I've said it before, I'll (no doubt) say it again...

...but any citizen who wants to understand our current pickle ought to read up on the Kennedy Assassination and its coverup. Our current millieu of right-wing crazies run amok, government-sanctioned violence and skullduggery, and irresponsibility in high places is strikingly similar. The poisonous murk in which the plot(s?) took root, quotidian incompetence by government agencies charged to make sure stuff like that didn't happen, the massive ass-protecting by every branch of government once it did (which made it impossible to ever find out for sure what really happened), and a servile mass media more committed to the status quo than the truth--all this wasn't born on November 22nd, but that event throws it into harsh relief. How our government can break down has never been so clearly shown--failures like Vietnam, for example, are much more complex; JFK's murder and its aftermath are a simple example of what citizens of a democracy need to watch out for. Start with David Talbot's interesting essay in Salon.