Well, Dean was a better candidate but yeah...

I liked Dean a lot too. He's a great liberal.

He was the most viable candidate. Just like four years ago when the Republicans chose George Bush. John McCain was a much better canididate in every way but one: the ability to raise money. That made Bush more viable, for the Republicans, then. It makes Kerry more viable, for the Democrats, today.

If you were a Democrat I wouldn't be.

HTH.

Treason's a charge that is very difficult to prove; our founding fathers made it so in the Constitution. And 'purging the bloodline' of a traitor (killing the family, even though they had nothing to do with the crime) is expressly forbidden as well.

I can see they shoulda tried Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen for treason because of the extraordinary damage they did to national security, but they reached a plea-bargain deal with the Feds.

If such an 'October Surprise' occurred, and it was found to be politically motivated, you bet yer ass the Dems and most of the American public will be demanding the CinC be impeached, put on trial and shipped to Federal "Pound-Me-In-The-Ass" prison. Do not pass 'Go', do not collect your industrial-size issue jar of K-Y jelly!

You could get me to agree on this one any day of the week! My understanding is the ONLY reason they didn't get a firing squad (which I still think they should have gotten!) was that the Intelligence Community was afraid of what may have been compromised in a full blown trial. Bastages. The Walker family of spies almost singlehandedly caused the whole Pueblo incident.

Ditto with Boyce and Lee (The Falcon and the Snowman; both are now on parole), William Kampiles (sold a KH-11 spysat manual to the Russkies), among a few others... The intelligence community is absolutely shit-scared that their security lapses and intelligence failures will become dirty laundry aired in public.

But none gets my blood to boiling than the Walker family spy ring. They shoulda gotten hanging by piano wire from meathooks, much like Adolf Hitler did with the ringleaders of the July 20, 1944 bomb assassination plot against him. (Hitler was said to have watched a film of their slow, torturous execution.)

OMIGOSH!!!! You are the very first person who has ever brought this up to me!! I've been working on a screenplay on the July 20, 1944 plot for over a year, and I'm amazed how many people don't even know about the various plots to kill Hitler!

And a good friend of mine knows the daughter of the author of The Falcon and the Snowman, Robert Lindsay.

Oh, and I agree 100% about the Walkers. And Ames. And Hansson. And the ones we've never heard about!

One of my 'hobbies' is military history, World War II in particular.

Bit of trivia you can use: the street in which the German War Ministry in Berlin was located was once known as the Bendlerstrasse. After the war, it was renamed after Graf von Stauffenberg (the ringleader of the bomb plot), as Stauffenbergstrasse.

Generalfeldmarschall Rommel had no direct part in the bomb plot, though he was seriously considered in the running for a post in the new government, had the bomb plot succeeded. He was caught up in Hitler's revenge after the bomb plot, possibly because he was increasingly becoming more popular than Hitler. So, Rommel was given a choice: take cyanide and be given a hero's funeral or have him and his family suffer through a People's Court, the only sentence given being death.

Thank you for the info! I really, really need to visit Berlin!

Did you ever read The Berlin Diaries by Marie Vassilchikov? She was a White Russian Princess who worked in the Propaganda Department, and got involved in the plot via Adam Von Trott. What is so amazing to me is the contrast between her almost celebrity status, dancing the night away at one embassy or the other, and then having to crawl out of the bomb debris in the morning. It's a point of view that's rarely heard, and yet so interesting!

Any books suggestions?

Haven't read that particular book... but I'll keep it in mind to read it if I see it.

William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is probably one of the best (and concise) books about that dark period in German history. Harder to find is his other book Berlin Diary, a first hand account of living in Berlin as the CBS correspondent there during the rise of Nazi Germany and the early years of WW II.

A well-researched and concise history of the dreaded SS is The Order of the Death's Head by Heinz Höhne.

Rommel wasn't a nazi, and several times before D-Day he had urged Hitler to surrender, stating that the hold of territories gained by invasion would be bartering chips lost if an invasion succeeded. So I can see how he would be sympathetic to the plot and thus Hitler's need to eliminate him.

your intelligence comes out in each and everything you post.

I kinda thought the media blew his little scream out of proportion...the race would be much more interesting if Dean were running...

If I was as lacking in that faculty as you are, I don't know that I'd have the grace to compliment others.

Thanks! :cool: