I saw the first inchings of the whitewashed “better back then” image for liberals and assorted opponents of the New Republicans toward the presidency of George W Bush a few months ago in a blog post from Andrew Sullivan — damning the light intellectual heft of Sarah Palin by evoking past conservative and Republican luminaries with an “even George W Bush” — parenthetically, mind you, but it was a first step.

We had seemed to got past that point with Nixon.  He had started to be touted as an ironic “last liberal president”.  Notwithstanding the willingness of Nixon to have his name blurbed on best selling books warning of dire consequences to Earth’s ecology, I don’t think people quite comprehend how bad Nixon was — and I refer to his Domestic Policy here, and not even cultural matters on that score.  His economic policy was short-sighted to the point of the 1972 election cycle, leaving Jimmy Carter to hold the bag or inherit the wind.  One of the Worst Presidencies Ever, however you slice it.

We’re getting the reinvented image of the Presidency of Bill Clinton.  “I never thought I’d say this, but…” say the repetitive talk radio audience, “Obama is making me wish we had Clinton back!”  It’s mostly that ahistorical attitude — the partisan animus of the moment, and there is less to invest emotionally in hating Clinton as against Obama.  To the degree that their hate should correspond with my love, I suppose it’s true:  Obama is better than Clinton — notwithstanding he’s a disappointment on some scores and not a disappointment on others, and though Obama has a much larger array of problems confronting him than Clinton.

Still, go back to 1996, and the presidential debate with Bob Dole taking a quick job through his working relationships and the honesty and integrity of George McGovern — a proud liberal, not like Bill Clinton who’s hiding behind his nonliberal record, and who worked on McGovern’s campaign, by the way.  Skip to today and you will find Newt Gingrich claiming McGovern held American Values– not like you know who.

And then we had that curious example of the Weekly Standard a few years back claiming Harry Truman as an heir apparent to the cause of Conservativism.  Foreign Policy wise, mind you, but that was all that mattered.  As it were, the Cold War was evolving, it took Eisenhower and Kennedy to evolve it past the haggard beginnings that Truman had to work with.   But I’d like to hope the ghost of Truman with Health Care would end that claim.  It’s evocation by convenience.  We’ll see it with Clinton sooner or later — the next step in that process that began with Bush at that odd Sullivan post damning Palin and the talk radio calls wishing Obama were Clinton.  Mind you, Clinton has no beef with Bush, as we see in him wanting nothing to do with a “death match face-off.”  All a game.

Glenn Beck is turning into Lyndon Larouche.  Witness.:

Beck: I told you over a year ago, please read about the Weimar Republic. Read about the end of the Republic of Germany, Weimar, before it fell into the hands of the Nazis. We are facing the same kind of financial questions that they faced! It was unsustainable! And for the first time in American history we started to monetize our debt! That’s when I told you, please read about Weimar, because they did it! And it ends the same way every single time it has been tried.

Larouche has been saying that for the past five decades, though, of course, it comes from a place in conspiratorial fear and is not all that original. In paranoid fantasy right and left, it’s always 5 minutes to Hitler.  But, Beck gets a bit weirder still.  The cadence of the rant that follows does bare a resemblance to the various Larouche items.

Hm.  Regarding the upcoming Rachel Brown campaign to unseat Barney Frank, supposing for a moment that it’d be imagined as Norman Rockwell’s famous painting or maybe we can go with…

Nah.  That gives the campaign too much credit.  According to their lpac releases, where they had “lead a mass strike” in those teaparty protests, they are now “leading a mass strike” in the California University Student protests.  From their literature:

The obstacle throughout all of the actions has been the small-mindedness of leaders and activists alike. The mental disease that exists, preventing the Mass Strike from thinking bigger, must be overcome.

Currently the cult is making a big deal about “Brainwashing” from society.  It’s a tactic of control to force them against the outside world, surely, unaware of their existence, rolling through political revolts of one kind and another without their assistance.  The googling is now showing a very small trickle, probably not worth pointing toward.  But here’s Some bleeding over from the org regarding the tacking back to the focus on “Brainwashing”, from the cult onto the web.

See this forum posting here.
Which, I guess, is this man’s attempt at getting to advocates of Neuro Linguistic Programming.  At first blush, it looks like a cult to me, or money making scam.  Some quick googling shows it to be it reguarly compared to the concepts and techniques of Scientology.  I see some analysis of the construction of the wikipedia article seen here. But I note that when I clipped from this forum, these were the most current hreads on the forum directory.

Is this an example of cult mentality aligning across two different spots?

This caught my attention, LaRouche does a fantastic job of eliciting and exhibiting his own time mapping and time based values… not everyone would agree with him, but this very clearly demonstrates (from one perceptual position) how time awareness shapes identity… LaRouche steps up to the podium about 2 minutes into this presentation..

So what has our Neuro Lingustic Programmed Larouche recommender been saying in these forum parts?

I would add to this that, IME, many NLP people simple lack the stomach to look into the yawning gates of hell. They want a comfy, rosy, conflict free idealized world, like a cozy lounge where they…

That does sound familiar from the Larouche cult, claiming a member is “not up for the fight” and whatever.  But to one item, for “Ritual Abuse” we get this.

WTF is this ? Green Bomb programming ? A google check on this story shows zero confirmation, zero follow up… sounds more like a case of projective psychosis you encounter in the extensive conspiracy/Illuminati/New World Order/Kennedy Assasination/Purity Of Essence/mercury amalgam dental fillings as UFO detectors/giant eyeball in the sky/twitchy paranoia literature…

I don’t even know anymore.
Anyway, that isn’t much, but the only other presence of Larouche I see for the week consists of repostings like this and this and this andHowie G’s blogging.
Also this complimentary comment to this old story.

WickedPissa  WOW! In the Peoples Republic of Newburyport even. My hats off to the protesters, now watch the moonbats comments follow. He is being exposed daily for the fraud he is. I hope we make it until next years midterms.

Recommendation to WickedPissa: Pick your political allies more wisely.

In other, more important news: the  Transcript of Nov. 5, 2008 proceeding before the U.K. High Court re Erika Duggan’s request for a fresh inquiry into the death of her son Jeremiah and her “skeleton argument” filed by Mrs. Duggan’s counsel last year are available online here.

………………….

And now, Page 3.

Mr Roberts grew up in Rockford, Illinois but didn’t know he was adopted until his sister told him at age 10.   Despite his adoptive father telling him “nothing good” would come of discovering who his real parents were, Mr Roberts used a social services agency to locate his mother, Terry.
She confirmed Mr Roberts was adopted and told him his birth name was Lawrence Alexander but would not reveal the last name.

Roberts, ever curious, wanting to be able to trace his  his life story and history, geneology being a way to place your story in the cosmos, kept at it, but Terry remained tight-lipped on the identity of his father.

And now, page 4. Friends, I’d like to tell you about Bose Radio. or Judy of Plano, Texas writes: Dear Mr. Harvey. My new Bose Radio is amazing.  It certainly is.

Eventually, Roberts wore down his birth mother and learned the identity of his father.  She told him that he bears a physical resemblance to him.  Roberts has been in mailing contact with his father, a prisoner in the California Correctional System, and while he has his phone number he has avoided calling him, though he and has received weird stuff from him in the mail.

And his father’s name… is Charles Manson.

And now you know the Rest of the Story!  Good day!

The Thrill of Victory; the Agony of Defeat.  Or The Fierce Urgency of Now; the Audacity of Hope.  One or the other.  It was in part a way to rationalize or make an advantage of a vote for less executive or legislative experience.  There are other ways to dissect those two phrases and what they mean — a sort of harking back to an argument against the claim for “Gradualism” throughout the first part of the twentieth century as a means to halt any civil rights advancement, for instance.

You know about that well forwarded email by Lou Pritchett believe it or not about how “you scare me”?  The one where near the beginning we get “don’t know your background” (and then, contradictorily enough, rolls into what he believes to be his background)?  That was a Lou Pritchett Problem, not a Barack Obama problem.  You do know that he was in the Illinois state Senate, and that his career there is a part of the public record?  You do know that the newspapers in Illinois covered his votes and politicking?

Chicago Tribune-November 17, 1997
UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE PROPOSED
Invoking the name of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, a group of physicians and legislators Sunday announced they will seek an amendment to the state constitution to guarantee health care coverage for all state residents.
 Despite the popularity of Bernardin, however, such a measure would face overwhelming odds against winning approval. Previous efforts to institute universal health care coverage in Illinois have failed over the years, primarily because of the massive tax increases that would be required to fund such programs.
The proposed “Bernardin Amendment” would use prose directly from the cardinal’s 1995 pastoral letter to establish health care as a basic right of Illinois citizens and require the General Assembly to enact a plan that permits everyone in Illinois to obtain decent health care on a regular basis by 2002.
“What a fitting way to honor Cardinal Bernardin, who was a voice of conscience, courage and compassion in the health care dialogue,” Dr. Quentin Young, president of the American Public Health Association, said at a news conference at the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago.       
Young noted that more than 1.3 million Illinois residents–about 11 percent of the state population–are uninsured. According to Voices for Illinois Children, some 300,000 children also lack health care coverage.
Rep. Michael Boland (D-East Moline) said he will introduce the measure in the Illinois House in January. State Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago), he said, has agreed to introduce the measure in the Senate.

But we’re a long ways from there.  Theoretically it’s covered in the Pritchett penned essay, but the then state legislator now President has since trimmed his sails again and again, arguably right into the presidential campaign and right into this Senate session and is still being pegged as “Socialist Radical” by LiebermanNelsonSouthernDemocratBunchies — the first one’s goal seems in large part little more than to gratify himself with this sort of limelight:

 Reaching the point where the Bill can only be measured as either better than the current system by default, or not.  What it is is a Rube Goldberg device designed to swerve through the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” — an artificial device birthed by unholy artificial legislative structure, not organic policy designed to meet the needs of the people.  And what is insuffrable about it is that is projecting to an Obama administration after a sort of customary and unremarkable two or three seat loss in the Senate in 2010 — imagine a 57 to 43 Democratic advantage.  That is still a heafty party majority, and yet unless it clears the way to a sort of “‘Moderate’ Republican” some cover for the same sometimes unremarkable policies that doesn’t exist right now with the Democrats whose being is marked by a definition of “bipartisan”, it becomes more gridlocking.  These are due to, I would suggest in part, the thought process of Harry Reid, as well what a Barack Obama imagines he wants to engage with.  At the moment I’d almost want this thing to be scuttled and a small bore bill of three relatively tepid by tangible reforms to fall into place as a “Health Insurance”

OR is the pressure point looking something like?:

Now, granted the people shouting out that he should have called for “Single Payer” than compromised from there miss the fact that, in American politics sucha program would have been a non-starter and written off from the get-go by the mass of American politicians and “opinion-makers”.  But what needed to be done was for the president to start with somet

There was an impression and label for Obama, contradicting the “Audacity of Hope” “Fierce Urgency of Now”, which followed through the campaign.  Obama is “Cool” and “Collect”.  It garnered him a good slice of the electorate for a small “c” conservative outlook looking for a line of “Stability”, and the appeal lied in the man looking past petty politial contrivances.  This came with the claim to “watch the campaign” to see how he would govern.  It came against a Hillary Clinton, liable to take a wild swing in concocting stories about Bosnian Snipers, and against a John McCain, liable to select a very odd running mate or to bolt during an economic emergency.  The problem with this is it makes for a President unwilling to “rock the boat”, and we see it with acceptance of the status quo and unremarkable allowances to the Banking Industry in getting the Economy Running again — no heads are going to crack.  The irony is that the Lou Pritchett style opponents (worrying that at the end of a second Obama term the man will have effectively silenced the usual suspects of talk radio and menacingly enough destroyed his ability to mass viral forward this email message) seized upon a line about “remaking America” — and he was by his campaign type temperamentally not apt to do such a thing even when called for.  We can brush up the charges leveled against President Eisenhower, except with that chorus of boos along the lines of the most fervent haters of President Roosevelt threw out.

Rudy Giuliani is not going to run for New York governor.  The word on the street is that he is taking a run at the Senate, and the further word on the street is that he is going to use the Seat as a springboard for a 2012 Presidential run.

Or, more exactly, he is going to use the Senate campaign and a Senate campaign victory as a springboard for a presidential run.  For the life of me I don’t know if a victory is necessary for the plan, or if he could just go from a losing senate campaign to a presidential bid.  The good news is that he would be running for the two year remainder of Kirsten Gilibrand’s appointed Senate seat, so there would be no purpose in running for re-election from that post (unless he were planning a 2016 bid.)  As Giuliani would be spending his Senate term running those Presidential hurdles — I suppose this time out making sure to try to win New Hampshire — he’d sort of have those two years of Senate experience in vacancy.

Say what you will about Obama, but when he won the Senate in Illinois in 2004, the voters were voting for a new Senator, not a presidential candidate, and he wandered into the Senate at least long enough to get a campaign booster or two — a Coburn Obama Transparency Act to wield on the campaign.  New Yorkers would best view a Giuliani Senate bid as elecing a passage-way for a Giuliani Presidential bid, akin to what Hillary Clinton’s 2006 re-election bid was, save she had a full term behind her and would have four years of a Senate seat ahead of her should she fail to be elected.

It is a strange prize, and a strange thing to ask the state electorate to vote for.  New Yorkers would be electing Giuliani into a “Temporal Vacuum”.  At the moment, Giuliani leads in the polls, but I suspect this will fade in the campaign season — Kirsten Gilibrand has relatively low name recognition in the polls, and Giuliani would be expecting a split election for Cuomo to the governorship (probably), Charles Schumer for another term as Senior Senator, and him as Temporal Vacuum.

 This sort of tangential review of the new biography out on the presidency of James K Polk is all good and well — the point made about getting away from some political fighting for his grand accomplishments by limiting himself to his one term — except I am stuck at this line.:

A one-term limit is by no means a guarantee of presidential boldness or success; the only other chief executive to enter office with a promise similar to Polk’s was Rutherford B. Hayes, one of our worst presidents ever.

Wait.  I suppose modern opinion holds Rutherford B Hayes as a bad presidency due to the election of 1876 getting defined as the defacto end of Reconstruction, the reason the preceeding Ullysses Grant administration has risen in the Presidential Rankings Sweepstakes.  Check out the graph for that effect .  But, as you can see, his last ranking was 33rd — a small fall from his previous place in the 20s, complying with our evolving understanding of American history, but at any rate far enough up the list to not get the label “one of our worst presidents ever”.

I want Tim Murphy’s explanation as to where he goes off calling Rutherford Hayes one of the worst!

To be fair, there are four presidents I go blank on, and if someone were to ask me to describe the tenor and accomplishments and failures of their administration (in broad brushes, mind you), I’d go blank.  Hayes is one of them.  I’ll leave you go guess the other three names I have in mind.

Regarding Polk and his successful work of a single term: it is remarkable to go through the Democratic Party nominees post Jackson, post Van Buren.  1844: Polk, dark horse.  1848: Lewis Cass, a significant splinter group lead by Van Buren did him in.  1852: Franklin Pierce, was old and harkened the country to earlier less tumultous times in a nation that felt itself falling apart.  1856: James Buchanan: was acceptable to all the party factions due to the fact that he had been out of the country for the previous four years.  The only way for him to be successful is to have pulled away from the recriminations of his party’s (and countries) sectional battles over slavery, and the would be presidents’ desire to appease and amoelerate all sides.

From Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” interview with Sacha Baron Cohen, regarding the movie Bruno, and the scene with Ron Paul.
GROSS: It’s a really funny scene. But you know, really, seriously thinking about it, like what options did Ron Paul have? He couldn’t very well stay in the room while you’re stripping, you know? So what could he have done?

Mr. COHEN: Well listen, you know, a lot of this comedy is about putting people, hopefully who are good targets, in uncomfortable situations. That’s the experiment. What does somebody as powerful as this, you know, somebody who’s standing to be the leader of the free world, how does he cope with a man dancing in front of him, you know?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. COHEN: It shouldn’t be the biggest challenge in the world considering, you know, if he would’ve got the job he would’ve been in the U.N. facing Ahmadinejad or deciding whether to press the red button. You know, how does this guy – is he going to be able to cope with it if he has a Austrian fashion reporter dance provocatively in front of him in a hotel room? I mean incidentally, on the DVD as well, we’ve got – we did the same scene with Tom Ridge and John Bolton.

GROSS: Oh, and also Gary Bauer, the Christian activist.

Mr. CHARLES: Yeah.

Mr. COHEN: Yes.

GROSS: Yes. And why did you try out several different people – tell us why you did it several different from the political world…

Mr. COHEN: Well, well…

GROSS: …how they reacted differently and why you chose Ron Paul in the end.

Mr. CHARLES: Keep in mind that again, this is one take filmmaking. So if we try with Gary Bauer or John Bolton and it doesn’t quite work, it’s very hard to make that scene work in the movie then. And so we try to do it more than once in different locations with different people, sometimes, if we can get those people.

And in this case, we did it a few times all in one day in Washington. We flew to Washington from Los Angeles, shot this all in one day and then flew back – these four different interviews. And ultimately, Ron Paul was the last and we had refined the process through the four – the three times we had done it previously. And so when Ron Paul came in it just wound up being the funniest version of the scene. And he was also probably the most powerful person of all the four people that we had.