THE HUNTING OF A PRESIDENT. Anybody
remember that? We were appalled by what was done to Bill Clinton.
Mostly, we were appalled – and still are – by the fact that there was an
organized plan to take down a sitting president. An organized
plan – aka a conspiracy.
Though the BBC can report on the
efforts – the conspiracy -- to take down FDR, the American press has
largely played dumb all these years. (It is playing, right?) One
exception? NPR.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's
WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. In 1933,
Senator Henry D. Hatfield, a Republican from West Virginia, wrote a
letter to
a friend complaining about President Franklin Roosevelt.
SALLY
DENTON: (Reading) This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the
annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the
status of a
robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of
capitalism but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless
the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to
regain their lost freedom.
RAZ:
When Sally Denton came across that letter, it sounded amazingly
contemporary. So she dug further and came across a whole series of
attacks and even
plots against FDR. She's written about it in a new book called "The
Plots Against the President," and the story begins just weeks before
Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933. It was one of the darkest moments of
the Depression and many people in America were calling
for a dictator to get the country back on track.
DENTON:
Unemployment is skyrocketing. The country is rocking precariously
economically in all ways. And it's hard for us today to realize that in
1933 the
country was reeling. There were suggestions that capitalism was not
working, that democracy was not working. Various intellectuals, and I
mean not crackpots, were really considering the possibility of fascism,
of communism, of socialism, of Nazism. The whole
country was in play.
RAZ:
We often hear about the times just before President Kennedy was killed
and how he was really vilified by his opponents. And some people suggest
that
that is what led to his assassination, that climate. You describe an
almost similar climate in the early 1930s, 1933, that surrounded
Roosevelt. Talk about some of the people who were sort of vitriolically
opposed to him and what they said about him.
DENTON:
As I was writing this book, sometimes I felt like I could close my eyes
and just transpose, you know, modern day vitriol to what was happening.
There
was a sense that Roosevelt was radically changing the relationship
between the government and the governed, and there was great fear about
that in many quarters, both the right and the left.
So
you had these enemies like Father Coughlin on the right who was
concerned that he was becoming a communist, a tool of Jewish monied
interests, then Huey
Long on the left who felt that he wasn't going far enough to
redistribute the wealth. And then you had, you know, right wing
reactionary veteran's organizations. You had Wall Street interests.
RAZ:
It's interesting because there was really genuinely a conspiracy at a
certain point to overthrow the Roosevelt administration, to replace it
with a
kind of a crypto-fascist movement, and this was - the people behind it
were mostly financiers, bankers, part of a group called The American
Liberty League. Who were they?
DENTON:
Well, they were some of the wealthiest people in America. I think the
handful of people that were really behind the Liberty League controlled
assets
worth more than $40 billion.
RAZ: They thought he was a socialist or even worse.
DENTON:
They thought he was a socialist, I don't know. A lot of times, it was
unclear whether or not they were able to even distinguish between what a
socialist
was or a communist or - there was just this sense that he was upsetting
the status quo.
RAZ: These bankers were behind something that became known as the Wall Street Putsch. What was their plan?
DENTON:
They thought that they could convince Roosevelt - because he was of
their class, the patrician class, they thought that they could convince
Roosevelt
to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government.
It was a cockamamie concept. And the fact that it even got as far as it
did is pretty shocking.
RAZ: How far did it get?
DENTON:
It got far enough so that they had at least $3 million invested and
claimed to have up to $300 million at the ready. They appealed to a
general,
a retired general, to lead it. And had he been a different kind of
person, it might have gone a lot further. But he saw it as treason and
reported it to Congress.
That was a conspiracy. It was also
the t-word. We don’t like to toss the word around lightly. It’s a
serious term and, if found guilty of treason, you can be put to death.
The organized efforts to take down Bill Clinton strike us the
same way.
Which brings us today. Zack Haller
has linked to a document by MEDIA MATTERS. This is a document which,
whether they realized it or not, documents an organized conspiracy to
take down Donald Trump.
Let’s clarify terms here. Reporters
pursuing a story? Not a conspiracy. That’s true of, for example, Carl
Bernstein and Bob Woodward pursuing the Watergate story. Yes, Richard
Nixon felt like it was they’re-out-to-get-me. But the reality
is that they were covering a story and investigating it. Yes, it could
damage him. But that’s too damn bad. His actions were being
investigated. His actions. What he elected to do. As for what
happens, the chips fall where they may.
Reporters investigating a lead are not committing treason even if the results could oust a president.
Most of the time.
See, we’re coming back to what was
done to Bill Clinton. Anyone acting independently or on behalf of their
news organization has nothing to worry about.
But there was ‘reporter’ (piece of human filth) David Brock.
He was not a reporter. He was part of
a conspiracy working to unseat Bill Clinton. He was a well known liar
(who should rot in hell for the way he lied about Anita Hill). He
should have been prosecuted along with the other media ‘elves’
who were part of a conspiracy to take down Bill Clinton.
Instead, he's been allowed to bring his
trashy ways over to the left.
And we’ve been the worse for it -- and day after day, he makes us even worse.
He was supposedly going to teach us how to fight.
We didn’t need the ridiculous David Brock to know how to fight.
All he’s taught is destructive
deception. He’s taught how to lie and how to cheat. He plays dirty
because he’s nothing but s**t. He oozes around the left and we all get a
little more disgusting and a little more dirty just by interacting
with him.
That document Zach Haller’s linked to?
It’s a plan to destroy a sitting president.
Now there is no reason for anyone –
pro or anti-war – to support someone’s war. There’s no reason to
support someone’s EPA policy or whatever.
But there’s a world of difference between that and what the document outlines.
It is a plan for every day to destroy a
sitting president, every day to create an outrage. It is a plan for
those who are on the George Soros payroll – THE NATION, MOTHER JONES,
etc – to gin up outrage day after damn day.
The document declares of one section
(American Bridge): “American Bridge is the Democratic epicenter of
opposition research and rapid response in presidential and Senate
elections. In the Trump era, there must be no ‘off years.’ American
Bridge will sustain a nonstop campaign against Trump, his
administration, and Republicans who enable him.”
"A nonstop campaign against" a sitting president.
Getting why we're bothered? Getting why David Brock's actions cause us to raise our eyebrows?
This isn't journalism.
It is a conspiracy and it is prosectuable.
