA and FBI, start withdrawing troops from Vietnam, severely crack down on organized crime, some other stuff …) so they got together and organized a little turkey shoot which dispatched JFK into the afterlife on 11/22/63. They set up a patsy by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald to take the blame, then quickly had him eliminated by a mafia thug on nationwide TV, followed by a governmental review (the notorious Warren Commission report) in which a bunch of high powered dickheads lied their collective asses off.

                Democracy in the United States of America has never been the same since.

                Next up: Lyndon Johnson

                                                                  

Continuing with the U.S. Presidents of my lifetime ....

     I was aged 7-15 during the administration of my second POTUS, war hero, amateur golfer, and unrecognized pussy hound Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yes, at one point late in WWII, as the story goes, Ike was banging his driver, Captain Kay Summersby, with reckless abandon while Mamie tended to the family business at home. It seems looking back on history, that just about all of our so-called heroes had little quirks of one kind or another that went largely unreported at the time, some worse than others, to protect us, the general public, from realizing that our “heroes” were merely human beings after all. Back then I wasn’t paying much attention to politics, other than the reoccurring nightmare of having to crawl under my desk at least once a week, stick my head between my legs and kiss my sweet ass goodbye because the Ruskies were going to blow us all to smithereens at any moment. Other families had bomb shelters stocked to the roof with enough provisions for several lifetimes while my family would simply have to make do with the ditch outside next to the street. It wasn’t much of a ditch.

     Even though I had not the slightest idea what they were, there was a communist behind every tree and being called a “Commie” was instant grounds for a fistfight. Even in the blazing heat of a stifling August afternoon, we were supposedly in the midst of a “cold war” and I wondered where? Minnesota?

     Individuality was largely frowned upon. One was expected to toe the line, act right and sincerely believe with all your heart that Ozzie and Harriet were the perfect parents and David and Ricky were the perfect offspring. I thought it odd that Harriet wore high heels when she vacuumed, but then so did Donna Reed and Jane Wyatt on Father Knows Best. I had trouble understanding this because one of my duties was vacuuming which everyone knows is best done either barefoot or in socks.

     The only asshole on TV was Eddie Haskell.

     I can thank Ike for much of the cynicism I have today as far as politicians are concerned when he lied his ass off after Gary Francis Powers was shot down over Russia in the U-2 spy plane. To make matters worse, history now records that Powers wasn’t alone, that there were numerous other pilots shot down during this period that were left in Russia to rot.

    However, Ike’s greatest sin came about when he selected a sleazy California Republican party hack to serve as Vice President. Later, Richard M. Nixon would lead the nation down the road to ruin.

     Next up: John F. Kennedy  

  

A review of the U.S. Presidents during my lifetime

     Before we get to this amazing and bizarre presidential campaign of 2016, I figure a small review of those who have gone before is necessary to set the stage for what is appearing to be one of the strangest moments in United States political history. I'll approach these one at a time:

     There have been a dozen U.S. presidents in my lifetime beginning with Harry Truman. I only missed FDR by a month and what I know about Harry mostly comes from history texts which I read later, mostly during the college years. I learned he liked to drink whiskey and play poker and had a plaque on his desk that said, “The Buck Stops Here.” He had a daughter who played piano and sang badly and it pissed him off if you brought this up. 

     He surprised everyone when I was three by getting reelected and once stood down General Douglas McArthur when McArthur wouldn’t act right in Korea. 

     But I hold ‘Ol Harry responsible for two of the more heinous occurrences in U.S. history: (1) Because some rather mad scientists in Oak Ridge had cooked up this gadget that had a destructive force unknown to modern man up to that point, he authorized using this devise one pleasant fall morning on some innocent civilians in Hiroshima, Japan, killing thousands and thousands.

     The story goes that this was done in order to avoid invading Japan, but that was bullshit. Japan was whipped and everyone, including Japan, knew it for a fact. The Hiroshima bomb was dropped primarily to show Joe Stalin and Russia just what a bunch of bad motherfuckers we Americans were. Three days later, he authorized dropping another one on Nagasaki, which was just plain mean and barbaric and (2) Several years later, ‘Ol Harry signed a piece of paper which created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the whole world has suffered greatly because of that ever since.

Next up -- Ike.      

Okay, now where was I .......

     Our New Orleans buddy Liz Beeson set this blog site up for Carol and I way back when we first moved to Granada. A lot has gone down in these past 5 1/2 years, we've moved four times because we could and each place has been a tropical delight. Our current digs are on Calle Arsenal, just down the street from Kathy's Waffle House. Here's what this place looks like, at least the garden:  

       We will have been here for two years in June and have both decided that we're gonna stay for a while longer.

     We plan to resurrect this blog for, among other things, political purposes in this turbulent election year of 2016. And just for the record, be it known right off the bat that we are both liberal progressives and 100% Bernie Sanders backers.

     More to come ....