our son of a bitch

"Yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch".

This line goes way back to WWII. It has been attributed to:

• Franklin Roosevelt on US General George S. Patton.
• Winston Churchill on the man Patton loved to dislike (and vice versa), British General Bernard "Monty" Montgomery.
• Either or both of them on Charles De Gaulle. Take your pick.

Variations go back further than that. It is claimed that Acheson said this about Tito; And that Dulles said it about Somoza, the son of the son of a bitch of Roosevelt.

Speaking of brutal Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, Harry Truman is supposed to have said "He's a bastard, but he's our bastard." This quote is attributed to Truman, FDR, and Nixon. This is a broad chronological range. There were actuall three Somozas: Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who fathered Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and the Somoza dynasty that ruled Nicaragua from the mid 1930s through the late 1970s.

The Marines invaded Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed until 1933, fighting but never defeating the revolutionary Augusto Sandino. They created the Nicaraguan National Guard and installed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. Then Sandino, who had signed a truce and put down his arms, was assassinated by Somoza. In 1935, General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua, said: "[I was] a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism - I helped purify Nicaragua for [an] international banking house." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it another way. "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Corruption, torture, and wholesale murder of dissidents continued for 45 years under two generations of Somozas, for after Somoza Garcia was gunned down in the streets in 1956, his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle took control. The Somozas plundered Nicaragua and became millionaires. The younger Somoza, "the vampire dictator," made $12 million a year buying the blood of his people and selling it abroad at a 300% mark-up, but his biggest single rip-off occurred in 1972 after an earthquake killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans: Somoza had his National Guard seize $30 million in international relief supplies and sold them to the highest bidder. Near the end of his reign, he aerially bombed his own capital to stay in power, but he was overthrown in 1979 by a rebel group who called themselves the Sandinistas, after the revolutionary hero his father had slain.

Time Magazine printed the following in its 15 November 1948 issue:

In 1939 [Anastasio Somoza] got himself elected for eight more years. And he went to Washington. To prime President Roosevelt for the visit, Sumner Welles sent him a long solemn memorandum about Somoza and Nicaragua. According to a story told around Washington, Roosevelt read the memo right through, wisecracked: "As a Nicaraguan might say, he's a sonofabitch but he's ours."

The basic "punchline" had been floating around Washington since well before 1939. For example, after the Chicago Convention, Gen. Hugh Johnson, who had worked hard with Barney Baruch to stop Roosevelt, was asked what he thought of his nomination. Johnson replied by recalling a story of a county convention of Democrats in which the wrong man had been chosen. Driving home from the meeting, two politicians were comparing notes. Both had opposed the successful candidate. One said to the other, "Damn it all! We should never have let them put Blank over. He's a So and So!" The other man sighed and said nothing for a long time. Then he cheered up. "After all," he observed. "Blank isn't so bad. He's our So and So."

A short piece written on the death of Senator James Watson [Indiana], the "last Republican majority leader in the Senate before the Roosevelt era," includes this telling:

Senator Watson used to tell a story of Uncle Joe which shall be our contribution to the stock of reminiscences about Jim Watson. One day in the House the Speaker spoke about a party man as a deserving appointee for some vacant post. "But you couldn't recommend him," said young Watson. "He's a so-and-so." "Yes, he may be," said Uncle Joe, "but, my boy, he's *our*
so-and so, isn't he?"

"he's a so-and-so, but he's our so-and-so" bears some resemblance to a popular anecdote said to have involved U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Pennsylvania; 1792-1868) and cited well into the 20th century:

Speaking of the probable contests for seats in the next Congress, the Boston Herald says: "The republicans are not over scrupulous, when in power, as to the management of contested cases. In fact, their morality was well illustrated by the characteristic remark of Thad. Stevens, when it was said that both claimants of a disputed seat were 'd-----d rascals,' 'I don't
doubt it,' said the grim old 'whip,' 'but what I want to know is, which is our d-----d rascal?'

"He's a damned rascal," said Thad. Stevens bluntly on a similar occasion,
"but as he's *our* damned rascal we must put him in."

An anecdote involving "[he may be a _____,] but he's our _____" (and similar) was already pretty familiar to office-holders, political pundits, and Washington wags by the time FDR started his first term. That it had been brought out again in 1934 and applied to FDR's nomination in 1932 (consequently making FDR "our son of a bitch") must have gotten some additional notice in Washington and at the White House.

It's a little hard to know whether FDR ever really used the line in the late '30s or whether someone else just recycled the anecdote, attributing the line to the President in reference to some Latin American dictator. There is a common knowledge legend that the then director of the CIA had said of the dictator Marcos before the 1986 revolution "He may be a son of a bitch but at least he's our son of a bitch." There is a whole lot of other dictators about whom the same quote had been attributed! Batista, Pinochet, Fujimori,Mobutu, the Shah of Iran, Savimbi, Suharto, Trujillo and even Botha have been lumped into this expression.

the politics of drugs

For more than a year the CIA has been trafficking 300 kilos of cocaine a month from Ecuador to Chile for export on to Europe, according to recent  media reports from Santiago, the Chilean capital.

Proceeds from the 300 kilo-a-month business have been used to create a war-chest to finance a Cocaine Coup in Ecuador that was scheduled to be “green-lighted” after the expected win in the just-concluded U.S. Presidential election—expected, at least, by some Agency officials—of Mitt Romney.

---

Televisa was the victim of an illegal operation

Mexico’s Narco Televisa Scandal: 

The Impunity of the Elite

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Daniel Hopsicker

(extracts)

“It has become known as the case of the fake journalists, read the lead in a recent wire report about the case distributed to American newspapers.

Thousands of posts on Twitter discuss what happened to 18 Mexicans busted in Nicaragua driving a half-dozen satellite TV vans from Televisa.

They are at #Narco-Televisa. On the other hand, at #fake journalists, there is just one. It reads: “I love #fake journalists… You don't know how to write and wouldn't know a real story if it bit you in the ass.”

Televisa and Pena Nieto together were also enmeshed in a scandal together. The Guardian published documents showing Televisa committing dirty tricks against other candidates to help Pena Nieto win the Mexico presidency, and—in a blatant pay for play scheme which listed fees for various services on offer—raising Peña Nieto's national profile while he was governor of the state of Mexico.

And Wikileaks released cables from the American Embassy in Mexico recently illustrating US concerns that the Mexican presidential election frontrunner had been paying for favorable TV coverage.

So why is a US reporter stationed in Mexico City, where all this is well-known, calling it—while providing no evidence to back the claim—the “fake journalists” scandal?

On August 20, border guards in Nicaragua detain 18 Mexicans—17 men and one woman. They are all wearing Televisa t-shirts, and they are traveling in six satellite TV vans emblazoned with the Televisa logo. They carry press credentials from the network.

Customs officials received a tip from a Nicaraguan official who spent the previous evening in Tegucigalpa Honduras in the same hotel as the Mexicans. He became suspicious after hearing loose talk.

The leader of the group, 39-year-old Raquel Alatorre Correa, will be described in newspapers in Mexico City as a “brunette with voluptuous breasts, a wasp waist and an arrogant attitude.”

She is adorned with a Cartier watch, a Bvlgari Italian ring, a triangle-shaped diamond ring, several gold chains, an IPod, a Blackberry, and a two-way radio.

She is, in short, heavily-accessorized. And so is her mansion in Merida.

Later, when authorities in Mexico raid her homes and ranches (she has 12) in the Yucatan, they find her main residence has an electrified fence, two gates, security cameras, and special outdoor lighting.

She tells border officials—who find her high-handed and petulant—that she and her fellow journalists are in Nicaragua to do a story. When asked exactly where in Nicaragua they are headed, she says “I won’t tell you.”

A search of the satellite-TV vans is a foregone conclusion. What turns up is a surprise:

$9.2 million in cash, stuffed into built-in hidden compartments, as well as traces of cocaine. Prosecutors charge the group with money laundering, drug trafficking and organized crime.

Questioned about the arrest of one of their TV crews, Televisa emphatically and categorically denies any link to either the Mexican suspects or the six satellite TV vans.

For good measure, and perhaps to show the earnestness of their intentions, the giant network threatens to sue the 18 incarcerated Mexicans—who are already looking at doing 30 years in a squalid Nicaraguan prison—for appropriating the company’s good name.

Next Mexico's Attorney General Marisela Morales steps into the fray, to say the suspects have falsely used Televisa’s name as a cover for criminal pursuits.

“Using the prestige or name of persons or companies without their knowledge,” she explains breezily, "is part of the way in which criminal organizations operate in Mexico and other countries.”

Despite her assurances, there is a problem: In Mexico City, journalists discover all six vans are registered to Televisa.

Her office is later forced to admit, to much derision, that her remarks weren’t based on the results of an independent investigation, but on assurances from Televisa.

In the columns of unfriendly journalists, reporter Carmen Aristegui stands accused of being a “manipulative freak” who is “sickly obsessed.” She has a “communication strategy Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would have loved.”

She is said to share (with Proceso magazine) a “fixation.” To suffer from a “Fatal Obsession.”  To engage in “pure unsubstantiated sensationalism,” and to “repeat a lie a certain number of times hoping it will become the truth.”

Her reporting on the “Cocaine Caravan” scandal is “an incredible waste of resources, both financial and human.”

“Yet Aristegui persists in disguising her obsession with famous phrases like ‘the public interest’ and ‘questions that deserve answers.’”

Cooler heads observe that Carmen Aristegui has won Mexico’s National Journalism Award on four occasions, as well as the Cabot Prize from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
In a recent radio interview, she says, plaintively and poignantly, “I want to live!”

Nicaraguan authorities seem underwhelmed with the response to requests for information they have received from both Televisa and Mexican law enforcement.  “The claim that Televisa was the victim of an illegal operation," says the Attorney General of Nicaragua, “must be supported by evidence.”

The prosecutor in the case pointedly states that he has not yet been satisfied that Televisa is not involved.
According to prosecutors, the narcos, or the narco-journalists, from Televisa have been running, for the past five years, a drug trafficking and money laundering pipeline running the length of Central America.

As weeks pass, there are a series of revelations. The six vans, it turns out, were registered to Televisa.
Televisa's response was to insist that motor vehicle personnel had been bribed. Notorized documents make this seem unlikely. Then, too, there are letters on Televisa letterhead signed by the vice president of the news division, asking border officials to expedite the vans entrance into their country.

he is our son of a bitch

"Yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch".

This line goes way back to WWII. It has been attributed to:

• Franklin Roosevelt on US General George S. Patton.
• Winston Churchill on the man Patton loved to dislike (and vice versa), British General Bernard "Monty" Montgomery.
• Either or both of them on Charles De Gaulle. Take your pick.

Variations go back further than that.  It is claimed that Acheson said this about Tito; And that Dulles said it about Somoza, the son of the son of a bitch of Roosevelt.

Speaking of brutal Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, Harry Truman is supposed to have said "He's a bastard, but he's our bastard." This quote is attributed to Truman, FDR, and Nixon. This is a broad chronological range. There were actuall three Somozas: Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who fathered Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and the Somoza dynasty that ruled Nicaragua from the mid 1930s through the late 1970s.

The Marines invaded Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed until 1933, fighting but never defeating the revolutionary Augusto Sandino. They created the Nicaraguan National Guard and installed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. Then Sandino, who had signed a truce and put down his arms, was assassinated by Somoza. In 1935, General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua, said: "[I was] a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism - I helped purify Nicaragua for [an] international banking house." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it another way. "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Corruption, torture, and wholesale murder of dissidents continued for 45 years under two generations of Somozas, for after Somoza Garcia was gunned down in the streets in 1956, his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle took control. The Somozas plundered Nicaragua and became millionaires. The younger Somoza, "the vampire dictator," made $12 million a year buying the blood of his people and selling it abroad at a 300% mark-up, but his biggest single rip-off occurred in 1972 after an earthquake killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans: Somoza had his National Guard seize $30 million in international relief supplies and sold them to the highest bidder. Near the end of his reign, he aerially bombed his own capital to stay in power, but he was overthrown in 1979 by a rebel group who called themselves the Sandinistas, after the revolutionary hero his father had slain.

Time Magazine printed the following in its 15 November 1948 issue:

In 1939 [Anastasio Somoza] got himself elected for eight more years. And he went to Washington. To prime President Roosevelt for the visit, Sumner Welles sent him a long solemn memorandum about Somoza and Nicaragua. According to a story told around Washington, Roosevelt read the memo right through, wisecracked: "As a Nicaraguan might say, he's a sonofabitch but he's ours."

The basic "punchline" had been floating around Washington since well before 1939. For example, after the Chicago Convention, Gen. Hugh Johnson, who had worked hard with Barney Baruch to stop Roosevelt, was asked what he thought of his nomination. Johnson replied by recalling a story of a county convention of Democrats in which the wrong man had been chosen. Driving home from the meeting, two politicians were comparing notes. Both had opposed the successful candidate. One said to the other, "Damn it all! We should never have let them put Blank over. He's a So and So!" The other man sighed and said nothing for a long time. Then he cheered up. "After all," he observed. "Blank isn't so bad. He's our So and So."

A short piece written on the death of Senator James Watson [Indiana], the "last Republican majority leader in the Senate before the Roosevelt era," includes this telling:

Senator Watson used to tell a story of Uncle Joe which shall be our contribution to the stock of reminiscences about Jim Watson. One day in the House the Speaker spoke about a party man as a deserving appointee for some vacant post. "But you couldn't recommend him," said young Watson. "He's a so-and-so." "Yes, he may be," said Uncle Joe, "but, my boy, he's *our*
so-and so, isn't he?"

"he's a so-and-so, but he's our so-and-so" bears some resemblance to a popular anecdote said to have involved U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Pennsylvania; 1792-1868) and cited well into the 20th century:

Speaking of the probable contests for seats in the next Congress, the Boston Herald says: "The republicans are not over scrupulous, when in power, as to the management of contested cases. In fact, their morality was well illustrated by the characteristic remark of Thad. Stevens, when it was said that both claimants of a disputed seat were 'd-----d rascals,' 'I don't
doubt it,' said the grim old 'whip,' 'but what I want to know is, which is our d-----d rascal?'

"He's a damned rascal," said Thad. Stevens bluntly on a similar occasion,
"but as he's *our* damned rascal we must put him in."

An anecdote involving "[he may be a _____,] but he's our _____" (and similar) was already pretty familiar to office-holders, political pundits, and Washington wags by the time FDR started his first term. That it had been brought out again in 1934 and applied to FDR's nomination in 1932 (consequently making FDR "our son of a bitch") must have gotten some additional notice in Washington and at the White House.

It's a little hard to know whether FDR  ever really used the line in the late '30s or whether someone else just recycled the anecdote, attributing the line to the President in reference to some Latin American dictator. There is a common knowledge legend that the then director of the CIA had said of the dictator Marcos before the 1986 revolution "He may be a son of a bitch but at least he's our son of a bitch." There is a whole lot of other dictators about whom the same quote had been attributed! Batista, Pinochet, Fujimori,Mobutu, the Shah of Iran, Savimbi, Suharto, Trujillo and even Botha have been lumped into this expression.

Illegal but Legitimate

On 22 March 2005, the renowned author, educator and linguist Professor Noam Chomsky delivered the third and final lecture of the 2004/2005 Gifford Lecture Series, Illegal but Legitimate: a Dubious Doctrine for the Times.

The Gifford Lecturers are recognised as pre-eminent thinkers in their respective fields.

The Gifford Lectureships were established in 1888. Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) was a senator of the College of Justice in Scotland.