Re: Watergate -- the smoking gun?

[valis <valis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth Christopher Hitchins (via Sid), in part:
> To recapitulate: In 1968, Pappas delivered $549,000 in cash to the
> Nixon campaign. The money came from the KYP, the Greek
> intelligence service. Since the KYP was at the time a wholly subsidized
> arm of Langley, Va., United States law was being broken in two
> outrageous ways -- the supplying of campaign funds by a foreign
> dictatorship and the recycling of U.S. intelligence money into
> America's own electoral process.
and
> On March 2, Haldeman told Nixon that White House counsel John Dean
> and Attorney General John Mitchell are getting money for the burglars
> from Pappas, that Pappas has the great advantage of dealing in cash and in
> return Pappas wants the retention of U.S. Ambassador Henry Tasca in
> Athens. The new tapes have Nixon ordering Tasca kept at his post and a
> few days later receiving Pappas in the Oval Office.
and
> We still do not know what the Watergate burglars had been told to
> look for, except that it was "financial stuff." And we still do not know
> what was on the deliberately erased section of the tape of June 20, 1972.

My short-form answer, considering the general American learning curve
on political vice and virtue: ATPIT (Haldemanese for "At this point in
time") who gives a shit?
To disturb this particular set of fetid remains after all these years,
as to plumb at any similar depth in the galactic cesspool of Washington,
is only to draw in the popular gaze to gawk afresh at the mute past
when it should be closely interrogating the present and near future.
The political traumas of one generation are quite incomprehensible to
the next, due to the lack of adequate context, but they can serve well
to assure mammoth lacunae in current attention while giving nothing back.

Carl Dassbach's announcement of CM150-L, a list to prepare observances of
the Manifesto's 150th anniversary - aired here yesterday and apparently
exciting no one but yours truly - needs a payload beyond what's obvious.
I propose that this new list, in conjunction with pen-l and psn-l, be the
venue for a follow-up manifesto, written collectively for the benefit of
today's blue- and white-collar workers, using contemporary landmarks and
processes as its points of departure and context.
Hey, folks, these Schoolmen's debates on Marx/ism won't help anybody once
the excrement is airborne!  _Now_ is the time, if less so than yesterday.

                                                                   valis


       "Four tanks captured Greece!"
                                  -- An Athens lawyer, to me, in 1968