I was thinking I could let this story lie.  I would get back to it with my usual brush-off on Friday.  Then I saw this quote.  True, this is qualified  support, but it is a type of favorable support nonetheless, and one that in key passages I am having serious trouble straining out these statements that could fit a context that would put Gerry Birnberg’s words intoa a favorable context.

“One of the things the LaRouchites are able to do is to engage young people,” said Gerry Birnberg, chairman of the Harris County Democratic Party. “If she can turn out young people to vote for Democrats, all the better.”

Birnberg said Rogers has much to commend her. He said his main objection to her candidacy is her association with LaRouche, and that if she instead held many of the same views but belonged to a group called “LBJ Democrats,” her ideas would appear much more mainstream.

Birnberg and Rogers both said much of LaRouche’s economic thinking is in line with Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s, including investment in public works, separating commercial from investment banking and opposition to corporatism.

The reaction has died off justifiably so — a lot of bloggers connected to the area have thrown in their “Final word”.  As everyone paying attention to politics in Texas know, a Lyndon Larouche Youth Member by the name of Kesha Rogers, supporting a platform of Impeaching President Obama on a platform of cutting NASA funding and pushing a Health Care Agenda characterized as a direct copy of that implemented by Adolf Hitler.

Right there, on the most superficial look at the situation, Harris County Democratic party chairman Gerry Birnberg should be removed from his position.

I am actually rather circumspect and nonplussed by Kesha Rogers’s victory.  I had posted on factnet a sentence that this would be a year a Larouchie could sneak in a Democratic Primary victory — though, I did follow that with a sentence that they won’t.  Another poster, by the pseudonym “chator”, pointed out the fairly obvious that Kesha Rogers, running in a heavily Republican district with a Republican Incumbent and not well known Democratic contenders, was their best shot of the three Larouche Youth Members running — Summer Shields  against Nancy Pelosi and Rachel Brown against Barney Frank.  When I refer it as the best year it could happen, I refer to it in the same way that 2008 was the year a perenial idiosyncratic candidate Bob Kelleher had at winning a Republican nomination for US Senate in Montana.  Party fortunes are down.  If you wish to chalk up a primary reason for Doug Blatts defeat, it is simply that his election did not mean anything — he was likely primed for a lop-sided defeat to Pete Olsen, and thus he had few resources to turn to churn away at party Apathy against a Crowded Ballot.

Circumspectly, I don’t fault anyone — though I don’t blame anyone who might.  But I still retain a definite demand on how the Democratic Party should respond to the campaign of Kesha Rogers on behalf of the Lyndon Larouche Movement.  She should have no political party support of any type, and at any prompting a denunciation of her organization as a vicious demagogic cult.  I am in principle opposed to the idea being floated out there to remove her from the ballot in the same way the last Larouche Democratic candidate that pulled off a victory in Texas did — Claude Jones — though I admit that I am not all that strongly opposed.  Falling short of cutting all ties, Harris County Democratic County chairman offered the Lyndon Larouche Movement that line of support.

“One of the things the LaRouchites are able to do is to engage young people,” said Gerry Birnberg, chairman of the Harris County Democratic Party. “If she can turn out young people to vote for Democrats, all the better.”

Understand what these lines represent.  Gerry Birnberg has just thrown rhetorical support, useful for Larouche’s propaganda purposes in spurring forward his cadre of workers revved up to continually battle the onslaught of a “New Dark Ages”, to an organization I will now characterize in three ways.:

#1:  A Crypto – Fascist Personality Death Cult.
#2:  A multi level marketing Marketing Scam running off of political frustration
#3:  A long time pop cultural punch line.

My phrase “Crypto-Fascist Personality Death Cult” may sound a little like referring to something as “Poopy-heads”, but a quick look would show much the worse from the Larouche organization ala “Locusts”.  It may be that should leave out the “crypto” before “Fascist”, but I harbor a basic desire not to spot, even in extremities, an ideological spectrum.  “Personality cult” comes from the act the organization has had in convincing their small number of activists that Larouche is the most important person in all of Human History.  Their education studies amounts to sitting them at a metaphorical chair headed by Larouche and across from the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, and Fenimore Cooper to feel a part of the plotting strategy against a similar table where sits George Soros, Bertrand Russell, Queen Elizabeth, and Mark Twain — the forces trying to unleash a New Dark Ages.  That is how the organization “engages” “young people”.   I put the word “Death” in there as as we speak, Erica Duggan is attempting to convince the British Government to open up an investigation into the circumstances of her son’s death, a long process that has sparked the Larouche organization to blame it on Dick Cheney and Barronness Symons.  And I refer to the suicide of Printer Kenneth Kronberg upon reading a memo on the morning of April 11, 2007 directly blaming the organization’s misfortunes on the Baby Boomers, particularly the printer.  His widow has a lawsuit currently filed for the campaign commenced against her, fabricating her as the cause of Larouche’s Criminal Problems in the late 1980s.

Regarding the political multi-level Marketing Scam reference, the organization takes a special pride in the confusion garnered by their ideological chameleon act.  The one constant in 40 years has been their trading off on political frustrations and anger at the moment with raw, demagougic appeals.  As a rule, when they have meant to gain recruits — Kesha Rogers during the Bush Administration for instance, they have voiced concerns from the Left.  When they have meant to raise funds, they’ve appealed toward the right.  The logical result of the organization as marketing scam came when Larouche was charged and convicted of Credit Fraud in their dealings with elderly donors in particular, at that time with appeals such as a campaign to quarantine AIDs victims.

I don not expect Gerry Birnberg to have a ready knowledge on the history of the Lyndon Larouche organization.  Life is too short to maintain active awareness of a fringe cult.  I do expect him to be cognitive of what he endorses and condones.  On the most superficial level, this reaction to Kesha Rogers’s victory falls up against the broad cross-partisan (and across to England) reaction this election result has garnered: laughter.    I fail to see what good this endorsement makes.  We have a couple of Simpsons references, one Futurama joke, a Saturday Night Live parody, a reference in a comic book by Howard Chaykin, a joke made by Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football, and a pop cultural footnote reference list that goes on from there.

For comparison’s sake, at least any Republican official who hedged their bets in the early 1990s on the Senate and Gubernatorial nominations in Louisiana of David Duke would have done so with an electoral voting c0nstituency in their sight.  Further, from a purely superficial partisan level, the Larouche organization counts at this moment any Republican electoral victory, including Scott Brown’s in Massachusetts, as their personal victory and vindication that the “Masses” have turned to them.  A chair of a local Democratic Party should not be speaking favorably of an organization actively working to defeat the Democratic Party.

Birnberg said Rogers has much to commend her. He said his main objection to her candidacy is her association with LaRouche, and that if she instead held many of the same views but belonged to a group called “LBJ Democrats,” her ideas would appear much more mainstream.

The Larouche organization had previously siphoned themselves officially under a rubric of “FDR Democrats”, now they only do so unofficially.  I do not think it is wise to encourage a group to camouflage them under more favorable politicians.  I assume the reference to “Lyndon Johnson” is not merely an allusion to their shared first name, but also meant as a push-back to some of the characterizations of the locally popular issue with space exploration, as well a reference to the highest elected Texas Democrat.  But it is wholly inappropriate comparison.

Leaving aside the matter of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson left behind the two major Domestic Achievements of the Civil Rights Act and Medicare.  When Lyndon Johnson used the phrase, “We Shall Overcome” to define his push for Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr reportedly choked up at the clear cut non-equivocating meaning.  Lyndon Johnson took a long poltical path to that point, that started with the customary Southern Democrat’s first Congressional floor speech defending Segregation, then later aligning himself to be picked for party leadership from the Southern Dixiecrat power-brokers (Richard Russell), and in pursuit of national office pushed through a weak civil rights bill in 1957, weak enough to pass Southern Dixiecrat muster.  From there he defined himself by picking up the somewhat undefined legacy of the assassinated John Kennedy and “Gave Up the South for the Democratic Party for a Generation”.  On the campaign trail in 1964, he deleiverd an anti-demagoic appeal in Louisiana with use of rather blunt language.
Lyndon Larouche’s civil rights legacy includes working with Ku Klux Klan leader Roy Frankhouser, and — when he decided the way to furbish his historic reputation amongst his cadre — recruiting two King disciples to suggest he was going through the same thing King went trhough.  One, James Bevel, stopped by the Larouche organization en route to Louis Farrahkan’s organization (and was later convicted of incest).  The other can be seen on a video at youtube giving effusive praise to President Barack Obama.

Regarding Medicare, the Larouche organization is clinging to the line that they are attacking the Obama administration’s Health Care policies from the Left.  I am fairly sure that a majority of Democrats would support an expanded Medicare program over Obama’s health policy.  But I am also pretty certain that the Larouche organization would peg such a policy push as out of Nazi Germany, for the same reason they are pegging the current policy push as out of Nazi Germany.  It maintains the organizations’s sense of fighting on the Eve of Armegeddon, and aligns them with polarized political forces.
Noted too that the Larouche organization has cut out their employees’s Health Care Plans, and moved a lot of their people to the ranks of “Volunteer”.

I do not blame this embarrassing election result on anybody.  Embarrassing election results happen in every election cycle in a lot of low impact elections.  This one is perhaps a bit more embarrassing as it comes attached with a rather vicious highly demagogic  organization, and is not entertained by a single idiosyncratic person.
What am I to make of Gerry Birnberg’s qualified condonings?  They strike me as disqualifications for his job.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 3:19 pm and is filed under The LaRouche Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.