Clawing at the lid of his coffin...

Nasty little joke, there.

Just so no one thinks I "hate America": I believe fervently in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I believe that America should be a beacon of moral behavior in its dealings with other countries, and a friend to the downtrodden wherever they may be. This does not mean I think we should be the policeman of the world. But I do believe we should ally ourselves with foreign leaders who are a credit to their countries, not a blight upon them.

I believe in the separation of Church and State (as an atheist, I have to). It may interest you on the religious right to know that our Founding Fathers were not so much Christians, as Deists. They believed in God, but didn't necessarily listen to him. They did believe in the teachings of Christ, but more as a philosopher ("do unto others, etc."). They all advocated keeping God out of government. Prayer was part of our public education system until a Jewish student objected to it, and forced a judicial, constitutional examination of the practice. This does not mean that students can't pray, or have religious clubs; it just means that government money can't be spent on it.

At the end of this post (and for quite a few posts afterwards, I will be doing a little history lesson on the subject of US intervention around the world over the last hundred years or so. These will be for the uninitiated into CIA/foreign intelligence culture and the way the United States has screwed up, again, and again\. I will list the presidents behind these policies. All of what I'm about to write has been sourced to a wide variety of historians, reporters, etc. I look this information up carefully. Much of it is available through the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA in future posts), via declassified government documents. In other words, these events are documented by our own government, about their own behavior. Or else revealed by whistleblowers who were directly involved. None of this will be innuendo or conjecture.

Currently, the most interesting thing in the news is the trial of Scooter Libby for obstruction and perjury. (remember, we're not putting him on trial for outing a CIA agent, we're putting him on trial for lying to the FBI about outing a CIA agent - same reason Clinton was impeached). If the witnesses are telling the truth, there's more red meat to come in terms of testimony that puts the current administration in a rather bad light. Well... a worse light, depending on your point of view.

INTERVENTIONS:

Nicaragua - 1937 Anastasio Somoza Garcia was the de facto dictator of Nicaragua until 1954, when he was assassinated. His sons succeeded him. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." We supported him during World War II, through multiple rigged elections, selling him seized land and goods of other elites in Nicaragua for a fraction of their price. Any hint of popular uprisings were squashed. His sons were a tad worse.