the cloistered outfit of the LYM
Scott McLemee, on his duo “Inside Higher Education” article / “Crooked Timber” blog entry — posted the comment:
It took a while, but a LaRouchie has commented on my article, saying among other things
And then on to a refutation of this Larouchie’s belief that she is fighting the neo-cons, and then to the precise point of reference for Larouche’s ideology. I submit that McLemee is slightly off about when Larouche started aligning himself behind the FDR mantle, but it’s a minor point — especially in line with the bigger focus about — oh, you know — Larouche’s klansman alliance and such.
But indeed. Three Larouche followers ended up making comments to the “Inside Higher Education” post. Starting with Margaret Fairchild. The name is strangely familiar, and familiar in association with Larouche. (ie: I am not confusing the actress Morgan Fairchild with Margaret Fairchild. Though the quickest of google searches shows there was indeed an actress named Margaret Fairchild — of some renown, too). It appears that there might indeed be a family of Larouchian Fairchilds, headed by Mark Fairchild — who destroyed the 1986 Illinois Democratic Party — and ended the political family dynasty of Adlai Stevensons — by unexpectedly winning the nomination for lieutenant governor.
Never mind. The first sentence sort of stuns me. Suddenly there are a lot of blogs about Lyndon LaRouche and the LYM. Could this be because the man LaRouche has been fighting to Impeach since 2002, is in big trouble? Why all the attention to LaRouche, if he’s so crazy and irrelevant?
Simply put, there aren’t a lot of blogs about Lyndon Larouche and the LYM. There’s this blog — and I have chosen to stay on this horse since December. There are a couple of others. And there’s an assortment of entries of various blogs on encounters with Larouche or odd places Larouche has stuck his unwanted neck out — video game players pounding on about Larouche official Don Phau glomming onto the Virginia Tech tragedy with some rewritings of old 1980s conspiratorial diatribes on Heavy Metal music reworked so as to replace video games for the subject, for instance.
Seriously, I was a little pleased when that my bloglines feed for the word “Larouche” spit out all the comments from these Scott McLemee pieces, because otherwise the standard is a whole mass of Larouche party-line material about, oh, you know, the BEA Scandal.
It is enough to make me feel like this goddamned blog is a bigger deal in Larouche-land than I had thought. Really? Is that a possibility? That seems like an insane proposition.
Margaret Fairchild goes on to air her insecurities and the cue to the motivation of anyone who joins with the forces of Larouche from the start. “The LaRouche youth, stupidly wanting a future, not wanting to go to war for Dick Cheney and Halliburton, or work at Walmart after getting a college degree.” I don’t precisely know what the venues to change the status quo are — and I am constantly searching through our nation’s political history to attempt to conceptualize such things out–, but I know it is not with Larouche — after all, the opportunities for Career Advancement at WalMart are much greater than with LYM.
And she throws out the Larouche party line on Larouche’s Fraud case. For that, I may as well suggest Chaitkin’s biography of George Herbert Walker Bush (available at Powells), which is relatively hilarious in the manner that a few references to Larouche as “the pre-eminent political opponent of George Bush” turns the book right around and makes it about Larouche.
Moving on to Larouchie #2: The point that Scott is missing is that Larouche is right. And on to describe an ebullient technological wunder-future — the rub coming that any practical considerations of Environmental Impact Statements are going to be pretty much null and meaningless.
Actually I just want to skip along to Larouchie #3, and for all intents and purposes want you, the reader, to forget everything you have read and focus on Margaret Fairchild’s sentence: Suddenly there are a lot of blogs about Lyndon LaRouche and the LYM. And “Grizzled Veteran”‘s opening sentences in this message:
Why indeed the sudden appearance of articles in the media about LaRouche and his youth movement. The New Republic just weighed in with an slander piece on LaRouche as well.
LaRouche and his LYM have Dick Cheney on the ropes and they will most certainly knock him out for the count.
God bless Lyndon LaRouche and all the people in his organization both past and present.
What a cloistered outfit we have here. The New Republic’s “slander piece” was a rather banal affair. I can count on one hand the media pieces on Larouche that have appeared lately, of this and that type. But the thing is, in the Larouche Universe, this handful of articles — Nick Benton’s pieces, Scott McLemee’s piece, the New Republic fluff piece, the piece that is coming up shortly for another political magazine — seem like a MEDIA FRENZY, bashing up against the gate, suddenly THE ENTIRE ESTABLISHMENT of synarchists is being pitted against the forces of Larouche… because, I guess, Cheney has an approval rating in the 20s… what with that BEA Scandal nobody has ever heard of that Larouche, Inc. has sent his following into a frenzy over.
If you dig into the pieces, and throw out the New Republic fluff piece as a matter of spite, the answer to the question is sort of answered with the final statement of that blog comment — God bless Lyndon LaRouche and all the people in his organization both past and present. Or, better still, forgetting the first half of that equation, and go with: God bless Ken Kronberg.
But perhaps the cloistered outfit of the Larouchians don’t quite see that “slander” connection, since it is outside what they need to think about.
………..
An additional update: The writer of The New Republic fluff piece has written on the “Larouche Watch” blog: as it happens, I had reported on all of those things – the magazine just wasn’t interested. sometimes that happens and it’s got nothing to do with the writer. This gives the suggestion that Larouche had his organization primed for something of, quote-in-quote “slander” (ie: substantive reporting), and what appeared was less than what they saw him sniffing about toward. Or maybe I’m just giving the yahoo too much credit by suggesting he has standards to define “slander”.
July 19th, 2007 at 4:47 am
Conor Clarke (the TNR reporter) may have reported on “all of those things,” but based on my information, he was not poking around in LaRouche’s Northern Virginia environs or asking members past or present any questions that might suggest he was reporting on those things. So I guess we have to take his word for it, but I wonder how well he informed himself about “those things” before he did or didn’t report on them.
Avi Klein, on the other hand, who says he is preparing an article for the Washington Monthly, as been all over the place in LaRouche-Land.