Let's just say...what if MLK and RFK weren't gunned down by the CIA?

[Taverner]

Let's just say they lived...

RFK runs in the 72 election and chooses MLK as his running mate...

This country takes a completely different turn...

What do you think would have happened with an RFK/MLK presidency, and the years afterwards?

[villager]

1. Don't think MLK would've wanted to be in the gov't, officially, but

...your thesis, about this being a completely different country by now, is correct.

Which is exactly why all those "coincidental" "lone nut" assassinations happened, skewing our "democratic" process toward Reagan and the Bushes, and the present death knell of America moment we find ourselves in....

[Taverner]

3. Phillip K Dick had a theory

He noted that from 63-73 a lot of 'lone nut' shootings took place. JFK, RFK, MLK, Wallace, and George Lincoln Rockwell. His theory was that Nixon took contracts out on anyone who could even possibly challenge him. He knew Kennedys tended to beat him, and he wanted to remove any competition.

[villager]

7. Hmmmm... Tricky Dick as mastermind, and not just another useful pawn

...for those who were really behind the shootings?

[Taverner]

8. Well not so much Tricky Dick but whom he worked for

The Military Industrial Complex...to keep that war footing we've been on since 1942...

[villager]

15. well, there's no question they were behind it... or whatever facets of "them"

All with allied interests: perpetual war, energy dependence, centralized power, racial animosity, etc., etc...

[whistle]

2. These kinds of scenarios are the root of madness

[Taverner]

4. Ah but they're fun

Even if in the end, there's a tear in our eye for what might have been

[nebenaube]

5. is not ...

is not madness all we really have?

[whistle]

16. Do you truly believe that?

....That is a hard way to live :shrug: Unless you mean the last one on the list:

Definitions of madness on the Web:

lunacy: obsolete terms for legal insanity

rabies: an acute viral disease of the nervous system of warm-blooded animals (usually transmitted by the bite of a rabid animal); rabies is fatal if the virus reaches the brain

fury: a feeling of intense anger; "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"; "his face turned red with rage"

folly: the quality of being rash and foolish; "trying to drive through a blizzard is the height of folly"; "adjusting to an insane society is total foolishness"

unrestrained excitement or enthusiasm; "poetry is a sort of divine madness"

[Lint Head]

6. I'm not sure if MLK would have been in political office but I

am confident that we would have had a black president by now. I graduated from HS the year before MLK was assassinated. RFK was magical. He was a tsunami that only a bullet could stop and it did. How fortunate for the fascist cabal that eventually took over our precious republic. :dem:

[H2O Man]

9. In 1964,

during the week of the democratic convention, LBJ had the FBI watching RFK and monitoring his contacts with King. He was concerned the two were planning to promote Robert for something other than NY Senator.

In 1967, during the Labor Day meeting of the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago, there were plans to nominated a ticket of King and Dr. Spock. (The process was disrupted by agent provocateurs. (In '68, Spock was charged with four others on federal charges of conspiracy, for fighting the draft. Spock and three others, who had never been in the same room, were convicted; the following year, a federal court overturned that conviction.)

In 1972, Spock ran for president, with one of my old friends as his choice for VP.

[Ichingcarpenter]

10. Someone on Thom Hartman just said the same thing RFK/MLK presidency

Also something about the Army snipers sent to Memphis.
Can't wait for that hour.

[Taverner]

11. I love Thom Hartmann - he finds the real conspiracies from the made up ones

Citing evidence

Unlike Wingnut Art Bell who throws EVERYTHING out there, no matter how ludicrous

[MinM]

12. Mort Sahl's line about JFK applies here too...

certain people had to take President Kennedy's life in order to control ours...

Sahl is one of my favourite undersung heroes of the Sixties, for having spent the capital of a successful career in the Quixotic pursuit of justice for the murderers of America.

From the cover of Time

to "conspiracy monger"

That strikes me as the trajectory of an honourable man.

There's an interview with Sahl a couple of months later in 1968, before the epochal one-two of Dr King and Robert Kennedy, that is as prophetic as anything I've read from that time:

ARGO: Why is the truth behind the assassination of President Kennedy the last chance of America for its survival?

SAHL: Because the evidence developed by District Attorney Garrison indicates that certain people had to take President Kennedy's life in order to control ours...

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_archive.html

[L. Coyote]

13. FALSE ACCUSATION. I quit reading at this point "by the CIA"

People kill people!

[Taverner]

14. Have you been reading the news stories lately about their assasinations?

Stories have been coming out that there were a number of CIA agents in the hotel with RFK that day.

And reprehensor had an excellent thread detailing how they took out MLK here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3101300