I think I’ve seen this camper before, stocked to the barricades with bumper-stickers.  The most visible is at the top of all four sides:  “9/11 Was An Inside Job”.

Beyond that, there’s “End Wars for Oil and Or Israel”, “9// Controlled Demolition”, “US Troops out of the Middle East!”, “Arrest Bush Cheney Pearl Ashcroft Rice Rumsfeld Powell 9/11 Wars Crimes Lies” (Time to update to the new administration.)  “Bush Rage Allowed”.  “No War on Iraq” “No War on Iran” “IMPEACH” “I Love My Country But Fear my Government”.  “One Nation Under Guard”.
This is one side of the camper.  I didn’t jot down the other side.

And then we throw in these two:

“Ron Paul for President” and “Dennis Kucinich for President”.

Huh.  I guess we do get this from time to time.  But is the optimum ticket Paul / Kucinich or Kucinich / Paul?

I suppose the owner of this camper takes the vast arraignment of disagreements between Paul and Kucinich over the scope of government welfare and beauracracy as meaningless.  The areas of agreement are almost meaingless too, save a point of departure to 9/11 Truth.

I guess by making her announcement on one of the biggest News Dump Day of the year, the day before Independence Day Weekend, Sarah Palin foregoes the pontificating of the chattering class.  The “A Team” on the Cable “News” networks are on vacation, and the “B Team” is probably pushed aside for various to be unwatched Patriotic Specials.

But there’s not too much commentary to give.  What little I see is pretty obvious:  “It’s hard to see how this helps a presidential run.”  You think?  That is the point, I gather.  To speculate further, I sort of assume something is coming down the pike that would make that a moot point:  is something about to blow up in her ethics investigation, perhaps?  The wildest of the conspiracy theories regarding Trig’s birth on the verge of being proven true?  I assume we’ll find out sooner or later, and probably sooner.

If it’s not too bad, I assume she has some sort of future on a conservative speakers’ circuit, and the type of cruise ship tour which smittened Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard gang that helped push Palin into her year in the political spot-light.

In the end, I’m left wondering what the year of Sarah Palin meant.  She probably raised McCain’s vote percentage by giving a base something they could vote for, even as it negated the most intellectually honest nonideological line of attack against Obama (one year in the Senate before manuevering a Presidential run?  Really?) and thus effectively capping his support somewhere below the 50 mark.  What does it say that she had that base and how does one dice that item of Identity politics?  My lingering impression is the SNL sketch which was an unaltered and unexaggerated enactment of her Katie Couric interview, none the worse for comedy.  She now fades away.  We no longer have Sarah Palin to kick around — unlike Nixon.

Okay.  I’m a couple of days later in changing my calendar page from June to July, so I guess I’ll do so now.

Hey.  July 4 is tomorrow.  Independence Day!   Great!

Hm.  I wonder if August’s photograph will be the one that went around the Internet last election season.  Flag based, focused on the season.

(Photograph from the 2009 Sarah Palin calendar taken from Andrew Sullivan, who I think cited it from somewhere else.  And, yes, it is nauseating.  But no worse than the 2009 “Joseph Biden Calendar”, I suppose.)

This is Garfield’s congregation.  Which puts into perspective Garfield’s diary excerpt the week before calling a sermon “a very stupid sermon on a very great subject”.

He who studies the movement of American society cannot fail to see that we are under a reign of selfishness in striking contrast to 40 years ago.  As one newspaper said this morning, office-seeking, office-hunting, and looking after spoils have become the main object of life.  Each man is trying his best to crowd the others out.  We are having disgraceful political fights, and we may expect to see these scenes intensified.  Money, money is the craze all over the land; get money, no matter how, is the popular cry.  Why?  Because pleasure is the chief end of man.  Such is the tone of American society today, and it grieves me to say it.  Its apostles are lionized.  The men who are stabbing American morals and constitutional government to the vitals are held up as emamples to follow and admire.  I say to you that the President’s assassination is directly chargeable to this philosophy of good living that is pervading the minds of the public today, and assassinations will be multiplied unless we call a halt.  I predict that in less than 25 years, if matters go as they are going, we will have the Roman Arena in this country, and I do not think it improbable that gladiatorial combat will be restored.

— Rev. M. Harbison, visiting for Rev Power, Church of Disciples

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Our much boasted universal suffrage, our power and our shield, as in our enthusiasm we are want to term it, is not without its drawbacks, not without its dangers to our Nation.  I believe in popular suffrage to the full; but in the name of intelligence and virtue and common honesty, not say decency, I am against the system that places unrestricted power in the hands of the paupers and criminals whom Europe is pouring upon our shores by tens of thousands.
— Reverend Dr. JP Newman

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Philadelphia Press
We have not yet become so Mexicanized that assassination is employed as a political weapon.  This crime, which plunges a whole Nation into sorrow, is the deed of one maddened fanatic, crzed it may be, by political excitement and wrought into a morbid state by imaginary wrongs, but representing nothing but his own insanity.
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Pastors through, some more news items.
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Washington Star
Laying aside its effects upon the incumbent of that high place and those immediately connected with him, and without attaching much importance to the character or purpose of the murderer, the fat that two Presidents have fallen by the bullet of an assassin, raises the question whether the simple surroundings and quiet modes of life heretofor adopted by our Presidents are consistent with the genious of our institutions and becoming to the head of a Republican form of government are, after all, wise and sufficiently safe.  If the Chief Executive of the Nation is to be a target for the bullet of lunatics, disappointed aspirants for office, or political malcontents, it will be necessary to surround the office and its incumbent by more formal and efficient means of protection than have yet been devised or thought necessary.
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And you got to love the British Tories!

London Standard
It would almost seem as if a wave of revolutionary ruffianism is passing over the world.  We are not alone in suffering from its violence.  It is not England only, nor yet only Russia, only Germany, only Italy, that feels the shock.  The American Republic itself has just experienced its malevolence in a peculiarly painful manner.  It matters not whether the assassin of President Garfield had or had not associates in his hateful enterprise.  His act was revolutionary, was ruffianly, and was stamped with that vicious character of personal vengeance which marks all the attempts of the party of disorder.  They do not even aim at a rough sort of justice.  All they seek to do is to kill somebody or other, to alarm a great number of persons, and to disconnect society.  They seek to establish a reign of terror by spasmodic explosions, by irregularly recurring strokes of the dagger, by all and every of the fitful expedients of vague and general vengeance.  The American people are much too shrewd to be the dupes of the blatant adventurers who seek to raise a skirmishing fund to put an end to the tyranny of Great Britain.  They know thoroughly well that if England is suffering from any disease or any cause whatever, it is not from too little liberty, but from too much; not from the cankor of tyrnny, but from the enfeeblement of that just authority and those legitimate restraints, without the cooperation of which society never yet was held together.  Knowing this, and reflecting upon it, they will hardly refrain from drawing the conclusion that what is our case today may be theirs tomorrow.

Apparently stung by the net effect of sparodic blogs reporting, in combination of mock and irritation, meetings with Larouche card-table deployments, LPAC has stuck this report — a distillation of some scattered comments into something of a rallying call.  It is… funny, in that moribud way all of these things tend to be funny.

Generation that Fought the Nazis: LaRouche Is Right on Obama!
July 1, 2009 (LPAC)—Lyndon LaRouche’s webcast call to arms on fighting Barack Obama’s Nazi policy on medical treatment, profoundly touched the souls of his generation—those who fought in World War II, or lived through it. But many boomers and younger people were protective of Obamamania, and fearful of what their “friends” and peers will think about calling Obama’s plan “Nazi.”
Among the older people, whether it was those who attended the Washington-area meeting where LaRouche spoke, the regional meetings, or watched it on the web, or learned about it in the field, there was a powerful response. At a literature table in the New Jersey region, an older woman was at our literature table, getting briefed on the LPAC fight, and looking at our signs on Obama and Hitler. She looked over the LPAC literature, and exclaimed, “You’re right, his policy is Nazi.” Then she pulled up her shirtsleeve to reveal the numbers tattooed on her arm, put there when she was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland at the age of 9.
At the Washington, DC-area event, an Italian-American man from Philadelphia, said, “Lyn has to win. I know, I lived under Mussolini. Lyn is right.” Two men in their 80s had the same response. One, at a field site in Los Angeles said, referring to Obama and the Administration, “I’m 80 years old. They’re out to kill me!” Another World War II veteran, attending the New Jersey office showing of the webcast, said, “I’m in trouble … I’m over 80 … they want to be rid of people like me.” In Chicago, a 79-year-old man, who had retreated into religion from politics, listened by phone to Lyn’s webcast, and later said, “That speech should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country! What he said about the British is absolutely true! In fact, everything he said is true! He’s the smartest man in the world!!”

Hm.  Frankly, they could play the “Current events remind person alive during WW2 of Nazi Germany” game since at least Nixon, probably before.  A note to the family of the elderly persons referenced in this item:  it may be time to take over some of their financial decisions.

Granted, if one cares one probably has read these things, but I draw your attention to the factnet posts of  Hylozoic Hedgehog  under the “Old Mole Files” and the “New Mole Files”.  I gather part of the purpose here is carrying on an argument against  Dennis King (“quit lying” about “Larouche’s ideological orientation”), such as I’m left with the belief that it promised more than it delivered on that score.

I assume this was the purpose of putting in bold type and adding a paranthetical “emphasis added” to the phrase in Larouche’s stated purpose of finding “Leninist Boomers”.  Of course, a secondary purpose is to put the context of the org as being a forty year history of yanking a small cadre of “Leninist Boomers” around in various fashions, which I guess would argue for the cult orientation over any ideological consideration.

To review how the “left” and “right” strait-jacket is reconciled, here are two quotations from Tim Wohlforth in his memoir The Prophet’s Children:

“In fact it is quite remarkable how the ‘new’ Larouche organizes his followers in a Leninist cadre fashion, drives them with a vision of the historic tasks and the necessity of their actions and successfully reaches layers of society with “transitionl” slogans that appeal to economic needs or old prejudices.”

“The Larouchites began mouthing anti-Semitic phraseology, promoting the nuclear program and arms industry, advocating a Star Wars defense, and baiting gay people.  The old Trotskyite, a member of my own small organization, had emerged as a Fascist!”

I hesitate to say Wohlforth over-stepped his bounds in referring to various mainstream causes of the 1980s into the realm of “fascist”, though the “gay baiting” in particular may have the “matters of degree” on a one dimensional “left / right” spectrum.  The “anti-semitic phraseology” is what remains constant.  Also I wonder what “layers of society” he refers to here — surely the elderly people in the LPAC release and the similar credit fraud victims of the 1980s, and the college aged recruits, and a larger number I guess anyone who’s quoted a single line from Leon Strauss in the past eight years and talked and blamed Hitler on Prescott Bush over the past two decades.

As for the Nazis?  Well, we can move further afield from King, who  — cavalier about posting a photograph of the man’s arms out-stretched though he may be (ironically transforming Larouche into an ordinary politician).  I have no opinion on Plato and his “Golden Souls”, except that Plato’s Republic has served as the rationalization for a number of despots.  I have no opinion on Nazi Space swirls, except to point to nazi courtship.  And I’m hard pressed to figure out what else the org’s effect, outside its orbit of spending membership’s lives [Jeremiah Duggan the extreme example], has been besides stirring these conspiratorial items into public discourse.
Across the spectrum of what it means for Larouche to be defined as a nazi:  On the far edge you have European’s “researchers” and “reporters” who insist to him that they know they all read Mein Kampf and sit before portraits of Hitler.  An edge inward and you have this admitted tin-foil hat wearer’s conspiracy theory that the org was financed by fleeing Nazis’ Gold and there we have Dave Emory’s program which sticks him in as part of that “Underground Reich” (though, Emory would also hold forth about Prescott Bush on that score.)  At the opposite end, “European” had denied any existence of anti-semitism until recently.

Bear with me.  There will be at least two more posts of this type.  Relating to the news coverage and debate surrounding the assassination of James Garfield, from July of 1881… on a couple months.  Why?  It seems to provide provides some tangeantal historical context for current debate surrounding political violence, and the problems of where to place blame and what to fault.  The debate seems to reverberate and rhyme.

Next post for this mini-series, when I get around to it.: a couple of preachers.  Fall of Rome and all that, unless we change our wicked ways.
New York Tribune
A second president lies stricken down by assassination.  President Lincoln was murdered, not by rebellion, but by the spirit which gave the rebellion its force.  President Garfield has been shot down, not by a political faction, but by the spirit which a political faction has begotten and used.  But for that spirit, there was hardly a man in this country who seemed at sunrise more safe from murderous assault. […]
“Was he crazed by political excitement?,” then, as many say?  At what point, if ever, did the madness of faction become the madness of irresponsibility?  Do the leaders of factions ever intend all the mischief which grows from the wild and desperate spirit which they create, feed, and stimulate week after week?  Is it not their constant crime against self-government that, by kindling such a spirit, they send weak or reckless men beyond the bounds of right or reason? […]
As a “Stalwart of Stalwarts” his passion was intense enough to do the thing other reckless men had wished were done.  So the assassin Booth put into a bloody deed the malignant spite of thousands of beaten rebels.  His deed stands in history as the cap-sheaf of the rebellion.  So the spirit of faction which fired the shots of yesterday gave in that act the most complete revelation of its real character.
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Richmond Dispatch
Well is it for the man who sped the bullet of the assassination that he did not do it in a Southern city; for hot Southern blood would have terminated his life without waiting to learn whether he was a maniac or not — as he was, we take it for granted.
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Louisville Courier Journal
It is fortunate that the hand which dealt that blow was not that of a Southern man, because if it had been we should have from one end of the land to the other a Stalwart outcry against the South.  The author of this dire crime claims to be a Stalwart, and what is there in the character of the man in whose name and interest the deed was done and whose desperate fortunes it saves from destruction to rescue them from a suspicion which would, by a change in that author’s nativitiy, firmly attach itself to the most innocent people?  Mrs. Surratt was hanged on less circumstantial evidence than occurs to the mind as to Roscoe Conkling and Chester A Arthur.  The vile nature of the contest at Albany, the despicable rancor of the combatants, and the base methods adopted by both parties, render murder as likely a weapon as any other; and while we should be slow to accuse anybody, and prayerful that the man Guiteau is not the instrument of a conspiracy, we should not be eager to assume the innocence of a body of political wretches whose hands are stained by every other crime — not preciptate in wishing to hurry into power a hand of bandits and plunderers who may have planned this assassinatino as their last resort.

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Atlanta Constitution
The news is unquestionably startling, but no thoughtful man will deny that it is the natural and appropriate outcome of the political insanity which goes by the name of Republicanism.  Frenzy and fanaticism are the streams which have fed this remarkable organization from the first.  The fury with which the Southern people have been pursued, the stupendous fraud of 1876, the acknowledged corruption of 1880, the tremendous struggle between the factions, and the marvelous greed for office, all go to show the life of an individual, even though the individual be the Republican President of the United States, will not be allowed to stand in the way of those who are seeking place and power.  There are thousands of Republicans in the North today as insane as the “Stalwart of the Stalwarts” who shote the President, and as ready to be made tools of.  There are thousands of Republicans who would welcome a period of anarchy that would place in control of affairs the restless and revolutionary spirits who are determined at all hazards to control the Government.