David Andrews

Nice plaid, very 1963. Looks all Hart, Schaffner & Marx.

David said: Who among us didn't want to see Pastor Tim get it in the neck? Hmmm,........ Can't say I did David. I didn't really even see that as a possibility.............But I could see some guy having a male fantasy where every potential antagonist to the Jennings family could be seen as dead meat for our bloodthirsty, little, psycho killing Marxist wife! ---------So that's cool man!😃 +++ Oh, please, man - Pastor Tim wormed his way into the family's life; brainwashed the daughter into confessing that her parents were spies; and by the end of his storyline had the daughter spying on him before the Jenningses got him mercifully deported to South America by a Soviet-connected missionary society. And through all that it was actually Phillip Jennings who hated and distrusted him the most - the father, not the mother. Despite humane regrets, Phillip killed people for less. Inherent in the idea that they let him go is the idea that it could have gone the other way. It was good soap opera writing to let Pastor Tim escape with his life; it was great TV writing to have him not rat the family out to Stan in the end. I applaud both moves, though my prime reason for wanting Pastor Tim to get it in the neck is that he took up so much valuable story time. It seemed like the writers were setting the character up for killing in the same way the writers on The Sopranos gave long arcs to annoying characters who would finally get whacked, giving macabre satisfaction and relief to the audience that had to put up with them. In Pastor Tim's case, the setup seemed to go on at least a season too long - but the double payoff was great. As for Keri Russell's character - it was plain by season 6 that she didn't require my beneficence in the least.

CBS had considerable reservations about Hogan's Heroes and almost kept it off the air - but it became a hit. As Newkirk would say, "It sayeth in the Good Book, 'There is a time to mourn, and a time to taketh the p*ss.' "

I'm not sure if I shouldn't congratulate them for so diligently keeping up the look of an NBC drama during the Reagan years. I was impressed by the good work among all the actors, playing whatever nationality. (Spoilers Ahead) It had this for it: Who among us didn't want to see Pastor Tim get it in the neck? (He didn't) Who didn't want to see Keri Russell deliver a beatdown to Margo Martindale's character? (She did.) And then Pastor Tim refused to rat the family out -- above average plotting for TV that atoned for many sins. What the daughter did in the end, and how the couple shrugged it off, was also story gold.

Every time this Unz, or his ghostwriter, introduces the never before trope ("Never before had I believed in assassination conspiracy"; "Never before had I had any interest in 20th-century history"), something tendentious and agenda-driven is about to become his topic. Reader, beware of writers with favorite tricks.

I dunno, I thought The Americans was pretty even-handed, and indicted America for several evils from an imagined Soviet point-of-view. If anything, I thought it soft-pedaled many ills of the Soviet system, though it also ignored some elephants in our room, notably the Contra war. It was a TV show - it used selective history to make dramatic points. The worst thing about it was the old-hat staging, camera framing and editing that made it look like a 1980s network TV show - a mimetic fallacy that had me expecting to see the NBC peacock logo pop up at the corner of the screen every 15 minutes.

With the truth serum and polygraph requests, he seems to want to be "forced" to tell the truth under circumstances that he cannot be blamed for. But no one wanted any serious interrogation of Jack Ruby. Was he still on Preludin, or would he have been weaned off during the months he was in jail before Warren's visit?

We could do a commercial spoofing the OAS attempted hit on De Gaulle, but then both countries would go WTF!?

Thanks, Doug.

That Davy Crockett remake is looking better and better to me.

Interesting. One wonders if the first three-quarters of the text of parts 1 and 2 are a set-up ("I used to believe there was no conspiracy...but now, folks...") for the big bang of the fourth-quarter round-up of sources implicating Israel in the assassination. The tip-off for me was the review of the book on the USS Liberty, an incident that Unz - or his ghostwriter - relates to the assassination only through the dim suggestion that LBJ's culpability gave the Israelis leverage to blackmail the US into a standdown and a hush job. Just sayin'... A dressed-up goose is a propa' ganda'.

watching that POS Altered States with about three people in the audience The older and wiser one becomes, the smarter Altered States reveals itself to be.

I think Spielberg should go out with a remake of Davy Crockett, using CGI to reanimate Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen, so they could play against quality modern actors such as Shia LaBeouf and Alden Ehrenreich. Throw in Tom Hanks as Col. Travis and Harrison Ford as Jim Bowie, and you've got box office gold! P. S. - John Goodman as Mike Fink, King of the River!

So, nu? Create a narcostate from La Paz to Tegucigalpa to Ciudad Juarez, and then put Mr. Populist Trump in to seal up the border and send the innocent back, Like St. Michael at the threshold of Hell in Paradise Lost. So, nu? we used to say in Manhattan, before gentrification, when soup was cheap or reasonably priced on Second Ave.

If you look through the back threads, Paz, you'll find that the membership has paid a great deal of attention to, and written a lot of discussion of, French, German, British, Canadian, and Russian primary sources and historical research, just to name the origins I remember. A lot of attention has been given to Michele Metta's work, thanks in no small part to yourself. I think members are just anxiously awaiting the work's completion and translation.

Not to get paranoid, but Smedley Butler died at only 58, his condition "incurable": "Upon his retirement, Butler bought a home in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, where he lived with his wife.[73] In June 1940, he checked himself into the hospital after becoming sick a few weeks earlier. His doctor described his illness as an incurable condition of the upper gastro-intestinal tract that was probably cancer. His family remained by his side, even bringing his new car so he could see it from the window. He never had a chance to drive it. On June 21, 1940, Smedley Butler died in the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia.[72]" (wiki)

I dunno - those motorcycle cops in the McIntyre picture may just be squinting and grimacing. A photo captures only a millisecond of facial movement, and we may be seeing a fraction of their reactions to negotiating a turn in formation, under bright sunlight. See posts on this EF page:

Did a "silent majority" of these foilks then give their votes to Nixon?

The closest one got was the political conspiracy thriller bandwagon that the studios reluctantly jumped on in the 1970s. Some of these were non-specific and offbeat in the worst sense (Twilight's Last Gleaming, anyone?), but the trend kept a simmering undercurrent of dissent going during the decade and after, and directed attention to conspiracy revelations in books and magazines. The best was perhaps The Parallax View, which not-so-obliquely addressed the RFK shooting. I think we can thank Executive Action - and Dick Nixon - for starting that trend, though the seeds were planted as early as Blow-Up (1966), which caught the idea of assassination evidence hidden in photographs. I seem to remember that Executive Action was available on VHS tape for rental.

Over the past several presidential administrations (Democrat and Republican) and through the many congressional sessions since the Reagan years, American workers have lost rights that they fought for since the 1870s and into the Depression, and lost privileges afforded them in the optimistic remaking of the working world after WW II. And no one is rebelling against this or demanding any restorative measures. Couple that with the immense powers given to the corporate world, especially to banking, insurance and mortgage lenders (down to Trump's relaxation of banking regulations last week), and the individual worker is now powerless in our society. No one will mount any effective protests. No persons will engage in collective action, such as general strikes, to ensure the rights and empowerment of all. Common beat cops take their cues from militarized police forces and quash all dissent, down to misdemeanor level, with brute force,* and answer for it later, if at all. All this public passivity came out of failure to oppose the culture of assassination, or to even acknowledge it. The same psychology operated over the decades, and the failure to rise then is the same as the failure to rise now. It is no longer worth being a working person in America - and we are all workers. It is no longer worth being an investor, nor the owner of a retirement account or a mortgage. Below a certain level of financial security, it is no longer worth being a citizen. Our rights, duties and privileges can be cut off at any time, by fiat. If we had any sense, our retirement accounts and mortgages would, by established law, be put under control and protection of the federal government, and not in the hands of private entities licensed to steal and cheat. (*) http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/2-nj-police-officers-reassigned-investigation-launched-in-case-of-woman-punched-on-beach-by-police/ar-AAxVkxV?li=BBnb7Kz

A worthy subordinate enterprise might be to discover exactly how much of that "six figures" Marina Oswald and her daughters collected, and whom the rest was divvied up among. Cherchez l'argent! as they say.

Jim - Thanks for the link to the Wilcott documents. I just caught up with them. I remember, just after it happened, reading about the man injured in the Contra protest with Wilcott.

Boot: "Lansdale’s yin-yang approach, of hunting down guerrillas and terrorists while trying to attract the support of the uncommitted, is the basis of modern 'population-centric' counterinsurgency doctrine as applied by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Britain in Northern Ireland, by Colombia against the FARC, by Israel in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, and by many other countries with varying degrees of success." Doug Valentine says the same things in his own books, but he has harsher opinions of the method.

I'm reading the Boot/Lansdale book now. The Introduction has JFK equivocally approving the weekend NSC/State cable that demanded Nhu's removal and forecast a Diem coup if Diem refused to act on Nhu. Once the Diem coup was in motion, Boot has Kennedy afraid to recall Ambassador Lodge because he was afraid of Lodge as a Republican candidate in 1964.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/richard-n-goodwin-adviser-to-democratic-presidents-dies-at-86/ar-AAxAMuq Joe Hagan's new biography of Jann Wenner, Sticky Fingers, describes how in the late 1970s Dick Goodwin milked Rolling Stone magazine for beaucoup bucks for an underwhelming political column, plus an intro to Jackie and Caroline for Wenner. Dovey Johnson Roundtree, the African-American attorney who got Ray Crump, Jr., acquitted for Mary Pinchot Meyer's murder, has also passed away: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dovey-johnson-roundtree-defense-lawyer-and-civil-rights-warrior-dies-at-104/ar-AAxBxY4