Dan Moldea's America
by DCDave

The United States of America in which I was born and raised was the America of the civics textbooks. We were "the land of the free and the home of the brave." We were safely protected against tyranny through the ingenious system of checks and balances that our founding fathers had built into our government. Our freedom was safeguarded further by the Bill of Rights, in particular the First Amendment which guaranteed a free and uncontrolled press. We were truly Lincoln's "last best hope of earth."

Then, not too long after the Kennedy assassination it began to dawn on me that something was amiss. A lot of things seemed to be going on behind the scenes that we weren't being told about. In 1992 I voted for Bill Clinton as a protest vote against what I perceived as this pervasive corruption of our system. Imagine that, a vote for Clinton as a vote against corruption!

It didn't take me long to recognize my error. I had been like the Russian who backed the Bolsheviks out of protest over the oppression of the Czars. The Waco massacre was the first obvious sign that things were quickly getting a lot worse. The covered-up, hushed-up murder of scandal researcher Paul Wilcher in his D.C. townhouse in June of 1993 was another sign. Then came the discovery in Fort Marcy Park of the body of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster. The death immediately aroused my curiosity because the press seemed curiously incurious about such a curious choice of a site and the lack of anything approaching a convincing explanation for why it was being called an "apparent suicide" by the authorities. It also attracted my interest because I remembered Vince as an intramural basketball opponent back at Davidson College in the years surrounding the Kennedy assassination.

My interest has manifested itself in a number of poems and the long essay, "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster," now in five parts on my web site. What comes through very clearly in that body of work is my realization that I am no longer living in the country in which I thought I grew up. As my fellow Tar Heel, Thomas Wolfe, said, "You can't go home again."

But wait. I recently read a book entitled "A Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm," and I find there a mythical recreation that very closely resembles the America of my youthful fancy. It's not quite Mr. Rogers' neighborhood, but it comes close. It's:

Dan Moldea's America

  1. In Dan Moldea's America, deputy White House counsels don't come to the job fresh from having handled the legal work for the person reportedly responsible for bringing to America the largest criminal enterprise in history, a person heavily involved in financing both Republican and Democratic political campaigns, most recently the campaign of America's president, the counsel's boss.

  2. In Dan Moldea's America, the deputy White House counsel does not engage in two days of meetings two days before his mysterious violent death, meetings with the Deputy U.S. Attorney General and another person heavily involved in political finance who also has invested in casinos jointly with members of the Gambino family and the Meyer Lansky organization.

  3. In Dan Moldea's America, there have never been strong, attributed allegations that the deputy White House counsel had contracted a detective to spy on the future president at the behest of the future first lady, that the detective and the future deputy White House counsel had themselves been involved in the illegal drug business, and that the detective correctly predicted his own subsequent murder upon hearing of the death of the deputy White House counsel.

  4. In Dan Moldea's America, presidents don't have close friends, family members, and political backers who are or have been heavily involved in the illegal drug business.

  5. In Dan Moldea's America, presidents have never had subordinates who have covered up murders related to the illegal drug business or people apparently working on their behalf who have either threatened or actually inflicted bodily harm upon inconvenient witnesses.

  6. In Dan Moldea's America, autopsy doctors might make occasional mistakes, but they never are simply flat-out corrupt, fabricating cause of death at the behest of corrupt higher-ups who are protecting powerful people engaged in the illegal drug business.

  7. In Dan Moldea's America, heaven forbid that government clandestine and police organizations themselves might be involved in the illegal drug business, and, of course, no serious allegations have ever been made that they are.

  8. In Dan Moldea's America, if there were any truth at all to numbers 1-7, America's major news organizations would have duly reported them, with appropriate emphasis.

  9. In Dan Moldea's America, the word of a public official is always worth more than that of a private citizen unless, perhaps, that private citizen is employed by a major news organization.

  10. In Dan Moldea's America, major news organizations are interested only in pursuit of the truth. They never knowingly withhold important information from the public and they would never, ever knowingly assist public officials in covering up a crime.

  11. In Dan Moldea's America, if a capital-area college student doing undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration were to have been ruled dead of a gunshot suicide by the authorities and a second autopsy paid for by the parents showed convincingly that the young man was beaten to death, the news would not be blacked out by The Washington Post.

  12. In Dan Moldea's America, the major news organs do not get ahead of the official "investigators" in uncovering and revealing anonymously sourced "evidence" that reinforces the official line.

  13. In Dan Moldea's America, when witnesses, suspects, or investigators change their story, the last story told is always to be believed implicitly when it supports the official line.

  14. In Dan Moldea's America, government agents would not harass and intimidate a witness in an important case and if it were to happen, it would not be ignored by the major news organs.

  15. In Dan Moldea's America, official reports on important investigations are always critically examined and duly reported upon by major news organizations.

  16. In Dan Moldea's America, major news organs do not falsely report that investigating police did not talk to immediate family members on the night of the mysterious violent death of a high level government official and leave the record uncorrected for a year.

  17. In Dan Moldea's America, major news organs do not black out the news that a suicide note in a high-profile case has been determined to be a forgery by reputable handwriting examiners.

  18. In Dan Moldea's America, there is an adversarial relationship between the government and the press.

  19. In Dan Moldea's America, challenges to the official verdict in high level cases come only from nebulously-defined "conspiracy theorists" or well-financed political fanatics.

  20. In Dan Moldea's America, certain reporters are granted selective access to official "investigators" not because the reporters are stooges who will parrot the obvious official line--or the less obvious disinformation line-- but because they possess exceptional charm.

David Martin

October 1, 1998

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