Granted, Hillary is no spring chicken. Her fleshly allure has diminished over time. But Hillary has other ways of bending men to her will.

Consider her effect upon journalist David Brock. A ruthless political dirt-digger for the right, Brock nearly toppled the Clinton White House. His Troopergate story in the American Spectator triggered the Paula Jones lawsuit, leading to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Yet, when Brock trained his sights on Hillary, he suddenly went soft.

In 1994, the Free Press awarded Brock a million-dollar advance to write a Hillary exposé. Brock slowly fell under Hillary’s spell, as he wrote. In Brock’s words, he began to “sympathize with the trials and tribulations she faced, and even to see a kind of beauty” in her soul. “In finding Hillary Clinton’s humanity, I was beginning to find my own”, he later wrote.

Released in October 1996, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham turned out to be a whitewash, portraying Hillary as an idealist saddled with an unworthy husband.

Brock didn’t stop there. He publicly renounced conservatism in the July 1997 Esquire. Then he wrote a book smearing his former conservative friends and colleagues as crooks, liars, drunkards, dopers, philanderers, closet homosexuals and “right-wing fag hags“, in Brock’s memorable phrase.

Hillary knows how to return a favor. In 2003, she set up her own personal think tank, the Center for American Progress, with $3 million from Wall Street billionaire George Soros. One of the Center’s first priorities was to give David Brock a job.

Hillary’s Center helped launch Media Matters for America, an activist group dedicated to fighting conservative influence in the media. Brock was put in charge of it. Hillary’s former enemy had become her lapdog. Such is the power of Hillary’s charm.

Hillary worked a similar transformation on Richard Mellon Scaife. During the 1990s, the Pittsburgh philanthropist and newspaper publisher spent millions trying to expose Clinton wrongdoing through lawsuits and grants to journalists. Time magazine dubbed Scaife “king of the Clinton haters“.

Those days are over. Following a March 25 meeting this year with Senator Clinton, Scaife wrote in his newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, that the meeting had “changed my mind about her”.

In an April 20 editorial, Scaife’s Tribune-Review endorsed Hillary for president.

Hillary’s most impressive conquest to date is Rupert Murdoch, whose $60-billion media empire encompasses Fox News and the New York Post. When Hillary ran for reelection to the Senate in 2006, Murdoch stunned New Yorkers by endorsing her, even holding a Hillary fundraiser at his headquarters in Manhattan.

Fox News has become Hillary’s favorite network. Her campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe praised Fox in a May 13 interview on Fox & Friends. McAuliffe complained that “90 percent” of mainstream media favored Obama. By contrast, he noted gratefully, “Fox has been one of the most responsible in this presidential campaign“.

What is Hillary’s secret? By what alchemy does she transform bitter enemies into loyal operatives? Cynics might argue that Hillary employs methods more forceful than her winning personality.

They might note, for instance, that the last Clinton administration sicced the Federal Communications Commission on Murdoch, nearly putting his Fox Network out of business. At age 77, Murdoch may no longer have the stomach for that sort of fight.

Dick Scaife likewise felt the Clintons’ wrath. From 1993 to 1997, he gave $1.8 million to the American Spectator to fund investigative reportage on the Clintons. Such grants are perfectly legal, yet the Clinton Justice Department subjected Scaife and the American Spectator to a 14-month criminal investigation. No prosecutions resulted, but Clinton critics felt the chill.

The American Spectator had already suffered years of harassment, including several suspicious break-ins. Founder and editor-in-chief Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. later wrote, “The pressure was enormous. [David] Brock was the earliest to crack under the strain.”

Plainly, Hillary’s enemies-turned-friends have other possible motives for switching sides than mere puppy-dog infatuation. In fact, they have every reason to fear Mrs. Clinton. Staying on her good side may be a matter of simple survival for them.

This brings us back to the superdelegates. Most are leaning toward Obama, at this point. But convention rules allow them to change their minds right up till the end.

However she managed it, Hillary did get Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife to join her team. Persuading the superdelegates seems a small task by comparison.

The U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing claims it is making our banknotes “safer, smarter and more secure“. They say the violet stain on Lincoln’s face adds “complexity”, rendering counterfeiting more difficult. The big purple five on the back supposedly helps vision-impaired people count their change.

Hogwash! These goals could be achieved through less drastic means. There is no need to turn our banknotes into Monopoly money.

U.S. currency already features watermarks, microprinting, embedded fluorescent security threads, color-shifting ink and fine-line printing patterns — subtle security measures requiring little change in the dollar’s design. For the visually impaired, high-contrast features could be added in a tasteful manner, without resorting to garish, phosphorescent hues.

The fact is, we are being hoodwinked. The redesign of our currency has nothing to do with fighting counterfeiters or helping people with weak eyesight. It has everything to do with catering to the perverse canons of postmodernist art. The U.S. Treasury has allowed a cabal of avant-garde designers to pull off one of the most audacious practical jokes in art history; the “subversion” and “deconstruction” of the U.S. dollar. We the taxpayers must demand an end to this cultural vandalism.

More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle opined that art should be wondrous and beautiful. It should instruct and elevate the masses, he said, giving pleasure and catharsis or emotional release.

Today’s hipster intellectuals reject Aristotle. Instead, they embrace a philosophy variously called “poststructuralism“, “postmodernism” or just plain PoMo. For PoMo’s apostles, art is a weapon of revolution. Its purpose is to mock, degrade and undermine the cherished beliefs of Western civilization. PoMo theorists call this process “deconstruction” or “subversion“.

Photographer Andres Serrano famously deconstructed Christianity in 1989 by snapping a picture of a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s own urine. In 1999, the Brooklyn Museum showcased an image of the Virgin Mary which artist Chris Ofili had splattered with elephant dung.

Meanwhile PoMo designers have been doing to national currencies what Serrano and Ofili did to Christianity. Their first target was the Dutch guilder.

From 1964 to 1985, graphic artist Ootje Oxenaar redesigned the entire series of Dutch guilder notes on commission from the Nederlandsche Bank. Oxenaar began the project by studying banknotes from many countries. He found them all “very muddy in color“. Oxenaar later told the PBS series Nova:

“The only banknotes that really inspired me, in fact, was play money, like the Monopoly money, and that is what I think is necessary for banknotes too.”

Accordingly, Oxenaar designed the new guilders to look like play money. He sprang other tricks on the Dutch taxpayer as well. Oxenaar told a British design magazine:

“On the 1000 guilder note, it became a sport for me to put things in the notes that nobody wanted there. I was very proud to have my fingerprint in this note – and it’s my middle finger!”

The 100-guilder note formerly portrayed Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, a Dutch national hero who defeated French and British fleets in the 17th century. Oxenaar replaced Admiral de Ruyter with an image of a long-billed wading bird common in the Netherlands. “I changed our war criminal — the grand admiral — to a snipe“, he later quipped.

Oxenaar’s radical approach met resistance at first. But over time, he recalls, “there developed a circle of friends who believed in it… a circle of believers.” Our new five-dollar bill suggests that some U.S. Treasury designers may have joined Oxenaar’s circle.

For 67 years, no major design changes affronted the dollar’s dignity. Then the transformation began. The $100 bill was redesigned in 1996; the $50 in 1997 and 2004; the $20 in 1998 and 2003; the $10 in 2000 and 2006; and the $5 in 2000 and 2008. With each mutation, our magnificent greenbacks have been devolving, by slow but steady increments, into play money.

The $100 bill is now undergoing its second redesign in 12 years. U.S. Treasurer Anna Escobedo Cabral recently told a group of grade-school students, “The bill is still a secret, and I can’t tell you what it looks like. It will be very colorful, though!”

Since we taxpayers are footing the bill, secrecy seems inappropriate. The U.S. Treasury needs to tell us where these changes are heading.

TYPE 1: The Innocent Hillarycon

The first type is the most well-meaning, but possibly the most deluded. Innocent Hillarycons view Hillary as a weaker candidate than Obama, and thus seek to help Hillary win the nomination.

They are wrong. Hillary’s weakness is an illusion. She is playing rope-a-dope with Obama. By hanging on the ropes, and taking Obama’s punches, Hillary saves her strength for the knockout punch.

Rest assured, the knockout will come. No matter how many primaries Obama wins, Hillary will beat him at the convention. Backroom intrigue is her specialty.

Hillary will bully, bribe and blackmail the superdelegates to vote for her. She will claim disqualified delegates from Michigan and Florida. She will steal state delegates through litigation. At the appointed time, Hillary’s media operatives will ambush Obama with allegations of corruption, immorality and extremism.

Hillary has powerful patrons in all the right places. She will win the nomination.

The real purpose of Hillary’s rope-a-dope is to lull Republicans into complacency. In this, she has largely succeeded.

Conservative talk radio jocks have lost interest in Hillary. On February 11, Sean Hannity suspended his “Stop Hillary Express” campaign, arguing that Obama poses a greater threat. Rush Limbaugh told listeners on February 26, “the longer Hillary can stay in this the better for us.” He urged Republicans to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary in the primaries, “to keep that party at war with itself.”

Hillary’s rope-a-dope has paralyzed conservative book publishers, none of whom are assigning Hillary exposés. They fear she will drop from the race before their books hit the shelves.

“When I get anti-Hillary proposals, I tell them, ‘Just wait and see if she becomes president,’ ’’ says Marji Ross, president of Regnery Publishing. Regnery’s 2004 release Unfit for Command torpedoed John Kerry’s campaign.

No Unfit for Command will dog Hillary this election season. It is too late to assign such a research-intensive book. Hillary has outmaneuvered the dirt-diggers.

TYPE 2: The Crafty Hillarycon

The second type of Hillarycon supports her for Machiavellian reasons. A Hillary presidency would teach Americans a lesson, they say. Her extremist policies would shock the nation, driving voters into the conservative camp.

Nonsense. This is a formula for suicide. As president, Hillary would liquidate conservatives, unleashing the fury of America’s counterterror apparatus against us.

Most vulnerable are volunteer groups like the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which patrols the Mexican border to stop illegal crossings. Minutemen were outraged when President Bush called them “vigilantes”. But Bush never hampered their operations. President Hillary would handle them differently. She would declare the Minutemen “domestic terrorists” and send them to Gitmo for waterboarding.

If this sounds farfetched, consider the counterterror policies of the last Clinton regime. Barely a month after Bill Clinton took office, Muslim jihadists detonated a bomb beneath the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring thousands in February 1993. The Clintons responded by declaring war on “domestic terrorists“.

On February 28, 1993 — only two days after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — the Clintons laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told NBC on March 1 that our biggest security threat was, “Americans killing one another with guns”. Attorney General Janet Reno declared on March 13 that her number one priority would be protecting abortion clinics from terror attacks. Then came Project Megiddo, an FBI program targeting rightwing Christians.

TYPE 3: The Spiteful Hillarycon

The third type of Hillarycon supports Hillary out of spite. These are ideological purists whose hatred for President Bush has metastasized into hatred for all things Republican. Since they must vote Democrat or not vote at all, they choose Hillary, claiming she is more “conservative” than the rest.

Spiteful Hillarycons are the worst of the lot, because they are phonies. They know very well that Hillary has not a “conservative” bone in her body. But then, neither have the Spiteful Hillarycons.

What they share with Hillary is anger and vengefulness. They would gladly cast their votes for Mao Tse-Tung, if they thought it would vex President Bush. Their motives are psychological, not political.

This then is the Hillarycon agenda. It is neither a Republican agenda, nor a conservative agenda, nor a winning agenda. It is Hillary’s agenda. Surely we can do better than this.

Born in Saint Joseph, Missouri, Cronkite grew up in Kansas City and Houston, Texas. He dropped out of the University of Texas in 1935 to become a journalist.

Cronkite covered World War II for the United Press. He reported from North Africa; landed at Normandy in 1944; flew B-17 bombing raids over Germany and landed in a glider behind German lines in Holland. After the war, Cronkite covered the Nuremberg Trials, and served as Moscow bureau chief from 1946-48.

Then he got into television. In her 1979 book Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire, investigative journalist Deborah Davis reports that CIA co-founder Allen Dulles brokered a deal between the Washington Post and CBS News in 1948. Through this arrangement, the Washington Post became sole owner of all CBS radio and TV outlets in our nation’s capital. The Post‘s CBS affiliate WTOP-TV hired Cronkite in 1950, giving him his first job in television.

Allen Dulles — who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1953-61 — carefully nurtured his ties with the two media companies he had brought together. Davis writes:

“The Post men continued to see Paley and Cronkite every Christmas at a dinner given by Allen Dulles at a private club called the Alibi. … in the middle of downtown Washington…”

Investigative reporter Carl Bernstein wrote in 1977:

“CBS was unquestionably the CIA’s most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS President William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees… Paley’s designated contact for the Agency was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News between 1954 and 1961. … [CBS News president Richard] Salant… continued many of his predecessor’s practices…”

Sig Mickelson was Cronkite’s first mentor at CBS. Richard Salant appointed Cronkite anchorman for CBS evening news in 1962.

In my last column, “How the CIA Lost Vietnam“, I recounted Cronkite’s infamous conduct following the communist Tet Offensive of 1968. American and South Vietnamese forces had routed the enemy. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin later wrote in his memoirs:

“Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise. … Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence…”

Cronkite reported the opposite. “We are mired in stalemate,” he told Americans on February 27, 1968. America’s only hope, said Cronkite, was to “negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who… did the best they could”.

Cronkite’s message reached Hanoi loud and clear. The communists understood that Cronkite spoke for official Washington. In their darkest hour, he gave them hope. They resolved to fight on.

Nearly 30,000 American soldiers would die in Vietnam over the next five years. Then Nixon ended the war with the Paris Peace Accords of January 17, 1973. South Vietnam was safe. As long as Nixon remained in office, the communists did not dare break the treaty.

But the press had another trick up its sleeve; Watergate. Early Watergate reports in the Washington Post aroused little interest. Then Cronkite stepped in. “The story was fading from the papers and we thought we needed to revive it”, Cronkite told PBS’s Frontline in 1996.

Under Cronkite’s direction, CBS News aired a twenty-two-minute, two-part summary of the Watergate scandal in October 1972. It rekindled the scandal, forcing President Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974.

Predictably, North Vietnam invaded the South in December 1974. Saigon fell on April 30, 1975.

Cronkite’s CIA connection surfaced briefly during the Congressional Pike Committee hearings of 1975-76. CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, who covered the hearings, later wrote:

“A former CBS correspondent, Sam Jaffe, said that the CIA had gotten him a job at CBS and that the list of current and former journalist-spies included Walter Cronkite. Cronkite heatedly denied that…”

In theory, I see no reason why journalists should avoid helping the CIA in matters of national interest. But who defines the national interest? The tragic story of Walter Cronkite teaches us that CIA spymasters may be poor judges at best.

We now know that Cronkite was simply parroting the CIA line. Agency analysts had been churning out gloomy reports about Vietnam by the ream since 1963.

Sadly, they were not content to issue classified reports through proper channels. They went further. They sought to turn public opinion against the war, using press leaks and disinformation campaigns.

Ironically, it was the CIA that got us into Vietnam in the first place. The military wanted nothing to do with it. In a May 26, 1954 memo, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared Indochina “devoid of decisive military objectives.” The only way to stop communism in Southeast Asia would be to destroy its supply sources “in China proper”, the Joint Chiefs concluded.

The CIA ignored this advice. In June 1954, it sent Col. Edward G. Lansdale to Vietnam to begin paramilitary operations.

CIA strategists believed they could fight wars more effectively than the Pentagon. Their technique was to dispatch CIA advisors to hot spots, whereupon they would raise armies of local mercenaries. Such operations had borne fruit in Iran (1953-54), Guatemala (1954), the Congo (1960-61) and Laos (1960-62).

Vietnam provided the ultimate testing ground. The CIA was given a free hand there from 1954 through 1964. The experiment failed catastrophically.

In a memorandum of October 19, 1964, CIA officer William Bundy informed President Johnson that the situation was hopeless. America should flee Vietnam and “shore up the next line of defense in Thailand.”

Appalled by such talk, President Johnson turned to the military. In early 1965, he ordered bombing raids on North Vietnam and sent the Marines into Da Nang.

The CIA made a fateful choice. Rather than accept President Johnson’s decision, it resolved to stop him.

For this it was well-equipped with a powerful propaganda network. While heading the CIA’s covert operations division from 1948 to 1956, Frank Wisner recruited hundreds of U.S. journalists at virtually every major newspaper and broadcast network in America. He boasted that he could play the media like a Wurlitzer pipe organ.

Long after Wisner left, his “Mighty Wurlitzer” played on. President Johnson felt the full effects of its wrath.

CIA-friendly journalists Walter Lippmann and James Reston began savaging Johnson’s war policy. The New York Times ran a major feature on March 15, 1965 praising the New Left and glorifying Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

A group called the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) had launched SDS in 1959. Socialist Party bigwig and LID co-founder Norman Thomas helped shield SDS from critics. Thomas’ Institute of International Labor Research was later exposed as a conduit for CIA funds.

Prior to 1965, SDS focused on poverty and civil rights. In April 1965, it emerged as America’s leading anti-war group, sponsoring a “National March Against the Vietnam War” which brought 20,000 protestors to Washington.

CIA contract consultant Allard Lowenstein established the “Dump Johnson” movement on April 2, 1967. He persuaded anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy to challenge Johnson in the Democratic primaries.

Meanwhile, the Viet Cong were on the ropes. Communist forces in Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive in January 1968. It was a desperate, suicidal assault on hundreds of cities and towns in South Vietnam. The attack failed. Communist forces met ruin and slaughter on every front.

Nonetheless our media portrayed Tet as a U.S. defeat. Walter Cronkite declared on February 27, 1968:

“We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. … we are mired in stalemate… it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

To this, President Johnson responded, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection as president.

The CIA had made its point. Communist victory was still seven years away. But its seeds were sown.

Americans must learn from this dark episode. Even now the “Mighty Wurlitzer” plays. We must never again dance to its tune.

In a radio interview with Gregory Dalton of the Commonwealth Club of California, Kos said of his CIA interviewers:

“Every single one of them was liberal… people who want to make the world a better place… people who are internationalist… That was an eye-opening experience for me.”

Kos added, “I’ve never had a problem with the CIA, and… I’d have no problem working for them.”

Many leftists savaged Kos for these remarks, saying he had exposed himself as a closet conservative. Kos “is not a ‘liberal’ and he is not a ‘progressive’“, charges Francis L. Holland, a disaffected “Kossack” who runs the Truth-about-Kos Web site. Radical scribe Kurt Nimmo denounced Kos as an instrument of the “CIA-engineered controlled opposition”, tasked with reducing “the ‘progressive’ Democrat opposition” to the war in Iraq to “an empty and absurd rhetorical slogan”.

It could be argued that Kos exhibits a more sophisticated grasp of intelligence matters than his radical critics. Washington insider and high-level Democrat operative that he is, Kos knows things that scruffy street radicals of Kurt Nimmo’s ilk cannot. Kos knows, for instance, that the CIA favors leftwing Democrats, sharing their vision for global governance and democratic socialism.

Since its inception in 1947, the CIA has always leaned left.

British statesman Ernest Bevin declared in 1948, “We cannot hope successfully to repel Communism only by disparaging it… We must put forward a rival ideology to Communism.” What sort of ideology would it be?

Most western economists in the 1940s hailed “democratic socialism” as the wave of the future. Their enthusiasm for socialism prompted conservative economist Joseph A. Schumpeter to lament in 1942, “Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.”

The CIA’s founders agreed. They concluded that America could best fight Soviet influence by offering a superior form of socialism — that is, by creating leftwing movements with a pro-American orientation. “We all felt that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism”, explains Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a former analyst in the wartime Office of Strategic Services who helped launch the CIA.

Thus the CIA set out to recruit members of the “Non-Communist Left” or “NCL” — that is, socialists who opposed Soviet communism and sided with America in the Cold War.

The Agency became a mecca for leftists. “You’ll find more liberal intellectuals per square inch at CIA than anywhere else in the Government,” exclaimed one State Department official in the mid-1960s. In his book Never Stop Running, Duke University historian William Chafe writes, “Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, the CIA provided a welcome refuge [from McCarthyism] for progressive, social democratic forces.”

Many NCL operatives in the CIA hated conservatives as much as communists. “The most dangerous thing we can do… is to leave the task of exposing Communist fronts to reactionaries,” warned socialist philosopher and CIA propagandist Sidney Hook in 1949. Fighting communism was too delicate a task to be entrusted to “paranoid” conservatives, NCLs argued.

Frank Wisner led the NCL faction. While heading the CIA’s covert operations division from 1948 to 1956, Wisner recruited hundreds of U.S. journalists at virtually every major newspaper and broadcast network in America. He boasted that he could play the media like a Wurlitzer pipe organ.

Irked by “Wisner’s gang of weirdos“, as he called them, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover slipped Senator Joseph McCarthy some damaging dossiers on Wisner’s people in 1953. Some “weirdos” were fired. But Wisner’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” struck back, unleashing a barrage of anti-McCarthy smears through friendly media.

“As far as most of us were concerned, McCarthy was the domestic enemy,” remarked Wisner protegé Richard Bissell.

National Review co-founder James Burnham — himself a disillusioned NCL recruit — pronounced the program a failure in 1967. “The NCL is not reliable,” he wrote. “A large part of the organizations and individuals nurtured by CIA under the NCL prescription end up undermining the nation’s will and hampering or sabotaging the nation’s security.”

Burnham’s warning came too late. NCL networks had dug in deep, forming a shadow CIA within the CIA, complete with independent funding. Dislodging them would no longer be easy or certain. Indeed, some say they infest the Agency to this day.

His fans call him “Kos”. His DailyKos blog draws more than half a million visits per day, reportedly generating sufficient advertising revenue to support the Kos family in style.

Kos’ followers — called “Kossacks” — include over 125,000 registered users and hundreds of “diarists” or bloggers, five of them paid “fellows”.

Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are all DailyKos diarists.

Hillary Clinton spoke at the 2007 YearlyKos Convention, where she told the Kossacks, “We are… putting together a network in the blogosphere… we’re beginning to match… the advantage of the other side.”

The Washington Post touts Kos as the Democrat answer to Rush Limbaugh.

How did the 36-year-old Kos attain such lofty status?

Moulitsas presents himself as a self-made man. He told the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica:

“Before the Internet, someone like me could never have reached this level of success. I have no money. I don’t come from a famous or powerful family.”

Baloney, says Francis L. Holland, a disaffected Kossack who runs the Truth-About-Kos Web site.

Kos was born in Chicago on September 11, 1971 to a Greek father, Markos Moulitsas, Sr., and a Salvadoran mother, María Teresa Zúñiga de Funes.

Holland notes that an uncle of Kos served as El Salvador’s Education Minister. His mother’s family owns the Club Joya del Pacifico, a Salvadoran resort. Another Kos relative, Carlos Alberto Delgado Zúñiga, owns the Baja Salt Group, a global supplier of industrial and table salt.

Kos’ parents took him to El Salvador in 1976. They stayed for four years.

Political violence was on the rise. President Carlos Humberto Romero began cracking down on communist insurgents in 1977. This upset U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who sought to appease the guerrillas, not fight them.

Carter backed a gang of leftwing colonels and politicians calling themselves the Revolutionary Government Junta (Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno). They ousted President Romero on October 15, 1979, promising land reform and nationalization of major industries.

Carter’s “revolution” only emboldened the communists. In 1980, the country exploded in civil war. Kos’ family fled the country that year when communist guerrillas threatened to kill them.

Kos joined the U.S. Army after high school. From 1989-92, he served as a 13P missile crew specialist in Bamberg, Germany. Kos says that the racial diversity of the Army awakened his inner Latino, transforming him from a Reagan Republican to a hard-left Democrat.

Bolstered by racial pride, Kos earned two bachelors’ degrees from Northern Illinois University and a law degree from Boston University. He moved to San Francisco in 1998, seeking his fortune in the dot-com boom.

Then, one day, Kos decided to join the CIA. “In 2001, I was underemployed… between jobs… And so I applied to the CIA,” Kos said in a June 2, 2006 interview. Kos was amazed to find that his CIA interviewers shared his leftwing views. He recalls:

“Every single one of them was liberal… people who want to make the world a better place… people who are internationalist… That was an eye-opening experience for me.”

After six months, the CIA offered him an assignment with its Clandestine Service. But Kos said no. “The Howard Dean campaign took off and I had to make a decision,” he explains. Kos chose politicking over spying. Or so he says.

Curiously, Kos joined the Dean campaign in June 2003, more than a year after his CIA interlude supposedly ended. His story is fishy. But, then, so is everything else about Mr. Moulitsas.

Kos founded DailyKos on May 26, 2002. He positioned himself as a renegade, “crashing the gate” of the Democratic Party.

Yet he acts more like a gatekeeper than a gatecrasher. Following Hillary’s victory in the New Hampshire primary, for instance, Kos squashed speculation that she might have cheated. “Anyone who persists in this crap is engaging in unsupported conspiracy theories and violating site policy, a bannable offense”, Kos announced.

Some leftist bloggers have denounced Kos as a government plant. “Once CIA, always CIA”, says Francis Holland.

Any statement Kos makes should arouse healthy skepticism. Still, his account of a “liberal”, “internationalist” CIA rings true, given the brazen defiance President Bush has endured from that agency.

Last Thursday, the public interest group Judicial Watch published a memorandum which the Clinton Library was forced to release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The 24-page memo shines a spotlight on Hillary’s little-known relationship with America’s mightiest oil and banking dynasty. Dated May 26, 1993 and addressed to “Hillary Rodham Clinton”, the memo comes from Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia — better known as Jay Rockefeller — whose great-grandfather founded Standard Oil.

The memo lays out a detailed strategy for pushing the “Clinton reform plan” for universal health coverage. In it, Rockefeller snaps orders at Mrs. Clinton in the imperious tones of a man accustomed to obedience.

He instructs Hillary to get tough on critics of the health plan. “Impeach the credibility of opponents”, he writes. Portray them as “perpetrators”, “paid lobbyists” and purveyors of “ideological extremism”. Assign investigators to conduct “opposition research” on them and expose their “lifestyles”. Do not allow them “even one day without scrutiny”.

Regarding the need for a radio and TV advertising campaign, Rockefeller fumes, “Fundraising must begin immediately. I am frankly surprised that I have not been contacted or shown a plan for fundraising and media expenditures.”

Rockefeller plainly viewed Hillary as his subordinate, and the “Clinton reform plan” as his project. And no wonder. The plan we know as Hillarycare was originally Rockefeller’s idea.

“Health care was his major interest”, writes Joshua Green in The Atlantic. “The agony of watching his mother‘s lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s had made him a crusader for universal health insurance, and in the years before Bill Clinton was elected he had organized labor and health interests toward that goal.”

Many Democrats urged Jay Rockefeller to run for president in 1992, but he declined and backed the Clintons instead.

On January 25, 1993 — only five days after his inauguration — Bill Clinton appointed Hillary chairman of his National Task Force on Health Care Reform. Prior to that, she had no history as a health care reformer. In order to carry out the assignment, she had to make a crash study, “bearing down and learning the mind-numbing intricacies of the health-care system”, The Atlantic reports.

More importantly, Hillary relied on the guiding hand of Jay Rockefeller, who watched closely over the Task Force. In their book The System, Haynes Johnson and David S. Broder note that Senator Rockefeller was “largely responsible for creating the coalition of pro-reform groups to campaign for passage of the Clinton plan and had opened his mansion in Rock Creek Park… to them for their first strategy meeting.”

Hillary might have been short on health care experience, but she had carried much water for the Rockefellers, especially David Rockefeller, Jr., son of the family patriarch David Rockefeller who led Chase Manhattan Bank for 21 years, as president, then chairman and CEO.

As late as 1989, Hillary was not yet known as a national policymaker. She worked for a crooked Arkansas law firm. Radical education reformer Marc Tucker hired Hillary that year as a lobbyist for his National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE).

Tucker dreamed of imposing a Soviet-style school-to-work system on Americans, whereby the government would manage every citizen’s life, steering young children into career tracks, then placing them in jobs after graduation, in corporations vetted by government overseers. Rockefeller money funded Tucker’s think tank and David Rockefeller, Jr. sat on Tucker’s Board.

Eight days after Bill Clinton’s election, Marc Tucker wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton which began: “I still cannot believe you won. But utter delight that you did pervades all the circles in which I move. I met last Wednesday in David Rockefeller’s office with him, [Apple Computer CEO] John Sculley, Dave Barram and David Haselkorn. It was a great celebration. Both John and David R. were more expansive than I have ever seen them — literally radiating happiness. My own view and theirs is that this country has seized its last chance.”

Why David Rockefeller would be “radiating happiness” at the Clintons’ ascension to the White House is not clear. However, it is worrisome.

Something fishy is going on with the Clintons and Rockefellers. This election season, Americans need to dig deep and learn their hidden agendas.

That, at least, appears to be the intent of her new plan for universal health care. In it, Hillary promises health coverage for all, yet vows to slash medical spending in America by $120 billion per year.

The problem is that health care costs money. Cutting spending means cutting care. Just like her old plan from 1993, Hillary’s new plan will cut costs by rationing health care. Under its guidelines, Hillary’s health commissars can and will deny patients any treatment they deem “unnecessary”.

Hillary’s cutbacks will hurt the elderly most. As the heaviest users of health care, they will get the most denials. Hardest hit of all will be the baby boomers, now approaching retirement age.

The first baby boomer applied for Social Security retirement benefits on October 15, 2007. Over the next 20 years, 80 million more will apply. Their huge numbers are expected to bankrupt the system.

“I fear that we may have already committed more physical resources to the baby boom generation in its retirement years than our economy has the capacity to deliver,” worried Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking before the Senate Budget Committee on April 21, 2005. Regarding Social Security and Medicare, Greenspan said, “I do not see how we can avoid significant curtailment of the benefits currently promised.”

Greenspan was only saying aloud what elite policymakers had been whispering for years. There were simply too many baby boomers. Uncle Sam could not provide for them. Medical rationing seemed the only solution; withhold care from aging baby boomers and just let them die.

Hillary’s 1993 health plan reflected this sort of thinking. It would have created a National Health Board with power to decide who would get treatment and who would not. The Board would wield life-and-death power over every American.

Congress rejected Hillary’s plan, but leftwing billionaire George Soros kept it alive. A long-time political ally of Hillary, Soros formulated a plan for implementing Hillarycare through the private sector. He called it the Project on Death in America.

Soros announced his new project in a November 30, 1994 speech at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. “Can we afford to care for the dying properly?” he asked. Yes we can, Soros declared, but only by avoiding the expense of “aggressive, life-prolonging interventions” and instead providing “palliative” care for the elderly and gravely ill.

“Palliative care” means keeping patients comfortable while they die, but making no attempt to save their lives.

Over the next ten years, Soros’ Open Society Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation sunk $200 million into the Project on Death in America.

Its operations were shrouded in a fog of euphemism and doubletalk. Officially, the Project on Death promoted palliative care, but opposed such extreme measures as euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Program director Kathleen Foley even edited a book titled, The Case Against Assisted Suicide.

However, Ione Whitlock, chief research associate for the pro-life group Lifetree, charges that Foley’s opposition to assisted suicide is merely tactical. For instance, on January 20, 2005, Foley told the British House of Lords that, while she did not think it was “economically feasible or socially or politically appropriate” to legalize assisted suicide at the moment, it might be appropriate in “10, 20 or 30 years”.

“She opposes PAS [physician-assisted suicide] not because it is inherently wrong, but because this is not the right time to discuss it,” Miss Whitlock concludes.

The Project on Death stopped giving grants in 2003, but the damage was done. Project alumni have thoroughly infiltrated the medical profession. Their influence touches every community.

Already the killing has begun. Patients receive “palliative care” instead of real care. Many succumb to forced starvation, dehydration and even lethal injection in hospitals, hospices and nursing homes.

On September 11, 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, rescuers discovered 45 bodies at the Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. For reasons which remain unclear, hospital staff had decided to carry out “mercy killings.” At least nine patients, and maybe more, died from lethal doses of morphine and midazolam.

Medical authorities and major media largely sympathized with the killers. All criminal charges against them were dropped in August 2007.

The incident revealed a chilling fact known to few Americans; doctors today may kill their patients and get away with it.

A death cult is stalking America. For this we have Hillary Clinton and George Soros to thank.

The day after Hillary’s loss in Iowa last Thursday, her campaign chief Terry McAuliffe told reporters, “Listen, Hillary is going to be the nominee. There’s no question.”

McAuliffe was not indulging in wishful thinking. He was stating a fact. He knows things the rest of us do not.

One thing McAuliffe knows is that Hillary controls a decisive majority of the Democratic Party superdelegates. The superdelegates control 42 percent of the votes needed to nominate Hillary. They may vote for whomever they wish, for any reason, and may change their minds at will. In August, they will nominate Hillary.

Democrats started the superdelegate system in 1984, to give party leaders tighter control over the nominating process.

This was partly in response to the catastrophic defeat of George McGovern, the radical, anti-war demagogue who, in 1972, lost every state in the union except Massachusetts to Richard Nixon.

To prevent such maverick candidates from winning the nomination in future, party leaders rigged the system. State delegates were no longer permitted to nominate presidential candidates on their own. Henceforth party-approved superdelegates would also cast votes.

Superdelegates are party stalwarts, Democrat officials whose loyalties favor party over state. Their number varies from one election to the next. Currently there are 852 superdelegates, including 29 state governors, 232 congressmen, 49 senators, two “shadow” or non-voting senators from the District of Columbia, and 540 Democratic Party leaders and officials of various sorts.

At this year’s Democratic Convention, 4,049 delegates will vote. Hillary must get 2,025 votes to win the nomination. This is the so-called “magic number”. The 852 superdelegates total 42 percent of the magic number. In a close race, their votes could prove decisive.

At this writing, CNN reports that 257 superdelegates have already pledged their votes: of them, 154 (60 percent) have pledged for Hillary; 50 (19 percent) for Barack Obama; and 33 (13 percent) for John Edwards.

Should Hillary falter in the primaries, the superdelegates will likely come to her rescue and nominate her anyway.

The Web site 2008 Democratic Convention Watch offers updated lists of superdelegates who have and have not pledged their votes.

Of course, Hillary cannot win from superdelegate votes alone. She must get a sizeable number of state delegates as well. This presents no problem for Hillary. Her political machine is deeply entrenched in America’s urban centers. These crowded cities can overwhelm rural voters, bringing entire states into Hillary’s camp, with large numbers of delegates.

The decisive date will be February 5, dubbed Super Duper Tuesday by political pundits. Twenty-four states will hold their primaries that day.

“These states include some of our largest and most delegate-rich states, such as California, New York, Illinois, Georgia, New Jersey and others,” notes Steven Hill, political reform director for the leftwing New America Foundation. “Together these two dozen states hold enough delegates to nearly decide the presidential nomination all by themselves.”

Hillary is counting on that. As Steven Hill explains, “Having a single primary day with so many states… gives great advantage to those candidates with the most campaign cash and name recognition… It creates a virtual wealth primary in which new presidential faces will be quickly eliminated.”

In any contest of wealth, Hillary has the advantage. Her blue-chip backers include the likes of Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, wife of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild of the famed Rothschild banking dynasty.

“I’m always doing everything I possibly can for Hillary Clinton”, Her Ladyship told Portfolio magazine. “I have been waiting for this since Bill Clinton left office, frankly.”

Married November 30, 2000, Lady de Rothschild spent her wedding night in the Clinton White House.

OpenSecrets.org reports that Hillary has raised $90.9 million, only slightly higher than Obama’s $80.3 million.

However, most of Hillary’s money is off the books. No one knows how many millions Hillary has laundered through George Soros’ “Shadow Party“, a network of Democrat front groups masquerading as non-partisan charities. These include Fund for America, the Democracy Alliance, America Votes and Media Matters for America, among others.

Republicans need to stop gloating over Hillary’s every misstep and see the big picture. Hillary has the money, the machine, and the support of global financial elites. Unless we can muster a counterforce of similar strength, Hillary will win the nomination and the presidency.