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”.

I ran into a book the other day, I’m tempted to call it a historical curiosity and not much more — but I know better. The 1962 publication Men of the Far Right by Richard Dudman, which — whatever else it does — defines lines of political demarcation as viewed from the vantage point of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era.

The Men of the Far Right include

Senator Strom Thurmond
Senator Barry Goldwater
National Review founder William Buckley, Jr.
John Birch Society founder Robert Welch
General Edwin A. Walker
McMarthy backer Gerald Smith
American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell

If I’m at first tempted to play the game of “Which of these things is doing its own thing?”, ot figure out which you cannot connect to any other, I am stalled because I do not really know the answer. Likewise, these divergent figures do not a coherent movement make, even a fledgling one. To see George Lincoln Rockwell placed next to Barry Goldwater is a wee bit jarring. But, I suppose I can connect them through the “5 Degrees of Seperation” ploy — scratching about for thematic ties if not actual ties. Easy enough to tie him to Thurmond; easy enough to tie him to Welch — from either direction there you can tie to Smith, and from there to Rockwell.
Goldwater appears today as the harbinger of the future. From the vantage point of 1962, we are working through the strands of a hyper patriotic marked anti-communism which lined Joseph McCarthy as a pre-eminent figure of the “Right” in Eisenhower’s America — and lines General Edwin A. Walker as a key figure, and we are sorting out the strains of the Depression-era politics — meaning that Gerald Smith was a sort of Ghost from the Past.
In a previous decade, Strom Thurmond would be characterized as relatively moderate on racial issues compared to his Southern Dixiecrat Governor compatriots. By the time he jumped ship to the Republican Party, flagged at the press conference with Barry Goldwater, his role had changed, though I suppose would end up being overshadowed by George Wallace and/or Lester Maddox.

These days, Barry Goldwater’s image has been refurbished somewhat, an erstwhile maverick crypto-liberal, albeit with libertarian predilications. The semi-haliography is partially the result of shifting political alliance shifting and resulting political issues, and partially historical amnesia. Never mind — nothing is ever one dimensional, even if we try to conceptualize things as such. He is cited as someone who represents the “old Republican Party”, a decent sort where the current crop has “lost his way” — which seems disingenuous enough, seeing as he would have been the figure placed where we place Bush and the neo-cons and theo-cons today, and belly-ache on how the Republicans have lost their way and gone crazy in nominating this nutcase–

who had the fancy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Maybe you’ve not followed the Hamas Children’s television show “Tomorrow’s Pioneers”, but when we last left out this guy:

Farfur — oddly enough never a subject of a Disney Corporation lawsuit — was beaten to death by an Israeli who wanted to take his land away.
Well, his cousin, Nahoul, has descended to carry on Farfur’s legacy, and to avenge his death.

The premier of Nahoul is available on Youtube, and it is a laugh riot, of sorts. But as I contemplate the militant Islamist message being imparted on the Youth, and as I look at the crude production values, I come back to this question.

COUSINS?

Bees, Scientific classification, from wikipedia:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hymenoptera
Suborder: Apocrita
(unranked) Anthophila ( = Apiformes)
Superfamily: Apoidea

MICE, Scientific Classification, from wikipedia:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Rodentia
Superfamily: Muroidea
Family: Muridae
Subfamily: Murinae
Genus: Mus
Linnaeus, 1758

CAN’T HAMAS EVEN GET RUDIMENTARY BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE RIGHT?

In other news, the word has been that the Bee is disappearing. Hamas, I guess, can be lauded for bringing the Bee back into the public sphere.

I’ve been wondering if I should delete from the subscription bar at my bloglines page the feed for the lewrockwellblogs, nothing wrong with the tedium from its anarcho-libertarian bent — even if I don’t think I’ve pulled anything from it in quite a while, its incessant fandom of Ron Paul has been irking me as a tedium overdone.

Maybe I will, but first I am sidelined by a phrase that one of those people used:

Antiwar Conservative Democrat (and former Republican) Sen. Jim Webb.

The story regards the big hoo-de-hah between Jim Webb and Lindsey Graham over Iraq which has received much attention.  Lindsey Graham should, by all rights, be one of those 40-60 percentilers that makes the difference between a filibusting Republican Party and some measure or other on Iraq (however pathetically weak a resolution it is that brings us to 60) — in the distant recesses of my mind, I remember the Washington Monthly magazine calling him the swing voter of that last Republican Congress — a conservative who bridged some moderate Democratic support.  Never mind all that, he appears to have entrenched himself on this particular issue — and now falls safely on the other side of that 40 percent line — the solid block of Republicans who can be trusted to line up behind Mr. 30 percent approval rating “William Kristol says that History will Vindicate Him” President Bush.
Jim Webb, meanwhile, has as interesting a pedigree as any Senator, and I noted that a pair of commenters from the Reason Magazine and American Conservative magazine high-fived each other at his election victory for holding up a “Libertarian” – “Paleo-Conservative” alliance.  But tricky beast, that Jim Webb.  He is, rhetorically, to my left on economic issues — and I say that noting that he compared our current economic disparity either unfavorably with or a little too one dimensionally with The Gilded Age of the end of the nineteenth century.  The rhetoric makes me question his continued allegiance to Ronald Reagan — used prominently in his Senate election bid, but I suppose I will just have to roll with it — and say that I imagine sometime in the future, the political crosswinds will shift, alliances will change, and he will be “on the other side” again.

It is the Kurt Vonnegut quotation again: “Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.”

But for the moment he isn’t “on the other side”.   At the moment, he is one of the most dynamic of Democratic Senators, and by all rights the point person for the party on Iraq and National Security.  I have not gotten a chance to watch the brohauhau with Lindsey Graham — full of tight-lipped references to their “friendship” and brittle and nasty references to each other’s current state of mind.

Political theater, much needed to keep as aware that the body politic isn’t stifled in the quest to appease the 40-60 percentiles of the Senate.

… yes, but Ron Paul won’t really have arrived until the sort of soft-core porn* web-video maverns who keep releasing those music videos of hot chicks slinging double entendres regarding the presidential candidates (And, yes, I just watched the new “Giuliani Girls versus Obama Girls” one, so I am no better than anyone else)…

… release one with some barely clad busty lady prances about for Ron Paul.

I think I see better how this “Chattering Class Consensus” on which candidate is legitimate and which is not works.

Interestingly enough, the Hillary one appears to be unaffiliated, which is strange because it is professional and with the same techniques and cues as the Obama video it was responding to.

I swear, these things make me want to go read somebody’s legalese-worded Health Care proposal. And it makes me appreciate Mike Gravel’s tossing of rocks into rivers.

…………………………………………………………………….

* In this case, a very broad definition that includes these cutesy, but titillating, things where the comment wowoweewa! this song was actually kinda catchy. and yes, i did masturbate to this video… eleventeen times! is not out of place, and probably — for that poster– true.

A quick check of ebay and I encounter a signed photograph of Mike Gravel, circa 1971.

I wonder if this is a situation where the seller has been sitting on this for years, and it just dawned on him that he can now cash in on “Gravel Mania”.  I note that the description fails to mention his current presidential bid, focusing instead solely on the Pentagon Papers.

It should come with a free rock, to tie the historical threads together.  I’m just saying.

I travel widely and it seems the opinion of the Australians and Europeans is that the United States cannot finish a military action. Our military is obviously the strongest in world but the policymakers do not have the stamina to finish the job. I’ve heard it said that we should have given the rebuilding job to the British on the grounds that they stuck in and fought to a workable solution during the Malay conflict. American history since World War II has confirmed the fact that in order to defeat the U.S. military all one has to do is hang on and continue to fight, because America will run from a protracted conflict. I suggest that this history is a threat to our national security as sure as Aldrich Ames.

I believe that the Iraq War was ill-advised and poorly executed, but I doubt that the difficulties of regime creation could have possibly been foreseen. I, like most Americans, would like to roll back the clock and do many things differently.

I think we all need to consider the fact that abandoning the situation now is to abandon all those who have fallen, American and Iraqi, et al, and condemn them to having died in vain. President Bush has lost the respect of the world; I hope our policymakers don’t let it be so with the rest of us. I would suggest a public relations campaign to win the hearts and minds back for this difficult task and let Gen. Petraeus do the job.

As the Seabee slogan says,”The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.” This should also be the slogan for our policymakers. The “Greatest Generation” did it in World War II. Are we incapable? JOHN WEBB Canby

I stopped reading at “but I doubt that the difficulties of regime creation could have possibly been foreseen.”  I took a deep breath, mumbled under my breath “Sure.  Pixie Dust for ‘Regime Creation'”, then flipped a coin as to whether to continue reading.

Slog through the argument about “not letting them die in vain”, which is not an argument because it doesn’t ask whether those dying to not let those die in vain are dying in vain or not.  I find myself to a simple question.

Why must it be that we must believe that America is capable of anything and everything?  That just seems implausible for me to believe — the strongest man on Earth being told to — finish the metaphor for me by naming a very heavy thing that he might not be able to pick up.  More pointedly, if it is capable of anything and everything, why is the road to accomplishing that assured as whatever course has been defined and being followed?  The strongest man on Earth being told to use his brute strength to thread a needle.
Does that make sense?

“Giving the rebuilding job to the British” may be precipitated less by our “inability to finish the job” than how we go about the job in the first place — which is a load of private contractor bonanzas, and not any real consideration of:

From “Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II,” a pocket guide published in 1943 by the United States Army:

That tall man in the flowing robe you are going to see soon, with the whiskers and the long hair, is a first-class fighting man, highly skilled in guerrilla warfare. Few fighters in any country, in fact, excel him in that kind of situation. If he is your friend, he can be a staunch and valuable ally. If he should happen to be your enemy — look out! Remember Lawrence of Arabia? Well, it was with men like these that he wrote history in the First World War. Yet you will also find out quickly that the Iraqi is one of the most cheerful and friendly people in the world. If you are willing to go just a little out of your way to understand him, everything will be okay.

— Harper’s magazine

Funny, it appeared in the Oregonian a week prior to this letter — in that somewhat obscure corner of the “Living” section, the “wacky” Edge column.  And it’s probably more insightful than whatever David Broder column is appearing in the Opinion page this morning.

Actually, this is one of the better letters to the Oregonian, based on the fact that it doesn’t appear to come straight from a form letter.