And every year the Pentagon bite of the federal dollar got bigger and bigger. In Reagan’s eight years in office, military expenditure doubled from ar… - Rachel Maddow

North Carolina’s Robert Rice Reynolds, who had just that week granted an interview to Hitler’s mouthpiece newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, headlined “Advice to Roosevelt: Stick to Your Knitting.” A sample of Reynolds’s reasoning: “I can see no reason why the youth of this country should be uniformed to save the so-called democracies of Europe — imperialistic Britain and communistic France…. I am glad to be able to state that I am absolutely against the United States waging war for the purpose of protecting the Jews anywhere in the world.” Among the most outspoken isolationists was the powerful New York congressman Hamilton Fish, who was already heading up the National Committee to Keep America Out of Foreign Wars.

This much was certain: Germany had agents at work inside the United States; armed American fascists were being actively supported by the Hitler government; members of Congress were colluding with a German propaganda agent to facilitate an industrial-scale Nazi information operation targeting the American people; critical U.S. munitions plants were blowing up in multiple states. And the Justice Department, at last, was going to act to take it all apart. At least it was going to try to.

How on God’s green earth could a national figure, a man second in line to the most powerful office on the planet, a sitting vice president of the United States of America, be so dumb, or so venal, to still be pocketing bribes? It couldn’t be.