I see my last posting was on June 3.  Well, 20 days is a long time and there has been a notable amount of shaking up as the candidates, potential candidates, and non-candidates joustle for position in the Invisible Primary, three and a half years before the election.

#1:  Mitt Romney.  By default.  Wow.  This man has stayed right there at the top of this perch from the beginning.  When will he ever be pushed from his role as front-runner?
Mitt Romney has spent the past week making tedious and shrill statements excoriating Obama for not doing stuff to do stuff with the stuff doing in Iran.  It’s a lot of grand-standing for the public posture that every president since Nixon, with the exception of the last Bush, would hold, and every presidential nominee excepting McCain.

#2:  Sarah Palin.  This Mutual Aid pact with David Letterman played out to both Palin and Letterman’s benefit.  Palin gets the admiration of her legions of fans for thumping it to a Hollywood / New York celebrity.  Letterman gets to ensure that Conan O’Brien gains no traction.
Meanwhile, what’s going on in terms of actual Alaskan governance?  Alaskans can worry about that.
Hey!  She endorsed Rick Perry, Texan Segregationist!  What’s the significance of this move?  I don’t know.  Maybe about what…

#4:  Mike Huckabee … Huckabee’s endorsement of Marco Rubio in the Florida Senate nomination race  against the candidate that the RNC thinks might actually wins means. 
Incidentally, Mike Huckabee has also said some strong things against Obama’s measured reaction to the situation in Iran.  But when he says it, it sounds a little goofy.  The image of putting squirrels in popcorn machines doesn’t lend itself to Macho Talk.
Also notable is he appeared on an extended interview with Jon Stewart to talk Abortion.  Because nothing lends itself to comedy quite like the topic of Abortion.

#3:  Mark Sanford.  Big Enormous news.  Mark Sanford disappeared for a weekend.   He didn’t tell anyone where or what he was going or doing.  My first thought?  Went off to the woods.  Went hiking for a while.  Dropped out for a spell.  Big deal.
As it turned out, he … went off to the woods and went hiking.  I don’t know why my prediction was correct, and there are some who are still questioning the story.  If it makes you feel better, we can assume he went off on a tryst with a woman named Sally.  If that isn’t enough we can cut to the bottom of the page and believe the rather innocuous item that he went and had an affair with Charles Crist.  It doesn’t change the bothersome question of why I would care.  For the item of hypocrisy, it’s notable that he wandered off on Federally funded trailing — that’s as sensational as figuring out if he’s made any anti-gay comments and attaching it to a possible tryst with Charles Crist.
Anyway, everyone seems to be counting this out as the minute he lost his presidential footing.  But actually this should fit well with his constituency of “respectable” Ron Paul-ites.  He’s sent a signal that they’d love — that if elected president, Mark Sanford may just drop out of sight and not do anything for a two-year stretch.  That’s worth a vote for the anti-gummint people.

#5:  Tim Pawlenty.  Bowing down before the Religious Right.  And getting out of dodge before the going gets real tough.  And keeping Franken out of the Senate.  Is that enough for a presidential nomination?  Probably not.

#6:  Newt Gingrich.  Creeping toward his second apology — first time a back-track over Sotomayor, second time… well, never mind.  He’s not going to apologize to the Uighurs. 

#7:  Mitch Daniels.  Is he running?  He states categorically he’s not, and we’re beyond the age when a presidential candidate can pretend not to be running and then be nominated at the Convention, meaning if he wants to run he’ll have to say categorically so sometime in the next two years.  But that doesn’t stop the National Review from proclaiming his a real winner.  Because he’s so homely in that RV of his.

#8:  Bobby Jindal.  Has requested / ordered a “Bobby Jindal for President” group to cease and desist.  Wants to dampen the enthusiasm, I guess.  Now it’s time for his supporters to turn on him.

#9.  A tie.  The 178 House Republicans, 39 of the 40 Senate members, and the 17 Republican Governors not already listed.

#243.  John Ensign.  Yep.  That Ensign bottoms out at #243.  It’ll be interesting to see if he can recover from this set-back.

Sam Adams?  Not going anywhere.

This is hardly a note of triumphantalism, but:  Deal with it, everybody.

Addendum, 6-27:
I need to note that after a long absense of releasing rather lukewarm appraisals of the situation in Iran, due seemingly to Larouche being out of it and focused on “major speeches” in Europe — a bad sign for the post death of the leader — they’ve finally come out full bore against the British intransigence (the whole-hearted belief of “The Daily Elitist”.
Though, it’s a bit hard to imagine the “Support khamenei” line — or “The British must admit they killed Neda” –becoming a peition-gathering project, ala the current “Nancy Pelosi Sucks Eggs”, I gather the stance is enough to get the org some rumpus into Iranian State television (or round about there), for a full projection back to the cult about being a “American Statesman” figure — the better for a wikipedia edit.
…………………………………

Hand count.  How many people out there have been waiting to see when and where someone in the blogosphere or the web-o-sphere would take a Robert Dreyfuss article on the current events in Iran, and snip it next to parts of Robert Dreyfuss’s writings on Iran, perhaps from his book, from the 1979 to 1980 period?  (Today’s piece would appear in, for instance, The Nation — 1980’s Hostage to Khoemeni was published by the Lyndon Larouche Organization, as Robert Dreyfuss would have been the Secretary of State had Lyndon Larouche ever become president… no, don’t laugh.  Actually, yes — do laugh.)

(Crickets chirping.)
Okay.  Yes.  I am the only one.

Well, satisfactorily, here is my answer.  Right here.  This is the conspiratorial nattering which slides away inconvenient information, focuses on convenient threads, and seems to hold the American Clandestine government as the only actor that acts out there.  The Nation magazine is posited as a “gate-keeper”, a device to keep the Left in line, evidenced because Katrina vanden Heuvel’s father was International Rescue Committee which was a CIA plot.  Nonetheless, the author of this item apparently found The Nation valuable enough to continue a subscription until 2006, when it published a piece that followed the CIA line on the JFK assassination.

Actually, the Dreyfuss clippings here are from his 2006 book against his 1980 book.  And here’s the purpose of the Larouche organization.:

Surprisingly, though, the story of the CIA and British intelligence’s overthrow of the Shah is also told by Robert Dreyfuss in Hostage to Khomeini, 1980.   Dreyfuss rewrote the history of the Shah’s overthrow in The Devil’s Game, 2005.  In Hostage to Khomeini, Dreyfuss details how and why the CIA and the US military installed the Ayatollah and how Carter was manipulated into setting up the taking of the U.S. embassy — Dreyfuss even quotes the NYT to show how Carter knew that giving sanctuary to the Shah would lead to seizure of the embassy.  But now, as a Nation contributing editor, this time around Dreyfuss wrote, “Never did a revolution catch the United States more by surprise than did the one that swamped Iran in 1978-1979.” p. 214.
 
Why the change?  The obvious and most reasonable conclusion is that Dreyfuss is an intelligence agent or asset.  Dreyfuss’s earlier book was published by New Benjamin Franklin House, a Lyndon LaRouche affiliate.  One of the functions LaRouche served for the USG intelligence community was to advertise obscurely a covert operation that they dearly wished to keep secret, but to wrap it with the noxious LaRouchian ideology and nimbus so that anyone else respectable who revealed it could be smeared and dismissed as touting a crazy LaRouchian idea.

The one good thing that can be said with this to lend it some credence there  is that it is written in the past tense.  A second “say… what did Dreyfuss say round about 1979?” item is here.  (What did he say?  That the polot to bing down the Shah was orchestrated by, in particular British.  This is Larouche, after all.  Which I suppose makes some sort of conspiratorial sense in the way of Khamenei’s recent “British evilest of all” statement — the 1953 coup was encouraged by Churchill, had been rebuked by Truman.)

The topic of Larouche remains a bothersome one.  To have something of such irrelevance and then to peek into the natterings of the involved and their rather skewed perspective, trying at once to see where they are coming from … is a little disorienting.  I refer to the comments, and we can thread this roughly from  jimdeblasi to (as of this moment, and as of the 20th) MR76 at this Seattle PI story.  And it is a rather unremarkable story.  But comment by comment:

The La Rouche organization is an anti gay hate group.  With all due respect to the contours of the California Initiatives of 1986 and 1988, and the uses of the word “faggotry”, that’s a rather narrow classification for the org.
I already mocked Will I Am Tell’s comment in my last post.  He continues with a new comment under a different “question” moniker with such as:
Let me tell you first that I’m not a full out Larouche “supporter”.
Steve?  Is that you?
when I read the comments on this blog, it reminds me of something. I picture an article posted here, lets say it was posted in 1950 in alabama. (I know, no internet then, bear with me!) and it was about a black man who was hit in the streets, causing the white sherrif to arrest the white perpetrater for violating his civil rights. The comments on the blog that follow are “stupid n–ger shouldn’t be walking down that street in broad daylight.” and “damn n–ger was out there to rape a white woman!” and, “Why they chargin him with hate crimes, we all know n–gers ain’t human!”
In other words, those posting on this blog ought to be ashamed of tthemselves and their bahavior. Your attitudes are worse than racism, and you reveal what existential wretches you really are.

We are getting a rather unique perversion of the word “hate crime”.  Or maybe it’s not so unique, and every Cult of Personality deem themselves a necessarily protected class due to perceived historical persecution.

Silverchild, a name I recognize from my years of scanning these things, chimes in with:  Look at the BILE coming out of the minds and mouths of most of the folks commenting above- against LaRouche. It’s all media brainwashing. […]  As for the jerk who threatened the young LaRouche supporters, he has no right to threaten people or to rip down their signs-if he disagrees, he should create a movement and set up his own table.
Maybe it’s media brainwashing to go back to the article these comments are directed toward and pointing the rather minor nature of the reported threat?
But the Grand Dragon of Delusion comes with the final comment:

I’ve heard that back in the 1970s that Communist Party assaulted LaRouche organizers and that LaRouche responded with a self defense campaign called “Operation Mop Op.” They fought street battles with the Communists until the assaults ended. When LaRouche was arrested, the government sent 300 special ops police. You’d have to be an idiot to pick a fight with these people. No wonder the man threatened from his car and drove off!

So that’s the Larouche sequence of events on that one.  Bizarre for that item, is that it’s popped up in the wikipedia editing attempts.  Coincidentally, I assume.  But, if I may offer an explanation with Oscam’s Razor in hand, the man threatened from his car and drove off because it was an item of flippancy and a gut-level emotional response to the Obama Hitler Mustache and not, in the scheme of his life, a matter of much importance.  See, for instance, this reaction — just important enough to rip off one quick blog post.

Frequent blog poster “whitemale” shares his conversion story:

When Lyndon Larouche gave historical webcast in the month of July 2007, he pronounced at the time the stock market was at 14,000 that: “The Anglo-Dutch Financial Monetary system will die…”,
I nearly became overwhelmed with fright and fear because I never ever heard any forecaster speak with such utter certaincy and conclusiveness and surity. […]  I thought immediately to myself, “Lyndon Larouche must be a prophet or a majician with majical powers”, but there was more.
I note that he’s not there yet, as evidenced by allowing a few other experts into his purview:
You can call me a ‘tin-foiled’ hat wearer all you want for listening to peoples like Lyndon Larouche, Alex Jones and others but so far, most of everything that they have been warning about for years and years has come true.
As previous posts from other commenters told, people like Jones, Beck, and Paul are mere populists with no ideas.  This man needs to attend one these meetings discussed by this Berlin traveller to get his mind straight on that matter.

AND finally, in genocidal, Malthusian, energy plan news.  Also, in that vein.

And in a completely different vein.  Quite funny.  I guess The Abominable won.

According to wikipedia’s entry on Russian President Dmitry Medvedev:

Medvedev’s election continued an alternating pattern of hairy and bald Russian leaders dating back at least to Alexander I of Russia.

Glad wikipedia has the ability to shephard the vital information from the less than vital.  Oddly enough, the entries for, say for instance, Lenin or Stalin or Adropov or Tsar Nicholas fail to state the fact that they continued the tradition of alternating hairy and bald Russian leaders.

Quick!  Name this Politicians!

If you said, John Ensign, you’re more knowledgable about putting names to US Senators than I was a day ago.

I find it difficult to care in any way, shape, or form about the revelations of John Ensign’s affair, and the attempted cover-up, and the attempted extortion.  I don’t even really care enough to not even care.  But something that I need to suggest about this bit of political wisdom:

The political coverage about John Ensign’s scandal keeps referring to its damage on John Ensign’s possible 2012 presidential candidacy.

Huh.

So far as I can tell, speculation about a “possible” John Ensign presidential bid came to the forefront when he ducked into Iowa to make a speech.

The effect of the low bar of presidential speculation is such that, for instance, this “Invisible Primary” feature on the Atlantic website (Marc Ambinder’s Politics blog) includes such “presidential timber” figures who will never in a million years actually end up Presidential nominees and will spend their career probably in the House and perhaps into the Senate — as Eric Cantor and Mike Pence.

Also people like John Ensign get mentioned.

I think at this point every Republican politician everywhere might as well be lumped into the “Invisible Primary” race, and assumed or presumed to be either running or ready to be drafted, because they stand on the ready to take the Republican Party in precisely the place it needs to go toward electoral victory.  It’s a shame that John Ensign’s run has been derailed, because of all the things he brought to the table.

Such as…
And also…
Then there’s Ensign’s great ability to…

AND —

Can he read a teleprompter?

The most bizarre tweet I saw rambling out of the mass of Iranian twitterings referenced, of all things, the assualt of Waco and the Branch Davidians.  I was puzzled by this, until I learned that it was Khamenei’s brief against — of all people — Hillary Clinton in his “We will release the Hounds” speech.

If it’s safe to make American-centric allusions to the events in Iran right now, the American who best personifies the Crackdown– and the Spirit of Sheer Brutal Force — is

Bull Connor.

The historical analogies are fractuous, though.  I am pretty satisfied with “Berlin Wall versus Tiananmen Square”, because it offers up a rough dichotemy of success or failure.  The other item swirling around is that a successful Mousavi would be equivalent Gorbachev.  This stems from the irony that we’re sitting here in America, basically on the side of a 1979 Revolutionary promising to uphold the Isalmic Revolution — an irony which if you had gone back in time to 1979 and told Americans that in thirty years would be the case, as we sang our Beach Boy song parodies about “Bombing Iran” and as the saw America decried in Iran as the “Great Satan”, you’d have been called insane.

But the worm of history turns.  I mean, we’re not even the Great Satan anymore — Great Britain is the Great Satan!!

A Gorbachev suggests there would have to be a Yeltsin.  There is no Yeltsin.  And would this follow that there would then also be a Putin in the wait down the road?
The other possibility is Khruschev after Stalin.  Though in this case, Stalin would be in the offing with a crushed Revolution — stronger strings of Repression to make sure this doesn’t happen again, a more totalitarian state.

Maybe Khamenei can come back and push America into “Great Satan” territory a bit more than he did on Friday.  Reference something besides Waco.  I don’t know — what are the other cause celebres of the American Militia movement?

It occurs to me that if the Pepsi Cola corporation could get away with it, they would pluck out images from Tehran and use it in their current ad campaign (or the one for the past year) — the one which includes a hand reaching out past the smattering Berlin Wall, and a hippy drinking a can of Pepsi.

There isn’t too much historical legitimacy for the Berlin Wall Pepsi framing.  While the Cola War proponent of the of the Cold War had Pepsi signing its deal with the Soviet Union and swiftly flooding that emerging market, Coke made sure to stamp East Germany with the first bottling plant.  After all, Coca Cola was illegal in East Germany.  Which would have made it merely a subversive product, thrown over the wall during the Cold War:
Coca-Cola was deemed illegal by the East German authorities who considered it a “symbol of imperialist power”. The drinks company hit back in the Sixties by encouraging its managers to throw bottles of Coke over the Berlin Wall into the east.

Likewise, the problem for the hippy?  Pepsi was marketeted thoroughly squarishly back in the 1960s (even as it did its first iteration of their youth-focus for the baby boomers with the tagline “For those who think young”), and Richard Nixon was closely associated with the corporation.

But we’ll have to wait twenty years for Pepsi to ahistorically co-opt Iran’s Revolt, with a new variation of “Choice of a New Generation”.  In the meantime, it may be a good idea to they bring the Berlin Wall ads into heavier rotation for contemporary events synergy.

An East Coast 9/11 Truth activist, Greg Hoover, is suing Glen Beck and Fox News for defamation of character.

A nice way of getting attention, I suppose, and its important to him/them to differentiate himself/themselves from a lone Holocaust shooter, who happens to believe in a government conspiracy regarding the fall of the WTC towers.  But the lawsuit looks pretty baseless.

But this does look like a double-Sister Souljah item, for two talk show radio hosts.  In recent months, Glen Beck has been compared to Alex Jones for stuff like this.  He wants to be crazy, but not that crazy.  Alex Jones praised Glen Beck for some of the same paranoid poundering, but has had to do some rebuffing… lest he lay some measure of irrespectability onto Glen Beck.

Glen Beck doesn’t want to be associated with the 9/11 Truthers who populate Alex Jones’s milieu.  Alex Jones wants to safely propel Glen Beck to the margins of some gatekeeper role in establishing for the Elite the boundaries of respectable debate (one that doesn’t allow for the FEMA Camps and whatnot).  The better to champion Greg Hoover’s cause  to dispense of goddamned Glen Beck as he proceeds to interview the man most famous for the “world run by Lizard People” theory…

… I bring up David Icke rather gruituously for the minor purpose of posting this and this.

 

 

 As you see, Stephen Colbert and the members of the Lyndon Larouche Organization have come to the same comedic routine.  It’s worth comtrasting how the two handled the joke.  The Colbert bit took less than ten seconds, and what you see in this image is the conceit of the mock – O’Reilly asking “Did you put up the Hitler Mustache image?” — meaning even in this parody he recognizes it as an absurd parody.  It’s taken off, and he moves on the Obama Fly-Swatting story.  The LYMers, on the other hand, are taking the joke on the road, and standing on street-corners for hours on end (as oppsoed to a few seconds) with the “Hitler Mustache” placard. 

There is at least one outraged reaction against Colbert’s image — a bit different than the Seattle reaction.  As for the Larouchies, when I saw them standing in front of a Portland mall, they didn’t have the overhanging Larouche image that you see in the image shown at the top of this post.  I suggest that this might clarify a problem for them.  For some not entirely apt reason, there are people running into the Mustached Obama image who will assume this is a neo-nazi organization.  The giant image of Larouche will clarify iit, “Oh.  Okay.  It’s even lamer.  It’s the Larouchies.”

A bit of sympathy, of sorts.  Unlike the Obama Monkey “double standard” conundrum, which is a violation due to the historical nature  of considering blacks as sub-human — though in the famed April of 2008 speech Larouche more than violated the “same insult leveled at Bush” line by explicitly running to the racialist problems of miscegenation — the “same as Hitler” line is just too second nature as mindless invective.  If Carter, Bush I, Gore, and Cheney Can be imposed with a Hitler Mustache or compared to Hitler, why can’t Obama?

I suppose there’s the problem of Hitler’s Master Race conflicting with the message.  The need to arrive at a higher ground in the way of piddling political invective is shown with how this rather innocuous youtube video of Obama’s fly-swat brings out “n”-word practioners in the comments section (which I saw flooding the page 1 yesterday — today, it’s buried a bit deeper) .

Yes, I wonder what former Civil Rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson , now in her elderly years, bizarre Larouche validator, has to say about such an image.

The good news for the Larouchies, I suppose, is that the Obama’s Care plan’s path through the Senate has hit some set-backs this week.  This has nothing to do with the whole campaign of wandering to street corners and putting Obama Mustached pictures up, but the delusion that it does can safely fill their mind.  Likewise, I can almost imagine Larouche (a big fan of Stephen Colbert, I hear) might just assume that Colbert’s handful of seconds of showing an image of Obama with a mustache is evidence of some influence or other.
Comments from these postings, and a couple “talk radio pundits”, showing wherefor the Larouchies are aligned right now:

whitemale08 (???)  People who are smart and can connect-the-dots, can see on the horizon, a British Empire of Worthless Derivatives and Credit-Default Swaps Neo-Fuedalism and Serfdom posed as Malthusian Parasites and Ticks

I have my doubts that the campaign for a green google logo — for google to show solidarity with the Iranian protesters supporting Mousavi — is well guided.  The Iranian soccer players have a better leg up in this regard — being Iranian.  I tend to think Andrew Sullivan (one of a handful of go-tos for aggregation of the story) is playing a narcistic game by throwing his well – travelled blog green and urging others to follow — but at least his is big enough to have someone, somewhere in Iran, notice and throw out a tweet pointing that one out.

Me?  You desire for me to throw up some green to show Solidarity for — erm? — ironically enough, we’re all loving the man promising to keep the 1979 Islamic Revolution intact from nefarious forces.

All right.  Here’s a great box of green!

And here’s a small green frog!

And some grass to show solidarity!

Don’t ever tell me that at this historic moment, I didn’t do something to further the cause of Human Liberty and Universal tenants of Democracy!