Image you are transported back to the concluding days of the year 1999.  You blend in well enough, but are trying to convince someone in, say, a Starbucks that you are from the future.

“Oh yeah.  Who’s president in 2009?”
You nearly spit out “Barack Obama”, before stuffing it back in.  “Um.  Someone you never heard of.  If you went back to 1989 and spoke the name Bill Clinton… well, our president is more obscure and a bit unbelievable to you than the name Clinton was to 89…”

“How about this next election, 2000?  How does it end up?”
“Er.  Never mind that one.”

He fades away from you, and you desperately try to get him back by reaching to the only thing you’ve travelled with that marks the year 2009.  “Look!  I have this Time Magazine from 2009!”

 

“Hm.  Should I just pop myself full of prozac now, or…?”

It is good to know that the tradition of Free and Open Debate and Expression is taking hold in Iraq.

The last time we saw Muntadhar al-Zaidi he was alleging torture by his captors after serving time in an Iraqi prison for throwing a shoe at President Bush during a press conference. But al-Zaidi got a taste of his own medicine this week as a press event he was hosting was interrupted by an angry Iraqi who tossed a shoe at the shoe-tosser.

To clarify some cultural confusions, the media taught us a year ago that in Arabic and Muslim culture, throwing a shoe at a person is an expression of disrespect… unlike in Christian Western and Secular cultures? But What was the grievance and point of view of the Shoe Thrower who dared throw a shoe at the Shoe Thrower?  Is he a charter member in the regional chapter of the International Association of W Lovers?  By now somebody out there has gotten word from him and figured out his motivation.  I choose not to look into it, thinking the idea that he just meant to commemorate the One Year Anniversary of the Historic and Legendary Shoe Throw, by throwing at the Master, as a more poetic concept.

As I eagerly await the semi-annual candidacy hobby announcement of Gordon Allen Pross (and a special missile note to Gordon Allen Pross: you do know that there are elections of some kind every odd year as well, don’t you?), I have to take stock in other peculiar candidacies.

Look over to the tabloid papers as you purchase your sack of groceries, and you will have seen the story in one of the sub-Enquirer papers.  Obama’s Gay Lover.  Also former coke friend.  The scandal is just about to EXPLODE!

Obama’s Gay Lover, Larry Sinclair, darling of a handful of conspiracy minded conservative websites who would believe you if you told them that Obama splits up puppies and kittens in his spare time, (and are upset by the “Respectable Republicans” running away from the story) and face of a bunch of lazy Tabloid papers…

Is running for Congress.

I’ll have you know that the fracus over Obama’s gay lover is bi-partisan!

… Though I can’t quite pin down who Larry Sinclair’s constituency might be.  Who will he be siphoning votes from?

We’ll see who else pops in for a run at this or that.  The people are angry and chopping at the bit.  The problem is shown in the latest “Obama Asks Moms to Return to School” pop up ad, which shows this man vaguely resembling Charles Manson who states “You’re probably wondering how a guy like me ended up with a job that pays more than yours.”   Sure to force some resentment on the part of well scrubbed Middle America, ready for a populist uprising to get THEM into seats of authority to make sure such a thing won’t happen.  Gad those ads are weird.

I can’t say, and this is probably to my credit, that I’ve been hanging onto every new and scintillating detail of the news regarding Hal Turner all that closely.  I’ve seen the headlines, but haven’t read (Incidentally, that “I’ve seen the headlines” can be seen as a demonstration of what the Internet has over a batch of newspapers — though the presence of the “Hal Turner” headlines is not what accounts for the Print News’s downfall, except maybe in a narrow niche casting sense.)

Hal Turner is a neo nazi White Nationalist Short Wave and Internet Radio Host.  He was a frequent and favorite guest of Sean Hannity when he was broadcasting locally in New York, dumped and washed away from his memory when Hannity neared a national syndication deal.  I gather Turner served as the right flank for Hannity, and then subsequently moved further out of the mainstream in hatching his own platform, into the Neo-Nazi fringe, spouting off incidenary spiels bordering on Death Threats.  Well, except for the fact that he was widely suspected in those corners of being an FBI Plant — which, you don’t have to look too far into the fringes to see is a pretty standard paranoid stance.  (And not without its reasons — any “Direct Action” person will tell you to always beware the new recruit who’s a bit more eager and earnest for blurring the law of the land.)

Hal Turner finally did cross that line, and the Feds finally dumped charges on him for recent comments about wanting to see some Federal Officials dead.  At which point, it has come out — he is an FBI Informant indeed.  He’s been sending the FBI information picked up from his followerers, while all the while the FBI has been suggesting that he’s been going a little bit too far with his rhetoric, which Turner has responded to by not changing a thing.  And finally he did go too far, and currently is in Court, with a Gag Rule on him.

I’m having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around this story.  In an interview just before his Gag Rule, he said that his radio performance is not him.  And considering that he’s basically had a job to do for the FBI, that does strike me as a pretty compelling defense he’s prepping before his Grand Jury.  To a degree, that is: it a bit hard to imagine how anyone can sustain such bile for a decade’s stretch, which makes me think the FBI has essentially given Hal Turner an allowance to stroke his hateful ID in a bit of a contradictorily mind of fulfilling DUTY to country while blasting away the N-loving Homo Jewish Commie New Worlders underming the country.

But I don’t really understand what use the government has in sponsoring Turner.  I would think whatever asset Turner makes in passing off information is more than offset by the inciting to violent causes to his warrior audience —Hal Turner was never dangerous per se; his audience on the other hand… It looks all very counter-productive.

A bit oddly, when I jotted this down — knowing I would reference it when Obama gets around to announcing his fulfillment of his Campaign Promise to increase our military presense in Afghanistan (What?  You weren’t paying attention?), I didn’t reference the who for the 3rd paragraph’s counterveiling wisdom.  Circles around which you wander through, I answer now.

It is interesting to make the Vietnam comparisons, and when a president feels he (and maybe sometime in the future she) has to, it does suggest a pretty great political defensiveness — the items in the defensive stance with regards to policy showing the contrast of the Political Moment.  Compare Hamid Karzai with Ngo Dinh Diem.  It has become conventional wisdom that Karzai is corrupt, and that last election was, how do I put it?, illegitimate, with a limited base of power.  I think this is a pretty good departure from circa 2002 – 2003, when I found myself arguring over Karzai with a conservative Fox viewer on a message board.  She had made the pronouncement based on the opinions meted out by Geraldo Rivera on what a Fantastic Commander in Chief the President Bush was, and what a Great Man Karzai was, I believe with the theory that to go to the “left” of Geraldo Rivera would be to run oneself out of mainstream political discourse.  I hastened to add, always a bit tendenciously (“Yes.  Let me tap into my vast resovior of knowledge on Afghanistan.”), and referencing the phrase “President of Kabul” already felt a little cliched and half-cockneyed at the time, as the surreality of proclaiming Freedom with the customs of Sharia Law still being upheld.  (The next thing you know I’ll be throwing out the forewarnings about Afghanistan being known as the “Graveyard of Empires”.)

Times change.  I think even she would have come around to the new popular view on Karzai, and I hasten to ask: Do you think I was kidding when I posted these thoughts?  It is interesting to note that Obama is having to sell a troop surge around Karzai — “No Free Pass for Karzai”,   “He Better Ship UP”, “We’re working around him” — which, correct me if I’m wrong — did Johnson Nixon have that political necessity in talking around the various new governments of South Vietnam?  (Nay.  There we had the scene of various ambassadors parading around with them, giving the Communists propaganda fodder in showing them as American puppets.)

December 2001’s  Tora Bora Policy has re-entered the news, a Senate report timed to match Obama’s speech, [just as the time frame which has military pull-outs starting in time for the 2012 election seems well-timed] — first I knew about it was Seymour Hersh selling the details of a New Yorker article on Bill Moyers.  Every time it inched back into the news as “revelatory” thereafter, I’ve had to scratch my head.  A Congressman was blasted out of CNN for making some remarks connecting it to the coming plans for Iraq —

 Well, forget the Congress member – there’s a book on that.

Item #1:  Tumult is hitting the Washington Times, in part perhaps coming out of the  passing of assets from Publisher Sun Mung Moon to son.  Now, recently Sung Myung Moon held one of those massive Mass Weddings he used to hold.

AND SO

The former editorial page editor of the Washington Times has filed a discrimination complaint against the paper, saying he was “coerced” into attending a Unification Church religious ceremony that culminated in a mass wedding conducted by the church’s leader, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Richard Miniter, who was also vice president of opinion, made the claim in a filing Tuesday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that also disclosed he was fired last month. He said in an interview that he “was made to feel there was no choice” but to attend the ceremony if he wanted to keep his job, and that executives “gave me examples of people whose careers at the Times had grown after they converted” to the Unification Church. A Times spokesman said the paper would not comment.

AND it’s political ramnifications.

The paper, which Ronald Reagan referred to as his favorite, was considered a must-read for the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses.  The paper is among the most-quoted by conservative blogs, radio shows, and cable networks, and the Times has also enjoyed unusual access to conservative politicians.  Conservative news leaks in Washington most frequently go the Washington Times. […]
Moon’s political and media strategy would seem to have worked well for the Korean Messiah and self-proclaimed “King of Peace.” In March, 2004, ten Democratic and Republican Congressmen and Senators attended a coronation ceremony for Reverend Moon and his wife when it was held at a U.S. Senate’s Dirksen building. The Moon-approved video below indicates that these elected representatives were only a handful among a ballroom full of dignitaries.

Item #2:  C-Street, or “The Family”, which I first became aware of in the Harpers article from a few years ago, pierced out of obscurity this summer due to several Politial Sex Scandals.  It finally made the panels of Doonsebury, for instance.  It’s a… um… Religious Right Font in Congress, I guess you can say?

They survived for 70 years by not locking themselves in with any one faction. So you see Democrats like Representative Mike McIntyre, a very conservative Democrat from North Carolina; Representative Heath Shuler, also from North Carolina; Representative Bart Stupak; Senator Mark Pryor, who is pro-war, anti-labor, anti-gay and a creationist, but he is a Democrat. And he’s a guy who explained to me a couple years ago that through The Family, he had learned that the meaning of bipartisanship was that, quote, Jesus didn’t come to take sides; he came to take over.

Kind of like Rick Warren’s image of bi-partisanship, I guess.  Today they are apparently passing some anti-gay legislation in Uguanda.

Mr. SHARLET: Well, the new legislation adds to this something called aggravated homosexuality. And this can include, for instance, if a gay man has sex with another man who is disabled, that’s aggravated homosexuality, and that man can be – I suppose both, actually, could be put to death for this. The use of any drugs or any intoxicants in seeking gay sex – in other words, you go to a bar and you buy a guy a drink, you’re subject to the death penalty if you go home and sleep together after that. What it also does is it extends this outward, so that if you know a gay person and you don’t report it, that could mean – you don’t report your son or daughter, you can go to prison.

And it goes further, to say that any kind of promotion of these ideas of homosexuality, including by foreigners, can result in prison terms. Talking about same sex-marriage positively can lead you to imprisonment for life. And it’s really kind of a perfect case study in the export of a lot of American, largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda, which then takes them to their logical end.

GROSS: This legislation has just been proposed. It hasn’t been signed into law. So it’s not in effect yet and it might never be in effect. But it’s on the table. It’s before parliament. So is there a direct connection between The Family and this proposed anti-homosexual legislation in Uganda?

Mr. SHARLET: Well, the legislator that introduced the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of The Family. He appears to be a core member of The Family. He works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda.

ITEM #3:  The Church of Scientology has received a cease and desist order from the Estate of Winston Churchill to quit using Churchill’s image and quotations to sell the Church.

The literary agency Curtis Brown, which represents several members of the Churchill family, has written to the church’s London branch protesting at a range of advertising leaflets and posters that liken the Allied struggle against Nazi Germany to Scientology’s efforts to recruit new members.

One image, seeking new staff to volunteer to work at the organisation’s headquarters, carries a black-and-white picture of a Spitfire soaring triumphantly over the Home Counties, together with the quotation: “It’s not enough that we do our best. Sometimes, we have to do what’s required.” Another, to advertise a fundraiser to help the church create a celebrity centre in London, similar to the one it already has in Hollywood, name-checks Churchill among such “Great Britons” as David Beckham, James Bond, Harry Potter, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. The leaflet claims the event will be “their finest hour”.

Reminiscent of the Mormon Church’s conversion of dead people.  Or perhaps a Used Car Sales-person reciting the Gettysburg Address “Four Score and Seven Years Ago, Our Forefathers SLASHED PRICES!”