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I am here wanting to slap Scott for shillyshallying. Get to the point! Name the names and state clearly in bullet points where their petticoats are showing and give links to the primary sources. Yes, yes, fine, it's all in your book and if we want to follow your reasoning we should buy it and pore over it in our own sweet time, but, please, cut to the chase.
I'm bugged with myself because I read something about this filthy C.O.G. thing years ago, and it has never left my general outlook on things since that any and every person involved should be castrated and stranded on a desert island.
It may even have been John Dean who wrote whatever it was that convinced me so utterly and irrevocably that this would be the only sane response, but I can't remember. My brain kicks out such puny particulars as authors and publications and, well, just about everything about anything except that which has rung my obviously at least rarefied chimes.
I'm really smart! I sound like a... to put it charitably... a maniac.
Anyway, I had a phase where I was practicing being grateful for John Dean. In it I let myself be exposed to ideas and information ordinarily too revolting to entertain. Gratitude is very big in here, and sometimes it really messes me up. In fact, it was part of my panicked resort back to the left after two stolen presidential elections blew me like a sudden downburst from the gods into the reviled political polemics I'd long since abandoned as horse shit.
It was from the bottom of this pit of horse shit where I began taking stock of my gratitude for Truth Tellers... forgetting utterly that actual truth tellers and what we only call Truth Tellers are frequently-to-always not the same thing.
You probably think, if you're nice, that Zen realization means you miraculously turn immediately wise and maybe even functionally omniscient. Zen realization, if it has been complete, a really undeniably good gander at actuality, is the herald of that downburst from the gods that blasts you down into the horse shit pit, and thence proceeds your life in a minefield of horse shit pits so vast you cannot find its borders until you finally give up and lose your conditioned nonsense you call you for good.
So, at some point, also years ago by now, I lost my gratitude for John Dean when it struck me there is almost no chance his part in the whole Watergate thing was unscripted. I'd had to wait for my conditioning to lose its grip sufficiently to let this little beam of light through the clouds.
By now I'm at the point where I just have to mention that I know what I'm talking about even though I rarely sound like it, and I think my impatience with this piece is justified.
All of us have to do our best to cut to the chase. Leaving it labyrinthine only serves the generation of more pleasing affectations of scholarship. When it's the truth it can be rapped out like machine gun bullets.
always and any time....
