Grooming an establishment elite.

"I hope some journalist has the guts to ask John Kerry (Skull and Bones, 1965) and George Bush (Skull and Bones, 1967) whether they have any qualms about belonging to a secret, oath-bound network since their college days," wrote the author of a May 18 column for the Yale Politic. "Did they discuss Skull and Bones in code when President Bush called Senator Kerry to congratulate him on his primary victories? Will they agree not to leave the room if the reporter blurts out [Bonesman code word] '322' ...?"

The "conspiracy nut" who wrote that column was Tom Hayden, one of the most notorious leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an ultra-radical outpost of the 1960s Marxist counterculture. By his own description, Hayden is a product of the same Power Elite that created both John Kerry and George W. Bush.

"I was a member of a secret society during the same era as Bush and Kerry," Hayden recalls. As a junior at the University of Michigan, he enrolled in the Druids, "which involved a two-day ritual that included being stripped to my underpants, pelted with eggs, and tied to a campus tree." As a senior he was tapped for the university's "most prestigious secret society, Michiguama," but declined the supposed honor.

Hayden had a much more compelling glimpse of the process used by the Establishment to groom future leaders at the 1960 convention of the National Student Association (NSA). At that event he found a chart compiled by the NSA leadership. "At the top of the chart was written 'Control Group,'" Hayden recounts. "On the left was my name and that of Alan Haber, a founder of SDS. On the right was a box marked 'YAF'--Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative group founded at Yale by William F. Buckley (Bones 1950)." Seven years later, "it was revealed that the CIA secretly controlled and funded NSA," he continues, and that it recruited some of Hayden's fellow radical "idealists" as assets.

"The political system is a moneyed oligarchy underneath its democratic trappings," Hayden opines. "The vast majority of voters are like fans in the bleachers: We participate from the cheap seats, are supposed to enjoy our place, and vote for whichever Bonesman we prefer. Our taxes even subsidize the corporate box seats." President Bush and Senator Kerry, designated by Hayden as "the Cowboy and the Brahmin," are "quarreling members of the same old club ..."

Despite the fact that Bush and Kerry represent the stone ruling Establishment, Hayden insists that the incumbent is a renegade "unilateralist" in foreign affairs, which is why "CIA types seem to prefer Kerry (covertly, of course).... For the record, this November I am voting with the CIA. They represent the lesser evil in the choices before us."