Murderers

     One can write a novel set during a famous historical period, like the Great Depression or the French Revolution, have well-known people of those times as characters.  Franklin Roosevelt or Maximilien Robespierre would make good characters; Adolf Hitler, too, and J. Edgar Hoover, Marie Antoinette and Georges Danton.  I've seen films featuring all of these as characters.  It's tempting to think of history as the story of great and wealthy people.  By "great" I don't mean "good."  Great, among other definitions, means "above the average."  People who "make their marks on history" are standouts.  Pens, bottles of ink, typewriters, cameras, microphones, served as media to immortalize Robespierre and Roosevelt, yet millions of no longer known historical players have been forgotten because history doesn't examine the lives of ordinary people unless they impact "the great."
     We know a lot about Lee Harvey Oswald because he was accused, without being tried in a court of law, of assassinating President John Kennedy.  Had he not become mixed up in that mess, it's likely Oswald would've remained unknown.  A popular postmodern American novelist, Don DeLillo, wrote a good novel about Oswald called Libra.  DeLillo took on as subject matter a controversial American, offered his own take--admittedly a difficult task getting into the mind and life of Oswald, a man regarded in so many different ways by so many different theorists, official and otherwise.  Many people have opinions about Oswald; the assassination and its investigations created a jumble of possibilities, leaving behind a broken trail of evidence making it impossible to find out the truth.  That's a practice of the CIA and other intelligence agencies worldwide: disseminate disinformation, "muddy the waters."  (Note that the government's official 9/11 theory is not airtight and suggests plausible alternatives).
     I do not accuse the CIA of killing Kennedy, but I do accuse that agency in 1963 of behaving exactly like itself: of creating discord, screwing with governments, planning and carrying out coups, participating in covert activities here and abroad.
     Dan Rather, then of CBS News, once asked, in a televised interview, former CIA Director Richard Helms if the agency was in any way involved in the Kennedy assassination.  Helms, of course, said "No."
     As far as the dumb minds in the CBS building were concerned, Helms's answer put the question to rest.  Still, even and especially today, former CIA officials and operatives are regularly asked for their viewpoints on MSNBC, the alleged liberal cable news network.  If not the CIA, former Bush administration officials are frequent guests, their Bush/Cheney era views normalized.  David Frum, a speechwriter for Bush who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" to group together Iran, Iraq, and North Korea--three countries not linked together--appears often on Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC show.  Frum, a Republican, finds Donald Trump unsatisfactory, a position shared by MSNBC's new pundit, George Will, and by Fox News pundit, Charles Krauthammer.  Neoconservative and warmonger Bill Kristol also doesn't like Trump.  This makes them seem like the kinds of men a regular old Democrat could have a conversation with, joke around about the nutty piece of shit who runs the Oval Office.
     Anti-Trump views, like those of Conservative Hugh Hewitt, will get you a show on MSNBC, even if you also believe Planned Parenthood should be defunded and millions of women and girls should be left without health care options.  It seems to be more important to Phil Griffin, who runs MSNBC, to bash Trump and spend inordinate amounts of airtime on the current president's apparent buddy-buddy relationship with Russia, wasting wind on discussions about Trump's weird personality, than on focusing on issues of actual concern to most Americans, like health care.
     The Republican machine continues to relentlessly attempt to repeal Obamacare, offering no sensible and humane replacement.  Each bill they try to pass represents the depth of their evil, for they are willing and eager to deprive millions of people of health insurance.  Trump, too, wants this.  Supposedly, the American people want it, in spite of polls revealing that only about twelve percent actually want millions of people to be fucked over and condemned by their own government.
     Senator John McCain, who ran for president unsuccessfully in 2008, has brain cancer.  Nevertheless, he got up from his recovery bed (after a risky surgery) to fly to Washington where he cast his vote in favor of depriving 22 million people of health insurance.  Entering the Senate chamber, every politician applauded him.  His "courage" was remarked upon, made into a "story" on the news.  Barack Obama praised the Senator in a tweet.  Obama didn't comment on McCain favoring the deprivation of health insurance for millions of Americans.
     The bill didn't pass, and neither did the one following it.  They've had seven years to figure out how to get rid of Obamacare, to come up with a plan that would succeed it, and they can't do it, so far.  It reflects badly on Trump, who criticized McCain, though not by name, for joining with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (both of them Republicans who might actually be worth a damn) in a "No" vote on last night's Obamacare killing bill.  McCain may have voted in the negative this time because the weakened thing didn't have a chance to pass, earning it the silly nickname, "Skinny Repeal."
     The anxiety caused by these motherfuckers trying to destroy health care, doing only that instead of the many other things they should be trying to do, like fixing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, withdrawing from Afghanistan, has kept me awake for sure.  Millions of others, whose health and monetary concerns are being irritated by this loathsome crew of degenerate politicians, are the people of history not mentioned by name and eventually forgotten.  It could be that the majority of people mentioned in history books were horrible, at least some of the time.
     McCain's appearance in Washington to vote after brain surgery wasn't courageous.  Applauding him wasn't, either.  Newspeople who celebrate McCain (they are the majority) may in the end, in history, get their man regarded as a hero, overlooking his viciousness.  Yet, his "greatness" is the same as that of Bill and Hillary Clinton, of Obama, of Bush and Cheney and other bloodletters of history, while the people they make bleed have no names.

                                                                              Vic Neptune