And now, for the mother of all rants, read the following interesting piece!

The betrayal of America
A Sick and Tired Writer
By Max Friedman
The Augusta Free Press

This column is a rant, not a soft, cuddly piece of fluff opinion. It is going to tell the truth like you have never heard it before. To quote Jack Nicholson from the movie "A Few Good Men" - "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth" - but I'm going to give it to you anyway.

So, as your mother used to do to those of you readers who are old enough to remember, hold your nose and take your medicine, because the doctor is in, and he's operating with a chainsaw.

After 35 years in the news/journalism business, from D.C. to Vietnam, I can honestly say that most of the leading Democratic Party politicians and their far-left support groups are traitors to this country. Besides the few who are deceased or out of office, today's DP is loaded with leaders who have sold out this country to the communists, to the Islamofascists and to their egos. Others are just plain stupid, addle-brained and knee-jerk jerks.

(I'll get to the Republicans in a minute).

Joining them in this class of betrayers is the mainstream media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CNN and CBS (as we used to say in Vietnam, the Communist Broadcasting System). They have put their hatred for President Bush before the safety and security of the country, and they have severally damaged our security efforts, not only at home, but abroad, and I will give examples to prove my point.

The Republican leadership in both the House and Senate should resign immediately because they are ineffective, incompetent, stupid and clueless as to what needs to be done to protect this country, to fix internal problems quickly and rationally, and they have no backbone for a fight with the Demonrats. Rep. Dennis Haslert is a nice guy, but he's too slow in a fight. The first one to draw and fire accurately wins, and he can hardly get his gun out of his holster. With Tom DeLay out of the picture, perhaps we are witnessing a new wave of younger Republicans who will have the guts to fight the Democratic Left the way they should be fought, to the death, because the security of the United States depends on it.

Sen. Bill Frist is a great guy, but he lacks the skillfulness and hunter instinct needed to stop the Senate Democrats from destroying this country. Sen. Trent Lott, not!. Sen. Arlen Spector, head of the Judiciary Committee, is a total waste, and I used to like his fighting spirit when he was a prosecutor in Pennsylvania in the 1960s. Now he is the great compromiser, and usually loses to the mean-spirited Democrats every time, plus the fact that he isn't a great committee chairman. Too often he misses the real point of the hearings and lets good opportunities for getting at the truth go right down the drain. Also, he is anal-retentive on the Constitution and national-security surveillance to the point that he is endangering our safety. As one jurist said years ago, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact," but Spector doesn't seem to know it.

The White House staff - I couldn't give a rat's behind about Karl Rove. If he is so smart and skilled, then why is he a political eunuch right now? And why did Scooter Libby talk to the press at all? Stupidest move he could ever make. The press is the enemy, not a neutral and objective medium. I don't care if higher-ups did authorize him to leak items on Iraq - he just should have kept his mouth shut.

Karen Hughes is a nice woman and good for domestic politics, but she is so out of her league in the international arena (as a spokesperson for the American position), that she is, indeed, in a "League of Her Own." In fact, she's not even in the right league, or stadium. Her first meeting with Moslem women months ago gave her a black eye and proved how ineffective she is for the job.

The White House public-relations/media-relations people - fire them all, for they are totally incompetent and useless. I get more news, better news, more timely news, and more detailed news from overseas on-line journalists such as Michael Yon and Bill Roggio in Iraq, and from other on-line journalists on various topics, including The Augusta Free Press' own contributor Bruce Kesler (now with the Democracy Project), Ruth King (for extensive on-line website coverage of the Middle East and Europe), and the guys from the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation/Radix Foundation, concerning Southeast Asia, the POW/MIA issue, and related military affairs, than I get from all the mainstream media put together.

Only Fox News Channel comes close to providing news no one else reports, a sort of visual version of The Washington Times (the best source of information on terrorism and security issues in the daily print media) and its cousin, The Weekly Standard, followed by Newsmax and Worldnetdaily.com.

The press onslaught against President Bush has culminated in the U.S. losing many of its tactics and methods in the war against terrorism. The lies about how the U.S. treated terrorist prisoners and suspects at Guantanamo Bay, and the exaggerated stories about Abu Graibh (which was a disgraceful affair), the exposure of so-called black prisons for questioning terrorists held in back-line countries (as versus frontline countries), the disinformation reporting on what is actually in the Patriot Act, and now The New York Times deliberate sabotaging of an electronic surveillance operation run by the National Security Agency on a few dozen Americans, are only part of the picture of how the Left in this country is putting their own political and ideological agenda above and beyond the security of the United States.

If anyone thinks that the Dec. 18 story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts: Secret Order to Widen Domestic Monitoring," was anything other than a deliberate attempt to scuttle the vote on the Patriot Act, which was before the Senate on that same day, then you are crazy. And it wouldn't hurt book sales for Risen's new publication. This has been the typical modus operandi of the NYT, LAT and Washington Post for the past 35 years. Any chance they get to destroy America's operational agencies and tactics, they jump at with glee. Risen and Lichtblau are just the latest in a long line of subverters of America's security, all in the name of a free press.

Guys like Seymour Hersch (NYT), Walter Pincus (WP), Dana Millbank (WP) and other hatchet-job writers have always been assigned the dirty work of exposing and destroying America's intelligence systems and internal-security operations. Somebody should look into Pincus' background around 1959. They might find something very strange.

These subverters have been aided by Newsweek (the false Koran flushing down the toilet at Gitmo); CBS (the Bush National Guard documents fraud); and many misinterpretations or deliberate distortions of the actual scope of threats to our security (Jack Anderson and Karen De Young, WP, on the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua); NYT (Ray Bonner on the true nature of the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador, the FMLN); the real nature of communist penetration of Grenada (the 100 feet of seized documents tells it all); the continual blaming of the White House and the military for not capturing Osama Bin Laden (covering up for Bill Clinton's missed opportunities to have Bin Laden hand-delivered to U.S. intelligence), and the nearly complete failure of the media to tell about the tremendous progress being made daily in Iraq, are only part of the truth about the anti-American, left-wing, so-called liberal or mainstream media, in America.

Go back to 1970 and look at the timing of these stories, and you will eventually see the pattern of destruction that they have on ongoing congressional hearings, legislation, military operations, intelligence operations and the morale of the homefront and military front in the war on terror. The same could be said about some of the MSM during the Cold War when the U.S. was held in a moral-equivalency position to the two greatest genocidal nations in the world, the Soviet Union (an estimated 60 million dead), and Red China (an estimated 100 million-plus dead). The apologists and protectors of these countries were legion in the op-ed pages, and often on the editorial pages of the NYT and WP (as the two most influential papers in the country).

What Walter Duranty started in the NYT in the 1930s by covering up the mass murder that Joseph Stalin was perpetuating on the people under his control, was continued over into covering up for the so-called Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese masters, the mini state terrorist regime that the Palestine Liberation Organization had established in Lebanon, and now the extent of the threat that Islamofascism poses to the U.S. and Western civilization. Look at how so-called Moslem advocacy groups in the U.S. have been portrayed despite the fact that their leaders have been convicted of supporting terrorism, and that their members call for Jihad against the U.S. and the West.

At to this list both Playboy and Penthouse magazines during the 1970s when they ran often damaging articles about U.S. intelligence operations and techniques. They seemed to be trying to out as many operations as possible, and in one case, Playboy gave money to a longtime identified CPUSA member (Frank Donner) at Yale who headed an ACLU-backed project to uncover and destroy U.S. intelligence operations. They didn't like it when I exposed their gift to this longtime CP security operative who was now a part of the ACLU Surveillance Project at Yale.

Having been involved in internal-security matters since 1969, as both an operative and a journalist, I have both seen things that the WP and NYT would never publish (I tried), and have been told things that would make you want to go out and shoot, as traitors, a number of journalists (a few were actual communists and a couple may have been enemy operatives), as well as some lawyers and politicians. Maybe one day the documentation on this will be available to the public.

I will only give you a few insights here because of space considerations, but you might someday be able to read the whole story.

There have been numerous members of the Communist Party and their sympathizers in the U.S. Congress since the 1930s, and a few are suspected of being KGB agents of influence, if not actual KGB agents. When Professor Harvey Klehrs and John Haynes (Library of Congress) had access to the Soviet COMINTERN files (the operational arm of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the MVD/NKVD) in the 1990s, they found lists of American labor leaders who were not only Communist Party USA members but also Soviet COMINTERN agents, including the late Harry Bridges, who lied his way through congressional hearings, immigration hearings, court hearings and the media (who covered up his past very successfully) until the Klehrs/Haynes discoveries in the 1990s.

The same goes for the Democratic Party cover-up of Soviet spy Alger Hiss.

Some of the CPers/sympathizers in Congress were in powerful positions, including chairmanships of both full and subcommittees, and used these positions to promote communist propaganda and disinformation, to attack U.S. foreign policy, to discover intelligence secrets, to undermine and eventually destroy internal-security committees/agencies, and to aid our communist enemies. Freedom of Information requests to the FBI have revealed the communist ties of the late Rep. Emanual Cellers and Samuel Dickstein, as well as those of the late Leonard Bernstein and so-called journalist I. F. "Izzy" Stone (a probable KGB-agent-of influence).

Often congressional aides were part of the equation, with some of them being active in CPUSA-funded think tanks such as the Institute for Policy Studies or the Fund For Peace operations including the Center for International Policy. One look at the names of congressmen/senators and their staffers on those letterheads and in the publications of these organizations verify what I have just said, and the list is much long.

A few congressmen/women have/had CPUSA front records that stretch for miles, and some also supported the Trotskyite Communists of the Socialist Workers Party and the once-Trots, now Stalinists, Workers World Party, whose fronts are led by Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general under Lyndon Johnson. These fronts include the International Action Center and ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), as well as others.

Among the CP fronts that the dirty dozen members of Congress have supported have been the Labor Research Association, the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression (the old Angela Davis support group), the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee/House Internal Security Committee, and its successor, NCARL, the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation), the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, led by identified Soviet agent Steve Nelson, the U.S. Peace Council/World Peace Council, and the National Coalition to Fight Inflation and Unemployment (this only covers some of the 1970s).

Besides supporting the communist-dominated anti-war groups, including the various Mobes (of which I was a covert member), and their successors, PCPJ (Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice) and NPAC (National Peace Action Coalition), the one major SWP front that lists congressional sponsors is the Political Rights Defense Fund, which, like PCPJ/NPAC, has one John Kerry as a sponsor/endorser. It was an anti-FBI operation.

If you want names of these people, here are a few of the worst: Abzug, Conyers, Dellums, G. Miller, D. Edwards, Rangel, Kastenmeier, Harkin, Kerry, Braun, P. Burton, P. Mitchell, C. Hayes (CPUSA), G. Crockett (CPUSA), T. Weiss, and about another dozen with lesser numbers of fronts or less serious affiliations. Dellums even wrote a glowing memorial statement for Sandy Pollack, a key CPUSA operative and a true Comintern (Communist International) agent if there ever was one in the 1970s and 1980s. It is in her tribute book, along with a lot of other people whose names would shock you.

For a few of these mentioned congressional names, there is some serious evidence that they were secret members of the CPUSA, but this for a future story. For some congressional names not mentioned here who were reportedly members of the CPUSA, I am working on finding the documents that will allow me to reveal the truth about them. Don't ask me how I know about them, I do. Unfortunately, I can't tell you all of it right now until the proof is in my hands, and getting them declassified for public review is going to be one heck of a battle. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich) tried his best to make sure that these documents were either destroyed or sealed for 50 years (when the House Internal Security Committee was destroyed in 1975). He knows what's in them and fears the devastating damage that they will do to him and the Democratic Party should they ever be released. His own record is a beaut, even just the public one.

John Kerry - let's ask him why he and Sen. Tom (the Vietnam veteran fraud) Harkin (D-Iowa) made a trip to shore up the Communist Sandinista leadership of Nicaragua in 1984 right before a congressional vote was to be held on whether or not to fund the anti-communist freedom fighters known disparagingly as the contras (a communist-disinformation term). Congress voted down arms for the FFs. Then right after this trip and the vote, Daniel Ortega went to Moscow for an arms deal in complete betrayal of pledges he had made not to do so. (See Stephen Powell's book, Covert Cadre, for much more on this pair).

Congress then regained a little sanity and revoted to aid the freedom fighters in Nicaragua, which led to the military stalemate in that country and then to free elections that ousted the Reds.

Kerry and Harkin have a lot to answer for on this one, and Kerry misspent millions of investigation dollars on a communist-perpetrated fraud regarding the so-called Contras and drugs in Latin America. Some of the key people Kerry relied on for information were avowed supporters of Hanoi and the VC, a self-proclaimed saboteur, an finger wound exaggerator (just like Kerry), and an FBI informant who committed perjury before Congress.

You might also want to ask Kerry and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) about the destruction of secret documents from the POW/MIA Task Force they headed in the mid-1990s, as well as their deal to cut out the human-rights requirements and live-sightings reports issue from the conditions for any diplomatic recognition of Hanoi's dictatorship. Former POWs and the families of MIAs are seething at this betrayal, which is why many Vietnam veterans will never vote for John McCain.

A member of this task force is available for any hearing on what happened to those files.

Ted Kennedy - The man is only interested in one person in the world, and that is Ted Kennedy. I feel that he sold his soul to the devil a long time ago, a la Damn Yankees, and he has and will betray anyone (Mary Jo Kopechne, for starters) and his country for power. Following in his footsteps is Kennedy-wannabe Kerry, who has a number of other skeletons in his closet that he doesn't want the public to know about. Remember, he told Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" last year that he would release his military records by signing the SF 180 form. We're still waiting - and waiting and waiting. Has our boy done something rash in the past that he doesn't want the public to know about? The evidence points that way, and the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth only scratched the surface of the egomaniac known as JFK-lite.

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), once the hero of moderate liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, has been used to spearhead the Democrat Party's surrender policies on Iraq, and while he was once a valiant soldier fighting in the big muddy of Vietnam, the only thing he is fighting in today is his muddled mind. He sounds like a programmed robot from the 1960s protests, only he doesn't know it is 2006, and things have changed. The U.S. is winning in Iraq, and his opinions are not only outdated, they are just plain wrong. I don't know whether to pity the man or to write him off as a turncoat. Either way, he has betrayed his country and her fighting forces, thus following in the fine footsteps of the Democratic Party of George McGovern and Ted Kennedy, Frank Church, Jimmy Carter and John Kerry.

I found a photograph the other night in a KGB-front publication, the World Peace Council, and its newsletter of 1978, which featured a KGB-agent of influence led delegation of WPC leaders (mainly Communists) to the U.S., including Washington, D.C., and Detroit, Mich. The Detroit City Council, led by veteran CPUSA front supporters Mahaffey and Henderson, was in the picture, as was one city councilman named Carl Levine, as in present-day Sen. Carl Levine (D-Mich.).

The DCC gave the WPC party a grand welcome, as did some members of Congress in a reception for them in D.C. Carl was known for his anti-intelligence activities in Michigan, so it was no surprise to see him in that photo. He helped destroy the information on that group.

Today, Sen. Levine, the anti-intelligence fool on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a powerful enemy of America's ability to defend herself. It looks like stupidity is habitual. And don't worry, Detroit's other veteran CPUSA/WPC fronts supporter Conyers also shows up in WPC newsletters giving speeches to worldwide WPC meetings bought and paid for by the KGB and the CPSU/International Department.

However, when a WPC publication was published by Congress in 1983, all photos of congressmen at WPC affairs (including Conyers) were left out, deliberately. I have the original version of the WPC booklet, and that's not what was published by Congress.

To sum up this still incomplete rant about the Democrats, the media and gutless Republicans, the Democrats have sold their souls to the devil so that they can destroy George W. Bush at all costs, including the betrayal of our troops in the field and the security of the United States in the long run. All they want is power, and they will do anything to get it by smearing the president and his administration, by lying about the Clinton administration's past actions and inactions, covering up the destruction of U.S. intelligence capabilities that led to the intelligence failures of their policies and administrations (Carter and Clinton), i.e. Iran and Khomeini, World Trade Center I bombing, Black Hawk Down in Somalia, the USS Cole, the African Embassy bombing, the Khobar Towers bombings, and the multiple failures to take Bin Laden when the Sudanese offered him to us, all of which led to 9/11.

The Democrats perverted the 9/11 Commission into near impotency, covered up the firewall that obstructed U.S. intelligence agencies from cooperating, and now they are stonewalling other government investigations, including the potentially most damaging scandal of all, Able Danger.

While the Republican leadership has almost no backbone in Congress and did not have a very effective public leadership in the White House regarding Hurricane Katrina, the Democrats have done nothing but endanger the U.S. for the past 40 years. One betrayal costing 58,000 lives in Vietnam and Indochina should have opened the eyes of even the most dedicated Democratic Party member as to what the DP stood for. Yet they want to repeat it again in Iraq, and their supporters still think that their party cares about America.

These are the most treacherous Democrats ever to sit in Congress, the most incompetent, the most egotistical, and the most stuck on stupid bunch of SOBs in modern American political history (Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi being the prime examples), and a lot of the American people are the dumbest bunch of yahoos ever to go into a voting booth to help them carry out this betrayal.

As for the mainstream media, hell is too good for them. There must be a special place for traitors and fools, and I know that it isn't half full yet. Ask any soldier in Iraq about the mainstream media, and they will tell you they prefer the honesty of Al-Qaeda and the Ba'athist terrorists.

I am so ashamed of what the Democrats have become, and so angry at their betrayal of our armed forces (including my son), that I will never vote Democrat again for the rest of my life. Sorry, Scoop and Hubert, you were honorable men, but you have been desecrated by your party just as John Kerry desecrated the honor of the Vietnam veterans in 1971.

God help America! The Democrats won't, ever, and the Republican leadership can't unless they get some backbone.

Max Friedman is a regular contributor to The Augusta Free Press. The views expressed by op-ed writers do not necessarily reflect those of management of The Augusta Free Press.