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How Come It's Still 1984?
..."But let's be honest about this: It was a Republican administration that sent in Major Smedley Butler and the U.S. Marines to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, forcing the legislature in Managua to sign a peace treaty in English as American warships loomed offshore, a treaty giving us the right to run the Nicaraguan railroads under the laws of the state of Maine.

"It was a Republican administration that overthrew the popular government of Mohammed Mossadegh, the 'weeping mullah,' in Iran in 1953, re-installing the Pahlavi shahs, whose secret police surely ranked them among the most repressive despots in recent history.

"Let's not even get started on the regime-change assassinations we backed in places like Chile and Vietnam, as little as 30 and 40 years ago. And if we're so in favor of democracy and self-determination, why is President Bush making nice with KGB assassin Boris Putin, when just last week the Russian special forces murdered Aslan Maskhadov, the last elected president of independent Chechnya?

"If we're really going to change our stripes now, a good start might be to acknowledge to our own people the things we did that caused our government to be so widely feared, hated and distrusted, out there in the world at large."...