Today marks a milestone — the 80th birthday of G. Gordon Liddy. While any biographical reference to Liddy invariably leads with his role in the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal — and subsequent prison time — it’s important to say also that the man’s life has transcended that historical moment. It’s a life that has been rich and full and adventurous. I know him best in his reinvention as a top radio political talk show host, The G. Gordon Liddy Show on Radio America, where, since 1992, he has daily featured outstanding topics and guests and skewered the folly and misdeeds of the Left.
What many may not know about Liddy is that he’s appeared as an actor in movies and television — including Miami Vice, Airwolf, MacGyver, The Highwayman, and as himself (!) in Oliver Stone’s 1995 movie Nixon. Also, he’s a big fan of ABBA. (Yes, that 1970s disco band from Sweden.)
On a more serious note, Liddy had impressive, formidable accomplishments long before his Watergate downfall. He earned a law degree from Fordham Law School, graduating as an editor of The Fordham Law Review. And then he served two years as an Army artillery officer during the Korean War. And then, still in his 20s, served in the FBI as a Special Agent, earning multiple commendations from J. Edgar Hoover. By age 29, Liddy became the youngest Bureau Supervisor at FBI national headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Oh, and in his spare time, he was rated by the Treasury Department as a pistol expert and is an FAA-licensed pilot.
But perhaps the aspect of G. Gordon Liddy that I admire most is his self-described fierceness and fearlessness. “Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear,” he once famously declared. It must be a truly liberating way to live.
I bent G. Gordon Liddy’s ears back today on his radio show (easy to find them, given his lack of hair) on my current crusade to get people to understand that it’s not just that the risk of swine flu has been exaggerated but that it’s being exaggerated for political reasons. Even battle-hardened veterans like Liddy are surprised to hear that the World Health Organization didn’t create a pre-fab pandemic just to gather more power and increase its budget but rather is using it to promote social engineering and redistribution of wealth between nations, as I noted in Forbes Online.
Yes, it really is that bad.
Following
a whistleblower report that criticized a global warming rule, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reportedly considering shutting down the agency office in which the critical report originated.
Dr. Alan Carlin, the senior analyst whose report EPA unsuccessfully tried to bury, worked in EPA’s
National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE). According to a story in last Friday’s
Inside EPA, the agency is now considering shutting that office down.
The Washington Times ran
an editorial yesterday, critical of the potential shut down of the internal review office by the EPA.
In June, the Competitive Enterprise Institute made waves by releasing internal e-mails from the Environmental Protection Agency. In those messages, a top administrator told a key researcher that the researcher’s new report would not be released. Why? Because it does “not help the legal or policy case” for a controversial decision to treat global warming as a health hazard. In short, because researcher Alan Carlin’s conclusions differed from the administration’s political agenda, his research was ignored.
“Economists are the most likely professionals within EPA to examine the real-world effects of its policies,” said Kazman. “For this reason, the NCEE is a restraining force on the agency’s out-of-this-world regulatory ambitions. EPA would love to get that office out of the way, especially since it has within it civil servants like Dr. Carlin, who are willing to expose the truth about EPA’s plan to restrict energy use in the name of global warming.”
Over the past two months, I’ve chronicled the plight of EPA whistleblower Alan Carlin at the hands of Team Obama’s dissent-stiflers. My friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute first blew the lid on the story and continue to monitor the war on EPA watchdogs. The latest development? EPA may get rid of a key internal review office that has provided too many inconvenient truths
Stay tuned for more developments in this story.
Louisiana police stopped and detained an American citizen for displaying the historic Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on his car, World Net Daily reports. The flag has a treasured history in America – named after an American general and statesman, Christopher Gadsden, and was once used by The United States Marine Corps as a motto flag. In any case, political talk show icon G. Gordon Liddy was incensed by the reported incident and is now encouraging patriotic and First Amendment loyalists to go buy a Gadsden flag sticker and put it you-know-where — on your bumper sticker. Just so happens, the Bureaucrash activist group is offering the sticker — along with other politically incorrect, First Amendment-loving t-shirts, stickers, pins and other “contraband.” Visit Bureaucrash.com and click on “contraband” to get your Gadsden flag on.
Edit: Link to the G Gordon Liddy Show podcast, hour 1.
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