Why is Bill Clinton speaking at our convention in Denver? He had nothing good to say about Barack Obama during the primary season and shot several nasty broadsides at him which, if not downright racist in nature, were certainly interpeted as such by many.

The rationalization appearing every day of the week on this blog site is he is a former President and as such,common courtesy dictates that he be invited. Others say we must invite him out of respect for the office he once held. But lest we forget, Bill Clinton was one of only two Presidents impeached for misconduct while serving in that office.

Dick Nixon resigned before he could be impeached on August 8,1974.had he not resigned he most definitely would have been impeached and we would today have three former Presidents carrying the stigma of impeachment.The difference between Nixon and Bill Clinton is that Nixon never again spoke at a National Convention after leaving office and we Democrats feel obligated to invite Bill Clinton every 4 years.

I have long believed that the American right wing has never gotten over the social changes of the 1960s and in particular, that the United States lost the Vietnam war–which they blame on the hippies, the pointy-headed professors, and the liberal media. To them, Iraq is not about WMDs, bringing democracy to the Middle East, or even keeping the oil flowing. Rather, it's an effort to re-fight Vietnam and prove, more than a generation later, that the hawks were correct then and still correct today.

Earlier this year, I read an interesting book, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America, by Andreas Hillen, a professor at City College of New York. As the title suggests, the book heavily emphasized pop culture (the author is a big fan of The New York Dolls) but his description of the famous homecoming that year for American prisoners of war speaks volumes about why John McCain is waging such a sleazy, low-ball campaign...

Back when the Beatles were new and hogging the charts they were literally taking the bread out of the mouths of the top songwriters of the day who were used to writing the stuff that the top 40 singers recorded and these writers all got an OK living on the royalties...

The new singer-songwriter era messed up a good thing for the status quo. So The old guard got together with some producers and others interested in coming up with a vehicle to get back in the game. And the marketing and TV thing they came up with became the Monkees and it was a very successful tool that got these guys back on the gravy train. And why not. They were by and large good songwriters and the Monkees had a market and were entertaining and relatively harmless. I watched the shows back then and bought the records...I liked the Beatles and most of the "real" acts more. (shows you how ancient I am...) The downside is that the formula has been improved on and reinvented over and over again and music has suffered ever since as the labels and producers manipulate and control what we are supposed to like.

Early the summer of 1973 my father and I had a small communications failure,  the chainsaw slipped, and I spent my vacation walking funny with a knee I couldn't bend because there were stitches holding the skin in place. I ruined a brand new pair of jeans and, by jumping at the last possible moment, managed to retain my kneecap.

This proved to be a good thing, though it mostly ended my soccer career.

We had finally acquired a television, a twelve-inch black and white, possibly because -- my guess -- dad and I had begun driving to a colleague's house to watch football and that worthy fellow grew his own grapes and made his own wine.

Because the television was, in our house, a new and fascinating thing, and because I couldn't run and play and swim that summer -- I was 14, and briefly took up putt putt golf -- I watched the Senate Watergate hearings. All of them. Every single moment. And, when PBS ran the Army-McCarthy hearings, I watched all of that, as well.

This is how I came to believe in the American system of government. To help celebrate one of my favorite anniversaries, please leap back into the past with me. Or to the future, whatever it proves.

Today marks the 34th anniversary of Richard Milhous Nixon’s infamous helicopter departure from the White House lawn following his resignation speech the night before.  Barring some unforeseen cataclysmic revelation – or Cheney, Rove et al developing a conscience and actually testifying before Congress – it’s an event we will not likely witness again in our lifetimes.

Goodbye to you
Goodbye to everything I thought I knew
You were the one I loved
The one thing that I tried to hold on to

-"Goodbye To You," Michelle Branch

The judicial process is such that by all rights, the testimony of Karl Rove, Josh Bolten, Harriet Myers, Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling, combined with the tell-nothing-new book by Scott McClellan, should have led to the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

But where today's dishonoree faltered, the Bush White House has succeeded with flying colors.

See, one of the things about a loyal Bushie is that s/he is loyal to her or his president, not country. By refusing to testify, Rove et al. are very clearly saying that they value the president over the country.

On this date 34 years ago, thanks to a tremendously paranoid president, loyal Americans such as John Dean, members of Congress who were not backing down and a news media able to focus on something more significant than Paris Hilton's jail time, President Richard M. Nixon announced his resignation effective at noon the next day.

Faggot. Nigger. Bitch. Please excuse the blunt language. From here forward, to avoid the ugly words, I’ll refer to it as "FNB politics." With little to show the electorate in 2008—after six years of uninterrupted control—besides sub-standard care from a privatized workforce at Walter Reed Hospital, thrice-married "family values" presidential candidates, and a boom in home foreclosures, the conservative base’s 2008 strategy has begun to emerge: Weaken the major Democratic opponents by making their image unpalatable to the public.

Rick Perlstein, the brilliant author of Nixonland, explains to us just what is happening to our candidate for President.

After ranting in this diary about how criminals from previous administrations have come back to haunt us, I decided to do an experiment; just how many historical precedents have come back to haunt us?  The findings are disturbing.

If you don't think history is doomed to be repeated if not learned from, well, follow me after the jump...

Exhuming an ugly history:

As Chile and other countries wrestle with whether it's better to exhume their dark pasts or to leave them buried and try to move on, the current, elected government of President Michelle Bachelet, who herself was detained and tortured by the Pinochet regime, has moved to make that black period in Chile's history part of the country's national heritage.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...

A clear and urgent duty of the next president will be to investigate the Bush administration's torture policy and give Americans a full accounting of what was done in our name. It's astounding that we need some kind of truth commission in the United States of America, but we do. Only when we learn the full story of what happened will we be able to confidently promise, to ourselves and to a world that looks to this country for moral leadership: Never again.

That is the final paragraph of Eugene Robinson's column in today's Washington Post, entitled A Torture Paper Trail, inspired by the documents obtained under a FOIA request and then released by the ACLU.  The column is, as is usually the case with Robinson, well worth reading.  I am simultaneously reading Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, thus there is little in the documents that can totally surprise, but the effect of Robinson's column on top of what I read in the book is overwhelming. It requires me to insist once again on some kind of accountability for the misdeeds done by our Government.  Only unlike Robinson, I want to examine more than just the misdeeds of the Bush administration.

In 1967, John McCain was shot out of the North Vietnamese sky, crash landed in a lake, taken prisoner, and held in captivity for ... 41 years, so far.

No one can dismiss the unimaginable agony of enduring six years in an enemy prisoner of war camp. It is surely a brutal experience both physically and mentally. It is the sort of experience that never leaves you and, indeed, it seems never to have left John McCain. His entire post-POW frame of reference is shaped by what he went through, and also by what he missed as a consequence of his incarceration.

Barack Obama began his speech saying he's an American citizen and a citizen of the world (his first applause line)  The McCain camp highlighted that phrase in its dismissal of Obama. Too, the dismissal spreads through the Meme-o-sphere.

But John McCain himself has used the phrase "Citizen of the World" in a speech on May 27th of this year at the University of Denver. [source]

There is such a thing as good international citizenship, and America must be a good citizen of the world—leading the way to address the danger of global warming and preserve our environment, strengthening existing international institutions and helping to build new ones, and engaging the world in a broad dialogue on the threat of violent extremists, who would, if they could, use weapons of mass destruction to attack us and our allies.

Many past Presidents (and the current one, too!) used  "citizen of the world" in their remarks. Here's a collection of them....

McCain  is impugning Obama's patriotism in a way no other nominee  has, in the last 50 years. Not Nixon. Not Bush 43 advised by Karl Rove. Not  Bush 41, helped by Lee Atwater.

When we adopted the surge, we were losing the war in Iraq, and I stood up and said I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war. Apparently Sen. Obama, who does not understand what’s happening in Iraq or fails to acknowledge the success in Iraq, would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.

McCain is charging Obama with treason.

Not even Sen. McCarthy went this far, accusing a political opponent trying to lose  a war to win an election. But we need to look that far back for a fitting response.

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?..If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.

Getting a pardon doesn't make you innocent.  In fact, it strongly suggests that you're guilty. Short of impeaching Bush, there's nothing Congress can do to stop him from pardoning all his cronies and maybe even himself.  But here's my idea on how to mix a little bit of sting into the blessing of being pardoned.  I think it can be done with an act of Congress.

It's that time of the presidential campaign season: who's your vice president?  If the past is any indicator, the way both John McCain and Barack Obama choose their mates will be, well, gonzo.

Once upon a time there was a f****d up Connecticut trust fund kid who was so f****d up that he could even f**k up getting f****d up. In fact he got so f****d up he had to stop getting f****d up, although that did not stop him from continuing to be a massive, world-class f**k up in all other respects.

Afterwards daddy’s firm got him various jobs, like it had before, but now they let him out in public, first in Texas and then in Washington. Eventually he had the Preznitcy stolen on his behalf under the cover of the robes of the Supreme Court. Good thing his handlers didn’t let him try to do it himself. He’d have f****d it up.

This Election already has been a historical one.      
And more history promises to be made.      
Numerous comparisons to past elections can be borne out by similarities.  

One of the most important aspects of this whole FISA mess has been largely overlooked. That is that it is not just about privacy. Or principle.

It is about political power.

The power of the Executive to spy on Americans is an incredible political weapon. Our Founders understood this even back in the 18th Century - information is power.

And if one has any doubt about the dangers of such power, one has to look no further than the presidency of Richard Nixon. There's a great scene in the movie All the President's Men where Woodward finally gets Deepthroat to talk. It is not, as far as I know, taken from an exact quote. But it is an accurate depiction of what Woodward learned:

Woodward: I'm tired of your chickenshit games. I need to know what you know.

   Deepthroat: ... Mitchell [Nixon's attorney general] started doing covert stuff before anyone else. The list is longer than anyone can imagine. It involves the entire US intelligence community. FBI, CIA, Justice. It's incredible.

   The cover up had little to do with Watergate. It was mainly to protect the covert operations. It leads everywhere. Get out your notebook. There's more.