🚀 go-pugleaf

James J. Lippard wrote:
> In article <327A4549.5407@aud.alcatel.com>,
> Jeff  <bankjl@aud.alcatel.com> wrote:
> >> WJC is without a doubt the sleaziest president we have ever had.  Of
> >course, #2
> >> was GHWB.
> >
> >I guess I'm confused as to what Bush did that made him so sleazy.  Tell
> >me, was he accused of adultry or using a public office for illegal
> >purposes?  Although he may have not been the best president ever, he
> 
> Yes.  See _Spy_ magazine's 1988 issue with the article on "1001 reasons
> not to vote for George Bush."  Number 1: he cheats on his wife.  The
> article named names and circumstances; the story was widely known among
> journalists but I don't know if anyone else published it.  
Yes, this is widely known and accepted, that Bush had a long-term affair that 
continued while he was in the White House. Does this mean that he did bad things 
for the country as a whole? Not necessarily.

>Others included
> lying to Congress about Iran-Contra, 

Indeed.

>his fake arranged drug deal in the
> park across from the White House so that he could pump up the "War on
> Drugs" by holding up a bag of crack on national TV. 

Oh, yeah, that one was particularly sleazy. Did you know that the 'dealer' they 
bought from had never sold cocaine before the FBI begged him for it (he was a 
small-time marijuana dealer), he'd never been to that park before, the FBI had to 
draw him a map so that he could find the park to do the drug deal.

I also liked the Noriega one; after going to a foreign country and kidnapping 
Noriega to bring him to trial in this country (can you imagine how the US would 
howl if any other country came here and violated our sovernity by doing the same 
thing?), it was widely reported that he had tens of pounds of 'an unidentified 
white powder, believed to be cocaine' in his refridgerator. Apparently, no-one in 
the raiding force had ever seen masa flour before or knew how tortillas are made, 
because the powder turned out to be masa flour. I mean, I've seen both these 
powders and they don't look anything at all alike.


> Odd, since the
> CIA--which Bush used to head--helped introduce crack to this country in
> the first place (http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/).
> No, I don't beleive this. Crack is a marketing name, it is the same thing as what 
people used to call 'free-base', i.e. a basic (in the chemical sense), smokable 
form of cocaine hydrocloride. Ask Richard Pryor about this, but free-base was 
around in the mid-to-late 70s. What people would do then was to buy powder 
cocaine and use water, baking soda, and heat to turn it into free-base (or 
ether, there's at least two recipies). Crack is just when someone else has 
already done that chemical transformation for you and sells the resulting lumps. 
'Crack' appeared as a product about 85 or so - I remember that we first heard 
about it from an article in SPIN.

Now, admittedly, the CIA and Ollie North did import a large amount of cocaine 
into the US using military planes landing at military airports that did not go 
through customs. And certainly, much of that cocaine probably ended up as crack. 
But introduced? Naaaah.

> > But then, a lot of people's opinions concerning politics are not based
> >entirely on facts.

True words indeed. 

But much of the problem is that people forget their history, forget their own 
experience, and listen to the revisionists who want to rewrite history and 
interpret its lessons to suit their own agenda. The 60s and 70s were very little 
like the way the republican revisionists describe those times.

But lying in politics works. And as long as people are more willing to accept 
interpreted history over their own experiences, we will continue to be a 
rootless, nongrounded society.

> 
> I think you're the one in the dark.
> 
> >Thanks,
> >Jeff
> 
> --
> Jim Lippard    lippard@(primenet.com ediacara.org skeptic.com)
> Phoenix, Arizona  http://www.primenet.com/~lippard/
> PGP Fingerprint: 35 65 66 9F 71 FE 50 57  35 09 0F F6 14 D0 C6 04

david Horton
-- 
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