Did you know that JFK's average at Harvard was C? Bush's entire resume would be lucky to be graded at that level, as open as it was to the public, but Obama's transcripts and associated documentation have never been released to the public and no one knows why. At Harvard Law it must have been stellar if he became head of the prestigious Law Review, but who knows?
The author introduces his own remarkable mother into the narrative of the first section, in the context of Krieg's research at the National Archives into one of her CIA connections. One of the first women to enlist into the U.S. Marines during World War II, she also authored murder mysteries and articles on crime, medicine, and even drug abuse by teenagers, a novel topic at the time. Her book Green Medicine: The Search for the Plants That Heal discusses LSD and folk remedies. Her Black Market Medicine deals with the dangers involved with mafia distribution of counterfeited prescription drugs.
In 1967 she was a star witness in one of the first congressional hearings ever to focus on the mafia. But as a result of her deep knowledge of medical topics, she visited "Red" China in 1972, ahead of President Richard Nixon, whose official elevation of the Bamboo Curtain has had such a stunning impact on subsequent history. Krieg's mother briefed the CIA on her visit. Mrs. Kreig's brief forays into the narrative are a tribute from a proud son to a truly remarkable and revolutionary role model.
Other CIA liaisons follow in the narrative--relevant to Barack Obama, whose first employer after his graduation from Columbia University was a CIA front company. Moreover, according to other Archival records, ten years earlier, young Obama undertook a CIA-related trip to Pakistan from Indonesia, where he was living with his mother and step-father at the time. US citizenship issues kicked in.
Disallusioned? I'm fascinated. I lived in Warsaw, Poland, for two months as a child and am now searching for my own puppet strings. I'm sure that I rubbed elbows with the CIA, but did they rub elbows with a terrifically skinny, buck-teethed eleven year old with overly thick glasses? I could go on, but who cares?
The CIA even played a role in bringing together Obama's biological parents in Hawaii--Ann Dunham's father's alleged career as a furniture salesman was also a CIA cover, according to investigative journalist Wayne Madsen. The associations fan out from there.
But more is missing from the Obama and family records than transcripts.
Want to find out how Barack met Michelle--as a legal mentor? Questions surrounding Barack's tenure-track position at the University of Chicago--no relevant publications, de rigeueur there, have ben found. Read on.
Three subsequent chapters summarize the roles, both overt and covert, played by the Bush dynasty. Herein was find not only an overt CIA connection--G.H.W.'s appointment to head the CIA by Gerald Ford, but a possible covert connection with the JFK assassination: someone who resembled "Poppy" was seen standing close to the infamous Dallas book repository shortly before the shooting, an allegation denied with a vehement alibi by the family.
Be that as it may. By the time you finish this book, nothing will surprise you. Here is the "puppet-string prototype": "secret agendas, elite institutions, greed, and corruption behind the veneer of normal civic life and public service" (p. 87).
We next read of "America's Machiavelli" (he's been called worse than that, including "Turd Blossom") Karl Rove and his role in the notorious firing of the nine Republican prosecutors in 2006, which led to the forced retirement of both Rove and Antonio Gonzales, among a scandalous number of others. We read of the tragic descent of the hero-for-our-time David Petraeus, of Romney's transition (which never happened) director Mike Leavitt, a fellow Mormon, both of whom wished to "replicate [their religion] throughout the government," a situation Kreig describes would entail "male supremacy, racism, secrecy, dominance of church over state," and more.
Then there was Election 2012, saved from descent into a Romney "selection" by heroic Ohio attorneys who caught Columbus officials in the act of another network of deceit patching voting machines for "experimental" purposes in the setting of a presidential election. Who experiments with voting machines in a presidential election rather than a school gymnasium? Only those Rove-runners who think they can get away with it.
They were caught, again by Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck at the eleventh hour in another court hearing that convinced the judge that no good was afoot--a tour de force pulled off again by the Ohio heroes who had seen such a ruse succeed in 2004 and quelled it in 2008 but not rested on their laurels, which didn't interest the press anyway. Election integrity is "not sexy enough" after all, in the eyes of the scandal-starved media and the expert academics more interested in grant money to ignore certain realities while dwelling on devoutly centrist issues like which state's machinery will bring it to the top of the list. No one looks twice at ugly voting machines, though going through the motions less and less cynically thanks to such activists who risk so much and influence so much in return for slow results and anonymity.
"EI" does interest Kreig, though, and it is hoped that through his words THE word may reach more--that more than landslides are denied within the present system. History is changed for the better through human sacrifice. Democracy in action.
*****
The final section, on the 2012 challengers, "killing us softly" Ryan and "prophet of profit" Romney, answers the initial question why even those most liberal among us should question our allegiance to the lesser of evils. It seems that . . .
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