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.

Peter Dale Scott, who has written so much about what is presented as government fact and the realities that lie hidden often well beneath the surface, coined the term Deep Politics to encompass this realm.

The powers that be that reside in the highest echelons of government have sought to squelch any such inquiry as falling under the heading of conspiracy theory.  To be a conspiracy theorist is to live in a wild world devoid of reality.  

Initially using the conspiracy theory pejorative worked superbly as a means of denouncing anyone who dared suggest that the official theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination that a troubled former Marine loner holding presumably strong Marxist leanings was responsible for the assassination of a popular American president.

Initially any questioning of official dogma was considered crackpot theorizing by a substantial majority of Americans.  Eventually as the white heat of analysis was put to  the lone gunman theory more Americans, ultimately encompassing a majority, doubted an official theory that was embraced in the Warren Commission Report, the government's investigative conclusion of what occurred.

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 two parties have combined against us to nullify our power by a 'gentleman's agreement' of non-recognition, no matter how we vote ... May God write us down as asses if ever again we are found putting our trust in either the Republican or the Democratic Parties."~~W.E.B. DuBois (1922)

Marilyn Davenport's recent journey into the ugly world of racism exposed the under belly of a county, party and state with a tragic history of ugly racist conduct.

An important strategic aspect of the 74-year-old Orange County Republican Central Committee member's conduct relates to her angry counter punch embodying a familiar "the best defense is a good offense" strategy.  

Rather than permit the onus to reside on a tasteless act depicting President Barack Obama as a descendant of chimpanzees, Davenport denounced the revelation of her e-mail as "cowardly".

Even the "apology" of sorts that Davenport delivered was conditional as well as decidedly lukewarm.  Davenport explained that the e-mail was sent to a selective few people she knew who could presumably "understand" her intent.  

Presidential political strategists find that the road to victory often stems from establishing tactics based on successful past paradigm results.

When the Tea Party was given credit for helping Republicans score dramatic gains in the 2010 midterm elections that included winning control of the House of Representatives, many Washington watchers recognized that the way the victory was achieved was reminiscent of what happened in 1994 in the middle of President Bill Clinton's first term.

The shattering victory of the Republicans caused Clinton to initially experience crushing depression according to many on the D.C. presidential watch.  Meanwhile Republicans chortled at the prospect of winning the presidency in 1996.  

There were many independent observers not influenced by GOP euphoria who also believed that the tide was running so strong that it would be difficult for Clinton and the Democrats to surmount it.

Much is being written about the death on Saturday of master director Sidney Lumet at 86 so the focus here will be on the manner in which he exquisitely interacted with master actors and developed critical subject matter.

Lumet stated that, while it was essential to entertain audiences in film, his goal was to supply something more.  He did this by tackling some of the most complex and controversial material through showing human beings confronted at critical crossroads.

Henry Fonda was an actor who stood for bedrock truth in the manner of James Stewart and Gary Cooper, but often with a measure of complexity.  It was a master stroke to cast Fonda in the lead of Lumet's first film, "12 Angry Men", a gripping look at the controversial subject of capital punishment humanized through the experiences of New York City jurors in a case of a young man being tried for murdering his father.

A younger Fonda had received critical praise for playing an outsider thrown into a rush to judgment by townsfolk to apply lynch law justice to a group of strangers headed by Dana Andrews in "The Ox-Bow Incident", released in 1943.  

As someone perceived as a capitalist mogul Donald Trump was associated with a certain type of political expectation if he chose to become involved in presidential politics.  At first blush the expectation was an issues approach comparable to Mitt Romney, seen in the context of a chieftain of wealth within the Republican Party.

Some seasoned pundits who make a living attempting to ascertain actions of politicians were taken aback last week when Trump fervently raised the birth certificate issue regarding President Obama.  

According to the conventional wisdom Trump would be expected to challenge former Massachusetts governor Romney for the more tidy and orderly Republican vote, those who follow the maxim of Calvin Coolidge that "The business of the country is business."

Trump instead invaded the province of Mike Huckabee without so much as a knock on the door and fought him tenaciously for the Tea Party vote.  After the initial shock waves wore off pundits began to analyze the surprising behavior of the mega rich property developer from New York City.

Eric Alterman wrote recently that Michele Bachmann should not be taken seriously as a national political force.

Alterman is correct that the public has a right to expect that a Member of Congress from Minnesota and putative Republican presidential aspirant like Bachmann has an obligation to possess a requisite amount of knowledge to fulfill any kind of positive role within the American political system.  

To be taken seriously Bachmann needs to have at least some of that quality they refer to as gravitas.  This stems from knowing certain important facts and taking sober and reasoned positions on basic issues.

What troubled Alterman and scores of other Americans is that recently Bachmann proclaimed that America's Founding Fathers detested slavery and eliminated it.  As many respondents pointed out, any informed grade school youngster knows that slavery was not abolished until Abraham Lincoln waged a bloody civil war.  

The CIA was on the job and ready to roll when it came time to overthrow a popularly elected leader in Iran to assist the interest of British Petroleum in Iran in 1953.

That same CIA was on the job to assist a future dictator named Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party gain power in Iraq.  It was the days of the Cold War so the rationale was that the Communists in Iraq must go, and so a dictatorship steeped in blood was launched.

There came a time when the New World Order, a term used reverently by President George H.W. Bush, decided that it was time to take over Iraq's oil interest and so conflict was launched.  

Can we suppose that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie was just confused and making an independent blunder during that famous interview with Saddam Hussein when she said that an occupation of Kuwait on his part would be an "Arab-Arab" issue and not the concern of the United States?  Had she talked to no one in the Bush Administration in advance?

The recent Japan tragedy brings into sharp focus the ongoing debate concerning nuclear power.  

The loss of life and vast property destruction to a global economic power brings into focus with increased acuity the longstanding debate over nuclear power and the right's insistence that concerns about its inherent danger is a non-existent canard being promulgated by the lunacies of a panic stricken left.

Concerns about the potential danger of nuclear power are met with the same measure of ridicule as trepidations about climate change.  All too often points raised by scientific sources are trivialized by talk show noise and false bravado.  It is given traction by the ranks of listeners who derive comforting assurance by such verbal broadsides.

Rush Limbaugh has been a voluble and persistent source of comments to a sea of faithful listeners eager to devour such appetizing morsels.  In the cases of such disturbing instances of global tragedies occurring through climate and nuclear dangers, comfort via an "ignorance is bliss" scenario can be more understandable than other subjects in the Limbaugh lexicon.

The Gilded Age of America in the late nineteenth century embodied ownership of politicians.

While political bosses like Boss Tweed and Jim Fisk controlled and owned politicians, these representatives knew what their corporate sponsors expected.  It was a period when the United States Senate was called The Millionaires Club.  The corporate owners pulling the strings on their bought political puppets saw that they were sufficiently enriched as they did their bidding.

Similarities abound on what is occurring now and what happened in that corporate dominated post-Civil War period.  While reformers such as William Jennings Bryan and the populist movement called for the direct  election of United States Senators, corporate string pullers denounced such "radical" notions and preferred the then current system of state legislatures selecting them.  

Guess who pulled the strings on state legislators and observe what is happening currently.

The current conflict involving Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republican attempts to prevent collective union bargaining is a resumption of a practice that has been long associated with the Republican right.

The Democratic president associated with nurturing America's labor movement was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  By developing a partnership between labor and the New Deal the crafty president developed, an association was in place between the union movement and the Democratic Party.  

It not only enabled Roosevelt to secure four presidential victories, but sowed the seeds for successes beyond Roosevelt's lifetime for liberal Democratic chief executives extending from Harry Truman's Fair Deal, to John Kennedy's New Frontier, and culminating with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to the end of the sixties.

Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932 on a platform of balancing the budget, one conservative enough that Barry Goldwater later remarked that he would have been comfortable running on it, began experimenting with Keynesian economics and therein forged a Democratic Party surge.  

The 1960 presidential election between Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice President Richard M. Nixon launched the modern political television era.  Following that exciting race, which ended with Kennedy scoring a wafer thin popular vote advantage of one-tenth of one percent, the art of political campaigning would be changed forever while also becoming considerably more expensive.

There were very few televisions around when President Harry Truman scored his huge upset win over Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York in 1948 and they were owned by the nation's more affluent citizens.  

Four years later the medium was in its teething stages in the political sphere.  A major ad run by Republicans on behalf of General Dwight Eisenhower recited some major economic party talking points followed by the candidate appearing and stating that he intended to change all that after the election.

As incumbent President Eisenhower was in his last few months of his second term he passed along advice to his vice president that it would be foolhardy to participate in televised debates against his Democratic Party opponent.  

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck ostensibly stand for freedom and extension of human rights but the facts reveal a different result.

A current case in point surrounds recent events in Egypt.  To lovers of democracy throughout the world the confluence of events, brought about through a coalescing of freedom lovers in Egypt seeking to bring an end to a three decade dictatorial regime noted for suppression of basic rights and rigged elections, was an example of grassroots democracy in action.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck immediately sounded sirens of discontent to their loyal patrons.  Limbaugh was alarmed that the demonstrators were leftists and included a number of feminists.  

What is a leftist to Limbaugh?  Based on his alarmist messages to a core audience that has made him a multimillionaire, anyone to the left of the Limbaugh-Beck-Fox News axis constitutes a dangerous leftist threat.