The prospective scenario for 2012 bears striking similarities to the 1964 presidential race.  The nagging question is whether the same force that benefited enormously from the result of the election contested almost a half century ago stands ready to benefit again.

While Sarah Palin is at the moment the key player in what could be a shifty move on behalf of the New World Order in superficially ordaining one result while achieving another, Michele Bachmann could be a key player as well.  Bachmann's latest comment made Sunday at a mega church was that God had personally called on her to run against Barack Obama in 2012.

In 1964 the John Birch Society flexed much political muscle within the potent rightist ranks of the Republican Party.  Today it is the Tea Party displaying clout within a Republican Party that in 2010 gained control of the House of Representatives.  Standing on the top tier of Tea Party  popularity  among current notable Republicans are Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

In 1964 the Vietnam War was gathering momentum.  A debate was  occurring between President Lyndon Johnson and his conservative Republican rival Senator Barry Goldwater that, in retrospect, resembled the legendary account of Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreeing to do battle.

How nerve wracking it was for the right during the Vietnam War era.  There was the strong conviction that if the forces of Ho Chi Minh were not repulsed then it was only a question of time before those forces invaded and occupied the United States through relying on sheer statistical superiority.

Lyndon B. Johnson was one of the craftiest legislative leaders in American history.  His ability to shrewdly dicker and make a minimum wage law or Medicare was a thing of great natural beauty.

The inherent Johnson tragedy lay in the fact that when he assumed the presidency he began making decisions in the realm of war and peace for which he was profoundly ill suited.  The Gulf of Tonkin was rigged to display North Vietnamese animus toward the U.S. that did not exist in reality.  

An astute French historian and political scientist named Jean Lacouture told all that were willing to read and listen that the Vietnamese independent movement was strongly embraced by Ho Chi Minh's father.  Ho Chi Minh told any Americans willing to read or listen that his sturdy admiration for George Washington stemmed from that great general's fight for independence from British rule whereas he and other Vietnamese wished to end foreign dominance as well.

The destruction of world empires have important events that trigger the final results.  In the case of the American Empire that marked its apex  following World War Two the climactic event was the Vietnam War and the events that flowed from it.

The linchpin of destruction was launched by a military-industrial complex initiative carried out by what is now termed the New World Order.  Then Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who worked closely with the CIA in the critical period shortly after World War Two when America stood at its highest military and economic peaks, wrote later about the creation of a secret team.

The ambitious game plan of a new Secret Team was to set into motion actions precipitating war that would generate economic profits for the military-industrial complex.  

Mindful of the fact, made crystal clear by President Harry Truman's unleashing of the atomic bomb against Japan, that nuclear warfare would signal the end of humanity as we know it, the Secret Team sought to engineer conflicts that would provide huge enrichment to the military-industrial complex without escalating to the level of nuclear warfare.

One of the grave tragedies of our times is how Iraqi deaths receive no accountability.  This occurs at the point where President Obama and others hold the U.S. out as a major source to achieve global stability.  

The question is this:  How can the U.S. hold itself out as a guardian of peace and security when the subject of Iraqi deaths extending from that first "shock and awe" aerial assault to the present is ignored?  

It should be recalled that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to assure Americans that newly developed U.S. "smart bombs" would penetrate the forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but would bypass Iraq's citizenry.

As for the U.S. dodging accountability, a comment made by General Colin Powell in the aftermath of the earlier Gulf War is instructive for the tragedy of avoiding responsibility that it denotes.

With Karl Rove arrogantly proclaiming not only that he did nothing wrong, but that he is very much on the correct side of history, it is interesting to look back and see how he would fare in accordance with the standards of his first political hero, Richard M. Nixon.

As a young man growing up in Salt Lake City, Rove adhered strongly to the Nixon Vietnam position.  He accepted Nixon's position of demonizing opponents of the Vietnam War, including questioning their patriotism.

After Nixon's death progressive historians asserted that Nixon and his administration's foot soldiers demeaned true patriotism by embracing a narrow standard wherein, if they failed to support a flag waving posture operating lockstep within Nixon's narrow dogma relating to Vietnam, they were labeled as unpatriotic.

Like so many of Nixon's stalwart young supporters, including of William Kristol, Dick Cheney and others, Rove had no stomach for traveling to Southeast Asia and fighting for a cause he verbally supported.

When Jeff Greenfield was not long out of Yale Law School and was a regular on William F. Buckley's PBS interview program "Firing Line" he reminisced about the period he had served as a volunteer in the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Greenfield recalled a discussion featuring one of the leading figures of the Kennedy campaign, Richard Goodwin, with younger staffers such as Greenfield.  Greenfield noted the seriousness of Goodwin, assuredly reflecting the view of Kennedy, who also happened to be Goodwin's closest friend, on the subject of presidential power.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution, save Alexander Hamilton and others who believed in the very system being overthrown in America and favored, if not a king, a strong executive, subscribed to the philosophical concepts enunciated by French thinkers such as Montesquieu concerning the importance of limiting power in that branch and dividing it instead.  

The Virginians Jefferson and Madison were staunch Francophiles and believed that, unless checked, an executive dictatorship could well emerge.  Indeed, the elder statesman at Philadelphia's Constitutional Convention, the venerable Benjamin Franklin, when being asked at the conclusion of the final session what kind of government the new nation had, replied, "A republic if you can keep it."

Amid the swirl of commentary following Obama's West Point speech in which he laid out his Afghanistan War policy the commentary that was the most brutally perceptive and historically decisive was that of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

Maddow followed the historical roots of Obama's comments and reached the conclusion that he sounds like George W. Bush in 2002 enunciating what was thereafter called the Bush Doctrine, which tragically espoused an aggressive concept of preventive war based on a posture of what might happen in the future.

A clip was played of retired U.S. Marine General James Jones, Obama's National Security Advisor, stating that there is no current threat to America's security from Afghanistan.  

Meanwhile Obama made his frequent effort to link Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, indicating that the deploying of 30,000 more troops can help head off more of the same kind of terrorist action.

When then Congressman John Tunney was running in the California U.S. Senate primary in 1970, a race which would culminate with his unseating of Senator George Murphy in the November election, he made reference to the still raging Vietnam War as a "mirage."

Tunney used the word to accent what he perceived as a wrong-headed view of the United States being able to resolve conflicts through a continuing military commitment.  The people of Vietnam would see that the best hope for their future resided in linkage to American power.

The Vietnam War ended with over 59,000 U.S. losses.  The foreign losses, counting Cambodia as neighboring offshoot as well as Vietnam, is unknown in any kind of precise calculation but estimated at 2.5 million or more according to some estimates.

The tragic human suffering did not end with the termination of life.  The dropping of Agent Orange to remove the heavy jungle forestation that U.S. strategists were convinced would make it easier to fight a hit and run smaller guerilla force did not deter a determined enemy that engaged and disengaged under its own strategic terms.

Now that we have fallen as the world's leading economic giant, the burning question is why has the U.S. fallen into a crushing deficit?

First and foremost, we ignored the winged warning of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower to beware of the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.

Conducting wars has proven to be such a money maker for every industry of the gigantic U.S. war machine.  It appears that the U.S. is now locked into a perpetual war machine mentality.  The airplane industry is making billions supplying the latest aviation technical expertise.  The oil services company Halliburton has made billions for their war services in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Vietnam War was a fiasco where almost 60,000 U.S. service personnel lost their lives, based upon the false fears that if Vietnam fell under Communist rule, a domino effect would take place and all of Asia would ultimately fall into the Red orbit.  

For anyone who has worked as a professional reporter the ultimate attribute so many hope to achieve is the ability to develop a critical eye toward the present and future and shift gears when needed.

The one element that prevents so many from achieving success in reporting is intransigence.  Aided frequently by pressure, sometimes through a stubborn instinct, other times through refusal to apply the hard work and corresponding judgment to follow through, reporters will fail to observe an important trend.  

Walter Cronkite was someone who began reporting as a teen and was delighted to be in journalism.  This showed when he demonstrated a refreshingly youthful buoyancy over a positive achievement such as America placing astronauts on the moon.

On the sober front of international relations, Cronkite shook the collective collar of middle class America, those regulars who watched his network news broadcasts, when he asserted that to look for victory in the morass of the Vietnam War quagmire was to seek the impossible.  

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president who did not allow the Depression or the challenges of World War Two to destroy his faith in America's future.

His warning that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself was taken to heart by Americans, who courageously fought and won World War Two.

But tragically, fear overcame faith in America's strength and democratic system when fear of all Asia succumbing to Communism if Vietnam became a Communist nation resulted in almost 60,000 U.S. service deaths and some 2.5 million fatalities in Vietnam and Cambodia.  

Fear of Communism overthrew faith in democracy.  Those who died paid the price.  The U.S. was split down the middle over Vietnam and to a large extent still is.

Fears of Communism taking over in Vietnam triggering all of Asia to collapse, to Communism like a row of dominoes.  This fear helped ignite the Vietnam War.  

Ignoring a poll of Vietnamese conducted by our own CIA  indicating that 90 percent of the population wanted Communistic rule, the U.S. ignored democratic preference and charged ahead into the ill-fated Vietnam War.

After 60,000 U.S. service personnel were killed and estimates of up to 2.5 million Vietnamese and Cambodians killed, Vietnam did become a Communist nation.

And surprise, Asia never fell like a row of dominoes as the warmongers propagandized to get this war going.

One might ask at this strategic moment in U.S. history, at which point did America cease being good?

Some might claim the beginning of the end of real American goodness began with the ill-fated Vietnam War.  59,000 U.S. service personnel perished in the Vietnam conflict.  Estimates of the total death toll of Vietnamese Cambodians go beyond 2 ½ million.

The domino theory propaganda pitch to inflame the American public into the war mode was that if Vietnam became a Communist nation, all of Asia would collapse to Communism like a row of dominoes.

U.S. leadership at that point in history conveniently ignored Vietnamese preference of government polls revealing 90 percent of the Vietnamese people wanted Communist rule.

In the New York Times December 16, 2008 an editorial headline read:

The editorial went on to explain:

"Darfur, Congo, Rwanda, and before that Bosnia.  It is hard to contemplate man's inhumanity without feeling despair and paralysis.

"The world usually pays attention only after the killing has spun out of control when ethnic, religious and political divides are rubbed so raw that the furies are infinitely harder to calm.  By that point the United States and others are faced with the agonizing choice of either intervening militarily or allowing the killing to go on.

The editorial in Financial Times January 4 summarized the Israeli-Gaza conflict objectively:

"Gaza to be sure, was already a cauldron.  But it has got that way in no small part because of flawed western policies: first through allowing the Israeli Palestinian conflict to stew, and then attempting to isolate Hamas -- which was democratically elected three years ago -- and doing nothing to lift the Israeli siege that has turned Gaza into a prison for the 1.5 million inhabitants.

"None of these conflicts is at all easy, but rarely are they responsive to brute military force.  The record suggests force breeds extremism and, in extremis failed states.

"Israel's regular attempts to enhance its security and break the regional logistics by force well illustrate this.  The occupation of Palestinian territory after the 1967 Six Day War has locked it in a deadly embrace with its Palestinian neighbors that only the creation of an independent Palestinian state can break.