elementropy

Everything's Wrong

2010-09-10T23:06:00.008-05:00

Buried within an important story about the Fourth Amendment's further spiral down the toilet is this perhaps more important story -- or rather, the start of one:

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."

Neither are any truly poor people put forth for political office, nor are any poor people likely to be journalists, professional activists, political delegates, academics, or... indeed, BLOGGERS (hence the sadly few but righteous sneers at the "creative class" in 2008, and the many hysterical reactions thereto). The power and information structure of this country -- or, more to my point, the portion of society which has historical claim to looking after the interests of the poor -- is now totally incapable of advancing the agenda of the poor and working classes. This is why the Democratic Party is hostile to populism, and the Republican Party (especially its Tea Party adjunct) is careful to use it only cynically, in thorough bad faith. Or put another way:

The real message....is not that the rich have become liberal. It's that American liberalism itself no longer feels the need to espouse an economic agenda that is decidedly different from that espoused by conservatives. Economics has been surgically removed from the realm of politics and transplanted into a technocratic robot that is run by the Federal Reserve and its acolytes. At least for the time being, most liberal politicians don't seem to miss it.

Populism is boxed and the poor, working, and (now, increasingly,) middle classes will continue to be shafted by the supposed "Working Man's Party", the Obama Administration, the liberal intelligentsia [sic], the activist organizations, and the blogosphere because the Democratic base refuses to hold people accountable -- by which I mean, it refuses to fire, shun, abandon, or "purge" the very same elements that have abused it for so long.

What to do? Well, unless you're comfy class cultural elitist, emigration's probably not a possibility. But there are alternatives, no doubt futile but perhaps worth something and I don't mean for spite value: Primary Obama. Vote Green -- or whatever left third party you're able to. Divert whatever resources possible from orgs that advance social liberal agendas to those that emphasize leftwing economic solutions and the class issue, and if you catch any shit for that from the cultural elitists remind them that the first best way to solve the "isms" everyone cares about (but they monomaniacally) is to stop pissing on the poor whose "culturally retrograde" element (a minority they take care to mistake for the whole) they fear and loathe so much that they elevate it above every other concern; for instance, support unions. Complain to editors and producers about wingnut and Sensible Liberal pundits and writers. Stop advancing the careers and prestige of bloggers who have demonstrated a pattern of hostility to the left -- a rule of thumb would be anyone who supported the Iraq War and anyone who critiques populism from the right (incidentally, these are often the same people, isn't that right, Matty Yglesias?); also, anyone who reaches immediately for the fallacy of undistributed middle -- iow, who characterizes your aim of accountability as an urge for purity control, or anyone who characterizes a left-of-neoliberal economic agenda as "communist".

And then there is this, which a desperate populist might strategically support, at least as a bluff. For years now, the politically liberal branch of Academe has made common cause with the Wealthy Criminal Class, both consciously and literally (in the sense of economics departments) and unknowingly and figuratively (in the sense of sneering at the working class's cultural tastes -- or alleged lack thereof, and in the sense of fearing and loathing the working class's social conservatism). Tenure is middle class welfare. Since so many tenured "liberals" have, for reasons of culture or reasons of economic wingnuttery, helped the right wing destroy the the social safety net, it's only fitting that the poor, who have been paying the price, should return the favor: "You supported taking away my welfare, now I'll support taking away yours."

Eat It, Brad DeLong*

2010-09-10T21:26:00.006-05:00

IOZ is articulate on a subject near and dear to me:

Every farmer I've known, and there are a lot of them in Western PA, has loved farming and sacrificed greatly in order to keep farming despite the best efforts of state-subsidized industrial agriculture to deprive them of their vocation. The idea that families gave up their farms because "manual agricultural labor sucks" is laughable. The fact that your evidence of this is dubious publicity stunt designed to highlight the no-duh truth that people habituated to a certain level of income will refuse to work rather than accept work paying them too far below their accustomed wage is indicative that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. The whole sordid history of neoliberal intervention in the "developing world" is the decimation of subsistence economies, in which peoples produce locally most of what they need (subsistence doesn't necessitate "poverty," except to Nice Liberals and World Bank officials), via economic, environmental, and actual warfare, and the subsequent forced replacement of self-provision with economies of consumtion, in which people leave "manual agricultural work" for the sweat shop and the rural farm for the urban slum. The idea that you chalk these things up to individual choice rather than appreciating how they are necessitated by political and economic context only displays that it is you who holds the romantic notions, and the fact that any fifth-grader with a half-read copy of his Steinbeck can see the glaring flaws at the heart of the notion that agriculture stinks and it's great to get people off the farm and on the road ought to embarrass you.

A-fucking-men.

*By Brad DeLong I do mean the personally decent but ideologically execrable blogger/economist/free trade-enthusiast. But I also use "Brad DeLong" as an ankle-biting (at least to him, I hope) synecdoche to personify the type of cultural elitist Democrat whose "libertarianism with a human face" political economy, ethnocentrism (hypocritical at that: they love to accuse non-fans of their preferred policies of bigotry to the third worlders those policies make miserable but allegedly more wealthy), relative wealth (by which I mean personal insulation to the economic stresses their preferred policies have put on their less-fortunate countrymen) and total intolerance of anyone to their political left has, due to this type's total hegemony among the Democratic Party, utterly destroyed its ability to pursue the populist agenda needed to restore this country.

Why does the Democratic Party in general and the Obama Administration in particular suck? "Brad DeLong"!

Why has "social democracy" been so dumbed-down that it now means little more policy-wise than a progressive income tax and increased education spending? "Brad DeLong"!

Why does America not make anything any more? "Brad DeLong"!

How did the terms "leftist" and "liberal" get so diluted that they now mean, basically, "anyone who isn't a bigot -- at least, based on gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation; beating up the lower classes is okey-dokey -- and who also agrees with the no-duh fact that Donald Luskin and Jonah Goldberg are stupid fucking idiots"? "Brad DeLong"!

Why does the Democratic elite constantly kick the Democratic base in the teeth? "Brad DeLong"! Why does it politically kiss the collective ass of the Wealthy Criminal Class at every opportunity? "Brad DeLong"! Why does it constantly search for a "good faith" opponent on the right with whom it can compromise -- or to whom it can cave -- but at the same time demonize, stonewall, or betray everyone to its left? "Brad DeLong"!

Why are desperate immigrants from Latin America pouring into our country? What happened to their countries' economies? "Brad DeLong"!

Why are western companies moving their manufacturing base to China where goods are made in working conditions somewhere between those of 19th century Dickensian squalor, the Gulag, and some Nineteen Eighty-Four nightmare? "Brad DeLong"! Have you seen the pollution in China? What kind of ecocidal nutbag would want to help export our basest model of production and consumption, the most wasteful on Earth, to a country of two billion people? "Brad DeLong"!

Why is 2010 gonna be a disaster for the Democrats? "Brad DeLong"! Why is the Tea Party able to gain the sympathy of so many economically-shafted Americans whose welfare it obviously will not improve? "Brad DeLong"!

Etc. Etc.

A Loser's Game

2010-08-30T18:21:00.003-05:00

Baseball players deal with strife in odd – and terrifying – ways. One potential Hall of Famer told me recently that when he’s in a slump, he dreams of himself swinging a bat underwater and flailing about until he drowns. Though [Paul] Konerko’s mental anguish never reached that extreme, his nadir two years ago forced him to confront the reality so many never can: He’s going to fail 70 percent of the time, and he’d better figure out a constructive way to do it.

“There’s so much failure in this game,” Konerko said. “Getting too high isn’t a problem for most guys. Getting too low can be. It was for me. It’s been an ongoing battle. For a good couple years, I’ve been more rational how I view the negatives, the failures, and that’s only helped me get better. You kind of get tired of beating yourself up.

But it's natural to do so.

The "Fail Even When You Succeed" aspect of baseball is what gives it poetry. It's also what draws wretches -- players and spectators. It's why, as Deion Sanders shrewdly noted, there are so many alcoholics who are lifers in the sport.

George Soros As A Bedwetting Retard's Version Of Ernst Stavro Blofeld

2010-08-22T21:38:00.014-05:00

Scott, the supposedly more sane one of the three Powertools, fap-blurbs a spy novel written by something called Michael Walsh, who, it turns out, is one of the many wingnuts stuffed into Andrew Breitbart's internet clown car. Check out this description of the novel's villain:

As in Hostile Intent, Devlin's principal opponent is the shadowy, reclusive international financier, Emanuel Skorzeny, a German-born billionaire who harbors an enormous animus against western civilization, in part occasioned by his own morally complex past. Skorzeny despises the west for what he views as its terminal cultural weakness, and believes that society is no longer worthy of the great cultural treasures earlier generations of have bequeathed it. Although he has dedicated his life to making money, riches are not an end in themselves, but a means to a larger end: the euthanization of the west.

Lulz!

Naturally, the book is dedicated to the "brave...men and women...whom we put on the front lines of a shadow war that dare not even speak its name, and the enormous personal sacrifices - including the ultimate sacrifice - that they must make in order to defend us". Double lulz!

Holding Zhdanovian hackery -- of any variety, wing nut or "leftist"* -- in absolute contempt, I totally applaud this attempt at wingnut "literature". I'm thinking: Tom Clancy, with even worse prose but less masturbatory arms-technophilia mixed with a sort of late period Dos Passos sensibility. In other words: part Get Off My Lawn, part jock-sniffing, part Liberals Are Traitors.

A possible passage from the text:

Devlin, who used to battle the enemy at freedompundit.blogspot.com, now had the very enemy at his mercy; and in a race with a for real ticking timebomb, heroically used a XK-7 technique to extract valuable information which he was certain was legal no matter what the filthy traitors back home said, the stupid pussies.

"WHooo are you??" Skorzeny wailed in terror.

"Harvey --uh, Manfred...jen..sen...den," Devlin heroically replied with the quick wit he'd sharpened to a razor-edge from years of snarking at communist negroes on his blog. Then he methodically attached the electrodes to various pain-points on Skorzeny's withered body, the genitals, the hooked nose..."

"Jesus' will be done," Devlin silently reassured himself. As an afterthought, all the while fighting the distraction, he added: "Someday, if I and fellow thankless freedom fighters do jobs like this right, I'll be able to say that outloud, in America, without a liberal persecuting me for it!" He pulled the switch...

Hey, that's entertainment!

*Srsly. Read that link. I have never seen a more enthusiastic avowal of Aesthetic Stalinism in my fucking life. Also, too: an obvious irony in all this. The scarequotes are around "leftist" because these people wouldn't know socialism -- which, among other things, implores one to not think with one's blood (i.e. selfish or groupuscular "identity") but with one's class -- if it were somehow served to them as a chocolate gravy cheeseburger doughnut. Yet, of course, they are identical to the historically worst sort of socialists in their means, which is not due to design so much as to their stupidity and a weird sort of convergent evolution but still: isn't it weird to find self-identified liberals or leftists gleefully adopting a trait of the darkest form of socialism and it not be its at least theoretical advancement of the working class?

Adding: Am I being unfair? Am I just out to hurt someone's precious feely-feels? No. Search "The Simpsons" -- as in, the TV show -- in that site, then gasp in awe at their consistency-in-the-Emersonian-sense. Then compare that attitude to the similarly butthurt, similarly philistine nutjobs at Bozell's NewsBusters and, discounting for ideology, get a micrometer to measure the difference. Aesthetic Stalinists, I tell you.

Added: fixed some stuff. Also, also, too: yes, hellholes.

For Later Citation

2010-08-22T21:19:00.003-05:00

[FAIR USE and that that]

Pasting some passages from John Judis's "The Unnecessary Fall", an excellent piece even though published by the most useless rag in all of "liberal" journalism:

In the United States, politics pivots around the allegiance of the middle class, even as its identity has changed from yeoman farmers and mechanics to store clerks, office workers, x-ray technicians, and small business owners. They are, in Bill Clinton’s words, “those who work hard and play by the rules.” They are the central characters in a populist rhetoric that goes back to the early republic. It depicts the middle class as embattled and threatened either from forces below (impoverished immigrants, welfare cheaters, ghetto rioters) or above (Wall Street speculators, state bureaucrats, K Street lobbyists). Populism can be embraced by Glenn Beck or Tom Harkin. It is intrinsically neither left-wing nor right-wing.

Politicians, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, who found a way of using populism’s appeal during downturns have enjoyed success, while those who have spurned it have suffered accordingly. If, in circumstances like the present one, you don’t develop a populist politics, your adversaries will use populism to define you as an enemy of the people. That’s what Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late ’70s. And that’s what has happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barack Obama and to the Democratic Party he leads.

Obama took office with widespread popular support, even among Republicans, and some of his first efforts, including the $800 billion stimulus, initially enjoyed strong public favor. But that wide appeal began to dissipate by the late spring of 2009. Disillusion with Obama fueled the November defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia. By January 2010, it was a crucial factor in Republican Scott Brown’s astonishing victory over Martha Coakley in Massachusetts.

In the postmortem debate over these defeats, some Democrats have blamed Obama’s dogged pursuit of health care reform while the economy was hemorrhaging jobs. That may have been a factor, but the real damage was done earlier. What doomed Obama politically was the way he dealt with the financial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms.

[...]

As Obama was delivering his inaugural address, the financial crisis was already in full swing; and it was already apparent that financial speculation, outright fraud, and irresponsible and sometimes illegal housing-loan practices had played a very large role in precipitating the crisis. The public was up in arms. But, instead of rallying the public against the “money changers,” as Roosevelt had done in his first inaugural, Obama, taking a leaf from Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, put the blame on the public as a whole. “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age,” he declared.

Over the next month, Obama would periodically criticize bankers after embarrassing revelations–at various times calling the bonuses they gave themselves “shameful” and an “outrage”–but, after hearing complaints about his rhetoric from the bankers, he would back off. At a private meeting on March 28 with 13 Wall Street CEOs, the president, his spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “emphasized that Wall Street needs Main Street and Main Street needs Wall Street.” And, in his Georgetown speech, Obama returned to his theme of collective responsibility. The recession, Obama said, “was caused by a perfect storm of irresponsibility and poor decision-making that stretched from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.”

Obama’s policy followed the same swerving course as his rhetoric. One week, he would favor harsh restrictions on bank and insurance-company bonuses, but, the next week, he would waver; one week, he would support legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce the amount that homeowners threatened with foreclosure owed the banks; the next week, he would fail to protest when bank lobbyists pressured the Senate to kill these provisions. But, more importantly, Obama–in sharp contrast to Roosevelt in his first months–failed to push Congress to immediately enact new financial regulations or even to set up a commission to investigate fraud. (When Congress finally appointed a commission in July 2009, Obama and his party put a milquetoast Democratic politician, former California State Treasurer Philip Angelides, in charge of it.)

Obama’s appointments also conveyed an impression that he wanted to let Wall Street off the hook. He appointed Timothy Geithner to be treasury secretary. Geithner claimed that he was not part of Wall Street, but, in his capacity as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he had served under a board of directors headed by JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. As New York Fed president, Geithner had been partly responsible for the decision to let Lehman Brothers go under, for the unpopular tarp program, and for American International Group (AIG) paying back its Wall Street creditors with government money. Geithner chose as his chief of staff a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. Retiring Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan told me, “Most Americans were reading about the massive compensations and bailouts, and the administration largely hired people from the culture of Wall Street.”

By the spring, Obama’s apparent tilt to Wall Street had sparked a right-wing populist revolt in the country. The newly formed Tea Party movement, Beck and Fox News, and a host of right-wing bloggers were leading the charge; but, in a less extreme form, the general public shared their anger. In an early April New York Times/CBS News poll, the public disapproved of Obama’s aiding the banks by 58 percent to 33 percent. In this same poll, public approval of Obama’s handling of the economy began to fall. Pollsters who did focus groups also traced disillusionment with Obama’s economic policies to his handling of the financial crisis.

Congressman Barney Frank, who defends Obama’s policies, acknowledges that the president’s political difficulties began with the revelation that AIG, which had received $170 billion from the government, had paid out $165 million in bonuses to the division that had brought the company down. Geithner had known about the bonuses but insisted there were no legal grounds to block them. (It then came out that Geithner had pressured Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd to insert a provision in the stimulus bill that protected the bonuses.) “The pitchforks were out. It added injury to injury,” Frank says. That’s when public opinion of Geithner plummeted. According to a Rasmussen poll, 24 percent had a favorable view of Geithner and 44 percent an unfavorable one.

The public’s view of the bank bailout and the AIG bonuses colored its view of the auto bailout, the stimulus, and health care reform. One of the rallying cries for the populist opposition to Obama was “where’s my bailout?” (Obama himself acknowledged that it was “one of the most frequent questions” he was asked in letters.) The auto program became a bailout for the GM and Chrysler CEOs; the stimulus became a bailout of government itself; and health care reform was a bailout for the uninsured–or “reparations,” as Rush Limbaugh put it. Wrote right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin, “hardworking citizens were getting sick of being played for chumps” by “moochers, big and small, corporate and individual, trampling over themselves with their hands out demanding endless bailouts.” Obama and the Democrats were successfully portrayed as aiding “the moochers,” but not the “hardworking citizens.” In American politics, that’s a recipe for political disaster.

[...]

Some in the White House political operation recognized in the late spring that the administration’s economic efforts were being defined by right-wing populism and tried to push Obama to take a more populist tack. A group within the White House began calling themselves the “pitchfork gang,” but they would find their attempts to convince Obama to get tough on Wall Street or on insurance companies undermined by Geithner and by National Economic Council head Larry Summers, who were worried about upsetting business confidence. “There was a continual tension in the White House,” says a person who was privy to the discussions. “One week, we would be very hot, and then, the next week, we would dial it back.”

[...]

Contrast Obama’s attempt to develop a politics to justify his economic program with what Reagan did in 1982. Faced with steadily rising unemployment, which went from 8.6 percent in January to 10.4 percent in November, Reagan and his political staff, which included James Baker, Mike Deaver, and Ed Rollins, forged a strategy early that year calling for voters to “stay the course” and blaming the current economic troubles on Democratic profligacy. “We are clearing away the economic wreckage that was dumped in our laps,” Reagan declared. Democrats accused them of playing “the blame game,” but the strategy, followed to the letter by the White House for ten months, worked. The Republicans were predicted to lose as many as 50 House seats, but they lost only 26 and broke even in the Senate.

Some commentators have noted Reagan’s popularity was even lower than Obama’s. But, on key economic questions, he did much better than Obama and the Democrats are currently performing–and voters expressed far greater patience with Reagan’s program. According to polls, even as the unemployment rate climbed, a narrow plurality still expressed confidence that Reagan’s program would help the economy. On the eve of the election, with the unemployment rate at a postwar high, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 60 percent of likely voters thought Reagan’s economic program would eventually help the country. That’s a sign of a successful political operation. If Obama could command those numbers, Democrats could seriously limit their losses in November. But Obama has not been able to develop a narrative that could convince people to trust him and the Democrats.

Why has the White House failed to convince the public that it is fighting effectively on its behalf? The principal culprit is clearly Barack Obama. He has a strange aversion to confrontational politics. His aversion is strange because he was schooled in it, working as a community organizer in the 1980s, under the tutelage of activists who subscribed to teachings of the radical Saul Alinsky. But, when Obama departed for Harvard Law School in 1988, he left Alinsky and adversarial tactics behind.

[...]

He was not a typical blue-collar, bread-and-butter Chicago Democrat, but the kind of good government liberal that represents the upscale districts of the city, seeing in politics a higher calling and ill at ease with (although not in open opposition to) the city’s Democratic machine. He was also a post-racial politician who eschewed the hard-edged, angry rhetoric of Jesse Jackson. (That, too, is oddly reminiscent of Carter, who partly campaigned in 1976 as the white Southern antidote to George Wallace’s angry racial populism.)

[...]

These efforts to elevate Obama above the hurly-burly of Washington politics have been disastrous. Obama’s image as an iconic outsider has become the screen on which Fox News, the Tea Party, radicalright bloggers, and assorted politicians have projected the image of him as a foreigner, an Islamic radical, and a socialist. He has remained “the other” that he aspired to be during the campaign, but he and his advisers no longer control how that otherness is defined.

The White House and cabinet officials he appointed have reinforced his aversion to populism. As Jonathan Alter recounts in The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Geithner and Summers repeatedly blocked attempts to get tough on Wall Street on the grounds that doing so would threaten the recovery itself by upsetting the bankers. For most of his first year, Alter writes, “Obama bought the Geithner-Summers argument that the banks were fragile and couldn’t be confronted while they remained in peril.” Its reluctance to come down on the bankers crippled the administration politically, making it far more difficult for it to get its way with Congress on a second stimulus program that would have boosted the recovery and Democrats’ political prospects. Bad politics can trump good policy.

Pantload's Gift -- Was Regifted?

2010-08-18T18:41:00.001-05:00

Hmmm:

While covering the rally, I witnessed sign after sign declaring Obama a greater danger to America's security than al-Qaida; demonstrators held images that juxtaposed Obama's face with images of evildoers from Hitler to Pol Pot to Bin Laden; others carried signs questioning Obama's status as a U.S. citizen. "We can fight al-Qaida, we can't kill Obama," said an aging demonstrator. Another told me, "Obama is the biggest Nazi in the world," pointing to placards he had fashioned depicting Obama and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi in SS outfits. According to another activist, Obama's agenda was similar to Hitler's: "Hitler took over the banking industry, did he not? And Hitler had his own personal secret service police. [The community-organizing group] ACORN is an extension of that."

The seemingly incongruous Tea Party propaganda recalled signs waved by right-wing Jewish settlers during rallies against Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his support of the peace process, portraying him as an SS officer and as the French collaborator Marshall Petain. In 1995, amid the provocative atmosphere, a young right-wing Jewish zealot assassinated Rabin. The Israeli tragedy was a cautionary example of targeted hatred leading to violence.

Buffett 1, Randroids 0

2010-08-16T19:00:00.004-05:00

WARREN BUFFETT: Reasonable return is good enough, Charlie. I mean,
50 years ago, I was looking for spectacular returns, but I can’t-- I can’t
get them. We have-- we have eight or $10 billion to invest every year.
And we’re in the utility business, and it’s the same thing there. When we
build electric generation or something of the sort, we shouldn’t expect a
spectacular return. We’re building things that are essential to society,
and people need our services. They really don’t have any choice in the
case of the electric utilities, for example, and sometimes in case of rail.
And we should get a decent return on that. Enough to encourage us to keep
putting money into the business, but we’re not entitled to spectacular
returns.

I'll never say that a billionaire like Warren Buffett is the best guy EVAR or anything, but it would be a better America if more wealthy people were like him than like.. well, like the rotten soulless Randroid robber baron fuckfaces they are. And I don't say that because Buffett has famously pledged to bequeath his wealth to charity (a move progressives massively overrate), but because he invests the right way: long-term, and conscious of externalities and obligations.

Even better, he doesn't pretend that people have total freewill within this system. The Big Lie upon which libertarians in general and Randroids in particular base their entire venal world-view is that everyone is "free to choose" every transaction they take. Buffett, a utility owner, understands that people have to have electricity and that this gives him monopolistic or oligopolistic power over consumers, so he'd better deliver the product dependably, and he'd better not gouge people. Longtime students of Buffett will also know that he thinks this way not because of morally (maybe there should be a "just" in there) but because his "take the long view" business sense tells him the little people can't be abused for too long because if they are they will eventually throw the big people up against the wall.

This power structure is what Zizek means, incidentally, when he's talking about rent, which is what the common person is effectively forced to buy in order to function in society: food, shelter, electricity, water, health care... and also, more and more, certain technologies like computers and televisions (by the way, the Red Cross agrees that a TV qualifies as a "necessity") that facilitate what he calls "participation." When you have to have something you're not "free to choose" that something. It's at this point that the libertarian/Randroid will splutter something like "the Amish do it!", which is so ridiculous that it proves their bad faith. In my dream social democracy people like Buffett exist, own property, make money, are taxed accordingly; meanwhile, Randroids and libertarians, who believe there is "no such thing as society" get their wish and are removed from society -- straight to the fucking gulag.

Adding:

WARREN BUFFETT: ... but we’ve got -- we’ve got almost 60 million
people living in households where 20 -- the top income is $21,000 or less.
That’s the top of the 60 million people. So we can do better. Now, we
have done better over time. I mean, we put in Social Security and we’ve
done things in the country that have worked in the direction ...

CHARLIE ROSE: Medicare and Medicaid.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah.

WARREN BUFFETT: But a prosperous country should not just be
prosperous for the people like me who are wired in a particular way at
birth -- no credit to me -- but I happen to know something about capital
allocation. It wasn’t, you know, I could have instead -- I could have been
-- I could have been wired, you know, so I was, you know, I don’t know -- a
great ukulele player. But there’s more money ...

The above quote shows that Buffett understands and rejects the social Darwinist root of libertarianism; the following quote shows he understands and rejects the libertarian/Randroid denial of society infamously enunciated by Margaret Thatcher:

WARREN BUFFETT: And you don’t want to mess up the market system that
works to bring out of people what their best talents are, but the market
system is not perfect in any kind of distribution of wealth. And taxation
is a way where you get to the excesses of what the market system produces
and where you take care of the people that get the short straws. In a
country as prosperous as we are, nobody should get a really short straw.

CHARLIE ROSE: You know, some people are going to hear you say that
and they’ll say, "Warren is talking about sharing the wealth. There he
goes .."

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I’m talking about sharing the prosperity.

CHARLIE ROSE: You’re ...

(CROSSTALK)

WARREN BUFFETT: I’m prosperous because of the society around me.
Stick me down in some poor country and I’ll walk around and say I allocate
capital, you know, and they’ll say, so what? What we need is a guy with a
strong back. You know, and I don’t have a strong back.

CHARLIE ROSE: But can you row a boat or something?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Something like that.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

WARREN BUFFETT: So -- so society -- listen, when a couple of
middleweights fight it out on Pay Per View this weekend and get $49.95 from
me, or whatever it maybe, and I can’t remember their names two weeks later,
you know, they are benefiting not because of their own talent that much,
but because some guy invented television and then invented cable
television, and learned how to change a stadium of 15,000 people into a
stadium of 300 million. So they benefit from society. We all do. And
some like me benefit enormously from society, you know. I can’t do it by
myself. Stick me on a desert island, you know, you do not want to be on
the same island.

The Fascist Clown

2010-08-15T00:20:00.005-05:00

From Zizek's "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce" speech at Cooper Union:

Look at Italy...you have a chief of state (de facto), who consciously ruins his own authority, makes fun of himself, it's really like -- Michel Foucault, in his late seminars, spoke about eblouissement...Groucho Marx in power, clown in power -- this is effectively approaching. For example....I can't -- I couldn't believe it... a couple of weeks ago, Berlusconi's press representative, a lawyer, said it's a filthy lie that Berlusconi is impotent: he's ready to prove in court he's not impotent. I'm just asking -- what? how? you know what I mean..... I see this as an all-around tendency, this eblouissation of power, loss of the dignity of power.

From Zizek's essay in the LRB, "Berlusconi in Tehran":

The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ‘Teflon’ president no longer expected to stick to his electoral programme, and therefore impervious to factual criticism (remember how Reagan’s popularity went up after every public appearance, as journalists enumerated his mistakes). This new presidential type mixes ‘spontaneous’ outbursts with ruthless manipulation.

The wager behind Berlusconi’s vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I’m attracted to other women. Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man’s dream of greatness. Yet we shouldn’t be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game. A technocratic economic administration combined with a clownish façade does not suffice, however: something more is needed. That something is fear, and here Berlusconi’s two-headed dragon enters: immigrants and ‘communists’ (Berlusconi’s generic name for anyone who attacks him, including the Economist).

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’

Berlusconi's clownish style may seem new to Zizek -- and indeed it may be new in Europe which is, after all, the historical home of serious fascists* -- but it's old hat for we Americans. Zizek has fun with the type (I suspect he takes immense pleasure in comparing Berlusconi to Ahmadinejad, and who but a fascist clown could blame him?) and apparently Foucault, a generation ago, toyed with it as well, but the first real aficionado had to be our own Mark Twain (whom Zizek quotes in another connection) and the first one to make a career of fascist clown appreciation was, of course, H.L. Mencken. Then there was Gore Vidal, Hunter Thompson (who himself became a sort of caricature of a fascist clown in his old age), Al Franken, and, during the 80's, Christopher Hitchens.

Of course we have a tradition of fascist clown watchers because we've had a tradition of fascist clown rulers: for Twain there was the entire McKinley administration and then, finally, Theodore Roosevelt in his own right -- the prototype, as it were, of the archetype; for Mencken there was Harding, Coolidge and (so Mencken thought) Bryan; for Vidal, Hitchens, and Thompson there was Nixon (and cronies such as Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy), Reagan, and Poppy Bush; for Franken there was Dubya and of course the mouthpiece of the Fascist Clown party, Rush Limbaugh.

A fascist clown is a living laff-riot, a strawman come to life, Chaplin's Little Dictator irl, like, for real. It's almost impossible to take him seriously -- until he has you tortured, bombs your country, or simply grinds you into poverty.

I think it was when Mr. Burns was building the sun-blocker ("since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun!"), that his sycophant and until then co-conspirator in various evil schemes Mr. Smithers finally said something like, "Sorry, Mr. Burns, but you've just crossed the line from everyday villainy to cartoonish super-villainy" and opted out. That's exactly what fascist clowns are: cartoonish supervillains, except they're for REAL! Gordon Liddy might have slipped on a banana peel while putting poison in your medicine bottle or garroting you on the street**, but the comedy factor wouldn't make you any less dead. That's the danger of fascist clowns, they lull you into a sense of disbelief; "this cant be real, he can't be serious!" you say, right before you are economically, constitutionally, or physically murdered.

* but wasn't it Dorothy Parker who said that Hitler could have been thwarted at the start if people had only laughed at him? My brain hurtzes.
** actual methods of assassination Liddy was trained to and conspired to do.

Nazi Child Molesters

2010-08-09T15:07:00.003-05:00

Ahh, here's George Fwill proving the point I've long argued that becoming a fan of a sports team is a choice and that choosing to become a Chicago Cubs fan is an exercise in stupid idiocy, moral obscenity, and psychological retardation:

"I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, midway between Chicago and St. Louis. At an age too tender for life-shaping decisions, I made one. While all my friends were becoming Cardinals fans, I became a Cub fan. My friends, happily rooting for Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, and other great Redbirds, grew up cheerfully convinced that the world is a benign place, so of course, they became liberals. Rooting for the Cubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I became gloomy, pessimistic, morose, dyspeptic and conservative. It helped out of course that the Cubs last won the World Series in 1908, which is two years before Mark Twain and Tolstoy died. But that means, class of 1998, that the Cubs are in the 89th year of their rebuilding effort, and remember, any team can have a bad moment."[4]

Obviously, the choice to become a Cubs fan is a demonstration of the will (no pun) to self-pity. There is an ostentatious psychology at work here: a Cubs fan is an attention whore of the "woe is me" variety; Cubs Nation is the tennager's LiveJournal of baseball fandom; as a species Cubs fans are insufferably lachrymose louts. It's also no accident that so many Cubs fans are wealthy and politically conservative, and I'm not just talking about the horrible drunken lawyers and Lincoln Park Trixies one sees at the ballpark. They live ruthlessly, adopt a totem of supreme victimization, then comes the paradox: the initially and ("superficially") superficial stance becomes so embedded in their identity that it's just as much a part of the whole as their Republicanism or their religion. These people can't be "winners" in their personal life unless their team loses -- and no team loses like the Cubs.

George Carlin Channeling George Orwell

2010-06-08T22:20:00.003-05:00

From Napalm & Silly Putty:

Government
The CIA doesn't kill anybody, they "neutralize" people. Or they "depopulate" an area. The government doesn't lie, it engages in "disinformation." The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something called "sunshine units." Israeli murderers are called "commandos," Arab commandos are called "terrorists." The contra killers were known as "freedom fighters." Well, if crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?

Propertarians, Again

2010-06-07T12:56:00.003-05:00

It takes a lot of gall to make the argument Murray's making (even though he seems to have a point about fishing quotas) at any time, but considering that the stupidity and carelessness of British Petroleum and Transoceanic has so recently and flagrantly transformed the Gulf of Mexico into a geenormous tar pit, to make the argument now shows he's really committed -- or needs to be committed. But then he is a wingnut propagandist (Lysenkoist and astroturfing division), so QED.

Also, disaster crapitalism and all that.

Not that anyone should particularly care what I think, but I've said before that I prefer religious nutjobs to libertarian nutjobs, and one reason is because the former are at least sometimes honest about their desire to coerce. Propertarians are never honest about it; they totally deny it.

I used to tease digamma and sneer at this sad, pathetic loser to the effect that I knew air would eventually be privatized should their propertarian dream world ever come into being. Then their Randian heroes could charge people to breathe and further, I knew that when the penniless would inevitably suffocate, propertarians would simply say such deaths (actually, murders) were mere products of bad decision-making on the oxygen-deprived's part and no business of the government.

Sure enough, not long after that, I saw a Fraser Institute (Canuckistani wingnutiens, I think) nimrod state his belief that space should be privatized. No, not outer space; just space, area, here on Earth. Once I digested the implications of that... well, I'm sorry, but I saw through bland affectations of glibertarian "principles", through even hidden (but obvious) greed, to the real desired end of the total privatization of everything: gasless* chambers -- guilt-free gasless chambers, because those squeezed into them by property law would be, as Uncle Miltie so cheerily put it, "free to choose" them. The rhetorical exaggeration I used to joke and sneer about was actually true. Eventually, I realized the germ of this mentality was always there in their melons.

One of the reasons Melbourne's government amended the Poor Law in 1834 was because the influential thought economic "law" demanded it; but it was also consciously endorsed by the upper class as a form of self-flattery and as a way to spite their inferiors, the poor, for whom the right to work was deemed too cushy and the law's amenders knew they were placing under the whip of starvation. Freedom, amirite? Dig coal, toil in the prison-like workhouses, or starve; above all, play by our rules! That some of the poor did indeed move up the social ladder rather than perish confirmed and entrenched the belief in social Darwinism; stress applied to the weak had culled the worst of the lot and rewarded the strongest. The greed, ruthlessness, and cruelty of the early industrial revolution is "classical liberalism" and utilitarianism ideology put into practice; the parties responsible were the Whigs and Liberals. That is why glibertarians like Glenn Reynolds call themselves, when they're trying to be cute, Whigs; it's why wingnuts like a certain someone I had a huge blogwar with calls himself a "classical liberal"; it is why neoliberals like Brad DeLong approvingly quote Bentham and Mill and keep pushing free trade even when they acknowledge it hasn't been beneficial, because their fealty to economic law outweighs their desire to alleviate human suffering (and why in my weak moments I want to throw a copy of Hard Times at his head, especially when he falsely advertises himself as a social democrat). What propertarians through the years have meant by "freedom" is actually the (dis)function of a society engineered around economic "laws" discovered by people who think they are scientists. And the lever by which that engineering is facilitated is always -- no matter what they say -- brutal force.

Commodifying something means making that something scarce, which means profit for them and toil or migration or death for everyone else. Incidentally, "privatize" means what is says but in practice -- and propertarians know this, it's a feature not a bug -- it means "to corporatize." Which, in turn means that what was previously communally-owned or owned by an individual human being and therefore managed with at least some degree of accountability, will eventually be owned by a sociopathic "entity" that can bribe its way out of legal or social penalty. And of course (icing on the cake), this is always hailed as progress. What ideological conquistadors like Hernando de Soto have done for land abroad Murray is trying to do for the ocean; air is next.

Some people, not all of them vile, used to larf when I'd call libertarians crypto-fascists. Well, there's not so much larfin any more.

* As in oxygen-free. Also, cf. Whitaker Chambers's opinion of Ayn Rand:

From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"

Attn, Comrades! Neocon Politburo Proscribes Decadent Western Musik!

2010-06-05T10:23:00.002-05:00

From Hendrik Hertzberg's book Politics:

The [neocon panelists'] discussion on Western culture took up the troubling question of why Vaclav Havel has a picture of John Lennon on the wall of his apartment. Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, bemoaned the fact that the East European dissidents liked Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles. John O'Sullivan, editor of National Review, said this was only because the authorities had censored them, though he didn't trouble to say why they had censored them. "Is rock and roll always bad?" asked a questioner from the floor. Richard John Neuhaus, the Lutheran-turned-Catholic theologian, said he didn't know because he wasn't masochistic enough to listen to the stuff. O'Sullivan said he disliked all popular music after Cole Porter. Kramer suggested that Lennon and his friends "used to sing the praises of Ho Chi Minh." (Untrue, by the way) Oh, well. Western civ may be as decadent as Kramer says, but at least he doesn't blame it on the stones. He blames it on the Beatles.
--Washington Diarist, The New Republic, May 21, 1990

Cultural Commissars

2010-06-05T09:52:00.002-05:00

Here is the noble Christopher Hitchens (who died on September 11th, 2001; the neocon now using the same name and more or less the same face is a ghola) demolishing the execrable Norman Podhoretz in a review of the Pod's Ex-Friends:

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends. This is redeemed somewhat by the possibility of making new ones, and in his late maturity -- some might say that like the medlar fruit he went rotten before becoming ripe -- Podhoretz has found companionship and solidarity with some new chums. He mentions them shyly, as if he were back in his lonely childhood and his mother had secretly bribed them to play with him:

Here, in what is for me a rare submission to the principles of affirmative action, which dictate that I should strive to achieve greater name-dropping 'diversity', I will single out Henry Kissinger and William F. Buckley, Jr.

In spite of our failure to form ourselves into a cohesive family, we have managed to join forces as a dissenting minority of 'heretical' intellectuals who are trying to break the virtual monopoly that the worst ideas of my ex-friends hold (even from beyond the grave) over the cultural institutions of this country.

The purpose of recruiting these new chums is clear: to enlist them in the urgent task of pissing on the graves of the old ones. This makes them more like cronies, or accomplices, than actual friends. But perhaps that's better than nothing. Is it Henry and Bill, perhaps, who get together and agree to laugh at Norman's jokes? Whatever the case, the man who can describe this gleesome threesome as a trio of heretical dissenters is certainly eager to please.

For the purposes of comparison, here's what happens when Podhoretz encounters an authentic dissident:

When on a visit of my own to Prague in 1988 I was taken to meet Vaclav Havel,...the first thing that hit my eye upon entering his apartment was a huge poster of John Lennon hanging on the wall. Disconcerted, I tried to persuade Havel that the counterculture in the West was no friend of anti-Communists like himself, but I made even less of a 'dent' on him than Ginsberg had made on me thirty years earlier.

Good of Podhoretz to have spared so much time to put Havel straight. But that's the sort of guy he is -- always willing to oblige. Also, the fact that Havel was under house arrest may have helped both men to concentrate.

The above anecdote occurs in the chapter on Allen Ginsberg[...]

[snip]

The Russian exile writer Vassily Aksyonov -- another example of the real as opposed to the bogus dissident -- once wrote that Podhoretz reminded him of all the things he had left the Soviet Union to escape. He had, said Aksyonov, the mentality of a cultural commissar. As the Ginsberg essay demonstrates, he has the soul of one as well.

DP For The Bunghole

2010-06-04T12:55:00.000-05:00

Above: Schlemiel, schlimazel, schlociopath.

Shorter Daniel Pipes
"My Peace Plan: An Israeli Victory"

My totally awesome plan for peace first involves manipulating American and European governments into abandoning all restraints on Israel, then the Righteous State must triumphantly exert its will on its subhuman enemies, annihilating the Palestinians and utterly crushing their souls, grinding them under foot, leaving them bereft, decimated, humiliated.

'Shorter' concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

What They (Not Ted) Said

2010-06-01T18:00:00.004-05:00

Atrios:

I really hate the annual ritual of writing columns about how people don't behave properly on Memorial Day. People don't get many vacation days in the greatest country on Earth, and sitting around pretending to be sad or watching Spielberg war porn doesn't really honor those who served either.

Henley:

[W]e’ve actually reached the point where “Every day is Memorial Day.” You pretty much can’t get through a day of radio, TV and internet without multiple messages that so-and-so “honors the sacrifice of those who serve.” The message might come from the station, from a car-dealership, a personality, or a Beltway Bandit, but it’s omnipresent. Yes, these sentiments are vapid and rote and therefore not truly emo. The very ubiquity of pro-military gratitude drains it of even the possibility of meaning. If we wore fright costumes every day, Halloween would seem kind of blah.

To really consider the meaning of all the lives lost in military service to the United States is to grieve at an awful lot of waste and rage at an enormous amount of folly. Few American wars have been both just and necessary. At best, we can imagine the American dead of the other wars saying, “Had this been an actual emergency, I’d have done no less.”

Right on cue is the Nuge with an article whose insanely nationalistic feedback screams with the intensity of ten shitties:

America is at war. Thousands of Americans have paid the ultimate sacrifice, and thousands more have been wounded. Pause to remember them this Memorial Day. Say a prayer for the warriors and their families. They are the world's true freedom fighters.

Never forget them. Make every day Memorial Day.

The totality of his demand for perpetual memorial for perpetual conflict for perpetual peace of course goes hand in Godwin's hand with:

When we commit our troops to war, we must make a commitment to them and their families that we will achieve total victory through the application of total war.

***
PS - this is good stuff.

This Blogosphere Needs An Enema

2010-06-01T14:38:00.001-05:00

There's a lot of sociopathic, not to mention Orwellian, rhetoric flying out there in response to -- in defense of -- Israel's latest brutality. I mean, Pam Geller always has the "kill all the muslooms" theme playing full blast, of course she's gonna use this opportunity to.. keep doing it. Just as predictably, the idiots at Commentary are playing Irgun to Pammy's Stern Gang; being smoother with words and more deft at PR but every bit as much tribalist and bigoted as she, and with exactly the same goals, they're vigorously spewing second-hand the propaganda from AIPAC's and the Israeli government's blastfax. I'm sure Chait and Peretz at TNR are doing much the same thing but I can't be bothered to look. Whatever. And so on. Ugh. If I were a better blogger (or I should say a less lazy, less demoralized one) I'd catalog all the moral obscenity out there -- especially from "my side" -- condemn the culprits, demand some form of accountability, and rage at the lack thereof. But, no; fuck it; what's the point?

Slowly (I've been blogging since '03), I have absorbed the lesson that not only do I, like everyone else, have to watch hypocritical and murderous governments I am partly responsible for as a citizen and taxpayer do stupid and wicked things and totally get away with it, I have to watch demented people endorse these stupid and wicked acts, often with recommendations of even more brutality, and totally get away with it -- hell, get rewarded for it. And, obviously, I'm not just talking about wingnuts. And all this in a medium which both left and right insist is more meritocratic than the em-ess-em.

The Arabs and Turks Israel murdered on those boats will not be restored to life. Israel and its benefactor, my country, will totally get away with the crime. The wingnuts, and so-called leftwingers who think with their blood rather than their brains, who view any American or especially Israeli military action as an invitation to fapstasy, will not only totally get away with it, but their stock, as it were, will rise.

I should quit -- have quit. But I always come back. Dunno why.

A Wishy-Washy Waste

2010-05-06T04:05:00.003-05:00

Christopher Hitchens, 5/13/2010:

[Ralph Miliband's] best-known book was Parliamentary Socialism, in which he analyzed Labor's attempt to transform society through the ballot box. His conclusion was that a party too wedded to pragmatism and compromise would in the end sacrifice its principles, but in doing so it would also cease to work as an electoral machine. Perhaps I'll take this book down from the dusty old shelf on which I have preserved it.

(Italics mine.)

A.J.P. Taylor, 10/1957:

I doubt whether anyone with an Anglican background can become a true radical. George Lansbury came nearest to it. Yet there was always a subtle dividing line between him and the rebels around him. Gladstone tried hard, but he could never rid himself of the belief that a duke or a bishop had more political sense than Cobden or John Stuart Mill. The rule still applies in the Labour Party. Its leaders with an Anglican education seek radical ideas, but they lack radical instincts. Time and again they wind up on the Right without ever meaning to do so.

Throw out Taylor's "Anglican" and replace it with "professional" or even "typical" and it holds true for modern Labour and Democratic politicians. The result is or will be just as Miliband thought.

Like I Was Sayin'

2010-05-03T00:17:00.003-05:00

Thanks, mostly, to American academics' misappropriation and misapplication of Foucault, science is considered merely an ideology or a "point of view," something to be weighed against emotion and feeling and superstition and mythology, to the point that stuff like this is supposed to be respected and indeed is listed in such a way as to make it equal to the other serious objections before it:

Members of the tiny, isolated tribe had given DNA samples to university researchers starting in 1990, in the hope that they might provide genetic clues to the tribe’s devastating rate of diabetes. But they learned that their blood samples had been used to study many other things, including mental illness and theories of the tribe’s geographical origins that contradict their traditional stories.

[...]

Another article, suggesting that the tribe’s ancestors had crossed the frozen Bering Sea to arrive in North America, flew in the face of the tribe’s traditional stories that it had originated in the canyon and was assigned to be its guardian.

Listening to the investigators, Ms. Tilousi felt a surge of anger, she recalled. But in Supai, the initial reaction was more of hurt. Though some Havasupai knew already that their ancestors most likely came from Asia, “when people tell us, ‘No, this is not where you are from,’ and your own blood says so — it is confusing to us,” Rex Tilousi said. “It hurts the elders who have been telling these stories to our grandchildren.”

(My emphasis.)

Clearly the scientists studying the DNA fucked over the Native Americans, and abused the limited permission implicitly given them by the natives. But that doesn't mean the science is somehow false or should somehow be censored because it conflicts with myth.

How should decent Americans want to help the most abused ethnic group in our history? Give them money, reparations, as much sovereignty as they demand, admit past abuses, demand that history be taught accurately, feel guilty and ashamed of our government's Indian policies and encourage that feeling in others, give Native Americans access to better services, stop abusing them.. the list is endless but one thing it does not include is giving in to this weird, identity politics-based form of Lysenkoism. Decent people don't give a shit if the theory of evolution "offends" creationists; neither should decent people care that Native American beliefs have been "offended" by the facts of science. If the scientific evidence says Kennewick Man, for instance, is one thing but Native American belief says he's another, there's only one side to take. Sadly, many on the left take the wrong side. In this regard there's no difference between Vine Deloria, Jr., and Jerry Falwell, except liberals think there is -- not because of their "white guilt", but because, first, academic culture and, now, the broader culture interprets and applies Foucault in a certain way.

It's as if, for such people, the world has been Rashomonified. All explanations of a given problem, issue, or event are possibly valid, possibly compromised; the truth being unknowable, everything's subjective; every point of view is basically equal (democracy, amirite?) so it's best to support the point of view of those who have been historically abused. Science, after all, had its origins with imperialistic peoples (racists!), has been abused imperialistically, and therefore empiricist is imperialist!

I've even had an especially fanatical Foucaultian tell me that math is at the very least culturally-loaded and dubious. Now I'm with Mark Twain when it comes to statistics, and know a great many sabermetricians who are total douchebag ideologues whose conclusions are complete crap, but math itself does not lie and the facts it proves are not mere "constructs" and means by which the powerful enforce their will.

[Yes, I'm thoroughly aware of the irony here: in the previous post I am demanding more relativism, but in this post I insist some things are universal, if not perfectly so.]

Misappropriation

2010-04-28T09:44:00.004-05:00

Literature:

“After the war French writers rejected the idea of narrative because Hitler and Stalin were storytellers, and it seemed naïve to believe in stories. So instead they turned more and more to theory, to the absurd. The French declined even to tell stories about their own history, including the war in Algeria, which like all history can’t really be digested until it is turned into great literature."

"Social Sciences":

Of course, [Julia Kristeva] is hardly the first French thinker to wield more influence over students and scholars in the United States than in France: this was also true of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In fact, it was the fate of Ms. Kristeva and this three unlikely subversives to be accused of planting the seeds of political correctness in American colleges long before the concept was re-exported back to France to be mocked as a typically American aberration.

It's funny how that works. A group appropriates something borne of another culture, intended for that culture, and only properly understood by people of that culture, takes it for its own thinking the only translation or adjustment necessary is the elementary one of language. Of course it's not just the taker's fault; often it's just as much the giver's. For instance, regarding beautiful letters, it's probably more Roland Barthes's fault that American universities have utterly ruined the study of literature than it's the fault of -- I dunno -- say, Susan Sontag. And certainly, regarding "social sciences" (identity politics division), Foucault ran with and totally exploited the fame and acclaim America showered on him -- and who could blame him? -- but it was the angsty, middle-class remnants of the New Left who were all too eager to buy what they thought he was selling.

Marxism was borne of the thwarted revolutions of 1848 -- thwarted revolutions of, at that time, the most developed countries on earth. Marxism was intended for and could only be properly understood by industrial Germany (and England, to give Engels credit where due). Naturally, it was applied to the European country most unlike those: Russia. In that application was a massive mutation.

Christianity was borne of a colonized, tribal people, humiliated by their conquerors and suffering from occupation and the corruption of their own elites. It was invented by a Jewish man, intended for and properly understood by other Jews. Naturally, it was applied to "the uncircumcised", the goyim. In that application was a massive mutation.

Lenin & Trotsky, Russians; St. Paul the Hellenized and Romanized Jew; American Academics -- they've all made the same basic error of taking systems of thought that are not parochial so much as culturally particular, systems they themselves do not and can not fully understand, and applied them to something they don't fit.

Yay, Terrorism?

2010-04-22T14:21:00.003-05:00

Sometimes it is a force for good in the world:

Within about six months of being named prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated in Madrid by four Basque members of ETA, who carried out a bombing while he returned from Mass in a Dodge 3700. ETA placed 80-100 kg of explosives in a tunnel they had excavated under the street. The blast catapulted the vehicle over the Jesuit monastery in front of which it had run, and it landed on a second floor balcony on the other side.

[...]

This assassination, dubbed Operación Ogro, was in retaliation for the execution of five political opponents by the regime (including some members of ETA) and was applauded by many opponents of the Francoist government. Since Carrero Blanco could have become the most powerful figure in Spain upon Franco's passing, his death was instrumental in the transition toward a democratic government in that country.

The article quotes a former member of ETA saying that a democratic outcome was highly unintended, but whatever. I mean, I'm ready to believe that Operacion Ogro was a scumbaggy exercise just as much as more obviously vile actions like Black September or the bombing of the King David Hotel. But in this case, who would take it back even if they could?

Nietzsche, Amanda Marcotte, and Science vs. "God" & Larry Summers & Greater Wingnuttia

2010-04-15T07:32:00.002-05:00

Guh:

CAMBRIDGE -- The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

Rah:

--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible--of God`s mortal terror of science? . . . No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, "God" faces only one great danger.--

The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.21What does he do? He creates man--man is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also bored. God`s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God`s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end--and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.--"Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world"--every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science. . . It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike--it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!--Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.--"Thou shalt not know"--the rest follows from that.--God`s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one`s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man must not think.--And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness--nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don`t allow him to think. . . Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be done?--The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always had need of war....). War--among other things, a great disturber of science !--Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.--So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become scientific--there is no help for it: he must be drowned!". . . .

George Bush, Sr. Anticipates Sarah Palin

2010-04-01T23:11:00.002-05:00

Via Sidney Blumenthal's Pledging Allegiance:

Bush's condescension toward the movement had occasionally seeped out. "I'm a conservative, but I'm not a nut about it," he had said. And he once classified the right wing as the "extra chromosome set."

Heh, retards.

How Mr. Kenilworth Got His Wings

2010-03-31T20:40:00.002-05:00

The Elliott Abrams story, as told by Sidney Blumenthal in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment:

Who are the young neoconservatives? "Well," said [Norman] Podhoretz, "there's my son-in-law." For Podhoretz, neoconservatism had become a family-run dry cleaners. There is his wife, Midge Decter, a one-woman lecture series on the evils of women's liberation, nuclear disarmament, and the sixties. ("As far as making the bed is concerned," she once wrote, "I plead guilty to thinking it right and proper a woman should do so.") Her blunt opinions lifted her to the board of the Heritage Foundation and the directorship of the Committee for a Free World, a neoconservative sect funded largely by the Olin Foundation. The committee's newsletter, Contentions, is edited by the Podhoretzes' son-in-law Steven Munson, the former public-relations aide to Ambassador [Jeane] Kirkpatrick. And it is characterized by ad hominem attacks on the Podhoretz family's perceived ideological enemies. Then there's Elliott Abrams, who... in the second Reagan term became Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, where he became the chief promoter of military aid to the Nicaraguan contras.

"Norman tends to take positions in an extreme way," said [Nathan] Glazer. "He's a romantic. Neoconservatism's identification with a tough foreign policy is almost entirely Norman and Midge and their in-laws and relatives."

"Norman and Midge are the golden couple now," said Abrams, shortly after the 1980 election. "It's strange."

The shadow leftism of young neoconservatives like Abrams does not have its emotional center in the 1930s. Instead, they are obsessed by the sixties, when, unlike their mentors, they could withdraw into their own society. They could not escape their peers; but by attaching themselves to the Counter-Establishment they hope to defeat them.

"I'm sorry, but John Lennon was not that important a figure in our times," said Abrams a week after Lennon's killing. "I do not believe he created the culture of the sixties. Come on! I've actually formed a political opinion of this. Why is his death getting more attention than Elvis Presley's? Because Lennon is perceived as a left-wing figure politically, anti-establishment, a man of social conscience with concern for the poor. And, therefore, he's being made into a great figure. Too much has been made of his life. It does not deserve a full day's television and radio coverage. I'm sick of it."

Elvis's demise, of course, was hardly ignored by the press. Abrams's insistence that it was reveals his political assumptions, a parochialism characteristic of neoconservatives bred in certain insular New York circles and perhaps a resentment against perceived slights.

"My parents were strict," he said. "Everybody went to a movie, and I always had to call home at nine-thirty. I don't think I'm the worse for it. I went to my high school reunion and I saw wreckage. A startling number of talented people -- waiters, bookstore clerks. It's awful." Were these the people who didn't have to call home?

When Abrams graduated, he entered Harvard. (He later attended Harvard Law School, and during his second year he rented the top floor of Nathan Glazer's house.) He was on the cusp of his generation, precisely the right age to be fully affected by the fusion of politics and culture in the sixties and to be fully self-conscious about it, neither too old by a few years nor too young. In 1968 -- before the assassination of Robert Kennedy, before the harrowing Democratic convention, before the fall campaign -- you people chose sides against the Johnson administration. Many were attracted to the cool intellectualism of Eugene McCarthy, many were attracted to the heated existentialism of Robert Kennedy, and many disdained and despaired of all hopeful possibilities. Abrams supported Hubert Humphrey. He was, in fact, national chairman of Campus Americans for Democratic Action, founder of the Harvard chapter, and an ex-officio member of the national ADA board. "I quickly discovered that CADA was a paper organization, in which anyone could immediately rise to the top. So I did." after he declared for Humphrey, he attended his first national board meeting in Washington. "I arrived all excited and delighted and happy." As he recalled, the first person to approach him said, "Resign!" He was, he said, "diselected," booted out of office for the Humphrey heresy. "It didn't change my feelings about liberalism," he said. "It changed my feelings about liberals. I thought I was doing the right thing. The ADA liberals were doing something very wrong. I was one of the people to drop away from what we called the New Left. I was at that tender age in the vanguard. No sooner did I enter than I left. There was no sense of past loyalties or friendships gone. I was so new to it."

Yet his experience placed him in opposition to his peers, making him an outsider. "If you are my age, you broke with your generation," he said. "While everyone was up in arms over Vietnam and involved with the youth culture, you didn't share it; you reacted against it. I spent a good portion of my time in college working against SDS. There aren't many of us. We have a feeling of swimming against the tide. You feel isolated, embattled."

"Elliott's still living in the world of the 1960s, where Harvard is about to be destroyed by revolutionaries, who happen to be his fellow students," said one of his friends. "He has a deep and abiding resentment about what went on and he sees it in all sorts of inappropriate contexts. He sees about half of the Democratic Party as SDS taking over University Hall. I would describe it as a fication in the past. But Elliott's no lunatic. It's not a weirdness waiting for an ideology to happen. He just doesn't see how times have changed in any way. Why has he been fixated? I'm not sure. He was not the only person affected this way. It's a political ideology he became a part of."

Working for Reagan was something about which Abrams had no ambivalence. "I was especially for Reagan because he had a harder line than any of the others," he said. Abandoning the Democratic Party was no hardship. "The conclusion I come to is that the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future is not the right place for neoconservatives. The Republican Party is. Either the Democrats will stay with the big-government/weak-America policy or they will begin to say 'me, too,' rather than being on the frontiers. Neoconservatives will probably, most of them, end up as Republicans. There isn't any reason to stay in the Democratic Party these days."

His longest statement of principle was a contribution to a forum of young neoconservatives published on the eve of the 1980 campaign in The American Spectator. He wrote:

Grant that injustice, poverty, disease, and war are in part simply endemic to the human condition, and in fact the result of ignorant or mistaken or evil acts by individuals and a very different result emerges. Where liberals see "problems," neoconservatives see "conditions."

Problems can be solved, but conditions are a result of human nature, even perhaps conditions like human-rights violations.

On the cover of this special issue of The American Spectator was a cartoon of his father-in-law, Norman Podhoretz, clutching a saber and leading the charge.

Earthquaker Oatmeal

2010-03-23T04:14:00.002-05:00

Above: Always sees the glass as half-fool.

Shorter Pissedopher Hitchens
Slate
"Long Live Democratic Seismology"

Considering the fact that upwards of eleventy billion Iranians will die in the next earthquake that will inevitably strike their country, it is a moral necessity that America should invade Iran and do whatever it takes to destroy its government, for even if the casualties from such an operation are upwards of eleventy billion minus one, it's still worth it according to my flawless neocon method of moral calculus

'Shorter' concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Why I Like Roy

2010-03-23T02:19:00.004-05:00

He's honest about it:

[Texas is] the only place in the country that gives New York serious competition for the most self-regarding jurisdiction on earth... which I can appreciate.

I myself can't. In fact, I find such self-regard totally insufferable, and in certain contexts (okay, sports) it drives me batshit fucking insane. Not so insane that I hope an entire group of people dies lonely, sobbing for mommy, in some pathetic and drunken mattress fire incident (that sort of bile, also sports-inspired, is solely reserved for the most repugnant sub-sapien primates on earth: Chicago Cubs fans), but pretty damn livid. Still, I can respect it of others when they admit it; rather like how I as an agnostic can respect the stated beliefs of Scientologists or Rotarians. To each, his own! (And how's that for self-regard?)

But seriously, congrats to Roy on getting shacked-up. Texas, though enemy territory, isn't too far; maybe we could all have a beer sometime provided he hasn't gone too native by then and insists on a Lone Star or Pearl Light.

PS: Roy needs to know that only barbarians think cooked beef can be called barbecue.

The HAWTEST Destroyer of Wingnuts, EVAR!

2010-03-21T23:54:00.002-05:00

No starbursts here, but I gotta say that Tanya Acker is beautiful and smart and beautiful and smart and beautiful and smart.

Moar of the Same - Plus Moar!

2010-02-26T02:25:00.003-06:00

John Bright's definition of imperialism, via AJP Taylor:

A gigantic system of out-relief for the British aristocracy.

Yes, and where the British sent dullard baronets' sons to India, America sends Simone Ledeen types to Iraq*. Upper class welfare for laissez-faire worshiping hypocrites and monsters. Same as it ever was... except we have an even more manly type of Elite for whom even riding the Green Zone gravy train is too dangerous. These people get a different, easier sort of welfare, more lucrative in terms of steady cash and, most importantly, direct access to power: it's called punditry.

*Cf. this and this.

Hehpocrite

2010-02-24T23:39:00.002-06:00

Pissedopher Hitchens, a couple weeks ago, very disappointed in the lack of civility, the crudeness, the total degradation zOMG:

[A]n obviously shocked Mr. Hari tried for a change of pace and asked Vidal if he felt like saying anything about his recently deceased rivals, John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. He didn’t manage to complete his question before being interrupted. “Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.” One sadly notices, as with the foregoing barking and effusions, the utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity. Sarcastic, tired flippancy has stolen the place of the first, and lugubrious resentment has deposed the second. Oh, just in closing, then, since Vidal was in London, did he have a word to say about England? “This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.” Good grief.

Pissedopher Hitchens yesterday:

Al Haig was a neurotic narcissist with an unquenchable craving for power.... "Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do," I once wrote. "And I think he is a homicidal buffoon." ...Indeed, the bulk of Haig's awful political career was an example of banana-republic principles and the related phenomenon of an overambitious man in uniform who mastered the essential art of licking the derrières of those above him while simultaneously (see above) bullying and menacing those below.... His manically authoritarian personality frightened even many on the right... and his career was one of contempt for democracy at home and abroad. From his squalid life one can learn to detect the diseased symptoms of Caesarism and the urgency of combating it.

And here's Hitchens from a good while back:

The stupidity of Ronald Reagan.... I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard.... Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see.

The only thing wrong with any of this -- a feast of crude truths -- is Hitchens's hypocrisy. And BTW, Vidal, age 85, was speaking impromptu; Hitchens, whose liver may be 85 but the rest of him is 60ish, took the time to craft his wonderfully graceless, ungenerous, snotty remarks on the recently deceased. Hitchens would like you to think he's disappointed in Vidal's tone, but it's a classic heads I win, tails you lose set-up. Had Vidal beautifully and baroquely slagged, say, Buckley, with purple flying all over the place, Hitchens would have concentrated on condemning the bitterness and florid mean-spiritedness in the older man's heart. Since Vidal insulted Buckley generically, Hitchens is free to play -- and does play -- the "bitter and witless" card.

Pundit Is Ah-scared

2010-02-19T18:44:00.004-06:00

George F. Will sez:

America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism.

While I'll agree that academic culture sucks, George Fwill is hardly the person to point fingers at Elites. Academics do indeed produce dreamy impracticalities, often using the near-slave labor of grad students. But at least academics usually know their subjects; most have at least some ammo where it counts: in their noggins. Is this so much worse than pompous douchebag pundits who produce utter crap, using the near-slave labor of research assistants; such pundits who pretend to be so well-read, but who in real life have absolutely no ammo except that provided by a gopher who knows how to plunder a Bartlett's? The Preznit's an academic who knows some things; Pundit-weasel hybrid is a fake know-it-all who knows nothing. I know who I prefer.

But the reaction against this must somewhat please him. That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness.

Uh, no. Populism is resentment, often righteous, of Elites, economic, political, and cultural, more or less in that order, who are perceived as thieving, corrupt, or otherwise unworthy. That populism can be anti-intellectual doesn't mean that it inherently is anti-intellectual; perhaps in a genuine meritocracy it would be, but then the fact that America is flagrantly not a meritocracy is one of the major inspirations of populism.

This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.

After William Jennings Bryan's defeat in 1908, his third as the Democrats' presidential nominee, this prototypical populist said he felt like the man who, thrown out of a bar for a third time, dusted himself off and said, "I'm beginning to think those fellows don't want me in there."

That's not quite fair: Bryan would have won in 1896 had Mark Hanna not bought, with Robber Baron money, the election for McKinley. Theodore Roosevelt would have won in 1912 had the Robber Barons not used Taft as a spoiler. It's not that populism isn't popular enough to succeed, it's that populism is so scary to the Rulers of the country that they will use any means to see it fail.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter -- peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that -- somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.

Who won in 1980? Oh yeah; Ronald Reagan, the least intellectual president between Harding and George W. Bush. Presumably, Will thinks Reagan rises above ordinary because the president was coached by a certain pundit...

In 1968, George Wallace, promising to toss the briefcases of pointy-headed intellectuals into the Potomac, won 46 electoral votes with 13.5 percent of the popular vote. He had the populist's trifecta -- a vivid personality, a regional base and a burning issue. Actually, he had three such issues -- backlash against the civil rights revolution, social disintegration (urban riots, rising crime) and resentment of the progressive projects of Great Society social engineers (e.g., forced busing of other people's children).

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.

Hmm, and who completely stole Wallace's thunder, and to great success? Will doesn't say, because it would fuck-up his thesis. Nixon fanned the flames of the worst kind of populism (racial resentment), but also the good kind, albeit hypocritically.

Typically, liberals get mad at me for bashing academics-in-government, a.k.a. technocrats. I've been called Spiro Agnew. But millions of Indochinese owe their incineration to the best and brightest academic experts like McNamara and McGenghis Bundy. Yes, that was then. Now, millions of Americans owe their joblessness or job-degradedness to pointy-headed experts like Larry Summers and Brad DeLong. And of course many Muslims owe their misery and/or deaths to Neocon and Liberal Hawk Perfessers. Nixon exploited righteous anger at these types, then put Dr. Kissinger from Harvard in charge, promptly guaranteeing the incineration of moar Indochinese not to mention the torture and murder of Chileans, Timorese, Cypriots, Argentines, Angolans, etc. etc.

You Will Never Stop The Lulz

2010-02-17T22:22:00.004-06:00

Sez Mary Elizabeth Williams:

George Carlin, who knew a thing or two about linguistics, once memorably declared that there are "no bad words." There are "bad thoughts, bad intentions," he explained. "And words." Ah, would that it were that simple.

It is that simple.

Were we to draw up a new list of verboten phrases du jour, surely right near the top would be "retard."

Happily, no.

While I generally try to err on the side of sensitivity (and often fall impressively flat), I also don't get my own knickers in a twist when I hear an occasional "retard" among friends.

Good, you're not completely into Ampersand territory, then -- which means you're not completely fucking retarded.

Silverman and "Family Guy," in contrast, built their material on the apparent hilarity of the mentally challenged -- or in a cheap send-up of "political correctness," if that's how they prefer to view it. But the material smacks of artless cruelty. That's why it's offensive, because it's the same comedically lazy, "Look at me! I'm so transgressive! Can you handle it?" routine they've both been hiding behind since the freakin' '90s.

It's easy to be offensive. It's easy to make people uncomfortable. And it's petty and mean to get laughs at the expense of people who actually are laughed at and teased all the time, and then pass it off as edgy social commentary.

It is, in general, easy to be offensive and make people feel uncomfortable; however, it's hard to be funny at the same time: Witness what passes for humor on "Identity Politics" blogs, whether Stalinist or wingnut. Both FG and Silverman manage to be funny; it's called having talent. All good comedy is ultimately transgressive; all great comedians are assholes in their own way, but they are clever assholes. Moreover, "mean" (insult comic) assholes, who mildly transgress against the general in order to severely wound the deserving particular, are usually freakin' righteous -- and that's really what people like Ms. Williams can't abide.

The belief that one can be nice and be funny is just as delusional as the belief in the virgin birth.

Triumph Of Will

2010-02-03T03:28:00.002-06:00

...Grant went off to his first war. Offandedly, he gives us what I take to be the key if not to his character to his success: "One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go any where, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished." This defines not only a certain sort of military genius but explains field-commander Grant who would throw wave after wave of troops into battle, counting on superior numbers to shatter the enemy while himself ignoring losses.
-- Gore Vidal, The Grants, Sept. 18, 1975

107. A sign of strong character, when once the resolution has been taken, to shut the ear even to the best counter-arguments. Occasionally, therefore, a will to stupidity.
-- Nietzsche, BG&E

First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All The Neocons*

2010-01-27T03:50:00.000-06:00

Here's Christopher Hitchens, to whom I'm indebted for the very handy Shakespeare quote:

Among the extremists in Tehran, there have already been bellicose noises about Bahrain, for example: a monarchical Arab mini-state with a majority Shiite population that some claim to be rightfully Persian. Given the rapid progress that it has made toward nuclear capability, and the no-less-rapid way that it has alienated its own people, the temptation for the Ahmadinejad regime to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" and to appeal to tribal and religious emotions is already fairly great.

Of course Hitchens is projecting. Once again, here's apostate neoconservative Francis Fukuyama telling the truth about Hitchens's friends and allies, devious and manipulative uber-neocons like Bill Kristol, et al., whose ultimate political aim has always been to busy giddy American minds ordinarily inclined to domestic progress and reform with distracting foreign quarrels exaggerated, inflamed, or manufactured out of whole cloth:

I think that for some neoconservatives… In a sense, they wanted to have an enemy. The end of the Cold War was a tough time because they didn’t know who the enemy ought to be. I think in the case of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard there was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because I think that they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well if foreign policy wasn’t a big issue.

The late 1990s was the, you know, the period of the stock market bubble and Monica Lewinsky and they didn’t really have an issue in all of that, I thought, that they thought was particularly important or had much traction with the voters and with the public. I think they initially picked on China as their target — and I always thought right from the beginning that was a big mistake because, first of all, foreign policy shouldn’t be driven by the needs of the Republican Party and domestic politics and secondly, I just don’t think that China is particularly useful to think of as an enemy comparable to the former Soviet Union. So in that sense, September the 11th was a big godsend because we were attacked and didn’t have to invent an enemy at that point. But I think that, just that general tendency to think of the world as extremely dangerous and full of big threats is something they try to carry forward.

The Soviet Union, the Vietnamese, the entire Arab world, the Chinese, terrorists and "terrorists," --- here's Bill Kristol recently complaining that Obama's prime time address should have been advocating MOAR war rather than health care reform -- the Iraqis, and, for a while now, the Iranians. They'll never stop.

* Cf. Shakespeare's Henry VI. What?

Never Had A Chance

2009-06-27T17:02:00.008-05:00

This is the finest thing I've read about Michael Jackson's character and cultural significance, not just in the recent days since his death, but ever:

What Jackson made of himself must form part of any honest eulogy. Defendants wish to be found innocent of the charges. Jackson was no usual suspect. He wanted to be found innocent, through and through. Innocent of guile, of all bodily dross and urge. Innocent of adult experience. Instead he found himself, as he sequestered with the bones of the Elephant Man, merged physiognomy with Diana Ross, and bedded down with little boys, at some weird four corners of his own making, where the innocent and the sinister, the icon and the freak, all come together.

The falsetto speaking voice, the licorice eyes, hair steam ironed and Zambonied until it was straight. The skin—what? We still don’t know. Bleached? Blanched? Poached? The barely suppressed facial hair. Effacement, defacement, refacement, unfacement. What word could do justice to the creation, out of a perfectly normal human countenance, of the dilapidated faerie mask that MJ’s eventually became? It was as if the slightest concession to the normal human horizon would let in a besieging pain. To substitute for the childhood he never had, he picked, with uncanny accuracy, exactly those things that don’t substitute for an actual childhood. Amusement parks and toys—the placatory devices of the bad parent.

A genius; an angry dancer; a grotesque among grotesques. What to make of Jacksonian America, now that the King himself is dead? An immense and spectacular frenzy; an urgent celebration; the affect of triumph; at its center a derangement; beneath that, in all likelihood, nothing.

The adult MJ would have never been himself, good and bad, had his childhood not been stolen. His childhood was stolen by three things: his one-in-a-billion talent; his abusive, womanizing, and alcoholic father; his mother's church. That last thief, as it were, especially should not be underestimated.

It is hard for those not brought up as JWs to understand just how so totalitarian a religion fucks-up a child. Even those who convert as adults to JWism, then become recidivists back into "worldliness," can scarcely appreciate the degree to which the religion wreaks havoc on child's psyche:

When we were kids, we studied the Paradise book, which has such disgustingly frightening pictures of things like Jezebel being thrown to the dogs, or a Canaanite getting ready to toss a baby onto this fire in the lap of their idol. The worst was part of a big, panoramic picture of Armageddon: this little girl, her doll, her dog and her bicycle all falling down into this big chasm in the Earth. Gave me nightmares. It’s probably why I was afraid to learn how to ride a bike.

That's the one I was subjected to -- it was well out of date by my time, but my grandmother was old school JW -- and would have been the one the Jackson kids were tortured with as well.

Fear will fuck-up a childhood, which in turn will fuck-up -- everything else. Imagine being raised believing that the world will end any minute, and while you might or might not survive, definitely everyone you know or love who's not a member of your church will die horribly. Because Jesus is the Prince of Peace. Then remember the real, non-religious probability of Armageddon during MJ's childhood -- he would have been at about the age where memories begin to stick when JFK and Krushchev nearly blew up the world. Then, imagine, on top of that, being so scared of your father's beating that you feel like puking in his presence. Then, as icing on the cake, your Dad's not only violent but sadistic, doing things like sneaking into your room through an open window late at night, wearing a mask, terrorizing you into "learning a lesson" about the dangers of burglars. Imagine all that, then empathize: your pathology may not have been MJ's, the variety and degree of which wealth and celebrity afforded him (and sheltered him from the consequences of -- until the trials and then death). But you'd definitely be fucked-up somehow.

I pause my search for more percocet to note that Michael Jackson almost certainly died from drug abuse.

Pure Yokelese

2009-06-23T06:26:00.010-05:00

I'm watching, for the first time, the Sling Blade bonus features. In an older interview which apparently was made soon after Sling Blade and broadcast on the Bravo channel, Billy Bob Thornton is talking about his pre-fame hard times when he couldn't get work. He complains that he couldn't even get cast as a redneck. Then:

The next thing I know, some guy from New York is playing a guy from Georgia. And they always use that accent that doesn't exist. I mean how many actors have you heard who aren't from the South who've done movies that [imitates fake accent] "Now boyah, ovah heah"... I haven't heard that in my life.

Wow. I'm surprised that someone so obviously gifted at truthfully writing his own native Arkansan accent (and cadence, and -- especially -- vocabulary) could be so deaf. The accent he thinks fake is actually of the Deep South; just because it was caricatured by that genius Mel Blanc doesn't mean that it's fictional. I dunno where the boundary might be, but I do know my Alabama-raised great-grandmother spoke exactly that way, as did my African-American fifth grade teacher in Memphis, Mrs. Jones, a grand and awesome lady whose family's geographical origins I never knew or have forgotten. ("Vacuum," for instance, is a word they spoke exactly alike: it was spit out, whatever the context, in a tone between a snarl and a shout, as if in frustration, as "VAAAHHHHL-cyum.") Moreover, all rural and most urban folk I've met in Mississippi, a state I've spent quite a bit of time in, have this accent.

On the other hand, I entirely sympathize with his gripe with New York jackasses trying to "do" Southern. In my experience, admittedly slight, most (not all) white creative types -- as opposed to "normal" people from the lower-middle and working classes -- from the Northeast have a horror of and contempt for the Southern cracker[1] (and blacks from the same area mirror this in their attitude to their rural Southern counterparts). No sympathy = no empathy = bad acting.

I'm sure the scientist-specialists have a proper name for an Arkansas accent, but I think I'm pretty accurate in saying it's half Texan, half Appalachian or "Highland." The hillbilly aspect makes "Arkansan" sound somewhat nasal no matter the timbre of the speaker's voice; Deep Southern, in contrast, is breathy, throaty, and emphatic if often very slurred (incidentally, the degree of slur is the giveaway to the speaker's class not race). "High class" Deep Southern is the grand accent, the one with the most dignity to the ear, but also the one most loaded with historical baggage. "High class" Arkansan, meanwhile, is not so noticeably different from its "low class" counterpart; the former is, if anything, tinged with more Western and Mid-Western attributes and less Appalachian[2] -- or, if you like, more German and less Scots-Irish. But there's still a twang and the vowels are still drawled (to riot in understatement).

Anyway, Sling Blade. The plot, the characters and their mannerisms, expressions, posture, choices, morality -- all perfect-as-in-truthful, and that's that. But what affected me -- and still affects me -- is the movie's absolute authenticity with regard to special, demotic, and dying Arkansan vocabulary. The movie came out in '96; I think I first saw it in '97. Some of the expressions and words the characters -- especially Karl -- use I hadn't heard, at least with any regularity, since my grandfather was living (he left this vale of tears in '92): "sommers" for "somewhere," "directly" (pronounced "dreckly") for "soon," "studyin'" for "considering" or "thinking," "reckon" for "believe,"[3] "nervous hospital" for "mental institution" or "nuthouse," "twyst" for "twice," "I'll be dog" for "I'll be dog-gone," "kindly" for "kind of"... I am sure there are more I'm forgetting right now. Also, more common words, indeed stereotypical (therefore frequently if, ultimately, wrongly striking a false note for the listener) for Southern or Western characters, are still accurate here: "ain't," "yonder," "feller."

Even the inflections are spot-on. Lucas Black ("Frank", the boy), is Alabaman but, I believe, had traveled/lived throughout the South before taking the role. He and Thornton both totally accurately say "ain'tchee?", a somewhat rare corruption of "ain't ya?". Dwight Yoakam, who if I remember right has Kentucky roots, has his "Doyle" character appropriately over-emphasize and drawl the initial syllable of "retards;" he is also dead-on in calling a funeral vehicle a "hurst."

[1] Obviously, I reciprocate.
[2] Also a small difference in vocabulary: Gratitude is expressed by "thank you" or "thank ya" or "thanks" except for in the truly back country, where one will still sometimes hear "thankee." Similarly almost everyone uses the quintessential Southern and Western word, "y'all," but occasionally one is jarred by its alternative, "you'ins," a deeply embarrassing word even to other Southerners (good old narcissism of minor differences, again), a word so "Hatfield vs. McCoy" in its vibe that I'm almost certain it must be a remnant from Appalachia, even though I've never seen the word's origins discussed -- indeed, I've never seen it referenced, not that this is a subject I've spent any time researching -- and have only heard the word used by deep-country, flatland-swampland (by which I do not mean "Delta," which is a whole different can of worms) people and not by Ozark-hillbilly types who would make more sense to the "Appalachian origin" thesis.
[3] I was stunned to learn my Chinese-Australian then-girlfriend used the word in the Arkansan sense, both in meaning and in frequency; apparently it's a normal part of Oz-speak.

Such People are Sociopaths -- and the Worst of Them, Libertarians

2009-06-22T06:17:00.002-05:00

This is exactly right:

There's an arrogance that comes over people who think the system is just. The more just you think the system is, the crueler you're likely to be, because if you generally believe that those at the top deserve their success, you have to believe that those at the bottom deserve their failure. That's when you start talking about people as "losers," and saying things like, "Winners make their own luck." So there's a very nasty side to this otherwise very nice-sounding idea that we should make society fairer. Success is never totally deserved just as failure is never totally deserved. And I think there are too many overly happy billionaires who say things like, "No one ever helped me, so why should I help anyone else? Why should I pay taxes?" And one wants to say, "Yes, of course. But…"

PETAphor

2009-06-22T05:11:00.003-05:00

Che Guevara's granddaughter is not trying to overthrow Senor Uribe, or even protesting the ongoing neoliberal rape of South America. No, that would be banal, I suppose. Instead, she's doing propaganda for the idiots of PETA. True, it's sensual and clever and artful propaganda (I especially like the carrot bandoliers), but Jesus Christ:

NEW YORK — The granddaughter of Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara is at the forefront of another revolution _ for vegetarianism.

Lydia Guevara poses semi-nude in a PETA campaign that tells viewers to "join the vegetarian revolution," said PETA spokesman Michael McGraw.

The print campaign is expected to debut in October in magazines and posters, McGraw said. It will be launched first in Argentina, where Che Guevara was born, and then internationally. PETA approached the 24-year-old in recent months after finding out she was a vegetarian, McGraw said.

In the ad, Lydia Guevara wears camouflage pants, a red beret, and bandoliers of baby carrots while standing with one fist on her hip and the other outstretched.

"It very much evokes the tag line of the ad, which is 'Join the vegetarian revolution,'" McGraw said. "It's an homage of sorts to her late grandfather."

Oh, please.

This is why the Left is a total clusterfuck of FAIL: all passion and vitality by its best and brightest is spent in the service of narrow identity issues or outright vanity projects (such as this one).

The Toy Fascist

2009-06-08T03:22:00.002-05:00

More from the October 1980 Playboy interview:

LIDDY: ........In the long run, you know, a nation's psychology is far more crucial than its military hardware. My Oriental instructor in the martial arts taught me that the outcome of a battle is decided in the minds of the opponents well before the first blow is struck. We certainly saw that in the France of 1940. The French had more troops, more tanks, more guns than the Germans, more of almost everything except the fanatic and disciplined esprit de corps of the German fighting man. Hitler's secret weapon wasn't the brilliant and imaginative coupling of Panzer and Stuka in concerted ground-air attack; it was the courage of the individual Wehrmacht soldier, each of whom carried blitzkrieg in his breast. Can you imagine what Rommel's Afrika Korps would do with today's volunteer army, the army that "wants to join you," as the recruiting posters said? Jesus, they'd chew us up and spit us out in no time flat. We couldn't fight our way out of a wet paper bag today.

PLAYBOY: The admiration for the German fighting spirit you've just expressed, and your general fascination with all things German, is an underlying leitmotiv of Will, and has assumed sinister overtones in the eyes of some critics, who accuse you of being a closet Nazi sympathizer. Could they be right?

LIDDY: They couldn't be more wrong. It's true that I do admire the mentality of the northern Teutonic races, not only their fighting spirit but also, and equally important, their work ethic and sense of discipline. I find all those values admirable, and have always identified with them. But I have absolutely no sympathy for Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Remember, German history spans thousands of years, and the twelve years of the Third Reich was no more than a historical aberration. One of the many tragic aspects of the holocaust is that the very German virtues I have enumerated -- discipline, efficiency, the ability to subordinate emotion to duty -- were perverted into the organized annihilation of millions of innocent civilians, not only Jews but gypsies and Slavs as well. To me, that is the antithesis of all the things I admire about the German martial spirit, and it is a stain on German honor from which the country will take many years to recover. But in fairness, I can also admire the sheer courage and military genius of German soldiers like Rommel who took no part in such atrocities, and maintained their and their country's honor intact. But for Adolf Hitler and the psychopathic scum in the concentration camps who butchered babies on an assembly line because they were born into the wrong race, I have nothing but contempt.

PLAYBOY: Many of your critics have speculated, nonetheless, that if you'd been born in Germany, you would have made one hell of a Nazi.

LIDDY: What can you really say to something like that? I mean, shit, I'm just as interested in the extraordinarily deep and rich culture of Japan, and equally fascinated by the traditional Bushido code of the samurai warrior. What're they going to say about that? "Oh, Liddy would have flown a Zero at Pearl Harbor"? Come on.

PLAYBOY: If you had been born in Germany and been of fighting age in World War Two, would you have served in Hitler's armies?

LIDDY: Well, that's all extremely hypothetical, of course. Here you are slapping me down in another culture and time and asking how I'd behave. Would I have been conditioned by my society into accepting Hitler as a savior, as our German maid did in the Thirties? I certainly hope not, and, in fact, I suspect just the opposite. I can accept and serve authority I respect, but against authority that I despise. I quickly turn to rebellion, as I did in the slammer when I fought the prison administration tooth and nail. In the case of Germany, you must remember that I'm a political conservative, and I respect tradition and the values of Western culture, and so I think it more likely I would have joined those conservatives and Catholics who tried to overthrow Hitler. Like Carl Goerdeler, or Count von Stauffenberg, the heroic officer who had lost an arm, hand and eye on the Eastern front but returned to almost blow Hitler to smithereens at Rastenburg during the July twentieth plot in 1944. And who, needless to say, was executed by the Gestapo shortly afterward. But yes, like Stauffenberg as well, I'm sure I would have fought for my country, probably in the Luftwaffe or a Panzer division. But it's all sheer speculation, of course. Next you'll be asking where I keep my Iron Cross!

PLAYBOY: If Hitler had abjured anti-Semitism and genocide, could you have supported him?

LIDDY: No. It would have made his regime less loathsome, of course, but he'd still have been a dictator, and Nazi Germany would still have been a totalitarian state. Again, as a conservative, I support the concept of a society that, whenever possible, is voluntary and noncoercive. As I explained when discussing the upheavals of the Sixties, there are times when the state, to preserve that very humane society, must intrude into the privacy and the freedom of the individual, but it should be done as sparingly as possible, and only in response to a clear and present danger to the very stability and security of the society. A totalitarian state, by its very nature, permanently imposes itself as the master of the individual, and thus is inherently abhorrent to me. Some, like Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, are bloodier than others, but all are ultimately destructive of the human spirit.

PLAYBOY: Your abhorrence of Hitler's genocide certainly sounds sincere, but it only makes your own fascination with the Nazi era more perplexing. For example, if you really loathed everything Hitler stood for, why did you go out of your way to arrange a special screening of Leni Riefenstahl's classic Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, for a group of White House aides?

LIDDY: Well, you've got to understand the background to that. John Ehrlichman and others who had run Nixon's 1968 campaign were always regaling people about what great advance men they'd been, and what giant rallies they'd organized, with balloons going up in the air by the hundreds, and on and on ad nauseum. I got bored hearing about those "mammoth rallies" of theirs that I finally said, "Hey, you guys, you want to see a real rally?" They took the bait and I set up a private screening of Triumph of the Will at the National Archives for the entire White House staff. It really is an impressive film you know, there's no doubt that Riefenstahl's a cinematic genius. Well, about fifteen people attended, and they sat there watching hundreds of thousands of storm troopers marching in mass formations under Albert Speer's spectacular stage management, a vast field of people standing to sing the Horst Wessel Lied at night as giant antiaircraft spotlights beam pillars of light through the clouds overhead, creating a luminous, cathedral-of-stars effect. In short, a really overwhelming display. And finally, when the lights came on, there was a moment of awed silence, and then from the back of a voice breathed reverently, "Jesus! What an advance job!" My point, it seems, was taken.

PLAYBOY: Forgetting for a moment the obvious negative connotations of the word fascism, and keeping in mind your professed detestation of Hitler's genocide, don't you, in fact, embody most of the traditional values of Italian and Spanish fascism, if not of Nazism -- i.e., duty, honor, love of fatherland, military elan and semimystical exaltation of personal and national will and destiny, strong anticommunism, genetic determinism, contempt for the herd, etc.? And, thus, couldn't you be fairly and objectively termed a fascist in that sense?

LIDDY: No, because if you're going to be at all precise and objective in your evaluation of comparative political systems, then fascism refers to a specific political movement that evolved in Italy in the Twenties and was subsequently emulated in various countries in Europe and Latin America. It embodies the concept of blind obedience, the corporate state, dictatorial, centralized one-man rule, and a host of other totalitarian mechanisms and concepts that are all anathema to me. And I certainly don't think that some of the qualities you enumerate, such as duty, honor, love of country and military strength, are exclusive attributes of fascism. Indeed, when I was growing up, they were much praised and universally aspired-to virtues in this country. I hope they will be again. But that certainly does not make me a fascist of any stripe.

PLAYBOY: Why did you sing the Horst Wessel song at the top of your lungs to a black audience in prison?

LIDDY: Because I had become the subject of racial prejudice myself while in the Washington jail, shortly after my initial conviction. I ran a daily gauntlet of racial slurs from the predominantly black prisoners, and even though I had told myself it shouldn't get under my skin, it finally did. I was in deadlock, so I couldn't even challenge to a fight the prisoners who hurled their taunts through the bars. I had my opportunity to strike back one morning when a guard escorted me to the showers. As I walked down the catwalk, a chorus of jeers greeted me: "OK, baby, if you want racist, here's racist!" I knew the words to the Horst Wessel song by heart from childhood, when I'd first heard it from Germany on our family shortwave radio, and I have a fairly strong voice. So when I reached the showers, I burst into full and rousing song, my voice booming through the cell block: Die Fahne hoch!" I sang. "Raise the flag!" As I went on, screaming out my frustration through the echoing tiers of the prison, the jeers and catcalls began to fall off. "Die Reihan dicht geschlossen....." The din gradually silenced, and by the time I reached the second verse of the Horst Wessel song, my voice was the only one that could be heard in the cell block. It was almost eerie, because I'm sure there was not one other man in that prison who understood one word of what I was singing. But they all got the message.

PLAYBOY: That initial hostility you encountered from blacks changed pretty rapidly as you began doing free legal work for black and white prisoners alike, and challenging prison administrators in the courts on questions of prisoners' rights. In fact, you ended up becoming something of a hero to inmates of both races. Did you experience in prison change any of your own racial attitudes?

LIDDY: Not really, because I had always abhorred racial prejudice and bigotry, even though I'm perfectly willing to answer back in kind when I'm on the recieving end, as the incident I just related indicates. But I think racism is one of the most stupid and ultimately wasteful of all human vices, because it denies a man's potential and worth for something as superficial and frivolous as the color of his skin. Throughout my life, I've had good and productive relationships with blacks. I also tend to particularly admire the virtues of the northern races, perhaps out of frustration with my own genetic composition. I have more Irish and Italian genes than German, and my hot Southern blood has always caused me serious problems with my temper, which it took me a long, hard struggle to govern. And I also happen to prefer the Nordic type of woman, as an aesthetic preference. I hardly think that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes can be condemned as a racist pronunciamento! But I also think blacks should take pride in their African ancestry. My God, if I could demonstrate I had some Zulu blood, I sure as hell would be proud of it, because the Zulu warriors were some of the finest fighting men on the face of the earth.

PLAYBOY: Leaving black-white issues aside, throughout your book you express a fascination with genetics and eugenics, even to the point of cold-bloodedly selecting your prospective bride according to the contribution she would make to your "family gene pool." How did she feel about that?

LIDDY: Well, it was not exactly an element I played up in our courtship. But even though it wasn't the most romantic of all considerations, I think it's a valid one, nonetheless. There's a good deal of truth to eugenics as long as you don't carry it to extremes, as we've done in the past with involuntary-sterilization plans and that kind of dangerous scheme, with all its potential for abuse. It had taken me a long time to build myself up from a puny, sickly child, so I wanted my own children to have a running start. That's why I determined that my smartest course was to marry a tall girl of Celtic-Teutonic ancestry who also had a terrific mind. And, as a result, I have five strong, athletic, and bright children. Of course, all those considerations have to be coupled with a mutual emotional compatibility, but they were definite factors in selecting my mate.

Top Reasons Why Decent People Should Detest Barry Goldwater

2009-06-07T01:26:00.003-05:00

I like Rick Perlstein; upon reflection (I was at first equivocal), I grow to dislike his celebrated biography of Barry Goldwater, which seems to me to a) trust conservatives -- by which I mean, at their word, at their memory, at their good faith -- far too much, and b)while reasonably condemning of such nutjobs as the YAF and the Birchers, totally leave out morality where Goldwater, who was their avatar, was personally concerned.

Rick, sadly, is not alone among liberals who admire Goldwater. The perverse tolerance of -- or even affection for -- Goldwater is traditional and somewhat inevitable: for a certain kind of liberal, the only one in the room who is to be shunned is the lone extremist, while the relative extremists in the room, who are often numerous, are in contrast accepted, implicitly or explicitly. Too exclude too much or too many is intolerance, you see: the ultimate sin for wishy-washy peeps. Goldwater was less reactionary than Robert Welch, General Walker, Curtis LeMay, and on racial matters, George Wallace. Therefore, for certain liberals, Barry's okay. Besides, Goldwater seemed to have principles where Nixon, say, was opportunist to his core. (Actually, both were venal in their own way; Nixon was simply better at the art of the powergrab than was Goldwater; and more to the point, what few principles Nixon did have were more humane than Goldwater's.) One need not wonder how the Overton Window moved so far right.

In later years the admiration grew. Goldwater was a UFOlogist -- one of his few charming traits -- and so won the admiration of the crackpots. More seriously, Goldwater said a few sensible things about the Religious Right in general and Jerry Falwell in particular. This completely suckered the social liberals who by far constitute the bulk of the chattering class. Never mind that Goldwater represented Wall Street and social darwinism in economic policy (social libs are comfortably upper middle class) and a diehard hawk in foreign policy (social libs are perpetually interventionalist); for such people, cheap rhetoric coincidentally agreeing with the gay rights and pro-choice movements completely redeemed a lifetime of reactionary politics.

In reality, Goldwater personally was just as awful as Goldwaterism -- the ideology which ultimately triumphed with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Consider:

1)Barry Goldwater would have irradiated the planet. In order to eliminate his enemies, a fanatic by definition will kill a great many innocents. This was the inevitable conclusion of brinksmanship, and Goldwater was the ultimate brinksman.

2)Goldwater, despite his convenient and belated denunciations (in one of his books -- but not the one ghostwritten by Brent fucking Bozell) of Richard Nixon's corruption and ruthlessness, was corrupt and ruthless himself, and the beneficiary, besides himself, was one Richard Nixon. Goldwater sabotaged Congressional investigations into the Greek angle of Watergate, obviously fearing that his connection to the slimy Tom Pappas would be revealed.

3)Goldwater was racist. Not in some banal, personal-private way in the OMG-he-said-those-people gotcha that is usually irrelevant, but in the truest, most important sense.

(See also.)

Old St. Cole

2009-06-06T21:14:00.005-05:00

wikipedia quotes G.D.H. Cole:

I became a Socialist because, as soon as the case for a society of equals, set free from the twin evils of riches and poverty, mastership and subjection, was put to me, I knew that to be the only kind of society that could be consistent with human decency and fellowship and that in no other society could I have the right to be content.”

Cole practiced what he preached. I'm not so consistent, but then few are even among the few who still believe in socialism. Still, those who are raised to be good rather than "successful" recognize in Cole's words, echoed in Debs's famous declaration "while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free," the moral necessity of socialism.

Good socialism is idealist and personal and organic, like the better forms of Christianity. (Concomitantly, the worst forms of socialism -- Trotsky's, for instance -- are like the worst forms of Christianity: universalist, coercive, synthetic.) Good socialism is also aesthetic: it rejects any making of peace with the Establishment with all the tacky materialism and social climbing that that usually entails; or, as Christopher Hitchens said of Norman Podhoretz's awful Making It, people were appalled by the sheer "crumminess" of the Pod's ambitions. But mostly, socialism is about trying to be Good and, trite as it sounds, making the world better.

Good socialism is a religion without metaphysics or theology -- in other words, it is a body of ethical reasoning; what Jefferson's Bible was to Christ's teachings, socialism is to Marx's -- or at least it was for people like Cole. Yet there can be an oft-putting high-mindedness in it. People are frequently base and often wicked; everyone is a person. In other words, we're all sinners. But some, through much dedication, sin markedly less than others, perhaps because they have a bit of a egotist-masochist will to martyrdom, or perhaps because they simply care more about being Good than the rest of us. Cole was that sort of man, a socialist saint. Alan Taylor[1] shows Cole in greater detail:

Cole's rejection of capitalism was total. Though comfortably off, he refused to invest his surplus money or even to take interest from his bank. When I remarked to him that he was making a present of interest to the bank, he replied: 'Better that my banker should commit mortal sin than that I should.' Christopher Hill, as an undergraduate, was delighted to hear Cole say at a meeting: 'Of course, I should prefer the whole system smashed.' ...In one of his last speeches he urged fellow-socialists not to think that 'socialists can afford to give up being levellers.'

There was a paradox, even a contradiction, in Cole's political life. Though a revolutionary in outlook, he was practical and reformist when it came to action. Maurice Reckitt described Cole best as having 'a Bolshevik soul in a Fabian muzzle'. During the First World War he acted as expert advisor to the trade unions... He believed in the working-class movement... There was also a personal contradiction in his public behaviour. In private Cole was cool, rational and at worst slightly disdainful. Once on a committee he became ruthless and impatient. Beatrice Webb describes how, when defeated at a Fabian meeting, Cole said: 'I withdraw the word Foold. I substitute Bloody Fools,' and flounced out of the room. He often resigned in anger and then returned some months later without a word of apology. Despite his democratic principles, Cole never shook off the belief that there was in the world one Just Man.... His last words, when his strength finally ebbed, were in character: 'I'm sorry to be a nuisance.' Douglas Cole came as near to complete integrity as any man of his time. I venerated him.

But then Taylor knew Cole; for we who did not, there's this:

He was, I think, the only Left figure never tinged with communism and yet equally free from anti-communism.

Youthful flings with communism were common in Cole's generation and in Taylor's. Taylor succumbed; Cole did not, no doubt because his family background was conformist, which is to say conservative (Taylor, in contrast, was raised by radicals). At any rate, Taylor is right to laud Cole's sensibility. He is also exactly right to imply a moral equivalence in his formula: in England, it was equally easy or difficult to be commie or anti-commie and each path presented an equal moral hazard; while in America it was far more easy to be anti-communist, and far more corrupting.*

Elsewhere, in an essay on Ernest Bevin in which he recounts many of that leader's inconsistencies**, Alan Taylor contrasts Cole's style and substance with that of Bevin:

[Bevin] once wrote to Cole: 'Really, old man, look how you have boxed the compass.' In fact, Cole erred, if at all, from rigidity of principle; it was Bevin who boxed the compass at a moment's notice, and, when he changed, everyone had to follow him.

Contrast this with A. L. Rowse's[2] take on the same episode:

[T]he biggest crackpots of the Left [were] alienating the most powerful, the biggest-minded, man [Bevin] in the Trade Union Movement, and Cole -- reluctantly -- capitulated.

The effect on Bevin was permanent: it confirmed his distrust for intellectuals for good and all. His attempt to work with them in a common effort [against the National Government of the 1930s] went by the board. To Cole he wrote, 'How could anyone have followed you in the last ten years?' -- referring to Cole's book on the Next Ten Years. 'Really, old man, look how you have boxed the compass.' 'When we have tried to associate with intellectuals, our experience has been that they do not stay the course very long. ...You see, the difference between the intellectuals and the trade unions is this: You have no responsibility, you can fly off at a tangent as the wind takes you. We, however, must be consistent and we have a great amount of responsibility.'

Rowse's quote puts things in the proper historical context, but Taylor's version illustrates the contrast in personalities.

At any rate, there's a shitload of irony here. Cole was indeed an intellectual born into economic comfort; Bevin was thoroughly working-class, instinctive, autodidactic; he was also everything Cole was not personality wise -- loud, charming, bullying (despite what Taylor says of Cole's behavior in committee). If Cole was too doctrinaire, Bevin was not doctrinaire enough. Another layer of irony here is that Rowse himself was a miserable snob albeit of working class origins, one of those cartoonish Oxford Don figures given to voluptuous displays of elitist self-love. Rowse liked Cole, but also sneered that he had no grounds to pontificate on issues like miners' working conditions because he had no experience of them. Fair enough, but Cole was more consistent on these issues than Bevin, and far more right on these issues than Rowse who, in typical bright boy fashion, had through hard work, shrewd politicking and a bit of luck, made himself upper-middle-class, and expected that everyone else worthy should do the same -- and if unworthy, should perish as nature requires.

*Cf. Gore Vidal: "I really am... a dedicated anti-anticommunist, a category far more vile to the true believer than a mere communist."

** Cf., again, Gore Vidal: "'Pragmatism' is often just a code word for 'opportunist.'"

[1] Politicians, Socialism and Historians
[2] Glimpses of the Great

The Swarm

2009-06-06T17:56:00.003-05:00

From wikipedia:

According to a 1995 World Bank report, after independence, "Zimbabwe gave priority to human resource investments and support for smallholder agriculture," and as a result, "smallholder agriculture expanded rapidly during the first half of the 1980s and social indicators improved quickly." From 1980 to 1990 infant mortality decreased from 86 to 49 per 1000 live births, under five mortality was reduced from 128 to 58 per 1000 live births, and immunisation increased from 25% to 80% of the population. Also, "child malnutrition fell from 22% to 12% and life expectancy increased from 56 to 64. By 1990, Zimbabwe had a lower infant mortality rate, higher adult literacy and higher school enrollment rate than average for developing countries".[43]

In 1991, the government of Zimbabwe, short on hard currency and under international pressure, embarked on an austerity program. The World Bank's 1995 report explained that such reforms were required because Zimbabwe was unable to absorb into its labour market the many graduates from its impressive education system and that it needed to attract additional foreign investments. The reforms, however, undermined the livelihoods of Zimbabwe's poor majority; the report noted "large segments of the population, including most smallholder farmers and small scale enterprises, find themselves in a vulnerable position with limited capacity to respond to evolving market opportunities. This is due to their limited access to natural, technical and financial resources, to the contraction of many public services for smallholder agriculture, and to their still nascent links with larger scale enterprises."

Moreover, these people were forced to live on marginal lands as Zimbabwe's best lands were reserved for mainly white landlords growing cash crops for export, a sector of the economy favoured by the IMF's plan. For the poor on the communal lands, "existing levels of production in these areas are now threatened by the environmental fragility of the natural resource base and the unsustainability of existing farming practices".[43] The International Monetary Fund later suspended aid, saying reforms were "not on track."

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), life expectancy at birth for Zimbabwean men has since become 37 years and is 34 years for women, the lowest such figures for any nation.[44] The World Bank's 1995 report predicted this decline in life expectancy from its 1990 height of 64 years when, commenting on health care system cuts mandated by the IMF structural adjustment programme, it stated that "The decline in resources is creating strains and threatening the sustainability of health sector achievements".[43]

Robert Mugabe started ok, but has since become one of the worst dictators EVAR. Still, the actions of the IMF, typically supported by wingnuts and Sensible Liberals alike, are just as much responsible for Zimbabwe's economic misery as anything Mugabe has done -- a fact Mugabe continually exploits for propagandistic purposes.

In the future, Robert Mugabe's grave will be rightly spit on for all the misery he caused; more's the pity that no one will spit on the graves of so many globalist neoliberals.

In the context of the Cold War, the corporate-capitalist minded regarded emerging socialistic economies with an equal distaste. Nixon vowed to make the economy of Allende's Chile "scream" -- and so he did, to Anaconda Copper's, Pepsi-Cola's, and Milton Friedman's eventual and utter delight. Then in the 1980s, things started to change: supernational entities like the IMF put a veneer on the old economic imperialism. Gone was the direct meddling from the White House or Downing Street (and, indeed, soon too was gone the other kind of meddling, from the Kremlin); now the meddling was done by proxy. Instead of helping emerging economies find markets, the means of production were tampered with. Yeoman farms as in the former Rhodesia or collective-family farms as in Julius Nyerere's Tanzania were sensible and successful starts to a post-colonial economy. Socialist education systems turned out waves young technocrats. General literacy improved. All this could not be tolerated by neoliberals who insist in their benevolent malevolence that rapid industrialization (with, naturally, foreign ownership, to whom all profits accrue*) was the only way to go. Show neoliberals a "third world" nation and all they can see is a labor pool to exploit until the countryside is depopulated, extranationals own most of the choice property, local and connected elites are suitably corrupted, and the masses, kicked off their traditional and communal when not ancestral land in privatization schemes, live clustered around the cities in awful shantytowns. A people's resistance often exacerbates the problem -- which goes to show that the initial contact must be avoided if the patient, as it were, is to be spared the disease. Then, like locusts, the neoliberals move on to the next country.

*Jonas Savimbi: "I am against nationalization; it is a disease which saps the strength of a national economy. The real question is the renegotiation of allowable profits. Foreign companies need their profits, they would not invest without them. But the people of Angola need their share. When Angola is independent the investors must know that the people will have a greater share." Alas, even Savimbi's "third way" is too much of a compromise for neoliberals who, after all, are nothing but "libertarians with a human face." I can't possibly overemphasize how much I hate them.

R.I.P.

2009-01-19T18:48:00.003-06:00

Ricardo Montalban has died, he was 88 years old.

He was probably the last of the non-Limeys to be dependably cast as an aristocratic bad guy -- or if not a bad guy, then a guy of ambiguous or mysterious morals.

Every middlebrow critic with highbrow pretensions, not to mention garden-variety, amateur cineaste-snobs, panned his performance as Khan, and not just because of their antipathy to the Star Trek franchise. But actually, Montalban played it perfectly.

I've been "Retardo Montalban" on the internet for years, but just because it was a silly, corny name, not cuz I had anything against the actor. Rest in peace, rest in the dignity with which you lived and worked, Mr. M.

(Thanks to Richard for the link.)

Well, Duh

2009-01-16T19:52:00.002-06:00

No shit:

Study finds another reason to hate recession: More tickets
By Todd C. Frankel
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
01/06/2009

The economist got a speeding ticket, and it got him thinking about why.

Thomas A. Garrett, an assistant vice president at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, knew he deserved to be ticketed while on vacation in Pennsylvania a few years ago. But, he wondered, are traffic tickets purely about public safety? Or are other factors at play? Many motorists probably have wondered the same thing sitting on a highway shoulder waiting for a citation. But Garrett turned it into a scholarly pursuit. He decided to conduct a study.

What Garrett and a co-author discovered provides yet another reason to hate a recession.

Traffic tickets go up significantly when local government revenue falls, they found. Their study showed for the first time evidence of how "local governments behave, in part, as though traffic tickets are a revenue tool to help offset periods of fiscal distress."

No surprise, some ticketed motorists might say. But Garrett and co-author Gary A. Wagner, an economist at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, say they confirmed a connection that seemed to exist only in isolated anecdotes. And they put a number on it: Controlling for other factors, a 1 percentage point drop in local government revenue leads to a roughly .32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in the following year, a statistically significant connection.

So in the middle of a recession, with almost all cities and counties facing falling sales and property taxes, "you would expect more traffic tickets," Garrett said from his office in downtown St. Louis.

"When things are bad," Garrett explained, "traffic tickets go up."

The study, entitled "Red Ink in the Rearview Mirror," will be published next month in the Journal of Law and Economics. It examined 14 years of data from 96 North Carolina counties. (Garrett's co-author was living in North Carolina at the time.) In North Carolina, as in many states, ticket fines are retained at the local level. The study authors looked to exclude the distorting effects of traffic enforcement campaigns and county population differences. They tried to take into consideration the effects of police per capita, population density, tourism and median family income.

In fact, they uncovered even more connections between ticket-writing and local economic conditions. If the county unemployment rate went up, so did the number of tickets. "This suggests that ... the timing of traffic tickets tends to mimic changes in county-wide economic conditions," the authors wrote.

Garrett said the study does not dispute that public safety remains at the heart of ticket-writing. But, he said, the study shows that political and economic interests affect how much emphasis is placed on writing tickets. "It seems quite reasonable to me that city officials communicate to police departments" the need for more ticket revenue, Garrett said.

The Missouri Police Chiefs Association took issue with the study's findings. Sheldon Lineback, the group's executive director, said examining the connection between government revenues and traffic tickets "is a very narrow tunnel to look through" that does not take into account other factors that might lead to more traffic tickets.

"I don't know of any chief that goes out and mandates more tickets," Lineback said.

But such incidents do occasionally gain attention. In 2004, the Post-Dispatch uncovered memos written by top police officials in the town of Bel-Ridge threatening officers if they didn't write more tickets. That same year, a Wellston police chief told city leaders that his officers would focus on writing tickets to boost city revenue.

And Garrett's study includes incidents from around the country where city officials made the explicit connection between revenue and traffic tickets.

At the Missouri Municipal League, legislative staff associate Patrick Bonnot said cities suffering from declining revenue would not necessarily look to traffic tickets as "a way to ease their pain." But, Bonnot said, "the temptation may be there."

Garrett's ticket study found support from the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which frequently complains about ticketing campaigns.

"It's no surprise to a trucker that local governments are using (traffic) violations as fundraisers," said Norita Taylor, a spokeswoman for the national truckers group, based outside Kansas City.

The National Motorists Association, a drivers' rights group in Wisconsin, also has seen anecdotal evidence that local governments "have their fingers in that ticket pie," said group President Jim Baxter.

In the world of economists, the relationship between traffic tickets and local government budgets is expected — rational, even. It has to do with incentives. Researchers previously have found police make many more drug-related arrests when they are able to retain seized assets.

Also, Garrett said, local governments squeezed for money are under pressure to find new ways of raising new revenue. They cannot raise taxes in a recession. So they look to things such as lottery sales, casino gambling and hotel occupancy taxes. These are "hidden taxes" — revenues generated mostly by nonvoters and nonresidents. Traffic tickets fit the bill.

"It is a politically appealing way of generating revenue," Garrett said.

And there is no shortage of traffic tickets being handed out. In 2006, 55.6 million traffic and ordinance violation cases were filed across the country, according to the National Center for State Courts. That is an increase of 9 percent from 1997.

But don't expect an economic recovery to slow the traffic stops.

According to Garrett's study, the number of tickets does not go back down when good times return.

Anyone traveling on HWY 63 between Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Memphis, TN knows about Tyronza, a town which purposely annexed part of the interstate so its policemen could patrol it and fill the city coffers. It was a blatant scam that at least one other town along the same route copied.

This, basically, is a petty example of a phenomenon that is usually much more dangerous. It's pretty much a rule that during times of stress or upheaval, that which holds power -- be it a state agency or private entity -- exponentially accrues even more power at the expense of the individual. In other words, the cops' power-grab here, their escalation of exploitation, is just another version of Naomi Klein's "disaster capitalism;" it is also what H.L. Mencken warned against when he noted politicians' tendency "to invade the Constitution stealthily, and then wait to see what happens. If nothing happens they go on more boldly; if there is a protest they reply hotly that the Constitution is worn out and absurd, and that progress is impossible under the dead hand. This is the time to watch them especially."

Awesome

2009-01-05T16:41:00.003-06:00

The following is even better than I remembered. Channel 5 wrestling... those were the days. Whoever wrote the storylines -- Lawler and Hart were no doubt involved -- in the classic Championship Wrestling period (roughly 1978-1987) were geniuses. This particular fight was before Kauffman came to Memphis, but the kind of innovation you see in these vids is what attracted him to wrestling in the first place.

The Epitome of Sangfroid

2008-12-21T02:09:00.003-06:00

This is probably bullshit originally pushed by the royal family and then amplified by the Orthodox Church, but if it's true, what a cool cat he was:

Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, reported witnessing what he called "a fiery ball" while in the company of his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II: "Once my parents were away," recounted the Tsar, "and I was at the all-night vigil with my grandfather in the small church in Alexandria. During the service there was a powerful thunderstorm, streaks of lightning flashed one after the other, and it seemed as if the peals of thunder would shake even the church and the whole world to its foundations. Suddenly it became quite dark, a blast of wind from the open door blew out the flame of the candles which were lit in front of the iconostasis, there was a long clap of thunder, louder than before, and I suddenly saw a fiery ball flying from the window straight towards the head of the Emperor. The ball (it was of lightning) whirled around the floor, then passed the chandelier and flew out through the door into the park. My heart froze, I glanced at my grandfather - his face was completely calm. He crossed himself just as calmly as he had when the fiery ball had flown near us, and I felt that it was unseemly and not courageous to be frightened as I was....After the ball had passed through the whole church, and suddenly gone out through the door, I again looked at my grandfather. A faint smile was on his face, and he nodded his head at me. My panic disappeared, and from that time I had no more fear of storms." [4]

If it were any other Russian royal, I'd be more suspicious, but one only has to read just what it took to assassinate Alexander II to appreciate what a tough old son of a bitch he was.

Well played, Czar. Way to shrug off being buzzed by a foo fighter in the middle of church services.

Self-Reminder

2008-12-21T01:58:00.002-06:00

A reminder to myself to write something some day about the worst writer in the history of TV and movies, Aaron Sorkin.

And I say this without watching a single episode of The West Wing. No, Sorkin earned my opinion with the god-awful Sports Night, perhaps the worst show I've ever seen on network TV.

Ok, I don't mean worse than some early FOX sitcoms or 80's network shoot-em-up dramas, both of which were frequently all kinds of stupid. I mean worse in the sense that critics loved it, worse in the sense that it was marketed as intelligent and witty. Worse in that it was horrible in its ambition; and worse in that it so completely failed to impress on its own terms. Worse in that it was composed of the smarmiest dialogue I'd ever heard in my life -- and I've been around a lot of flaky, "quirky" people whose sole talent is their ability to annoy. Fuck Aaron Sorkin.

MOAR Like This, Plz

2008-12-21T01:15:00.003-06:00

The free market demanded deregulation; deregulation caused consolidation; the free market worked as it always does with most producers and almost all consumers getting fucked.

There are always reactions, of course. Here's one:

New breed of hog farmers let pigs run wild

By Georgina Gustin
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
11/17/2008

FRANKENSTEIN, MO. — Hog farmer Russ Kremer stands at the edge of a pen, surveying his pigs as they scamper and snort in the mud.

"They like diversity," he says, pushing a camouflage ballcap off his forehead. "Some of them are down there in the water, some are grazing on the rough ground. Some are pretty cliquish; they remember their litter mates."

Kremer won't go so far as to say they're like children to him, but clearly his animals are more than meat products in the making.

Kremer raises nearly 1,000 pigs on his 160-acre farm in rolling Osage County in central Missouri. These days, though, he is often traveling around the nation, preaching the gospel of natural farming. "I'd rather be in my pen, enjoying my pigs," he says, "but some weeks I'm home just two, three days."

Over the last decade, Kremer has become an evangelist for raising animals outdoors, with fresh air, room to root and run, and without antibiotics. In the process, he has persuaded other farmers to go the same route, helping to create — and feed — a growing appetite for meat raised humanely and largely without drugs. The demand for naturally raised pork has become so steep that Kremer and small-scale farmers like him are sealing sales deals with companies around the country — and large industrial farm operators are taking notice.

While these independent farmers gain a toehold, some industrial farmers also have started to question what, exactly, constitutes a "naturally raised," and "antibiotic-free" pig. Farmers set their own standards — the only government designation that assures an antibiotic free meat is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "organic" label. At the same time, large corporations such as Cargill and Smithfield, have introduced their own antibiotic-free lines to capitalize on the demand.

"Usually these are market-driven programs," said Craig Rowles, a veterinarian and hog farmer from Carroll, Iowa, adding, "Antibiotic-free means different things to different people."

Kremer's transformation began 10 years ago when a boar gored him in the knee, causing it to balloon from infection. After being treated with six courses of different antibiotics, the wound hadn't healed. Kremer and his doctor came up with a hypothesis: his herd had become resistant to antibiotics, and Kremer, in turn, had, too.

"I looked at what was happening with me and with my pigs and I said, 'We have to change this,'" he remembers. "I was having the same problems as the pigs."

He never was able to make a conclusive connection but decided to go drug-free. He cleaned out his herd and started anew, filling his barns with deep straw, fencing in pastures and feeding the pigs an antibiotic-free diet. "Honestly, it's a lot easier to raise pigs this way," he says now. "You don't have to have a syringe in your pocket all day long."

ANTIBIOTIC DEBATE

In the 1980s, U.S. pork production moved indoors — into the confined animal feeding operations that now dominate the industry.

One major reason for the shift, hog farmers say, was the growing health concerns over fat in American diets. Farmers starting raising leaner but less-hearty pigs. To have a viable herd, farmers moved them inside into cramped quarters where disease spread faster. They started using more antibiotics routinely, not only to prevent disease, but for faster growth.

Soon critics began accusing the industry of rampant antibiotic overuse , saying these practices led to resistant microbes and growing drug resistance in humans. In 1998, the European Union responded to evidence supporting the link by banning the routine use of human antibiotics in livestock.

The livestock industry also was deregulated as confined feeding was on the rise. "Corporations could get bigger and bigger and bigger, and finally they started to control the marketplace," said Tim Gibbons of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, which runs its own 15-member hog farming cooperative in the Columbia, Mo., area.

Independent hog farmers went out of business, or were swallowed up by the large companies such as Cargill or Hormel, who contracted with individual farmers to produce their pork. Under those contracts, production, including the administering of antibiotics, was controlled by the companies.

Small farmers blame such companies for their disappearance. In 1985, there were 22,000 hog farmers in Missouri. Today there are 1,900, according to the Department of Agriculture, and 300 of those produce 90 percent of the state's pork.

Conventional hog farmers counter that confined feeding saved many farming families from financial ruin while putting safe, inexpensive, healthy meat on American tables.

"We put animals inside to keep them clean and healthy," said Don Nikodim, executive director of the Missouri Pork Association, whose membership includes most of the industrial hog farmers in the state.

Some large-scale farmers believe that consumers don't understand the extent of antibiotic use. "I think there's a misconception in the public that antibiotics are used haphazardly, and that really isn't true," Rowles said.

He recently testified at a congressional hearing on behalf of the National Pork Producers Council, urging leaders to vote against legislation limiting the ability of pork producers to use antibiotics. Rowles has an operation that annually brings to market between 140,000 and 150,000 pigs, which are treated with five antibiotics. He pointed out that government mandates withdrawal times for certain antibiotics before the pigs can come to market. "There are standards we have in place to assure the public," he said.

RISING DEMAND

When Kremer made the transition to natural production a decade ago, there was little demand for naturally raised pork. So he launched the Ozark Mountain Pork Cooperative to develop a marketing strategy and a label, called Heritage Acres, and started knocking on doors.

At the beginning, store managers couldn't see the value in the "naturally raised" distinction and wondered whether consumers would pay a premium for it. But eventually, as chefs around the country starting seeking out "heritage" pork and activists decried industrial farming practices, consumers started wanting it, too.

Now Denver-based Chipotle supplies some of its 800 restaurants with pork from the co-op, and in St. Louis it's available at Whole Foods and Sappington Farmers' Market, where it generally costs a few dollars more than its conventionally raised counterpart.

"I wanted the best flavor, and that's how it got started," said Andy Ayers, former owner of Riddles Penultimate Cafe & Wine Bar in University City, who started buying Kremer's pork about 10 years ago.

St. Louis-based Volpi Foods began buying pork from the co-op about six months ago for its salami and ham. Lorenza Pasetti, Volpi's president, said about 20 percent of its products are made with the co-op's pork, but the company can't find enough of it.

That kind of demand has prompted the corporate giants to launch their own antibiotic-free pork.

Some critics question, though, whether industrial farm operations can function without antibiotics. And even farmers who ascribe to natural methods, like Kremer, believe that antibiotics should be used to treat disease.

But for Kremer, antibiotics aren't the sole issue. It's the environment that usually accompanies their use. He says his pigs rarely get sick because they develop strong immune systems in a natural environment. And, more important, he believes their lives are respected from farrow to slaughter.

"We're all part of this equitable food system," he said. "When I speak, it comes from the heart."

This farmer's doing the right thing, but it amounts to a drop in the bucket. And the nature of the bucket won't change, thanks to the system of legalized bribery (the "free speech" of free marketers) through which the crappy farmers thwart the regulatory power of democracy. The degree of choice here for the average consumer is just large enough to superficially support the free marketers' Hitlerian lie* that the market is self-correcting. Actually, due to the expense and scarcity of decent pork, the only people who can afford it consistently are -- surprise, surprise -- wealthy free marketers. Thus the system provides in exactly the way they really want it to; they just lie about how, and most importantly, for whom.

*A nice code for the lie so huge, so outlandish, that it paradoxically seems plausible, at least to the congenitally credulous. Additionally, it is the lie so huge that it waylays its victims, just one of which is the truth.

Nineteenth Century Pantloads

2008-12-20T21:18:00.003-06:00

Ah, the "free market"-worshiping chickenhawk. From Zinn's People's History:

During the Civil War [J.P. Morgan] bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract.

Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon's father had written to him that "a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable."

Of course these wicked men are modern libertarians' Gods, captains of industry, Randian "achievers" who "generated" (not "accumulated" and never "stole") "wealth;" they made America great before the menace of progressivism, labor unions, and the Pure Food & Drug Act ruined everything. Robber barons? Well, as the typical libertarian/Reason reader David Nieporent wrote, "'robber barons' are a myth created by liberal schoolteachers." So there.

[No doubt digamma will show up to protest, decrying my supposed "strawman." Yet for every digamma in the libertarian fold there are eleventy hundred Nieporents; for every Jim Henley there are eleventy hundred Glenn Reynoldses. Rather as in Catholicism there are eleventy hundred Kathryn Jean Lopezes and William F. Buckleys to every one Dorothy Day or JC in DC.]

Never Would Have Guessed It

2008-12-20T19:08:00.003-06:00

Sauron was a fascist, an implementer of the devil's theories:

After joining his new master in Middle-earth, he proved to be a devoted and capable servant: “While Morgoth still stood, Sauron did not seek his own supremacy, but worked and schemed for another, desiring the triumph of Melkor, whom in the beginning he had adored. He thus was often able to achieve things, first conceived by Melkor, which his master did not or could not complete in the furious haste of his malice.”[19] “In all the deeds of Melkor the Morgoth upon Arda, in his vast works and in the deceits of his cunning, Sauron had a part.”[20]

A sort of Goebbels-Himmler type to Melkor's Hitler. (Wingnuts would say he's Lenin to Melkor's Marx.)

The time would come, however, when Sauron was almost wholly consumed by evil. Tolkien wrote that he did not think there could be such a thing as "Absolute Evil" ("since that is Zero"), but "in my story Sauron represents as near an approach to wholly evil as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants, beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit."[2]

Now this probably sounds like socialism to a wingnut, but to me it sounds like neoliberalism.

Gandalf went for advice to Saruman the White, leader of the White Council, but discovered that Saruman had been corrupted by his long studies of Sauron. Using the palantír in the tower of Orthanc, Saruman was now in communication with the Dark Lord and acted as his ally, though he also secretly hoped to gain the Ring for himself and use its power to supplant Sauron.

I like this; it's an instance of what could be called the "Apt Pupil" syndrome, the corruption of scholars of the historically morbid.

It literally never occurred to Sauron that his enemies were attempting to send the Ring into Mordor to unmake it at Mount Doom. Rather he took it completely for granted that they would try to access and use its power. Sauron regarded all his opponents, even up to Manwë Lord of the Valar, simply as rivals for world dominion and just as cynical as himself: “His cynicism, which (sincerely) regarded the motives of Manwë as precisely the same as his own, seemed fully justified in Saruman. Gandalf he did not understand."[54] Exploiting this blindspot in Sauron's psychology had been Gandalf's strategy all along: "Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse [power], that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning."[55]

Cynicism. This is no doubt true of all who abuse power -- not only of their own nature, but true with regard to how dimly they perceive the actual motives of decent people. Self-abdication always perplexes the power-mad; sometimes they are so thrilled with bewilderment that they fetishize the abdicator, witness the leaders of Rome, the Italian Republic, and Anglo-America in the respective cases of Cincinnatus, Garibaldi, and Edward VIII*. Proof, to me, is in the examples of the Founders: both Washington and Jefferson considered chasing power an unseemly endeavor. Both were embarassed by it. Yet both, at the same time, did exactly that -- often, behind the scenes, in a most rabid and ruthless way. Typically American in their hypocrisy, they knew better than to do what they did. They did it anyway, all the while denying it.

*In the Duke of Windsor's case, ignorantly.

He's To Stab You In The Front, Suckers

2008-12-20T17:19:00.002-06:00

But, of course, to the extent that you see or feel the stab at all, you'll think it's in your back. Because, frankly, you're a bunch of idiots: the man has made himself plain. So many times you were told that Obama is and will be a centristy, Clintonoid neoliberal. So many times you were outraged at the suggestion, and then stupidly pointed to Obama's identity as "proof" of his leftism/radicalism.

'But he's black!' you'd splutter, as if that fact coupled with his electoral win meant social democracy was on the march.

Actually, minorities can do the dirty work of the typically white Wealthy Criminal Class just as well as those who resemble the class's original membership. Witness the stockpiling of hacks, villagers, and pseudo-liberals in Obama's cabinet:

In Cabinet, Obama goes for experience, pragmatism

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama has wholeheartedly embraced experience in choosing his Cabinet. That may seem at odds with the president-elect's campaign theme of "change we can believe in."

[...]

More so than his recent predecessors, he has drawn heavily from the Senate for top advisers. His choices for secretary of state (Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York), interior secretary (Ken Salazar of Colorado) and vice president (Joe Biden of Delaware) were fellow senators. Tom Daschle, named health secretary, was the Senate Democratic leader from South Dakota until he lost his seat in 2004.

From the House, Obama has plucked Reps. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois as his chief of staff, Hilda Solis of California for labor secretary and just-retired Republican Ray LaHood of Illinois for transportation secretary.

[...]

Obama also came down on the side of experience in filling other Cabinet posts. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is a holdover from President George W. Bush's administration and a former CIA director under Bush's father. Attorney General-designee Eric Holder was deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.

Oh but never mind all that; everything's okay! Because it's a multiculturally conservative cabinet:

By most counts, Obama has fulfilled his promise to have the most diverse Cabinet in history. Of his nominees for jobs generally considered "Cabinet level," fewer than half are white men.

Three are Latino (Richardson, Salazar and Solis). Four are black (Kirk, Holder, U.N. Ambassador nominee Susan Rice and Environmental Protection Agency pick Lisa Jackson). Two are Asian-American (Chu and Eric K. Shinseki, Obama's pick for veterans affairs secretary).

But Obama fell short, Baker said, in picking full-throated Republicans for his Cabinet. Gates, staying on as defense secretary, has not confirmed that he is a Republican, and LaHood often annoyed GOP leaders by refusing to walk the party line on key issues.

All in all, however, Obama has put in place a diverse team in which almost no one appears to have been chosen mainly to fill a gender or ethnic slot, said Norm Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute.

"To be able to get that mix of Hispanics and African-Americans and Asians and women is really impressive," he said.

The overall team, Ornstein said, "is a collection of very strong individuals and people known for their pragmatism."

It may not please liberal activists who want sweeping change in Washington, he said, but it reflects a pragmatic new president facing some of the toughest challenges in modern times.

One day perhaps the special interest/identity politics uber alles wing of liberalism will finally understand that it's not what/who one is but how one thinks and what one believes that truly matters. But then that's just common sense -- it's also very, very socialist.

The Great Why? Of Watergate

2008-10-30T17:29:00.004-05:00

Christopher Hitchens, in a piece called 'Watergate Revisited: The Greek Connection,' printed the May 31, 1986 issue of The Nation, and reprinted in Hitchens's compendium, Prepared For the Worst:

Why not, just for once, take Gordon Liddy's word for it. He said that the purpose of the break-in was "to find out what O'Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats."

I know there are other hypotheses about the motive for the break-in. The most plausible, advanced by Michael Drosnin in Citizen Hughes, is that Nixon wanted to know what the Democrats knew about Howard Hughes and his payoffs. But Hughes was also paying off the Democrats, and there is no evidence that they ever planned to make a campaign issue out of him.

To summarize the reasons why Nixon, Mitchell, and Kissinger went into orbit at the very mention of [Tom] Pappas's name:

Pappas, exploiting CIA connections, was the bagman for an illegal and shameful transfusion of campaign money in 1968.

The congressional investigation of this deed was edging closer to the truth in early 1972.

That investigation was opposed at every step, by means legal and illegal, by Nixon and Mitchell. The American Ambassador to Greece, a friend of Pappas and a man who knew the guilty 1968 secret, took a hand in this wrecking operation.

All of the burglars had CIA connections, which may explain how they knew what to look for and why they kept silent.

Pappas provided the only money we know about to John Mitchell for the burglars' hush money.

All three subsequent House and Senate probes into the Pappas connection were sidetracked by men with either CIA loyalties or connections to Tom Pappas, or both.

[Note: The context of Hitchens's Liddy quote was before Liddy began to push the preposterous theory that John Dean was solely responsible for Watergate.]

Planning a Gestapo

2008-10-30T16:58:00.002-05:00

One last quote from John Dean's Blind Ambition:

[Walter Minnick] and [Egil "Bud"] Krogh had run the government's anti-narcotics campaign from the White House, once [John] Ehrlichman has wrested control from [John] Mitchell.

The only time I'd met Minnick before was at an odd meeting a few months earlier when Krogh had called me in and treated me to a mysterious denial that the White House narcotics office had been involved in the assassination of drug traffickers in Latin America. I had puzzled over what this bit of theater meant. No such story had appeared in print, and none ever did. But the episode piqued my curiosity about the drug program. Krogh has described to me how, when he was bored with his desk work, he had carried bars of gold bullion through Asia's "Golden Triangle" in CIA planes and bargained with drug chieftains. There were rumors of bombing poppy fields, and once Bud had asked my office to resolve a dispute among the Pentagon, the State Department and the Bureau of Narcotics over the legality of kidnapping drug traffickers abroad. If the goal was worthy, the means were secondary, the thinking went, and there was a firm conviction that agencies outside the White House could not be trusted.

Gordon Liddy had received his White House indoctrination in this very drug program, and he had read the signs clearly. Years later I would learn that the remarkable intelligence force he had described in Mitchell's office was only a part of his dream to build a clandestine police force for the White House. He and Hunt had recruited hundreds of operatives -- most had had CIA training -- and had promised them service after the election.

Liddy the True Believer, the Super Stormtrooper, the Mafioso

2008-10-29T22:34:00.006-05:00

John Dean's account of the fallout in the Administration directly after the Watergate burglars were arrested is, well, an arresting read. Almost immediately, everyone is paranoid and the circular firing squad gathers in formation. Now some of the culprits were hardcore crooks, some just went along for the ride even when they knew better, and then there was one who was totally selfless -- or rather was so conceited in his self-conscious "good soldier" act, because don't you know the true fascist must be prepared to fall on his sword for the Fuhrer -- that he offered to have everyone in the firing squad train their guns on him. (It's almost irrelevant that it really was Liddy's fault the burglars were caught, the fuck up.) A few excerpts from Blind Ambition:

... Jeb Magruder was calling. He needed to speak with me urgently.

"What's going on, Jeb?"

"We've got a real problem, John. I think we can handle it, but, well, it's a hell of a problem. Mitchell told me to get hold of you. Get your help. We've issued a statement. Mitchell issued it in California yesterday. He's still out there. Did you read the paper this morning? Basically the thing is going to be a tough PR problem. But I think we can handle it." Jeb's sentences came at me in a rapid staccato. He was on a thin edge between bravado and loss of control. His voice jumped up in pitch every now and again as if he had swallowed a gulp of helium. He was flailing, I thought -- throwing Mitchell's name around, looking for my help. Then he hit me.

"Listen, John, this all that dumb fucking Liddy's fault. He blew it. The stupid bastard. He should have never used McCord. He never told us he was using McCord. It was stupid. This mess is all his fault..."

[...]

"...I think you should talk to Liddy, John." He was still going. "I can't talk to him, because he hates my guts. But he'll talk to you. And you can find out what else went wrong. And what else we've got to worry about. Okay?"

[...]

"I've gotta go, Jeb. I'll get back to you. I'll find out what I can."

"Thanks, John. Listen, Liddy's over at 1701 [the Committee headquarters, 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue]. You can get him there."

"Yeah. Okay."

I clicked Magruder off the line... I punched in on the [interoffice phone line]. It was Ehrlichman.

[...]

"I presume you are aware of the little incident that transpired the other night?" Ehrlichman asked me.

"Yeah, I'm afraid I am."

"Well, here's what I'd like you to do. The Secret Service called me on Sunday morning about the arrests, and had some intriguing details. One of the Cubans had a check in his possession made out by Howard Hunt. That made me think of Mr. Colson. So I called Chuck over the weekend to ask about Hunt's well-being, and Chuck sounded like he hardly knew the man. Said he hadn't seen him in months. Said he couldn't imagine how a thing like this could have occurred. Now, I'm not totally satisfied our Mr. Colson is telling all. Why don't you have a little chat with him and find out what you can, and find out what happened with his friendship with Hunt?"

"I'll try, John, but Chuck isn't likely to tell me anything he won't tell you."

[...]

I sat back. Suddenly I felt calmer. I had a report to make, top priority, one stop away from the President. Somehow the assignment drove my anxiety into temporary retreat. I decided I would call Colson first, then Kleindienst, saving Liddy for last...

...I...dialed Colson on the I.O. before anyone else could call.

"Chuck, I just talked to Ehrlichman, and he asked me to look into this incident at the DNC. Howard Hunt's name keeps coming up, and I wanted to ask --"

"For Christ's sake! I talked to Ehrlichman about it over the weekend," Chuck shouted angrily. He spat out words like a machine gun, giving off so much energy I imagined him running sprints around his office. "I told him I had no idea where Hunt was, or what he was doing!" I haven't seen Hunt in months! He's off my payroll. He has been. I can't believe Hunt's involved in that Watergate thing, anyway. That's the craziest goddam thing I ever heard! I can't believe any of it --"

"Well, Chuck," I interrupted as firmly but mildly as I could, "what's the story on Hunt's relationship to you?"

"I hired him as a consultant for Ehrlichman," he said, stressing the name.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, those guys were all out in California, and they wanted me to bring somebody in to work on the Pentagon Papers. So I sent Hunt over to Ehrlichman. Hell, he wasn't even at the top of my list!"

"Chuck, you sent Hunt out to interview Dita Beard a few months ago, didn't you? We worked on that."

"Yeah, yeah," he said, "and he wasn't even around here then. I had to go find him. That's the last time I remember seeing him. Look, I'm going through my files right now to get all the information. I'll put it all together for you, and I'll let you know what's happening. But I don't know what the hell Hunt's doing. This doesn't make any sense to me."

"Okay, Chuck. Let me know."

"Oh, and, John, I'd like to have a talk with you and Ehrlichman." His tone shifted He became almost subdued. "I've got some things I'd like to go over with both of you about Hunt. I think we ought to have a meeting later."

[...]

Now it was time for Liddy, from whom I had learned to expect horrendous surprises. I braced myself and called. He was not in, so I left word. As soon as I hung up, I kicked myself mentally: Real smart, Dean, Liddy's all mixed up in this and you're leaving word for him to call you. How will you explain the call? Wait a minute, I thought. I'm not supposed to know anything about Liddy and this break-in. This can be explained as a perfectly innocent call -- legal work, campaign finance laws. I steadied myself, but the fears had already set in.

I summoned Fielding into my office and told him to go to the White House personnel office and pull Howard Hunt's employment records. I would need some hard facts if I ended up refereeing a dispute about when, and if, Hunt had worked for Colson. Fred did not question the assignment. He could feel emergency in the air. There might as well have been air raid sirens going off. He sprang to his duty like a military officer in battle. No questions asked. Lives at stake.

Jane buzzed. It was Liddy.

"Gordon," I said, "I'd like to meet with you."

"I'll be right over," he replied instantly, words clicking. I detected relief. "Have me cleared." He signed off in a hurry.

I buzzed Jane and told her to clear Liddy past the guards downstairs... Just as I was heading for the water fountain, I saw Liddy coming toward me.

"Gordon, I think we ought to take a little walk."

He nodded. He knew exactly what was going on, and he could read on my face that this was a very sensitive meeting. We walked briskly and wordlessly out the nearest exit.

"Let's walk down this way," I said, turning south on Seventeenth Street. We walked toward the Ellipse, with the EOB and the White House on our left, the FDIC building across the street on our right.

This was not the crisp Gordon Liddy I had dealt with before. His heavy beard was no longer shaven to the nubs. The black-and-gray stubble was long enough to glisten in the sun. His usual snappy three-piece suit had given way to a rumpled cord summer suit, the kind I associated with fraternity parties at the University of Virginia. He looks almost disheveled, I thought, he seems flustered, no longer the commanding presence. I noticed lines etched in his forehead.

I began with what I thought were calming remarks. "Gordon, I think I have to...I think you can understand why it's important for me, for the White House, to know exactly what's happened. I've spoken with Jeb, and Jeb has told me --"

He interrupted. "This whole goddam thing is because Magruder pushed me. I didn't want to go in there. But it was Magruder who kept pushing. He kept insisting we go back in there --"

"Back?"

"Yes. We made an entry before and placed a transmitter and photographed some documents. But the transmitter was not producing right. I think it was because of the range. The equipment we used was only effective up to an air distance of about five hundred yards. Our pickup was within range, but we got interference from the support girders running up the building. They're steel, and they can deflect a weak signal if they are placed so the transmission passes through their magnetic field. Anyway, it's defective, and the batteries might be weak. So we went in to find out what was the matter. The other thing is Magruder liked the documents we got from the first entry and wanted more of them..."

Liddy was gushing now. We stopped on the corner across the street from the Corcoran Art Gallery. I turned away from the traffic, facing the Ellipse. It was nearly lunchtime. I knew that the buildings would soon emit hundreds of familiar faces, and I didn't want to be seen with Gordon Liddy. I edged over to a park bench and stood there, my back to the sidewalks. Liddy followed me like an awkward dance partner learning a new step. I felt very conspicuous.

"...And, John, I know using McCord was a serious mistake. I accept full responsibility for it. It's my fault, and I don't want to put off responsibility on anybody else. But I do want you to know why I did it. And that's because Magruder cut my budget so much and was pushing me so hard I had to use McCord. I didn't have time to do anything else. Jim's a professional, and I trusted him. He was the only guy I could turn to."

"I understand, Gordon." I had heard enough. "But what about Hunt?"

"Well, Howard Hunt. He was the guy who got me the Cubans."

"You mean the ones who were arrested?"

"That's right. He knew those guys, and he got them for me."

"I see. Well, how about the people in the White House? Is anybody in any way connected with this? I've got to know that, Gordon."

"I don't think so. The only person who might have known about it is Gordon Strachan."

I turned away from Liddy for a moment to absorb Strachan's name. This was the worst blow since Magruder's call. I felt queasy. I really didn't want to know more, because I had to assume that if Strachan knew, Haldeman knew. And if Haldeman knew, the President knew. It made sickening sense. Now I understood why Strachan had called earlier.

Liddy interrupted the silence. "John, I'm worried about the men who were arrested. We've got to get them out of jail. They need bonds and lawyers. We can't let them sit there in the D.C. jail. It's a hellhole."

"Well, look, Gordon," I said, fishing for a clear thought. I wanted to end the conversation. "I can't do anything about that. And I think you can understand why I can't do anything about that."

He stopped for an instant, his eyes narrowing in thought. "Well, that's right. I can understand."

I saw more and more people on the street out of the corner of my eye. "Ah, Gordon, I think I'd better be heading back to my office now, and, ah, I -- I really think this is the last conversation we'll ever have until this whole thing is resolved." I was now more flustered than Liddy, who seemed to feel better after unburdoning himself.

"I understand that perfectly, John," he said, straightening himself up. "I'll walk on the other side of the street. That's probably best. But before I go over there, I want you to know one thing, John. This is my fault. I'm prepared to accept responsibility for it. And if somebody wants to shoot me..." My head shot around. His eyes were fixed and hard, his face full of emotion, his words coming out in bursts. "...on a street corner, I'm prepared to have that done. You just let me know when and where, and I'll be there. He ended with a gesture of finality.

"Well, ah Gordon," I said tightly, flashing back to his burned hand and to Mafia movies, struggling for the strength to calm him again, "I don't think we're really there!"

"Oh, no, no," he said, holding up his hands to hush me. "Look, John, I'm not going to talk about what's gone on. None of these men will talk, you can be assured of that. They're all soldiers. But we know what we're dealing with."

"Okay," I said softly.

We turned and headed back up the street. I was looking at my shoes.

From Another Point of View II

2008-10-29T20:16:00.002-05:00

Continuing from John Dean's Blind Ambition:

"We will have a second operational arm," [Liddy] continued, "that could be of even greater preventative use. These teams are experienced in surgical relocation activities. In a word, General, they can kidnap a hostile leader with maximum secrecy and a minimal use of force. If, for example, a prominent radical comes to our San Diego convention to marshal his army of demonstrators, these teams can drug him and take him across the border into Mexico until the convention is over. He would never see the face of a single one of our operatives."

Mitchell stopped rocking. "What the hell good is that going to do?" he asked with some irritation. It was his first interruption.

"Well, sir, by removing their leadership we'd throw them into confusion at a critical moment and lessen their effectiveness against us."

"Maybe," Mitchell mumbled. For a moment no one spoke. There was electricity in the room. Magruder looked at Mitchell's desk, refusing to glance at Liddy. So these were the people Liddy had burned his hand for, I thought. I waited for Mitchell to say something more, but I doubted he would.

Liddy broke the silence. "Would you like me to proceed, General, with another facet of the plan?" His voice betrayed his first sign of nervousness.

"Please," said Mitchell.

Gordon removed the top chart. Now we were into the political-intelligence component. Its code name, as I recall, was Operation Ruby. Gordon said he would incorporate his existing program of "live penetrations" -- currently only a chauffeur-messenger inside Muskie headquarters, code name, Sedan Chair -- into a larger network. Such infiltrations would depend, of course, on the target selected, whether it was Larry O'Brien, Senator Henry M. Jackson, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Senator Muskie or anyone else with an office and a staff. He had anticipated that the Democratic convention in Miami might be a target and had made preliminary studies of the hotels and the convention hall. "As you probably know," said Liddy, "most of the sensitive positions in these hotels are held by Cubans. They are the telephone operators, desk clerks, janitors, maids and union officials there. I have already made extensive contacts in the Cuban community, and I can assure you we can provide a steady flow of information from the hotels.

"Most of that information will be routine, however, and of limited value," he continued. "But this operation contains a completely separate unit that will upgrade our intelligence. I have secured an option to lease a pleasure craft that is docked on the canal directly in front of the Fontainebleau Hotel. It is more than sixty feet long, with several staterooms, and expensively decorated in a Chinese motif. It can also be wired for both sight and sound in complete secrecy. Now, my preliminary soundings convince me that many of the prominent Democratic officials, including senators and representatives, are vulnerable to weakness of the flesh, which seems to overcome them at conventions. We can, without much trouble, compromise these officials through the charms of some ladies I have arranged to have living on the boat. This will enable us to extract the kind of information we want. The operation will blend into the general scene of Miami Beach, and the boat can also serve as the storage headquarters for all our communications equipment -- "

"It won't work, Gordon," I interrupted. This was the Sandwedge "headquarters" nonsense pumped up to Hollywood proportions. It was outright extortion, and it was absurd as well. "How in the world is some whore going to compromise these guys at the convention? They're not that dumb."

Gordon shot an irritated look at me to underscore the fact that he was addressing Mitchell. But he was ready with his answer. "John, these are the finest call girls in the country," he said. "I can tell you from firsthand experience -- " This broke the tension, as everyone laughed except Liddy, who waited impatiently. "They are not dumb broads, but girls who can be trained and programmed. I have spoken with the madam in Baltimore, and we have been assured their services at the convention."

I'm going to break in here to note how fatal the laugh was to Liddy's having any chance to put a spell on John Mitchell. It was also probably fatal to Magruder's and Dean's relationships with Liddy; Gordo could never forgive such a slight. Laughter takes some of the sting out of fascist clowns like Liddy -- they may still kill you, but their malice has no power beyond that sole physical fact. It's difficult to be intimidated by someone you're laughing at, and Gordon Liddy's first-worst recourse in dealing with anyone was to intimidate them (hence his tricks with fire). Wasn't it Dorothy Parker who said that first mistake made in dealing with Hitler was that nobody thought to laugh at him?

As Liddy went on, I caught Mitchell's eye and shrugged my shoulders. He winked and puffed several times on his pipe, and the corners of his mouth turned up into a hint of a smile. It relieved me to see signs that he was not taking the theatrics seriously.

The chart changed again. Operation Crystal. Liddy began telling us that the best intelligence could, of course, be obtained by electronic surveillance. He had consulted experts -- "one of the world's leading experts" -- and solved the problem of finding untraceable equipment. Then he launched into an extremely technical description of microwave telephone communications, speaking of relay stations, routing frequencies and the difficulties of intercepting noncabled signals. His point became clear when he said there was equipment capable of intercepting all communications between an opposing candidate's airplane and the ground. The intercepting equipment was required to be near the airplane, but not within sight, of course. So Liddy proposed hiring a "chase plane" to follow Democratic campaign planes and make transcriptions of all airborne communications. It would be expensive, he said, but he stressed how much of a candidate's time is spent in the air, and how large a volume of sensitive communications went over the air microwaves. Then came the heart of Operation Crystal -- wiretaps. Liddy told us he could intercept any conversation we wanted, if he were given the target.

On he went to another chart, Operation Sapphire, which detailed plans to sabotage the campaigns of our opponents. They ranged from harassment and false demonstrations to far more ambitious schemes. "I have managed to obtain a copy of the architectural design of the Miami Beach Convention Center," he said, "and it includes a detailed diagram of the ducts and electrical switches for the air-conditioning system. It is possible, I believe, to shut down the air-conditioning system alone in an untraceable, nonrepairable fashion at an opportune moment. Imagine all those Democratic delegates sitting there sweating in one hundred degree heat in that hall on national television." He passed on through plans to have his own hippies harass the Democrats, and then flipped up the final chart.

"This diagram shows how all these independent components fit together into one apparatus," he said. "The organization is cellular. Personnel can be moved about at will from one operation to another without risking security, because the men will not need to know anyone but their immediate superiors. They have been trained to work that way. All the cells will be removed and insulated from the Committee. Untraceable. The operatives are all experienced and will not themselves be identified. But even if an error is committed at the operational level, it is still untraceable." Liddy pointed to the operations along the perimeter of the chart, and to the lines connecting them all with one central figure. "These components are designed to function together with only one central control. Here. I have assigned code names to the components after individual gems, and I have called the overall apparatus Gemstone."

Liddy paused. "This type of operation is expensive, of course," he said, driving toward his conclusion. "But I have carefully checked and rechecked the budget to make sure there's no fat in it. All of this can be done for a million dollars."

He took his seat. The show was over. We all waited for Mitchell to react. I knew he was offended by the wilder parts of the act, but I also knew he would not say so to Liddy's face. He disliked confronting people directly. It was a trait I had noticed in myself and felt was a weakness. Mitchell usually had other people express his blunt feelings; it was Kleindienst who had dressed me down about Huston's memo. I waited for an oblique response.

"Well, Gordon, that's all very intriguing, but not quite what I had in mind," he said mildly, looking at the last chart. "Frankly, I'm more concerned about demonstrators and police cooperation than some of the things you've mentioned."

"I understand, General," Liddy answered.

"And we can't spend that kind of money, either. I suggest you go back to your drawing board and see what you can do."

"Yes, sir," said Liddy.

As Jeb helped him hastily disassemble his charts and easel and carry them out, I went over to Mitchell's desk. "Unreal, and a little frightening," I said in a low voice.

Mitchell grinned. "I'd say that's a fair statement."

Liddy, obviously disappointed, asked Jeb and me for our assessment of the meeting. Jeb told him the whole thing was too expensive and would have to be toned way down. I hoped Mitchell would never reconsider the plan, but did not tell Liddy so. I did not know exactly what Mitchell wanted, although I was certain he would reject the carnival tricks and the muggings. In a way, I felt sorry for Liddy. All the tickler's pressure for massive campaign intelligence was now falling on his shoulders, but everyone was reluctant to give him the guidance he clearly needed. Including me. I did not feel he was my responsibility, and, for that matter, I wanted to stay as far away as possible.

"Gordon, you ought to destroy those charts right away," I said finally, which somehow eased my conscience. "I really think you ought to focus on demonstrations. That's our real problem area."

I accepted Jeb's offer of a ride back to the White House in his chauffeur-driven Committee car. No one spoke on the way.

A week later, on February 4, Jeb called and left word that there would be another meeting in Mitchell's office, at four that afternoon. Liddy had revised his plans. I was encouraged by the speed with which he had moved; I hoped it meant that Mitchell had sent a dousing message through Magruder. I wanted to skip the meeting. I didn't want to know what Gordon Liddy was doing, so I let the time for leaving slip past. Then I had second thoughts. If everything turned out as I hoped, I would look foolish for not going. Also, if Liddy stuck to his plans I could be held responsible for not informing the White House. It was still my job to know about intelligence. Reluctantly, I decided to go.

When I arrived the meeting had started. Everybody was hunched over copies of a revised budget that Liddy had prepared. I sat down and listened. They were discussing figures and making cuts. I heard no mention of the expensive and exotic items like the chase plane or the Chinese pleasure yacht, but there was talk of "targets" and "surveillance." I was surprised, and it came to me that Mitchell was perfectly capable of approving a scaled-down version of the Liddy plan. In retrospect, I am grateful to Liddy. If he had brought in a modest, straightforward wiretapping plan, Mitchell might have approved it on the spot and I would not have crossed him. I would have been in the middle of a criminal conspiracy.

As it was, I was worried about the direction of the conference. I studied Mitchell's face for his mood; he did not look happy. He was involved in the conversation, but he was wincing a lot. If he had looked pleased, I would not have seized an opening to protect both him and myself.

"Excuse me for saying this." I cleared my throat. "I don't think this kind of conversation should go on in the Attorney General's office."

All talk immediately ceased. I was surprised that I had the courage to speak out at all and gratified that no one had ignored me. Magruder looked as if he'd been stopped by a policeman, Liddy looked perplexed, and even Mitchell seemed surprised. His blank expression changed to one of deep thought, and then he began nodding his head. I was relieved. My old boss felt he had been protected by a good staff man, I figured. The meeting broke up almost wordlessly, and we all left quickly, like doctors vacating the operating room after a fatal mistake.

From Another Point of View

2008-10-29T17:10:00.002-05:00

Now for Gordon Liddy's presentation of his GEMSTONE scheme for John Mitchell. I've previously posted Liddy's version; now I'm posting John Dean's (from Blind Ambition):

"By the way, John," Liddy added, "I've been analyzing all these intelligence requirements for the campaign, and it's a big operation. What kind of budget do you think I should have? It's expensive to do it right."

"I don't have a clue what it costs, Gordon. But I know Haldeman wants the best. He's always bitching about intelligence." Thinking of [Jack] Caulfield's Sandwedge budget, I tossed out a figure idly. "Maybe half a million bucks, Gordon. Maybe more if you can justify it." Liddy, I soon realized, didn't take anything idly, and he returned to his calculations.

Soon afterward, he was back in my office complaining about the White House bureaucracy, which was threatening to take away his White House identification pass, and did. As he spoke, I noticed a bulky white bandage wrapped around his fist.

"What happened to your hand, Gordon?"

He shrugged. "Oh, nothing really."

"It looks serious."

"Well some might feel that way, but I don't. It was necessary, you see, that I prove my strength to the men I'm thinking of recruiting to assist me at the convention."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, in my business, John, it's important that those I work with understand I'm a man of strength. Macho, as they say. So to prove myself to them I held my hand over a candle until the flesh burned, which I did without flinching. I wanted them to know that I could stand any amount of physical pain."

"My God, Gordon!" I didn't really know what to say, so I told him I hoped his hand healed quickly, which he also shrugged off. After he left my office I called Bud Krogh and told him the story Liddy had just told me. "What's with this guy, Bud?"

Bud did not seem surprised. "Liddy's a romantic," he said. Then he offered some advice: "Gordon needs guidance. Somebody should keep an eye on him."

I was annoyed. "Bud," I said, "this guy is a strange bird. Why didn't you tell me this before? I can't watch him." It began to dawn on me that Bud might have touted Liddy to me to unload him from his own staff. It's an old trick, sell the bad apple elsewhere; I had done it myself. But this could be serious. "Listen, Bud," I said, "I think you should call Magruder and tell him to keep an eye on Liddy. He'd listen to you because you've worked with the guy." Bud agreed, and called Magruder too.

Jeb had heard the candle story. "Weird guy," he said.

On January 26, Jeb called with an invitation to sit in on a meeting the next morning at the Attorney General's office. Liddy was going to present his plans for campaign intelligence. I knew Magruder wanted me there for more than courtesy. I was still in the collecting point at the White House for demonstration intelligence. I had recommended Liddy for the job, and Magruder wanted an intelligence man from the White House at the meeting for protection. I was both curious and apprehensive. I knew this meeting was the culmination of a long series of demands coming down through the tickler. Campaign intelligence was important, and Liddy was our professional. But I had seen enough hardball at the White House to be worried, and Liddy's hand-burning incident stuck in my mind. The counsel's job, I thought, is to recommend caution before the fact and to work miracles afterward.

When I arrived at Mitchell's office, Liddy was arranging commercially prepared charts -- multicolor, three feet by four feet -- on an easel. He finished soon after I walked in, and everyone took a seat after greetings were exchanged. Mitchell sat behind his Bureau of Prisons and began his normal slow and unconscious rocking motion. the rest of us faced him in a semicircle, sitting in faded red leather chairs whose straight backs and narrow wooden armrests seemed designed to keep visitors in a state near attention, and we were. I sat on Mitchell's right. Magruder faced him directly, sitting in the center. And Liddy was on Mitchell's left, by his easel.

Jeb started the meeting, obviously nervous. "Mr. Mitchell," he said, "Gordon has prepared a presentation for you on what he believes is necessary for campaign intelligence, and handling demonstrations at the convention and in the campaign." Then he turned to Liddy, who was looking for a place to put his pipe. "Why don't you go ahead, Gordon?" Then a quick glance back at Mitchell. "If you're ready, Mr. Mitchell." Mitchell nodded his assent.

This was the first time I had ever seen Mitchell and Magruder together, and it was obvious Jeb did not have the easy rapport I had with him. Part of his discomfort grew out of political reality. Haldeman, not Mitchell, had hired Magruder to be Mitchell's deputy and run the day-to-day operations of the campaign. Mitchell, his influence waning, could do nothing about it. Jeb was Haldeman's man, or, more accurately, Larry Higby's man, since Haldeman never proclaimed a very high estimation of Magruder. Higby had put Jeb where he was, and Jeb had to walk on eggs. About the only thing Mitchell and Magruder had in common was an antipathy for Chuck Colson. Initially Jeb had been so frightened of Mitchell that he had dealt with him through me for weeks after joining the Re-election Committee. Finally I had told him that he must develop his own relationship with Mitchell, but I could see that Jeb was still uncomfortable.

Gordon Liddy, on the other hand, went to the easel and began his speech with authority. He seemed to enjoy the stage, and his speech was remarkably free of the normal conversational "uhs" and nervous pauses. He began with a brisk description of his own qualifications for handling the job and followed with a recitation of the names of specialists he had consulted, with appropriate security precautions, in the course of constructing his plan. I wondered how he could possibly have done all this at a time he was swamped in legal work.

Liddy explained that he had divided his program into components, which he would discuss individually before showing how it all fit together. This ended the preview. "If you have any questions, General, please interrupt and I'll address them," he told Mitchell with gallant deference, and then turned to his first chart.

The first component dealt with Mitchell's biggest worry, convention demonstrations. It had its own code name, Operation Diamond. Liddy told how he would set up intelligence liaison with the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA. Also, he would gather his own information by infiltrating antiwar groups with paid informants. All the incoming information would be professionally analyzed to determine which groups and which leaders posed the greatest potential for disruption.

"Now General," he went on, "this operation will be equipped with its own operational arm. It is my judgment that the local police and federal security forces will be of limited value. They all have their own fish to fry and their own political allegiances. They are not trustworthy, and in most cases they will not act until the situation is already out of hand. We need greater loyalty than they possess, and we need preventative action to break up demonstrations before they reach the television cameras. I can arrange for the services of highly trained demonstration squads, men who have worked successfully as street-fighting teams at the CIA. These men are extremely well disciplined, and they will have a history of engaging in such activities that will serve us well. They will appear spontaneous and ideologically motivated. These men carry their own cover and will not be traceable to us."

[Continued in next post.]

No Contrition

2008-10-29T16:50:00.003-05:00

John McCain said to David Letterman in a pathetic excuse sort of way, that Gordon Liddy had done his time.

Well, he did some of it; part of his sentence was commuted by Jimmy Carter. But Gordon Liddy is not sorry for what he did. In fact, in the 1991 postscript to Will, he explicitly states he'd do it all over again, then yet again peddles the crackpot conspiracy theory that John Dean was actually behind the whole Watergate scheme:

Let's get one thing straight right now: I'd do it all again (the entry into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist for national security reasons, and the political intelligence operation to advance the cause of the re-election of a president whom I was serving) without hesitation in the same circumstances that I believed obtained the first time around -- general disintegration of the social order -- and with the same authority I believed I then possessed, i.e., when asked to do so by the president's closest confidant and highest-level (cabinet member) advisor.

In other words, he'd be a criminal and thug and potential murderer and state-employed terrorist all over again for the sake of 'maintaining social order' and re-electing his Fuhrer, Richard Nixon, if John Mitchell or another cabinet officer, or H.R. Haldeman or another close advisor, gave the order.

Poor Gordon Looses His Nazi

2008-10-29T16:24:00.002-05:00

From Will:

The Hindenburg disaster on 7 May 1937 was the catalyst for a major and unhappy change in my early childhood. For some time there had been tension in our household stemming from my father's anti-Nazi views and Teresa's adulation of Adolf Hitler. She was an excellent cook and maid and, for a long time, her skills preserved her job despite my father's discomfort over her Nazi sympathies. It was bad enough that he would come home on warm days to the voice of Josef Goebbels booming sonorously from the Emerson; worse when he found our address was on the German Embassy mailing list for Nazi propaganda. The Hinderburg, however, was the last straw.

The problem was that Teresa did not accept the official crash explanation that static electricity ignited hydrogen being vented as part of the landing procedure. She was certain the Hindenburg had been sabotaged by the United States. And she said so -- not only to my parents and me but to tradesmen and even our guests. Superb cook or not, my father had had enough of her. Teresa, he said, would be happier in the home of German nationals. To me, her loss was a shock. Our first maid had been Scottish, but I was so young I didn't remember her. Teresa had been with us, so far as my memory was concerned, all my life.

My father tried to explain to his seven-year-old son that the Nazis were evil. They persecuted Jews. That made no sense to me at all. Dr. Rosenberg was a Jew. Burton Silver, a playmate, was a Jew. Why should anyone want to "persecute" them? What was "persecution" anyway? The explanation that it was like the way the Romans treated the early Christians seemed a bit remote. Nobody claimed Jews were being eaten by lions in Germany. I was troubled and perplexed. My father was always right, yet I had never heard Hitler speak one way or another about Jews on the radio, nor had Teresa mentioned them to me. Jews were just someone with a different religion, like Protestants; they worshiped God incorrectly and on the wrong day, were unbaptized and so couldn't go to Heaven, only to limbo with all the unbaptized babies, but no one I knew got excited about it. Indeed, I felt rather sorry for Burton Silver, eventually having no one to play with out in limbo but all those screaming little babies.

After Teresa, we had, in rapid sequence, several disastrously incompetent American maids, and then, for reasons that I suspect had as much to do with my education as with our need for domestic help, my father hired Sophie. Sophie was German -- she was also a Jew.

My recollection of Sophie is of a beautiful young woman having a haunted look. She was a refugee from Nazi Germany, still dazed by her rejection by her homeland. I was no more kindly disposed toward Sophie than I was toward her several predecessors, all of whom I considered usurpers of Teresa's position, and reacted by refusing to eat from a spoon Sophie had touched.

When I came home from elementary school with the news that the nuns had explained the recent influx of Jewish refugees by pointing out that the Jews were doomed to wander the face of the earth homeless because they had been responsible for the death of Christ, calling for his crucifixion and saying to Pilate that "His blood be upon us and upon our children," I commented that that didn't seem very fair to me. People like Burton Silver weren't even born then. My father agreed with a snapped "Ridiculous!" and, typically, turned to the law to emphasize the point.

"If I rob a bank," asked my father, "should you go to jail?" He went on to point out that the proposition was called in the law a "bill of attainder" and was condemned specifically in the United States Constitution.

The Wingnut Inferiority Complex, In RE: Gordon Liddy

2008-10-29T11:28:00.004-05:00

Alfred Adler's theory of the inferiority complex does a lot to explain rightwing psychosis -- indeed, it does a lot to explain, in general, the tyrannic mindset, the mental germ of fascism.

The convert is always more pious than one born into the faith. The impostor always strains to show more "realness" than the genuine article. Churchill, the self-admitted coward in the Boer War, always pushed the jingo button when he reached a more mature age. Theodore Roosevelt, perhaps the best American example aside Liddy, was an asthmatic weakling of a child, then grew up to be a geopolitical menace and, indeed, bully (incidentally one of his favorite words).

The model works with a religious context -- or ideological, or nationalist. As for the first, some of the most devout people are those who were first converted by the sword. As for the second, note how many former leftists went on to become the most batshit sort of wingnuts, often, as Connor Cruise O'Brien observed before he himself walked the same path, willing to make sacrifices for and commitments to the counter-revolution that they never would have made for the revolution. With regard to the last, it's worth noting that three of history's greatest tyrants achieved power in nations in which they were not native: Stalin the Georgian in Soviet Russia, Napoleon the (Italian) Corsican in France, Hitler the Austrian in Germany. And the same dynamic works with petty fascists as well: many of the most rabidly racist and murderous Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories are not originally Israeli but rather Benny from Brooklyn type Americans.

Gordon Liddy was a puny, spoiled kid, like Theodore Roosevelt. From Will, his relation of how he first found the strength to overcome; where Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon had the eponymous spirit in William Blake's watercolor to help him in his "becoming," Gordon Liddy found a rather similar spirit to help guide him, emanating from his family's shortwave radio and from the mouth of his family's servant:

My mother and father saw to it that the Great Depression did not inconvenience their children. I received the finest Lionel electric train for Christmas and, when a very expensive tricycle given me for my fifth birthday was stolen in three days, it was replaced immediately. Even in the depths of the Depression, we had a maid. Her name was Teresa. She was a German national. I loved her.

Teresa's country had been, she said, in deep trouble. Now, however, a wonderful man had risen from the people and was solving all their problems. Weak after having been betrayed and then defeated in war, Germany was strong and proud again. Great roads were being built and, unlike in the United States, everyone in Germany now had a job.

My mother had won an Emerson shortwave radio in a raffle at SS. Peter and Paul Parish, and Teresa and I would listen to programs broadcast from her native land, the volume swelling and receding in cycles.

In those days one frequently heard broadcasts by President Roosevelt. He had a rich, reassuring voice with a calming and encouraging effect. Often I heard commentators repeat one of his best-known sayings: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Obsessed as I was by fear, the phrase worked on me.

Listening to Germany touched me differently. First there was the music. I have always been particularly sensitive to music; to this day I must make a conscious effort not to permit it to affect my mood. My memory for it is like a tape recorder; I can play back in my head at will, fully orchestrated, anything I have heard. Indeed, from time to time my mood will throw an involuntary switch in my mind and, unbidden, an appropriate piece will fill me with its sound. The music that poured through the Emerson from Germany was martial and stirring. I lost myself in its strains; it made me feel a strength inside I had never known before.

From playmates who were German, I learned some of the language. One day Teresa was excited. He was going to be on the radio. Just wait til I hear him speak! Eagerly, I joined her at the Emerson. First the music, the now familiar strains of a song that started, "Die Fahne hoch..." -- "Raise the banner..." It was a rousing, powerful anthem, the Horst Wessel song.

We could tell when he was about to speak. The crowd could hardly contain itself. They hailed him in huge, swelling ovations that carried me along. "Sieg!" someone would shout, and what seemed like all the people in the world would answer with a roar, "Heil!" For he was their leader, Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler's voice started out calmly, in low, dispassionate tones, but as he spoke of what his people would accomplish, his voice rose in pitch and tempo. Once united, the German people could do anything, surmount any obstacle, rout any enemy, achieve fulfillment. He would lead them; there would be one people, one nation, one leader. Here was the very antithesis of fear -- sheer animal confidence and power of will. He sent an electric current through my body and, as the massive audience thundered its absolute support and determination, the hair on the back of my neck rose and I realized suddenly that I had stopped breathing.

When I spoke of this man to my father, he became angry. Adolf Hitler, he said was an evil man who would once again set loose upon the world all the destruction of war. It was just a matter of time. I was to stop listening to him.

The lure of forbidden fruit was too strong; I continued to listen, though less frequently. Teresa had said that Adolf Hitler had raised her country from the dead, freed it from its enemies, made it the strongest nation in the world and delivered it from fear. Delivered it from fear!

For the first time in my life I felt hope. Life need not be a constant secret agony of fear and shame. If an entire nation could be changed, lifted out of weakness to extraordinary strength, certainly so could one person.

[...]

I knew what I had to do, and I dreaded it. To change myself from a puny, fearful boy to a strong, fearless man, I would have to face my fears, one by one, and overcome them. From listening to the priests at Sunday Mass, I knew that would take willpower. Even Adolf Hitler agreed. He and his people would triumph through the power of their superior will. But I knew from the priests the price would be terrible. God gave us free will, but to strengthen that will to meet the temptations of life required denial, "mortification," suffering.

Suffering. That was the key. Whatever the consequences of what I was to do, I must accept and endure them -- outlast suffering to achieve my goals. Wasn't that the message of my mother's stories? Of President Roosevelt? My fears were so many and so gripping that overcoming them, one by one, would build incredible willpower! The world opened up to me. I could become anything I wanted to be! The thought took my breath away.

Teresa had told me of the Germans' suffering before their rebirth; my mother had told me how the strength and bravery of the American Indian warriors was born of the suffering of torture. In the Book of Knowledge I had read of the Spartan boy who refused to cry out while a fox concealed beneath his clothing ate the boy's insides -- and thus the boy had died a true Spartan. Hadn't Glenn Cunningham suffered as he stretched the scar tissue of his burned legs to run faster? Hadn't my grandfather suffered to return to play football with only one eye? Had not Jesus suffered the agony of hanging nailed to a cross for three hours before He could triumph over death?

Gordo's Letter From Prison

2008-10-29T08:10:00.003-05:00

I'm skipping ahead in the story because I'm pressed for time, but by now Liddy -- thanks to Judge Sirica, whom he predictably detests -- is confined to maximum security prison in Danbury, Connecticut. He relates his opinions of his fellow prisoners (the blacks he doesn't much care for, with the exception for Black Muslims whom he rather respects). Then he reprints a letter (brackets are Liddy's):

My situation and mood were expressed in a letter to Peter Maroulis on 8 February 1973:

Dear Pete:

All well here. Am in same size cell, maximum security etc. and not permitted to mix with the general prison population as I have not yet been sentenced. Conditions are, however, an improvement over my prior accommodations.

I know you must be engulfed in the accumulation of regular business now that the trial is over, but if you could manage a visit it would be helpful as, in spite of the assurances that our apprehensions are groundless, there are matters I am reluctant to trust to the questionable integrity of the mails.

The persons one meets in prison can be fascinating. My current chess partner is son of the wartime SS Gestapo Commander of Brussels. We get on famously. He knows more songs than I do, and shower time sounds like the invasion of Poland.

The typewriter is permitted to be used for legal correspondence only, so please explain the absence of letters to Frances and my parents. [Despite reams of samples of my handwriting given the FBI under court order, they had been unable to make a single identification because I employed one of my alternate styles. In case of retrial, I didn't want to give them any more.]You might pass on my mailing address to them when you get the chance, along with my love and reassurances as to my wellbeing.

I trust that by now you have heard from Ireland. [A code reference to the color green, signifying cash. I was concerned that Peter be paid. He was, at about that time, handed a paper bag by an unidentified caller. It contained $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills towards his fee.]

[...]

Next Liddy decided to out-butch the rest of the psychopaths in prison:

Although I felt no depression coming on, it made sense to be careful. I decided to tune up my will so as to be ready for anything. The first thing I did was limit my food intake to six hundred calories per day. This induced sharp hunger. Because it stayed with me day and night, the discipline was excellent and worth the severe weight loss. To keep up my strength I increased the number of pushups I did daily from one to two hundred (in sets of one hundred) added jumping jacks, jogging along the exterior of the cells, and sit-ups. My mood remained steady. I was getting along with all the other prisoners. Things were going very well, too well, I decided. I needed more stress to bring my will to maximum power. I turned to my old reliable method of ordeal by fire. This test would have to exceed all others in destruction of tissue and time of severe pain.

I selected a particularly strong-willed black bank robber named "Tex" with whom to engage in a battle of wills. Ready with a box of wooden matches, I got him into a discussion of the subject and pressed him to the point where he expressed disbelief and challenged me. Because I had been warned never again to indulge in that practice near or on finger joints and my palm was already burned out, I had to go back to where I started years before: my forearm. The scars there were light.

"Strike a match," I said to Tex, and locked my eyes into his. He struck it and held it out, not knowing what to do next. I put the unburned outside of my left forearm directly over the flame. As the fire burned through my flesh and melted it back into a blackened depression, a look of horror came over Tex; but he stayed with it. The match burned down and scorched his fingers before he dropped it. I grinned at him as he looked at the burn unbelievingly, then looked ill, got up, and left.

The pain was not as severe now because all the nerves in the roughly oval 1 1/2" X 2" area had been destroyed. There was just a deep ache in the center with the severe burning sensation confined to the less destroyed circumference. The wound needed attention and would have to be reported to get it. I summoned a guard, showed it to him, and told him that a box of matches had been set off under my arm as I played chess with a smoker who was careless. I declined, of course, to identify the non-existent smoker. The burn was recorded and treated in the prison hospital. It was so deep I had endangered the tendons that operate the wrist. Finally satisfied that my will remained invincible, I was ready.

Reportercide

2008-10-23T13:53:00.003-05:00

Long before Ann Coulter expressed the wish that al-Qaeda had flown jet airplanes into the New York Times building, Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt actually planned, themselves, on murdering an American journalist, Jack Anderson. Why? I've previously posted excepts of an interview in which Liddy disingenuously explained his motives while candidly explaining his methods; now I'll excerpt the relevant passages from Will. However, since I believe that it too is less than truthful as to Liddy's and Hunt's true motives, I'll try to fill in the blanks.

First, context. Liddy's presentation of his grand scheme "GEMSTONE" (see previous post) has just been laughed out of John Mitchell's office; the Attorney General told Liddy to come up with something more realistic. So Liddy broods. He also notices how some parts of his GEMSTONE scheme -- or something very much like them -- have been or are being put into action.

Something comes up with one of Bob Haldeman's operatives, a guy hired through Dwight Chapin. This kid is playing some dirty tricks on the Democrats and Liddy is not amused to hear about it. For one thing, he's in charge of the dirty tricks, goddamnit. For another, he regards this young man's actions as nothing but "glorified Halloween pranks," the kind of chickenfeed trickery that would accomplish little but possibly put the hated Democrats on alert status, which would in turn endanger Liddy's more drastic (by which I mean, illegal, insane, and potentially murderous) schemes. The young man is Donald "Ratfucking" Segretti. Liddy and Hunt fly to Miami to meet him; Liddy ecstatically relates how he tells Segretti to cut it out or else Howie might kill him. Segretti, scared shitless, agrees.

Then Liddy sees a chance to restart his grand scheme. The inspiration, as it so often did, came from Howard Hunt:

When Howard Hunt was told by Robert Bennett, his employer, that Hank Greenspun, a Las Vegas newspaper publisher, was believed to have documents in his office safe that would "blow Muskie out of the water" and I passed that information on to Magruder, the reaction was swift. Hunt and I were authorized to check on the feasibility of cracking the safe and retrieving the documents.

Vegas. Dirty politics. Money. In the early 70s, the next link in the chain would be either the mob, or Howard Hughes. In this case, it's Hughes, with whom, by the way, Nixon went back a long way.

...Hunt and I decided that in the absence of a go-ahead on the creation and funding of GEMSTONE, we ought to make an alliance of convenience with Howard Hughes, known to be an enemy of Greenspun. Hunt had excellent connection with Hughes Tool and the Summa Corporations through his employer, Robert Bennett, whose Mullen Company represented Hughes and who was embroiled in the campaign to prove the purported authorized biography of Hughes by Clifford Irving to be a fraud. According to Hunt, Greenspun probably had documents in his safe that Hughes would like to retrieve. By prearrangement, Hunt and I flew to Los Angeles and stayed in a suite obtained for us by Hughes at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It is in the old section, very 1940-ish and huge, appropriate to anyone doing business with Howard Hughes. Each of us had his own bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, and we shared a spacious living room.

Right. What Liddy doesn't mention, but had to know, is that Hunt and Robert Maheu, Hughes's majordomo until he was sacked in 1970, were both involved in the CIA-mafia attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

There we conferred with Bob Winte, a Hughes security man. I suggested that we mount a joint operation. I believed Hughes would go along with it because Winte had already obtained for us the floor-plan of Greenspun's office, with the position of the safe marked clearly. It was a safe I believed easy to crack and I proposed that Hunt and I do so with a Cuban team while Hughes provided transportation and cover for us in Las Vegas. Key to the plan was a Hughes jet transport to be on standby in the desert. We would crack the safe and take everything in it without examination, head straight to the waiting jet, and fly to a Hughes-controlled Caribbean destination of his choice. There we would examine our findings jointly with Hughes' representatives and divide the materials on the basis of our separate interests. Winte said he would seek approval and seemed to think the matter a mere formality. When, a short time later, Hunt told me that Hughes had declined on the basis of the cost of the jet, I didn't believe it and concluded that the real reason was that Hughes figured there was something in the Greenspun safe that he didn't want us to see. From Hughes's point of view, we represented the government.

Although Howard Hughes was in his own way a bumbling fuck-up, I think even he knew better than to get into such shenanigans as Hunt and Liddy's. But on the other hand, Liddy's not entirely wrong here in RE: Hughes's paranoia. At the time, Hughes was desperately trying to bribe Richard Nixon -- and any other politician who might be helpful, including Ronald Reagan's friend, Senator Paul Laxalt -- into discontinuing nuclear weapons tests in Nevada. Just as Hughes had his reasons for bribing politicians of both parties, he had reason to be afraid of any particular politician possessing too much dirt on him.

Liddy goes on to list other schemes and dirty tricks of various Nixon administration officials in progress at the time. The tone here is a mix of amazed pride and bitter resentment: the former inspired by the fact that so many of Liddy's comrades had the same creative (if often wacky) sort of ruthlessness as he, the latter because of the mere fact that other Nixon cronies had their own (black) operations in action meant that he wasn't really in charge like he thought he'd be. Poor Gordon feels a little neglected.

...Magruder sent me to see Hugh Sloan, treasurer of the finance committee. Sloan gave me an envelope with about a thousand dollars in it, and on Magruder's instructions I gave it to Howard Hunt. What it was for was none of my business so I didn't ask, but I learned later it was to finance Hunt's trip to the bedside of Dita Beard where, using our CIA-provided physical disguise, he interviewed her for Colson about the authenticity of her controversial memorandum concerning the ITT contribution to the convention.

I just love the affected passivity -- indeed, the innocence and ignorance -- of this passage. Actually, Hunt went to Dita Beard's bedside in hope that she would retract or disavow the memorandum, for it exposed Nixonian corruption at its most basic level. The business conglomerate ITT, already with close ties to the Nixon administration (both had, shall we say, a mutual interest in destroying Salvador Allende), decided to take advantage of the president's not-so-secret desire to make San Diego the site of the 1972 Republican National Convention. It offered the RNC $400,000 dollars to make it happen. Quid pro quo, ITT's price for its largesse was that the Nixon administration force the Justice Department to stop blocking ITT's acquisition of... Hartford Insurance, I think it was, on anti-trust grounds. Things looked bad but Nixon had plausible deniability until Beard's memo became public, hence Colson's interest in making the memo go away by getting Beard to deny its authenticity -- er, I'm sorry, [air quotations] "question her about its authenticity" [air quotation].

Incidentally, Hunt's disguise provided by the CIA? Well, it wasn't James Bond stuff: it consisted of a red wig and a voice modulator. Not exactly a Zartan caliber disguise. More like, part Carrot Top and part Dennis Leary. But then I've told you repeatedly that Hunt and Liddy were and are fascist clowns.

Now for where this whole post is going. Guess who broke the story of Beard's memorandum? Jack Anderson, the reporter who also broke the story of Howard Hughes's six-figure "loan" to Donald Nixon, brother of Richard (and Anthony Summers persuades me that Dick Nixon himself actually received most of the loan money). And sure enough, just a few paragraphs later, here's Liddy (after some snotty yet hopeful remarks about the "wimp" Jeb Magruder, who supposedly wanted a few of Liddy's GEMSTONE hookers for his own pleasure, which in turn might -- Liddy hoped -- mean that the SAPPHIRE aspect of GEMSTONE might yet be greenlighted):

On a brisk February day shortly thereafter, Howard Hunt and I had lunch with a man he introduced to me as Dr. Edward Gunn, a physician retired from the CIA and an expert on "the unorthodox application of medical and chemical knowledge." I took "retired" to be in quotes since that is standard technique and Hunt introduced me under my operational alias, "George Leonard."...

The purpose of the luncheon, Hunt explained to me previously, was to take advantage of the expertise of Dr. Gunn in preparing, for the approval of Hunt's "principal," a plan to stop columnist Jack Anderson. Even with each other, Hunt and I often, when discussing the most sensitive of matters, used the term my principal rather than identify our superiors. I, at least, had several. Hunt, to my knowledge, had only one: Chuck Colson.

Anderson, Hunt reported, had now gone too far. As the direct result of an Anderson story, a top U.S. intelligence source abroad had been so compromised that, if not already dead, he would be in a matter of days. That was too much. Something had to be done.

The conversation at lunch was in the hypothetical terms usually employed in such circumstances. We did not mention Anderson's name explicitly. Hunt urged the use of LSD on the steering wheel of the "target's" automobile to cause him to hallucinate at a public function and thus be discredited. Dr. Gunn shot down that idea on the ground that CIA experience with the drug had demonstrated the unpredictability of individual reaction.

I took the position that, in a hypothetical case in which the target had been the direct cause of the identification and execution of one of our agents abroad, halfway measures were not appropriate. How many of our people should we let him kill before we stop him, I asked rhetorically, still not using Anderson's name. I urged as the logical and just solution that the target be killed. Quickly.

My suggestion was received with immediate acceptance, almost relief, as if they were just waiting for someone else to say for them what was really on their minds. There followed a lengthy discussion of the ways and means to accomplish the task best. Hunt, still enamored of the LSD approach, asked Dr. Gunn whether a massive dose might not cause such disruption of motor function that the driver would lose control of it and crash. Dr. Gunn repeated his earlier negative advice on the use of LSD. Besides, though LSD can be absorbed through the skin, our hypothetical target might be wearing gloves against the winter cold, or be chauffeur-driven. The use of LSD was, finally, dismissed.

Hunt's suggestion called to Dr. Gunn's mind a technique used successfully abroad. It involved catching the target's moving automobile in a turn or sharp curve and hitting it with another car on the outside rear quarter. According to Dr. Gunn, if the angle of the blow and the relative speed of the two vehicle were correct, the target vehicle would flip over, crash, and, usually, burn. By this time I was sure Gunn had guessed the identity of the hypothetical target, since he asked whether he was local and suggested, if he was, that we use the method he had just described at Chevy Chase Circle, a route Anderson did travel. Chevy Chase Circle, he pointed out, is notorious as the scene of fatal auto accidents and its configuration ideal for use of the technique.

I argued that Dr. Gunn's method would require the services of an expert to ensure success, and one might not be available to us. Dr. Gunn looked surprised, as if it had not occurred to him that we would not have available all the resources of the CIA.

Other methods were discussed and discarded. "Aspirin Roulette," for example: the placing of a poisoned replica of the appropriate brand of headache tablet into the bottle usually found in the target's medicine cabinet. That method was rejected because it would gratuitously endanger innocent members of his family and might take months before it worked.

I came up with the suggestion we finally agreed upon as the one to be recommended. It was a lethal adaptation of a technique long in use by the FBI during surreptitious entries. When an embassy safe, for example, is to be penetrated so that crypto material for use by NSA, everyone who might have access to the office is followed while the penetration is in progress. It is not begun unless a wiretap or other positive means has been established that the embassy personnel will be away for a sufficient period. Should someone return unexpectedly, however, he would never get into the embassy door. He would be assaulted, his wallet and watch removed, and, while he was unconscious as the latest victim of the outrageously high rate of street crime in Washington (which is not within the jurisdiction of, and therefore not the fault of, the FBI), the entry team would make good its escape.

I'll just break in here to note how interesting it is that Liddy, a law and order guy who came to Washington full of typically rightwing impatience with bureaucratic laxity (and excuses for that laxity), has just gleefully recommended perpetration of street crime, and neatly shifted the blame for it on a rival government entity, the Capitol Police. Thus the would-be murderer is also a bureaucratic weasel of the shiftiest sort.

I submitted that the target should just become a fatal victim of the notorious Washington street-crime rate. No one argued against that recommendation and, at Hunt's suggestion, I gave Dr. Gunn a hundred-dollar bill, from Committee to Re-elect the President intelligence funds, as a fee for his services. I took this to be to protect Dr. Gunn's image as "retired."

Afterward Hunt and I discussed the recommendation further. It was decided to include the suggestion that the assassination of Jack Anderson be carried out by Cubans already recruited for the intelligence arm of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

"Suppose," said Hunt, "my principal doesn't think it wise to entrust so sensitive a matter to them?"

I am asked frequently whether I believe in "blind obedience" to orders from legitimate authority, the code that permitted many Germans to carry out genocide. I do not. While there is a presumption of regularity that must obtain in any orders from legitimate superiors without which no government could function, I believe in individual responsibility, free will, and the rule of reason. There is a point beyond which I will not go, and that is anything my conscience tells me is malum in se (evil in and of itself) or my judgment tells me is irrational. I have no problem with doing something that is malum prohibitum (wrong only because of the existence of a law prohibiting it).

An example of malum in se would be the sexual assault of a child. In every society such a thing would be recognized as wrong. It would require no act of the legislature forbidding it to inform people that it was wrong." An example of malum prohibitum, on the other hand, would be the statute prohibiting driving through a stop sign without coming to a complete halt. Absent such a law, to do so would be a morally indifferent act.

Common sense tells us that minor problems require and justify but minor responses, and only extreme problems require and justify extreme solutions. In the case of killing it is well to remember that the Ten Commandments, translated correctly from the original Aramaic [sic -- I think he means Hebrew; Aramaic would be correct for some of the New Testament], do not contain the injunction "Thou shalt not kill." It reads, "Thou shalt not do murder." Quite another thing. There are circumstances that not only justify killing but require it (when one is charged with the safekeeping of a child, for example, and the only way to prevent its death from another's attack is to kill that other person). These are all situations that require informed and responsible judgments.

There are other ethical doctrines that may be applied. In World War II some bomber pilots were concerned when they knew that, for example, the ball bearing factory that was their target was across the street from an orphanage and their bombing altitude meant that it was very likely the orphanage would also be hit. In such a situation the principle of double effect comes into play; the unintended secondary effect of the destruction of the orphanage is permissible. The classical example is that of the driver of a loaded schoolbus [sic] going down the one-lane mountain road with a sheer thousand-foot drop one either side rounding a turn to see a three-year-old girl on a tricycle in the middle of the road. He is going too fast to stop. The choices are go off the road and take thirty-five children and himself to certain death to spare the three-year-old, or run over the three-year-old and save the thirty-five. I'd run over the three-year-old. I also fail to see any distinction between killing an enemy soldier in a time of declared war and killing an enemy espionage agent in a "cold" war, or even killing certain U.S. citizens. For example, were I back in my ODESSA position and were given the instruction from an appropriate officer of the government, I would kill Philip Agee if it were demonstrated (as it has often been argued) that his revelations have led directly to the death of at least one of his fellow CIA officers, that he intended to continue the revelations, and that they would lead to more deaths. Notice that this would not be retributive but preventative. It is the same rationale by which I was willing to obey an order to kill Jack Anderson. But I would do so only after satisfying myself that it was: a)an order from legitimate authority; b)a question of malum prohibitum; and c)a rational response to the problem.

I thought about the damage Anderson was doing to our country's ability to conduct foreign policy. Most of all, I thought of that U.S. agent abroad, dead or about to die after what I was sure would be interrogation by torture. If Hunt's principal was worried, I had the answer.

"Tell him," I said, "if necessary, I'll do it."

Christ, the lies and sophistry here are just incredible. But that's typical Liddy, true to his character. What's jarring, what's out of character, is that he is for the first and only time I know of, using Nazis in a negative analogy. As far as I'm concerned, this tells me -- even if I didn't know anything else about his argument -- that it is based in bad faith.

Actually, the plot to murder Jack Anderson was nothing but "retributive:" in this passage as well as in the passage from the Playboy interview, the link in Liddy's mind from Anderson's politically damaging (to the Nixon administration) scoops to the need for his assassination is apparent. It's only when Liddy defensively feels the need to rationalize his atrocious willingness -- even cheerfulness - to murder that he comes up with the "national security" excuses.

And I just love how Liddy counts on the reader's naivete of CIA lingo, hoping that the reader doesn't catch Gordo's very deliberate conflation of agent and contact. One is an American citizen in the pay of the American government, acting -- or supposed to be acting -- in his country's interests; the other, usually a foreign national and often a citizen of a belligerent country, is a source of information to the former, and this is exactly the type that was 'outed' by Anderson. As such, Anderson was doing exactly what... many CIA agents, in fact, do: burn sources. Come on, anyone who's watched Spy Game knows how this works. Anyway, another giveway to the bad faith in the "national security" rationale is the sudden ambiguity of it. Notice how Liddy, just a minute before being so detailed in his examples (sharing the school bus parable with obvious relish), suddenly falls back on Anderson's damage to the ability of the Nixon Administration to make foreign policy. See? Any dissenter could be guilty of that; the elasticity of the rule can stretch to the size of Limbaugh's waistband, allowing a great many of Liddy's (and Nixon's, which is the real point) political enemies to qualify for liquidation at the hands of Liddyan thugs.

Regardless, the psychological point here is that Liddy is truly a fascist ready to kill on command. There's a reason why he's often asked "whether [he] believe[s] in 'blind obedience' to orders:" because it's obvious that he does, and it's normal for rational people to be curious about the ultimate servility of fascist people who are otherwise so paradoxically aggressive and... well, willful.

Gordon Liddy's Grand Presentation

2008-10-23T10:56:00.004-05:00

Now employed by CREEP and having concocted a huge plan to destroy the Democrats in '72, Gordon Liddy finds himself in a limo with Jeb Magruder (whom he doesn't like) on his way to present his grand scheme so fiendish in its intricacies to an audience of John Dean and John Mitchell. From Will:

As we were riding, Magruder asked about my hand again and, to shut him up, I abandoned the matchbook story and told him the truth, that I had burned it intentionally in a recruiting effort. As I had been doing things like that for years and was used to it, I failed to realize the effect such a thing would have on someone like Magruder. He was shaken, and that made me even more contemptuous of him.

We met John Mitchell in his small, inner office behind the great ceremonial one so familiar to the public from the days of Bobby Kennedy. At my request there was an easel set up. I greeted the Attorney General and, as Magruder seated himself in front of the desk with Dean, I set up my charts in the order I wanted to display them.

The plan was given the overall name of GEMSTONE, and although most components bore the names of a precious or semiprecious stone, some were named for minerals. I explained that the proposed service was what had been requested by John Dean and that it had full offensive as well as defensive capability. Then I got down to specifics. I started with operation DIAMOND.

DIAMOND was our counterdemonstration plan. At the time, we still expected the convention to be held in San Diego. I repeated my objections to the site, then pointed out that the best technique for dealing with a mob had been worked out years before by the famed Texas Rangers. They were so few that law enforcement types still tell the story of the town that telegraphed Ranger headquarters for help in suppressing a riot and were startled to see a solitary Ranger ride into town. "There's only one of you?!" they cried, and the Ranger replied quietly, "There's only one riot, ain't there?"

The Texas Ranger technique was to linger on the fringes of the disturbance, watching until they could identify the leaders, then work their way through the crowd to leaders and beat the hell out of them until, leaderless, the rioters became easy to disperse.

I pointed out that we would be dealing with skilled and determined urban guerillas who had been distributing manuals for violent guerilla tactics against the convention, including homemade bombs; that the Sports Arena area would be impossible to hold against a well-led mob attack; and that I proposed to emulate the Texas Rangers by identifying the leaders through intelligence before the attack got under way, kidnap them, drug them, and hold them in Mexico until after the convention was over, then release them unharmed and still wondering what happened. Leaderless, the attack would be further disrupted by fake assembly orders and messages, and if it ever did get off the ground it would be much easier to repel. The sudden disappearances, which I labeled on the chart in the original German, Nacht und Nebel ("Night and Fog"), would strike fear into the hearts of the leftist guerillas. The chart labeled the team slated to carry out the night and fog plan as a "Special Action Group" and, when John Mitchell asked "What's that?" and expressed doubt that it could perform as I explained, I grew impatient. I was getting no support from Dean and Magruder. Both were sitting there, watching Mitchell intently, trying to gauge his reactions. I expected that from Magruder, but not from Dean. This was, after all, what he had asked me for, and I looked for an indication from him to Mitchell that this was what they were getting.

With Magruder and Dean out to lunch, I felt obliged to impress Mitchell with my seriousness of purpose, that my people were the kind and I was the kind who could and would do whatever was necessary to deal with organized mass violence. Both Magruder and Dean were too young to know what I was talking about, but I knew that Mitchell, a naval officer in World War II, would get the message if I translated the English "Special Action Group" into German. Given the history involved, it was a gross exaggeration, but it made my point. "An Einsatzgruppe, General," I said, inadvertently using a hard g for the word General and turning it, too, into German. "These men include professional killers who have accounted between them for twenty-two dead so far, including two hanged from a beam in a garage."

Mitchell gazed at me steadily, took another puff on his pipe, removed it from his mouth and said, "And where did you find men like that?"

"I understand they're members of organized crime."

"And how much will their services cost?"

I pointed to the figure on the chart. It was substantial. "Like top professionals everywhere, sir," I said, "they won't come cheap."

"Well," said Mitchell dryly as he brought his pipe back up to his mouth, "let's not contribute any more than we have to to the coffers of organized crime."

I didn't know Mitchell well enough to be able to tell whether he was being sarcastic or just objecting to the amount I had budgeted. I looked to Dean and Magruder for a clue. I found none. They just sat there, staring at Mitchell, like two rabbits in front of a cobra. Mitchell said no more, so I went on to the other operations.

RUBY concerned the infiltration of spies into the camp of Democratic contenders, then the successful candidate himself. COAL was the program to furnish money clandestinely to Shirley Chisholm of New York to finance her as a contender and force Democratic candidates to fight off a black woman, bound to generate ill-feeling among the black community and, we hoped, cause them difficulty with women. Once again Mitchell interrupted me. "You can forget about that. Nelson Rockefeller's already taking care of that nicely."

For each operation I explained what would be done in detail. EMERALD outlined the use of a chase plane to eavesdrop on the Democratic candidate's aircraft and buses when his entourage used radio telephones...

QUARTZ detailed emulation of the technique used by the Soviet Union for microwave interception of telephone traffic, and I explained in detail the way it was done by the Soviet Embassy.

For use in gathering information at the Democratic National Convention at Miami Beach, [Howard] Hunt and I had an option to lease a large houseboat moored within line of sight of the Fontainebleau. This would enable it to be used as a communications center for CRYSTAL -- electronic surveillance. It was an opulent barge, with a lush bedroom mirror over the big king-sized bed. We'd get our money's worth from the houseboat. It would double as headquarters for SAPPHIRE because it was from there that our prostitutes were to operate. They were not to operate as hookers but as spoiled, rich, beautiful women who were only too susceptible to men who could brag convincingly of the importance of what they were doing at the convention. The bedroom would be wired for sound, but I disagreed with Hunt's suggestion that movie cameras be used. That wouldn't be necessary to get the information, might cost us the women recruited who might object to being filmed in flagrante, and, as I pointed out to Howard, there wasn't room to install them overhead anyway. Mitchell listened to that impassively, as did Dean. Magruder, however, wore a look of eager interest.

I presented a plan for four black-bag jobs, OPALs I through IV. They were clandestine entries at which microphone surveillances could be placed, as well as TOPAZ: photographs taken of any documents available, including those under lock. As targets I proposed the headquarters of Senator Edmund Muskie's campaign on K Street, N.W.; that of Senator George McGovern on Capital Hill; one for the Democratic National Convention at any hotel, because we had access to just about anything we wanted through all the Cuban help employed in the Miami Beach hotels. One entry would be held in reserve for any target of opportunity Mitchell wished to designate as we went along. I looked at him questioningly, but he just kept sucking on his pipe, suggesting none.

Next I presented plans for GARNET: counterdemonstrations by groups that would attract media attention and be perceived by most Americans to be repulsive as they advocated the candidacy of Democratic candidates of our selection. The groups would also carry out disruptive tactics at fund-raising dinners and other affairs.

The largest disruption operation, however, was reserved for the Democratic National Convention itself. We had paid well to acquire the entire blueprints for the convention hall and all its support machinery. The plan I outlined, TURQUOISE, called for a commando team of Cubans -- veterans of raids into Castro Cuba -- to slip at night from apartments rented across the street to the rear of the hall, where the air-conditioning units were, and sabotage them by destroying the compressors and introducing a destructive grit into the bearings of the blowers. Even John Mitchell smiled as I asked them to imagine those Democrats, already hot under the collar from so much internecine fighting over the nomination, when, in the 100-degree Miami summer weather, all the air-conditioning went out, damaged beyond quick repair, and the temperature inside the hall reached 110 or more degrees.

I closed the presentation with a summary of the many different offensive and defensive intelligence-collection and disruption operations the plan made available, and with a final two charts. One, BRICK, summed up GEMSTONE cost breakdowns by units (RUBY, COAL, DIAMOND, etc.) and the total of nearly one million dollars. The last was the flowchart, which looked roughly like a ski jump with a rise at the other end, running from day of approval, with the high outflow for equipment purchase, the valley of preconvention operations, and the rise as they increased in intensity at the time of the Democratic convention.

When I had finished, Dean and Magruder remained silent. John Mitchell made much of filling and relighting his pipe and then said, "Gordon, a million dollars is a hell of a lot of money, much more than we had in mind. I'd like you to go back and come up with something more realistic."

...I was disappointed... As I restacked the charts, John Mitchell continued, "And Gordon?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Burn those charts; do it personally."

"Yes, sir."

Hitman

2008-10-23T10:05:00.002-05:00

It's Springtime for Liddy and Gordon is feeling a particularly psychopathic euphoria. From Will:

I was so confident of the ability of the [dirty tricks] group recruited that when I happened to meet Bud Krogh on the steps of the Old Executive Office Building, I thought of a proposal I'd made months before. I'd asserted that key foreign drug-smuggling operatives, who were well known should be recognized as killers of American children and subject to being killed themselves. By us. State had been horrified at the idea of such direct action as assassination and the suggestion had gone nowhere, but Bud had not seemed to object in principle. He had been traveling abroad quite a bit and had an appreciation of the difficulties involved in combating the drug barons with mere diplomacy. I was also very grateful to him for all he had done to advance me in the administration. I patted him on the back and said, "Bud, if you want anyone killed, just let me know." He smiled and said, "I will." I reacted to his smile by saying, "I'm serious."

"I know you are," said Krogh, his smile gone. "I'll let you know."

Gordo Declares War

2008-10-23T08:57:00.002-05:00

Ok, so I'm now to the midpoint of Gordon Liddy's Will. Liddy is by now working for CREEP, he and Howard Hunt have cooked up all kinds of dirty tricks to use on THE ENEMY, so all that's left (now that he's had CIA help in making his paper diagrams look professional) is to run them by John Mitchell and the whole Hee Haw gang. He relates his sense of purpose on the eve of his proposal to the bigwigs:

I'd been working day and night because the legal work that was supposed to be nominal, just enough to serve as convincing cover [Liddy's title was General Counsel; actually he was in charge of dirty tricks], had turned out to be substantial; but my sense of purpose as I realized the opportunity I'd been handed pumped me so full of adrenaline I never felt tired.

I knew exactly what had to be done and why, and I was under no illusion about its legality. Although spies in the enemy camp and electronic surveillance were nothing new in American presidential politics, we were going to go far beyond that.

I think I'll stop here to note that this nicely obliterates the self-pitying claims made by Nixon and his apologists that Tricky Dick had done nothing not done before by others (FDR, JFK, LBJ being the usual names dropped), so why was everyone picking on poor old Richard Nixon...? Liddy's admission proves there was no double standard. Nixon's crimes were treated as singular because they were singular (and they remained so until nearly equaled by Reagan and then of course dwarfed by Bush II).

As far as I was concerned, anything went if it were merely malum prohibitum (about which more later). There was a law of physics that every action has an equal and opposite reaction; I was ready to break that one, too, in reaction to the radical left and the whole drug-besotted 1960s "movement" that was attacking my country from within.

In other words, the reactionary is vowing a reaction of greater magnitude than the action inspiring him. So much for Liddy's -- previously, and so many others' since -- claim that they were merely fighting fire with fire. Their aim, shared by many a sociopath, was overkill.

The experience of the last ten years left no doubt in my mind that the United States was at war internally as well as externally. In August 1970 the Army Math Center of the University of Wisconsin was added to the list of bombings. A father of two had died in the blast and three others were injured. Two years before Daniel Moynihan had warned of the "onset of urban terror" -- a bit late, I thought, in view of the thousands of bombings, burnings, riots, and lootings of the '60s, to say nothing of the murders of police just because they were the police, the killing of judges, and the general disintegration of the social order.

Moreover the antiwar movement threatened to prove the vehicle for these radical elements to gain enough acceptance to achieve political power (six years later it was Senator George McGovern's son-in-law who was to get the bail of one of the Math Center bombers reduced so he could be freed). The events of the 1960s offended me gravely. To permit the thought, spirit, life-style, and ideas of the '60s movement to achieve power and become the official way of life of the United States was a thought as offensive to me as was the thought of surrender to a career Japanese soldier in 1945. It was unthinkable, an unspeakable betrayal.

I remembered the rioting, burning cities, the bombings and killings, and the attempts to close down the nation's capital by mob violence; the American actress in the capital of our enemy broadcasting appeals to our combat troops to commit treason; the cooperation and approval of great newspapers in the theft and compromise of masses of classified documents. I remembered the crew-served automatic weapons in the halls of the Department of Justice, and I knew that what had happened to Richard Nixon in 1960 and to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 could not be permitted to happen again. With an ice-cold, deliberate certainty I knew exactly what I was going to be doing in 1972 and it was damn well about time: we were going to throw the Battle Override [switch].

Racial Preferences and Dirty Tricks

2008-10-23T07:22:00.002-05:00

What a case study Gordon Liddy is. I've already documented some aspects of his Naziphilia, but the totality of it astounds me. He has Nazi-inspired or -reinforced reasons for doing all sorts of things; he's even got a personal Nuremburg Law for sexual attraction. I've read an interview which I can't at the moment access where Liddy explains what kind of woman he wanted when he decided it was time to get married. He's only attracted to the Anglo-Saxon type, and insists that any potential mate be of similar "stock". So that's how Liddy picked his wife, now let's see how it influenced him as matchmaker. Also, while we're at it, let's note how he scouted for thugs to plant inside antiwar demonstrations (one of the dirty tricks Liddy and Hunt concocted was to hire hoodlums to beat-up leftists):

Hunt enlisted the aid of Bernard Barker and we traveled to Miami to interview men for our counterdemonstrator and antiriot squad, along with several prostitute candidates for use at the Democratic convention. The men were exactly what I was looking for: tough, experienced, and loyal. When I got through talking to them, some with the aid of interpretation, the leader spoke to Barker in Spanish. He looked at me and held out both hands with his fingers spread and curved like talons. Nodding his head at me he said something to Barker that included "El Halcon." Barker laughed. Afterward I asked Barker what the man had said. "He called you a falcon," said Barker, making the same clutching gesture, "the bird other birds fear." It became my code name.

Thus the Cuban criminals and sociopaths recognized one of their own kind.

Howard Hunt and I interviewed about a dozen men. Afterward Howard told me that between them they had killed twenty-two men, including two hanged from a beam in a garage. Our experience with the prostitutes was not good. Hunt and Barker kept recruiting dark-haired and -complexioned Cuban women. They were very good-looking, but their English left something to be desired. I was not sure they'd be suitable for the purposes I intended: posing as idly rich young women so impressed by men of power they would let themselves be picked up at parties and bars by Democratic staffers who, in the course of boasting of their own importance, would disclose valuable information. Hunt took the position that what the seduced men had to say would be tape-recorded anyway. I wanted to be able to call upon the memories of the women for what was said at locations other than those we had bugged. I was also affected by my own bias. Because I would be more attracted to Northern Europeans, I assumed fair women would be more successful and rejected those selected. Finally, having despaired of seeing other than the dark and sultry type from the Cubans, I retained, sight unseen except for professional photographs, two stunning Anglo-Saxon women recruited by Barker's associate Frank Sturgis.

Gordon Liddy Knows How To Impress Teh Ladiez

2008-10-23T04:47:00.003-05:00

By now I've reached the point in Will where Liddy has begun to work for CREEP. Jeb Magruder has already told everyone involved that Gordon Liddy is to be in charge of 'dirty tricks.' Howard Hunt, as usual, is right there with Liddy scheming, dreaming, planning these dirty tricks. One such dirty trick they agreed to develop was to plant attractive females at Democratic events, with the hope that these females would seduce important Democrats then extract information from them. Hunt and Liddy live high on the hog on CREEP's dime, touring the country in style, recruiting operatives:

During one of our trips to California Hunt attempted to recruit one woman suggested by [Morton] Jackson, and I a woman suggested by Hunt's candidate. The woman I was working on, Sherry Stevens, was ideal as a plant. She was flashily good-looking, young, had secretarial skills and experience, and appeared able to attract men sexually if she wished, possibly even the candidate [at that time, unless I am mistaken, feared by the Republicans to likely be Ted Kennedy]. At dinner Miss Stevens seemed reluctant, balking at the risks involved, and when I told her that her identity would be revealed to no one and she could just walk away anytime if she feared exposure, she pointed out that I would know her identity. I told her that no one could force me to disclose anything I chose not to reveal. She didn't believe me and as I was casting about for some way to convince her when I noticed she smoked. I told her to light her cigarette lighter and hold it out. She did and I locked my gaze upon her eyes and placed my hand, palm down, over the flame. Presently the flesh turned black and when she smelled the scent of burning meat, Sherry Stevens broke from my gaze and pulled the lighter away from my hand. She seemed frightened badly so I took pains to calm her, wrapping an ice cube against the burn with my napkin and returning to my dinner. Pale, Miss Stevens said she was sure I would never betray her, but excused herself as a candidate, invoking a just remembered plan to marry a Swiss airplane pilot in September of 1972. When I told her I'd be glad to have her services through August, at a very generous rate of pay, she refused and, expressing concern for my hand, asked to be taken home.

At her apartment Miss Stevens gave me more ice cubes for the burn and appeared even more fearful, saying she hoped "you won't go down in flames" if she didn't offer to sleep with me. I told her that if I became offended every time someone didn't offer to go to bed with me, I'd end up being offended by an awful lot of people. "My God," I said, waving the napkined hand, "is that what you thought this was all about? Weren't you listening to what I was saying?"

"Well, I wasn't sure."

"Be sure. I want you for the job. No strings attached."

She promised to think it over. Back at the hotel I learned that Hunt had done better, getting a preliminary commitment. When I didn't do my customary hundred pushups the next morning, Hunt asked why. I showed him my hand and explained how it came to be that way. "That way" was, by now, a huge blackened, water-filled blister covering my palm and rendering my left hand virtually useless. I located a nearby physician in the phone book and had him lance the blister, treat the burn, and bandage it, then Hunt and I returned to Washington to make our plans in more detail.

Back at [CREEP] I explained the burn to the idly curious as the result of an accident in which an entire pack of matches went off in my hand....

Liddy on the Hookers

2008-10-23T04:06:00.003-05:00

There's a theory of Watergate that the burglary was about the Nixon crew's desire to get the names of certain johns who were high-ranking Democrats.

I'm sure the burglars would have been delighted with any information they managed to steal along those lines, Gordon Liddy, in Will, notes (pre-Watergate) the flaw to this theory: that Republicans already knew that pursuing the hooker angle would mean mutually assured destruction:

I had had relatively few dealings with [John] Dean, most of the matters that concerned us mutually being handled through Jack Caulfield... Caulfield had let me know that he had obtained, for Dean, Xaviera (Happy Hooker) Hollander's appointment book and other materials, but said they were useless to either Democrats or Republicans because so many prominent members of both parties were represented in them they would cancel each other out in a political "balance of terror."

Now get a load of Liddy's description of John Dean whom he has a vendetta against to this day and indeed to whom he preposterously assigns the entire blame for Watergate:

Dean entered and sat down with a bare minimum of social pleasantries. His clothing was young lawyer conservative in contrast to the length of his hair, which he'd combed forward to cover a receding hairline. The rest was piled up on top of his ears and hanging shaggily down over the collar of his suit coat, its light blond color similar to that of a competitive swimmer who spends five hours a day in a pool full of heavily chlorinated water. No glasses adorned his youthful, ferretlike face.

Got it? Dean was a vain (comb-over), weasel-faced, pseudo-conservative, who wore the right clothes but whose hair gave away his foppish, treasonous ways (remember Liddy's remarks about his own children's crew cuts a few posts back: hair style is plainly for Liddy a major signifier of someone's ideological tilt). Subtle bit of foreshadowing there, Gordo.

Presidents as Character Witnesses

2008-10-23T03:41:00.002-05:00

The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Nixon is on tape calling Gordon Liddy a "nut." (Oliver Stone has his Nixon call Liddy a fruitcake, while his Haldeman echoes the real Nixon in agreeing that Liddy's nutty.)

Reminds of a dimly remembered anecdote I'm not gonna bother trying to look up. When Andrew Jackson was in the Floridas provoking war with Spain and slaughtering Indians, Thomas Jefferson wrote to... Madison, I think, though it could have been Albert Gallatin... his estimation of Jackson: "He really is crazy."

Howie and Gordon's Grand Schemes

2008-10-23T02:23:00.003-05:00

More from Will. First, Gordon Liddy lets Egil Krogh know exactly what he's capable of:

[Upon returning to D.C. after traveling to California to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist] Hunt went home and I went to the office to draw up notes for a report to Krogh... I showed him the Polaroid photographs [Bernard] Barker had taken of the damaged files to prove that they had indeed been entered and searched, and told him of the fact that we had to use an alternative entry method. Although Krogh was relieved that the operation had gone undetected, he was disturbed when I showed him the photographs of the damaged files and reacted somewhat like one unfamiliar with violence when combat scenes appear on television; he could accept it intellectually, but the harsh reality of what sometimes has to be done was something for which Krogh was not prepared. I was completely candid with him in my report showing him everything: the suitcase, tools, even the knife I had carried. He asked me, incredulous, "Would you really have used it -- I mean, kill somebody?"

"Only if there were absolutely no other way. But yes, I would, if necessary to protect my men. I gave them my word I'd cover them." Krogh was visibly taken aback by that...

Liddy had hoped that Krogh and the higher-ups would give him and Hunt permission to break into Dr. Fielding's (Ellsberg's psychiatrist) apartment (having already burgled his office), but in the end permission was denied on the grounds that it wasn't worth the risk. So Howie and Gordon worked on other schemes...

In September of 1971 I was engaged in a project attempting to bring a fresh approach to the federal drug enforcement effort when Howard Hunt approached me on the next Ellsberg neutralization proposal. According to Hunt, Daniel Ellsberg was scheduled to speak at a fund-raising dinner to be held in Washington, and Chuck Colson thought it an opportunity to discredit him. The dinner would be well attended by media opinion-shapers and the speech would get wide coverage. Could ODESSA [Liddy's group, named after the network established to extricate Nazis from the fallen Reich] drug Ellsberg enough to befuddle him, make him appear a near burnt-out drug case?

Hunt and I studied the matter and developed a plan to infiltrate enough Cuban waiters into the group serving the banquet to be able to ensure that one of our people would serve Ellsberg at the dais. One of the earliest dishes on the menu was soup. A warm liquid is ideal for the rapid absorption and wide dispersal of a drug, and the taste would mask its presence. Hunt was certain the he could provide men from the Miami Cuban community who'd worked at major Florida hotels; the drug, a fast-acting psychedelic such as LSD-25, he said he could get from the CIA together with a recommendation of the dose necessary to have Ellsberg incoherent by the time he was to speak.

After much delay, Colson, according to Liddy's account, green-lighted this operation, but too late for Hunt and Liddy to arrange it logistically.

[Miles Ambrose and I] discussed the power of the grand jury and how it could be used by the federal government to suppress the domestic illicit drug trade. From these conversations I developed a proposal for a new attack on the problem and presented it to the White House in a memorandum to John Ehrlichman call "Breaking the Connection." The proposal was not adopted as such, but it led, ultimately, to the formation of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

And what a success that has turned out to be.

I continued my close association with Howard Hunt, often lunching with him at his club in Georgetown, and it was again through Hunt that ODESSA received its next assignment. Daniel Ellsberg had been associated in the past with Morton Halperin and the Brookings Institution and, according to Colson as replayed by Hunt, either or both of them were believed to be using Brookings for storage of substantial additional amounts of classified documents at least as sensitive, if not more so, than the Pentagon Papers. Further, the Brookings security vault might have evidence shedding light on the identity of any of Ellsberg's criminal associates in the purloining of Top Secret Defense files; whether Paul Warnke and Leslie Gelb were among them; and whoever delivered the classified documents to the Soviet Embassy. Could we get into the vault, say, by using fire as a diversion, and retrieve the materials?

The problem appealed to me because I recognized it as one turned down earlier by Jack Caulfield. He had mentioned it to me, with much rolling of eyes and nodding of the head in the direction of Colson's office, as something to "far out" for his imagination and too risky for his nerve. I thought it could be done and so did Hunt. The problem was that the cover under which our men went in there had to be first-rate, and that meant costly. We devised a plan that entailed buying a used but late-model fire engine of the kind used by the District of Columbia fire department and marking it appropriately; uniforms for a squad of Cubans and their training so their perfomance would be believable. Thereafter, Brookings would be firebombed by use of a delay mechanism timed to go off at night so as not to endanger lives needlessly. The Cubans in the authentic-looking fire engine would "respond" minutes after the timer went off, enter, get anybody in there out, hit the vault, and get themselves out in the confusion of other fire apparatus arriving, calmly loading "rescued" material into a van. The bogus engine would be abandoned at the scene. The taking of the material from the vault would be discovered and the fire engine traced to a cut-out buyer. There would be a lot of who-struck-John in the liberal press, but because nothing could be proved the matter would lapse into the unsolved-mystery category.

Hunt submitted the plan for approval, but this time the decision was swift. "No." Too expensive. The White House wouldn't spring for a fire engine.

And in This Corner, Representing the Police State

2008-10-14T03:35:00.003-05:00

Moar Liddy from The U.S. vs. John Lennon

He repeats the story he told in Will about grabbing a candle-holding protester in front of the Treasury building and getting a light from him -- but he cleans up the language and tone considerably.

Regarding Kent State:

Ok, you had 18-year-old college kids, without the sense God gave a goose, going around challenging 18-year-old kids with 30.06 semi-automatic rifles. Yes, they were in uniform, but they were National Guard, very little training. They felt threatened, they were armed, what did you think was gonna happen?

On J. Edgar Hoover, in tones of admiration (Liddy was an agent before he was a Nixon goon):

Back in those days the FBI would operate affirmatively, in other words, would not just gather intelligence, but it perceived as its mission the disruption of the other side.

On John Lennon being a Weapon of Mass Destruction in the hands of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin:

The knife lying on a table is not a threat to any body. It requires human responsible agency to take the knife and use it to cut somebody's throat. [John Lennon] would be looked upon as a tool; in this instance, he was being manipulated in a way that harmed the efforts of the United States to win the war in Vietnam and to have order and stability here at home.

It was our impression of Lennon that, most of the time, he was walking around stoned out of his mind. But he was a high-profile figure, so his activities were being monitored.

U.S.A., love it or leave it:

It wasn't so much that Lennon was being critical of U.S. policy; it was that he was over here, and enjoying all the benefits and the success that we were giving him, the wealth, and all the rest of it, and bad-mouthing us here. Our attitude was: You wanna do that, go back to London, go back to Liverpool.

Imagine There Are No Wingnuts

2008-10-14T02:31:00.002-05:00

G. Gordon Liddy is asked about Lennon's song "Imagine" (from The U.S. vs. John Lennon):

Yes, ["Imagine"] was considered, you know, part of the antiwar movement. It was sort of an anthem of the antiwar movement and we reacted negatively to that. I remember my kids were in school at the time, in public school, and when we were told that there was going to be a concert we said, 'fine, tell us what music you're going to be singing." And I remember "Imagine" was one of them and I said [to my children], "Ok, when that comes on, you just stand there, don't sing." And they didn't.

Poor Richard Nixon Didn't Have The Wingnutosphere To Help Him!

2008-10-14T00:52:00.002-05:00

Gordon Liddy blathering and whining (and quoting Kurt Cobain) on The U.S. vs. John Lennon:

Well, first there's the old adage that, you know, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you, but the mainstream press, both print and electronic media in those days, they owned the information business in this country, and they were aligned against [Nixon] just as they are [now] against President Bush. The difference now is that you've got Fox News, you've got talk radio, you've got the blogosphere, so that supporting views can reach the public. In those [Nixon's] days, they did not, and so there was that sense of 'beleaguerment,' if you will; but there was also an understanding that this is, you know, civil war by another name, and we're gonna win this war.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2008-10-14T00:41:00.002-05:00

The producers of The U.S. vs. John Lennon make the mistake of asking Gordon Liddy about the First Amendment. They are rewarded with false-equivalence, dissembling, and self-pity.

The First Amendment works both ways. You are perfectly entitled to, on this movie, say, you know, here is the dreadful rightwing bigot Gordon Liddy, and what he thinks about blah blah blah. And I have a perfect right to say that you're a leftwing bigot who's calling me a rightwing bigot. In the incidents that you were about, the Dixie Chicks and what have you, yeah, people were taking their cds out and the eighteen-wheeler ..uh, pilots were runnin over 'em to express their contempt for people who would say what they said. That also is protected speech according to the interpretation of the United States Supreme Court.

What fans did with Dixie Chicks cds and said about them was of course never the point; the point was the likes of Clear Channel blackballing them from playlists, and Gordon Liddy knows this perfectly well.

Gordon Liddy Educates the Wannabes

2008-10-13T07:03:00.003-05:00

He shows the young Nixonites how a real fascist party is thrown; the snot-noses are thrilled. Here's his own version of the infamous story, from Will:

As I worked at the White House, one heard talk of the election that was just a year away and nostalgic storytelling of the triumphs of 1968. I got awfully tired of stories about "giant rallies" with all the balloons going up in unison. Finally, I had enough of it. "Hey, you guys," I said one day, "you want to see a real rally?" Curious, they asked what I was talking about.

One of the advantages of living in Washington is the availability of the museums, art galleries, and libraries. One of my favorite haunts had been the National Archives, and I subscribed to the little schedule of motion pictures to be shown at the theater there. I had taken my children to see Leni Riefenstahl's cinematic masterpiece Triumph of the Will. I called the National Archives and set up a special showing for the White House staff. About fifteen people attended. At the climactic end of the picture, as thousands stand to sing the rousing Horst Wessel anthem following scenes of hundreds of thousands of storm troopers and SS in the mass formations of Albert Speer's gigantic spectaculars, the last notes drifted off, the picture faded, and the lights came up. There was a moment of stunned silence. Then from the rear of the audience came an awed, "Jesus! What an advance job!"

The Original "Fake But True" Forgery

2008-10-13T06:28:00.003-05:00

Gordon Liddy describes, in Will, his first impressions of who was to be one of his main partners in crime, E. Howard Hunt.

Hunt was about my size, twelve years older, and a brief conversation revealed two things about him: he was knowledgeable in the area of intelligence operations and had a command of the English language one associates with brains and a first-class education. I had heard of him from Bud Krogh and, after conversation confirmed his expertise in the field of intelligence, I accepted him. We clicked immediately and I did what I could to help him.

[...]

Hunt continued to maintain a separate office, but he was so intimately involved in what we were doing that I assumed it was only because there was no more space available in Room 16. We became fast friends and our families visited each other. Howard's wife, Dorothy, had a strong personality and herself had an intelligence background. She worked in the Spanish Embassy, and I suspected she had been placed there by the CIA...

[...]

By far the bulk of my time was devoted to the problem of the Ellsberg prosecution and leaks. Added to that was an instruction to try to find, in Defense Department files, cables from the time of the assassination of [Ngo Dinh] Diem that would shed light on what, if any, was the American complicity in that episode. The Nixon administration that John F. Kennedy had ordered Diem slain. I checked the cable traffic at the Pentagon. My contact there was the late Fred Buzhardt, then General Counsel. I had no difficulty getting access to the regular traffic, but when I found that cables from the critical period seemed to be missing (the volume of cable traffic dropped noticeably, particularly on the prospective coup of Minh against Diem) and asked to see the Joint Chiefs of Staff back-channel traffic, I ran into a stone wall. Buzhardt wasn't the problem; it was Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.

I reported my difficulty with Laird to both Krogh and David Young. Krogh said that Ehrlichman would turn Laird around and give me access to the Joint Chiefs' back-channel traffic, where I believed I might find the "smoking gun" cable -- to coin a phrase -- but even Ehrlichman couldn't break down Laird. I had to abandon the project. At the same time Hunt was trying to find the same kind of cable by going through the traffic at State. He, too, determined that the key cables were missing. I am convinced, from the content and tone of the traffic that I did see, that the United States either ordered, or at least acquiesced with prior knowledge, in the murder of Diem -- but I can't prove it.

As it happens, Liddy was exactly right: the U.S. was responsible for Diem's assassination. But what he slyly omits is that Howard Hunt eventually forged the smoking gun cable both he and Hunt had failed to find:

In September 1971, Hunt forged and offered to a Life magazine reporter top-secret State Department cables designed to prove that President Kennedy had personally and specifically ordered the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.[18] Hunt told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 that that he had fabricated the cables to show a link between President Kennedy and the assassination of Diem, a Catholic, to estrange Catholic voters from the Democratic party, after Colson suggested he "might be able to improve upon the record."

Sounds like a job straight out of Chuck Colson's office, all right. I wonder if Liddy helped.

The funny thing is, the cable that gave the game away was in front of the Nixonites' faces all along. It was Cable 243, and it was a part of the Pentagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg leaked to The New York Times. Perhaps Hunt and Liddy just wanted to find a different cable than 243, one that didn't implicate Nixon's old running mate Cabot Lodge in the operation. Anyway, enough room was left in the cable for the Kennedys to have plausible deniability (something they were good at). There is just rarely if ever a smoking gun in these sorts of communiques, as Liddy and Hunt's superiors Nixon and Kissinger should have known full well, and indeed they perpetrated the exact same thing in their cables to Santiago green-lighting, in the same deniable language, the kidnapping and murder of General Schneider and the subsequent coup against Salvador Allende.

The Plumbers Set Up Shop, Inspired By Nazis

2008-10-13T05:09:00.005-05:00

In most action movies there's a scene or series of scenes showing how the group of heroes come together, an introduction to show each individual member's story before the whole commences to action. Liddy does the same thing in Will, with one important difference: his crew is the gang on the other side, the villains. Imagine Kurasawa had shown how the bandits, instead of the Seven Samurai, had been recruited, and that's very much the scene Liddy relates here. The context is soon after the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers and, about a month later the Times scooped the secret U.S. plans for the SALT II talks with the Soviets. Nixon and Dr. Death Henry Kissinger were livid, something had to be done:

On July 24 President Nixon conferred with John Ehrlichman and Bud Krogh about the devastating problem of leakage to the press of the highest classifications of national security information. Krogh came from the meeting shaken and soon afterward spoke to me. The President, Krogh said, was absolutely furious, as was Henry Kissinger, about the "deliberate" leaks. Krogh and [David] Young were to orchestrate a government-wide search to find the leakers and root them out. It had the "absolute highest priority." Daniel Ellsberg, who had been made a hero by the press, was now the symbolic personification of all the leakers. He had been indicted on 28 June, and it was mandatory that the prosecution succeed. Krogh, Young, and I were to supervise and coordinate all this for the White House. I had my marching orders.

[...]

From his staff Bud Krogh assigned a classically blond, precise, and efficient German-American to Room 16 [the Plumbers' office]. Her name was Kathleen Chenow. The CIA came over to give us the highest clearances and to take our oaths not to compromise them. One, for example, was so high that just the first letter of the identifying code word was classified SECRET while the word itself was TOP SECRET and the information protected so classified the Holy Ghost could only give it to God the Father on a need-to-know basis. I was briefed on "Project Jennifer": the attempt, by means of the Glomar Explorer, to raise the Soviet submarine sunk in the Pacific. It is the only one I can reveal to this day -- because it is already blown -- but my clearances included the high-technology satellite intelligence systems and matters of similar seriousness. I received them because my work on the new project required access to Pentagon files. Nevertheless, the top drawer of the file safe in Room 16 was forbidden even to me. It was, I believe, where David Young kept results of the Kissinger-ordered and other exceptionally sensitive wiretaps.

With Young so deeply involved in trying to locate the source of the SALT leak and Krogh maintaining his office upstairs, I was the only one left to do what obviously needed to be done: we couldn't just "wing" such an extraordinarily complex and sensitive assignment, so I undertook to organize the unit.

The first thing required, I believed, was our own sensitivity indicator to distinguish our product from that of the agencies we were coordinating and other White House sources. As history was to prove, compromise of the kind of documents we were generating would be disastrous. Our organization had been directed to eliminate subversion of the secrets of the administration, so I created an acronym using the initial letter of those descriptive words. It appealed to me because when I organize, I am inclined to think in German terms and the acronym was also used by a World War II German veterans organization belonged to by some acquaintances of mine, Organisation Der Emerlingen Schutz Staffel Angehorigen: ODESSA.

On the blackboard, in German for clarity and added security, I diagrammed the new ODESSA organization. The only exception to the German was the use, common in the Nixon White House, of the Greek letter and mathematical symbol, pi, as a symbol for the President. As I diagrammed, something puzzled me. I knew how the Nixon administration operated; at the apex of power there was very little room and the jockeying for position was intense. Anytime something important was going on, those with power, derived from proximity to the President, were careful to be represented, either in person or by a trusted proxy.

The Ehrlichman presence was Krogh. Kissinger was represented by David Young, even though Young tried to disassociate himself from Kissinger by saying that he had not been assigned his role by "Henry," as he had called him; he said he had quit as Kissinger's appointments secretary because he had gotten to the point where he could no longer "lie all day for Henry." I owed my position to John Mitchell. The only other power not represented was Charles Colson. It was inconceivable to me that Colson would not have a presence in such an enterprise. As these thoughts were going through my head, Kathleen Chenow entered to tell me there was someone in the outer office inquiring about reviewing some of our holdings on Ellsberg. Dave Young was busy. Would I see him? I walked out and was introduced to Howard Hunt.

E. Howard Hunt presented himself as a consultant working for Charles Colson sent down to Room 16 to review whatever we had available on Ellsberg. The empty space on my organization chart was filled. All the heavy hitters were accounted for.

Jesus, what a fucking fascist -- the man and the operation, even down to the Aryan secretary. The original ODESSA, of course, was the network that smuggled high-profile Nazis -- often the worst war criminals among them -- to safety in the West, particularly to South America. I'd very much like to know who in ODESSA were Liddy's "acquaintances," and how well he knew them, what the nature of their relationship was.

More Liddy Spittle

2008-10-13T04:31:00.002-05:00

David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine quotes a study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of 150 hours of political talk from fifty programs. Needless to say, they caught Liddy's rabid act:

According to the study, G. Gordon Liddy said that 1996 GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole was going to "run for president against a yellow coward who turned and ran, someone who's got a thumb up his ass instead of a bullet in his heart."

There's also a few Liddy quotes to be found in that great slab of collected wingnut spewings, Take Them At Their Words: Shocking, Amusing, and Baffling Quotations from the G.O.P. and Their Friends, 1994-2004, by Bruce J. Miller with Diana Maio:

When I was a kid and this was a free country, we were free to debate our country's history. Because of the frantic efforts of the notorious rat John Dean, we almost lost that right.
-G. Gordon Liddy, When I Was a Kid This Was a Free Country, Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2002, p.167.

I'm not sure if Liddy means this to say that because Dean squealed to Congress about Richard Nixon's crimes and thus led to Nixon's downfall, that freedom was almost lost, or if Liddy is talking about his utterly insane theory that Dean himself was behind the Watergate break-in, setting up poor Richard Nixon as the patsy to take the fall (yes, Liddy really has pushed such a theory); either way, it's totally bugfuck insane.

Then there's yet another quotation of Liddy's "head shots" spiel, but this one provides a context with regard to time period:

If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're gonna be wearing bulletproof vests... Head shots, head shots.
-G. Gordon Liddy, 8-94. Boston Globe, 4-29-95. After the Oklahoma City bombing, Liddy corrected this statement, saying that experts had told him heads were a difficult target: "So you shoot twice to the body, center of mass, and if that does not work, then shoot to the groin area." Associated Press, 7-31-96.

Then there's Liddy's infamously drooling remarks about Dear Leader's package on the never more appropriately-titled Hardball:

Chris Matthews: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?

Gordon Liddy: Well, I -- in the first place, I think it's envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman [Naomi Wolf] to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he's in his flight suit, he's striding across the deck, and he's wearing his parachute harness, you know -- and I've worn those because I parachute -- and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman's vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn't count -- they're all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.
-"Hardball," 5-8-03. Dailyhowler.com

Biting the Hand that Feeds Him

2008-10-13T03:30:00.003-05:00

G. Gordon Liddy, like many wingnuts who are brown-nosed by the corporate media, turns right around and kicks them in the teeth, which, in turn, causes the corporate media to brown-nose him even more. From David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine:

Notable Quotables, an attention-getting, twice-monthly publication, provides "a compilation of the latest outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media." A curious committee comprising Watergate co-conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, Iran-contra convicted felon Oliver North, Marvin Olasky (author of the book Prodigal Press: The Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media, which advocated that journalists "follow the Bible" in crafting their reports), and the ubiquitous Midge Decter, among others, makes frequent "awards" to the press, such as "Hypocritical Media Hatemongering" and "Good Morning, Morons."

And, as Brock notes, of course these nutty projects are what gives ammo to the likes of Brent Bozell and his crew of troglodytes over at MRC.

Liddy then goes on shows like Joe Scarborough's and Chris Matthews's, or his crap gets pushed by the likes of Lou Dobbs:

Through the "Dobbs List" segment, Dobbs recommends favorite books to the CNN audience, promoting, for example, a tome by G. Gordon Liddy. On his radio show, Liddy, referring to agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, has counseled his audience to "kill the sons of bitches," revealed that he had had a "secret plan to kill columnist Jack Anderson," and announced, "I accept no responsibility for somebody shooting up the [Clinton] White House," after describing how he used photos of the Clintons for target practice on a shooting range.

Liddy's book When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country, a cliched attack on "enviroradicals," "fulminating feminists," "devotees of diversity," "politically correct nitwits," and "killer air-bags," made the Dobbs List. Dobbs described the book as "a celebration of sorts of a time when boys could go hunting with a pal, make their own fireworks, and just burn leaves on an autumn afternoon." With odd understatement, Dobbs introduced the Watergate felon as having served "several functions during the Nixon administration." When Liddy's crimes inevitably came up in the interview, Dobbs lauded Liddy for refusing to implicate others, saying, "You never said a word, held your own counsel, and took responsibility for your own actions." To Dobbs, this was evidence of Liddy's "remarkable" character. Cutting to a commercial break, Dobbs said, "Next: Why the Democrats failed to scare voters on Social Security!"

Gordon Liddy: D.C. Vigilante

2008-10-13T01:52:00.004-05:00

Before he moved his family to D.C., Gordon Liddy got a head start on subduing the Negro Menace which plagued the nation's capital! From Will:

I wanted to start work [at the Treasury] immediately, so I imposed upon the hospitality of... my uncle and aunt in Chevy Chase, Maryland, while looking for an apartment [near] the Treasury. I found one on Rhode Island Avenue, Northwest, at Fifteenth Street. I should have looked a little longer.

Only when I moved in did I notice all the hooker traffic and furtive meetings in the hallways. When I went outside to say good-bye to my [a]unt... who had hauled my gear down in her car, I really found out where I was living. Walking toward the car, I heard a scuffle to my rear and, turning, saw two black men mug and rob a white man. Well, I had come to Washington to fight crime, hadn't I? I charged the two muggers, thinking that if I took care of one, the victim could handle the other.

To my surprise, both muggers, no doubt astonished, fled. I took off after them, thinking to flag down a police car along the way. No police were to be found. They crossed Fourteenth Street and stopped running a few yards from the corner. I didn't know then that Fourteenth Street, Northwest, is Washington's red-light district, riot corridor, and heroin heaven all rolled into one. I found out.

In a moment I was surrounded by guys off the doorsteps of ravaged row houses. About seven looked as if they wanted to play; the rest were spectators. I knew this would be one fight I wasn't going to win, so I decided to get in the first blow. As mugger number one said, "You followin' me or sumpin', mister?" I answered, "Yeah!" and hit him with a sucker right-hand lead to the jaw. He went down and the fight was on. It was off again pretty quickly when someone hit me hard from behind.

I wasn't out, because I remember what happened, but everything suddenly seemed in slow motion and voices sounded far away. My arms wouldn't do what my brain told them and my legs gave way. On the way down I took a kick on the left shoulder. I tried to get up but couldn't. A hand dipped into my pocket and my wallet was gone. Simultaneously the crowd vanished into the row houses and the police arrived. They helped me to my feet and, after explaining, I led them into the building. By that time the quarry had fled through the back door so I went back to my apartment to clean up.

The next day I submitted a memorandum advising Treasury that I had lost a fight and their building pass...

I decided that for so long as I was living in that neighborhood I'd better carry a gun. I learned that the Washington police wouldn't give a gun permit to someone at Treasury because that was up to the Secretary; if he wanted his agents to carry firearms, he had by regulation the power to arm them. The Secret Service, Customs, IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms all came under Treasury and each had certain agents authorized to carry a gun. All I needed was to become a "Treasury agent" within the meaning of that law, get myself some credentials that would satisfy any police officer who might notice I was armed, and I'd be all set.

It was very clear to me that I, as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury for Organized Crime, was a Treasury agent within the meaning of the regulation authorizing the carrying of a gun, so I put something to that effect in the file. But what about credentials? My building pass wouldn't do; every clerk and secretary had one. That proved to be no problem either.

When I was originally briefed I was shown a stock of gold badges and imposing credential covers bearing the seal of the Treasury in gold on simulated morocco leather. For insertion inside there were blank credentials. These bore beautifully engraved and scrolled UNITED STATES TREASURY DEPARTMENT. Under this example of the best work of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which produces our currency, was a splendid, light blue rendering of the main Treasury building. Across the face of the building could be printed any name and title desired. The lower portion bore the seal of the Treasury, a signature line for the "holder" and a countersignature line for the Assistant Secretary for Administration. There was space for a photograph and the legend:

whose signature and photograph appear hereon is an accredited representative of the Department of the Treasury of the United States and as such is authorized to conduct official inquiries on behalf of the United States Government.

The credential said nothing about firearms, but it was so impressive-looking nobody would challenge it. These credentials and badges were phony. They were for the use of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Of course. But isn't Liddy, in telling this story (and with such pride), giving away the company's secrets? I only mention his spilling CIA secrets and protocols because Liddy infamously plotted to kill reporters whom he alleged gave away CIA secrets. Anyway, Liddy continues:

Everyone knew that the Treasury had many different law enforcement agents of one kind or another, but few knew -- or cared -- what they actually were. This made "Treasury agent" an ideal cover for CIA officers operating within the United States. The Treasury, on request of the CIA, would make up a credential and issue a gold badge in any name desired and any photograph supplied. I promptly had my photograph, name, and title made up into one of the credential sets and was equipped to carry a gun anywhere in the United States. The Lord helps those who help themselves.

Thus a man charged with, among other things, enforcement of gun laws illegally forged credentials so that his illegal carrying of concealed weapons could go on unmolested by other, presumably more law-abiding, authorities. That's rich; how very Nixonian, how very rightwing: the law's for other people to follow. And black people had especially better follow the law, or Officer Liddy will be forced to.. well, let him tell the story:

When I first came to Washington, I was traveling light and brought only three guns with me: my .357 magnum Smith & Wesson, a snub-nosed Colt .38 Special, and a big Colt 1911 government model .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol. Within days of moving into the Windsor House I had occasion to use one, when there was a knock on my door at two in the morning.

Not expecting visitors at that hour but aware the place was crawling with pimps, hookers, hopheads, and what have you, I picked up the .45 auto.

An unloaded gun is worthless and every gun should always be treated as loaded, so mine always were. I eased the slide back to make sure there was a round in the chamber, thumbed back the hammer, and slipped on the safety. I held the gun muzzle down, as I approached the door, first turning on the hall light so I would be illuminated brightly, then reaching forward to open the door from a distance. A huge black man loomed in the doorway. He saw the big Colt and froze.

"Good morning," I said, "what can I do for you today?"

The man's eyes bugged out. He just couldn't get them off the massive .45. "Er, ah, 'scuse me," he blurted finally, "could I, er, ah, borry a stamp?"

"Sorry, pal; this window's closed." I snapped the safety off the Colt with a click that echoed down the empty hallway.

"You wanna be careful, wanderin' around a place like this at night," I said, swinging the muzzle of the .45 up to cover his belly. "Don't you know," I called after him as he bolted for the stairwell, "this is a bad neighborhood?"

But he was long gone, and I was laughing....

Hte Hippies Make Me All Uh-Scurred

2008-10-13T01:08:00.002-05:00

Gordon Liddy was on his way out of the Treasury Department, and on his way into the Plumbers' Department. But before he went to work for Bud Krogh, he paid a visit to Don Santarelli at John Mitchell's Justice Department. Liddy's almost salivating as he describes the scene (in Will):

The atmosphere in Washington was tense; just how tense I didn't realize fully until I got to Justice. Half a million demonstrators were in town, the vanguard of an announced huge mob of left-wing types who had vowed to shut down the nation's capital on the greatest holiday of the Communist world, May Day, 1 May.

My credentials got me through the GSA guards at the side door and, as I started my way toward Santarelli's office, I discovered just how sharp the struggle had become with those who had lost the 1968 election and wanted to reverse that result by any means. The corridors of the Justice Department building intersect at acute angles. At those angles, where they could sweep two corridors at once, there were uniformed infantry behind crew-served automatic weapons -- belt-fed light machineguns. Any of the mob who managed to overwhelm the GSA guards and enter the building to "shut it down" would be cut to pieces by machinegun fire. Nobody fucked with John Mitchell.

Amazing, isn't it, how a bunch of hippies, armed with cardboard posters and marijuana, were such a physical threat to besieged, machine gun-armed government types, huh?

Good Wingnuts Make Good Neighbors?

2008-10-12T22:17:00.004-05:00

When Gordon Liddy moved to Washington, D.C., he didn't much like his new neighbors (cough NEGROES and LIBERALS cough). As he tells it, he had a problem with vandals. So he threatened to go all "School of the Americas" on their asses; he really wanted those damn kids to get off his lawn.

He relates meeting with a neighbor whom he, at first, mistook for the vandals' parent:

A few minutes later a man came to the door, and [Mrs. Liddy] showed him into the living room. I came in through the dining room double door, the dining room table in plain view. My self-invited guest shied at the sight of the Bulgarian crown Lugars, the Colts, Smiths, Browning, and other firearms and I apologized for the gun oil I was wiping off my hand with a rag.

The man accused me of "terrorizing" the young people in the neighborhood. I told him about the vandalism and said I wasn't about to take any of that crap from a bunch of snotty-nosed teenagers. He acknowledged that there was no excuse for vandalism, said that was the first he had heard of it, but that the problem was one for the police, not individual initiative. I replied that theory was fine but the practical application nil in view of the District's crime problem and the shortage of police; that I didn't believe in worrying about enemies, preferring to let them worry about me.

My visitor was a career bureaucrat. He told me where he worked and at what. I told him that I worked at Treasury, and he made the unwarranted assumption that I, too, was a career bureaucrat and threatened to "go to your superiors in Treasury" if I didn't agree to discontinue defending myself and instead reply on the police. I though of Rossides, [Liddy's direct superior at Treasury, with whom he did not get on, and a hard-line lobbyist within the administration for the Greek junta, a connection worth remembering in light of Watergate] laughed, and told him to go ahead. His bluff called, my visitor proposed a compromise; he believed he knew the parents of the people I was complaining about. Would I give him the opportunity to go to them and try to resolve the problem that way?

I would, so long as the vandalism stopped. If it didn't, I was going hunting again. We shook on it.

The vandalism stopped for a while, then started again. I called my erstwhile visitor and told him I was going after them. He asked for one more chance and I gave it to him. The vandalism stopped and that was the end of it.

In August 1970 we moved to a new house between Forts Foote and Washington on the Potomac River in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Just two blocks from the river, it was a beautiful area, but even more beautiful were the people. Here were no bureaucrats; our neighbors were almost all military officers. Suddenly, the kids' crew cuts were right in style. My neighbors liked Richard Nixon, who was showing himself to be hard-nosed when it came to Vietnam and national defense. We loved it there and joined the nearby Tantallon Country Club.

As for the neighborhood he disliked and the dirty trick nature of the vandalism that so outraged Mr. Dish-it-out-but-can't-take-it Dirty Fucking Trickster? Well, lest you suspect I'm exaggerating in my characterization, here's Liddy's own words:

We leased a house on Legation Street just a few blocks south of Chevy Chase, and west of Connecticut Avenue. From our point of view it was a bad neighborhood. A few blocks away, hippies living communally in single-family houses would demonstrate their devotion to nature by such symbolic gestures as beating old Volkswagens to death at the curb with sledgehammers in a haze of marijuana smoke. The area was mixed black and white with the blacks sharing the strong antiwhite bias of the times. Closer to home the houses were occupied by career Democrat-liberal bureaucrats who hated Richard Nixon and had a laissez-faire attitude toward the raising of their children.

The trouble started in the local school. My three sons wore crew cuts and Nixon buttons. That led to some offensive remarks by some of the bigger boys, which led to the bigger boys' being beaten up by my two older sons... The schoolyard soon became generally respectful of my sons (and, if the truth be told, of my daughter... who is fearless and could hold her own in those days in a fight with her brothers). But when one more kid challenged [an older son] and went down under his fists, [Mrs. Liddy] and I were called in by the school authorities who informed us sniffily that, until our children had enrolled, there had never been a fight at Murch School. We were asked to tell our children to follow the school policy that if any one picked on them, they were to report that person to the authorities and "not resort to violence." I was having none of that.

To [Mrs. Liddy's] distress, I replied that in the late 1930s French children were taught that philosophy while German kids were taught to be fierce in battle. Given the destruction of the numerically superior French armies by the Wehrmacht in about thirty days, I preferred the German approach. Murch School would just have to live with it.

[Mrs. Liddy], who was a teacher in the same school system, was mortified by my decidedly undiplomatic way of expressing myself; but as word got around that my children remained free to defend themselves, the taunts pretty much ended -- few were willing to pay the price of swift, certain, and punishing retribution.

But certain older children, teenagers in nearby high schools, many of them larger than I, took to clandestine warfare. Eggs were tossed at the house or broken over the roof of [Mrs. Liddy's] convertible to bake on in the sun; tires were deflated at night and the grounds of the house damaged; we'd be awakened by firecracker attacks late in the evenings. I was aware that with the amount of serious crime in the District of Columbia the police would have no time to worry about who was throwing eggs at my house. I don't believe in being a victim, and I do not suffer fools gladly. I decided to do something about it.

My first move was to observe the pattern of attack. I noticed that the vandals took advantage of the cover offered by the alley in the rear of our house. It was seven feet below the grade of the backyard, so deep that the garage was cut into the rear of the yard, its roof on a level with the grade of the yard. The attackers roamed the alleys in search of "fun," smashing and overturning garbage cans, throwing firecrackers into yards, and so forth. If one listened carefully, one could hear them coming; they made no effort at stealth, it never occurred to them that the tables might be turned.

When I was ready I waited until I heard them a distance away in the alley and moved into concealment in the shrubs of the backyard. As they approached they discussed their plans. They would halt below the garage and, on the count of three, let fly with the eggs. As they approached the garage I slipped toward it and, as they reached the count of "two" jumped off the garage roof into their midst. Panicked, eggs dropping all over the place, they fled up the alley. I ran far enough after them to see which way they went and planned an ambush of my own. Across the street was another alley they frequented. There I waited in the shadow of another garage until one of the egg throwers came along. I grabbed him in a restraining hold I had learned years before in the FBI. He was about my size and struggle as me might, he wasn't going anywhere. The others swarmed around, offering my captive encouragement. It didn't help. I held him immobile and demanded his name and address, informing him that the only way he was going to get home was for me to take him there to speak to his father.

The young man refused to give his name. Another said he had a knife and I'd better let his friend go. I told him that he'd better not produce a knife or I would let his friend go -- then take the knife from him the hard way, break it, and take him and the pieces to his father. At that my captive yielded and I took him home, explained to his incredulous parent what had happened and that I intended to defend my property from vandalism and wouldn't hesitate to use reasonable force to do so.

But the vandals didn't believe me. About a week later another egg hit the house, so I took to patrolling the alleys on my own. Now I was hunting them...

Right, because not standing up to the teenage menace would be Munich, appeasement, faggoty Frenchification, blah blah blah; just like ol' G. Gordon told that liberal school teacher, these are the fascist facts of life. Liddy's kids seem like a bunch of thugs, but then look how they were raised. No wonder their house got egged. At any rate, the neighborhood must have collectively exhaled with relief when the Liddys moved and Liddy himself began to devote his uniquely batshit brand of "law & order" vigilantism to other, grander, contexts.

Incidentally, there were apparently exceptions to Liddy's general distaste for blacks. Like many wingnuts after him, Liddy was sympathetic to blacks he saw as sympathetic to his own philosophy. In other words, there's always a place at the table for an Uncle Tom or a Brother Clarence Thomas. As I mentioned before, Liddy did not get along with his boss at Treasury, Eugene Rossides. Liddy had hoped for promotion when he learned that John Connally, who'd been head of "Democrats for Nixon," had been named as the new Secretary of the Treasury, Liddy reasonably thinking that as a Texan, Connally would be receptive to G. Gordon's concentrated wingnuttery on the subjects of the drug war and gun rights in particular. Alas, ..

[Rossides cancelled my meeting with Connally and] was going to take advantage of the change in Cabinet officers to ease me out of Treasury. I was, he said, to be made Enforcement Legislative Counsel of the Treasury and... I would report through the General Counsel, Judge Samuel Pierce. I was to understand, however, that this appointment was just to enable me to find a different place in the administration or private life, whichever I chose, from a position of strength. I could take as long as I reasonably wished to find something new, but I was finished at Treasury; there just wasn't room there for both Rossides and me.

[...]

I accepted... and conferred with Judge Pierce. He was a big, smart, good-looking black man who had come from the same New York law firm in which my father had clerked so many years ago... I told Pierce frankly of the situation concerning Rossides... and me, and he said not to worry. He took people as he found them, and all he cared about was how I performed my job under him.

It was a pleasure to work with Pierce. Not only was he intelligent, he had the ability to get things done in remarkably quick time. He was especially good with White House staff. We got on very well.

Through Judge Pierce, I was able to keep my hand on the firearms issue and that infuriated Rossides, who would complain... But Pierce was not the kind of man to be intimidated. Anyone who has been able to overcome what a black man has to to rise as high as Judge Pierce isn't about to be pushed around.

But Pierce was the kind of man to be a (typically) corrupt Republican cabinet officer, as he was when he bore the title of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Reagan Administration. Anyway, take Liddy's fawning appraisal of Pierce and compare it to what he said about Dr. King and his followers and you'll have a better standing on exactly how (not very) sincerely Gordon Liddy sympathized with black folks.

What A Dickhead

2008-10-12T21:51:00.002-05:00

The sight of peaceful protesters holding a candlelight vigil is too much for G. Gordon Liddy to endure. From Will:

A number of my colleagues and I had to work late so we went to supper nearby. As we returned to the main Treasury building's Fifteenth Street entrance, I had just put a fresh cigar in my mouth when we found our way into the building blocked by a stream of people, four abreast, walking down the sidewalk carrying lighted candles as a symbol of protest. Leading the way for my comrades, I shouldered into the stream and across the path of a large man. I was disgusted by this display of support for the enemies of our country and expressed it by seizing the man's wrist and pulling his candle flame up to my cigar to light it.

"There, you useless son of a bitch," I growled, "at least now you've been good for something!"

Oh, Well Since You Quote The Experts...

2008-10-12T21:29:00.003-05:00

Gordon Liddy, in Will, knows how to argue about ballistics:

Although airliner hijacking had been a problem for some time, the companies had resisted suggestions to improve security because of the costs involved. But when three huge jets worth tens of millions of dollars were blown up by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), White House telephones sizzled with screams for help from the airlines. I was assigned to the task force that developed the "Air Marshall" program, and when the question arose concerning what armaments they should carry, the matter was referred to me.

I recommended the .357 magnum with high-velocity hollow-point ammunition. There was political resistance to the use of dumdum bullets, and I had to explain that they were far less dangerous to the innocent than solid "ball" ammunition because dumdums expanded and stayed in the target individual, expending all their energy in knocking him down, rather than going through him to hit an innocent bystander. I cited Nazi experiments using live Jews that determined one 7.9-mm solid bullet from a Mauser rifle could pass through and kill up to sixteen humans lined up in a row, and noted that while a stray solid-point round through the fuselage wouldn't result in explosive decompression of the aircraft, it might well sever a vital control cable or hyrdaulic line.

Now the point to my quoting this is not that Liddy was wrong -- actually he's right, as far as I know, about the facts of the ballistics -- but that he's always ready with the glib Nazi reference. Clearly he devoted much time and effort in studying the Nazis, but then he always was an admirer.

"You... You Human Paraquat!"*

2008-10-12T19:45:00.006-05:00

Gordon Liddy, godfather of the Drug War, tells the story (in Will) of how it began:

The second major problem on my agenda at Treasury was the problem of drug abuse. In September 1968 candidate Nixon had promised to "move against the source of drugs." President Nixon wanted to make good as soon as possible and the Departments of Justice (which had direction of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) and Treasury (which controlled the Bureau of Customs) were given the lead to do something effective, fast. That led to the formation of the Special Presidential Task Force Relating to Narcotics, Marijuana and Dangerous Drugs, which led to Operation Intercept and, eventually, to the Paraquat program.

Dick Kleindienst and Gene Rossides were appointed cochairmen of the task force. I was one of twenty members from a broad range of cabinet departments along with key agencies and bureaus assigned to develop a program for the President. By 6 June 1969 the report was ready.

It zeroed in on Mexico as the source of much of the problem; the idea was to get Mexico to do something effective about the growing of marijuana and opium poppy which were finding their way into the United States in great quantities. Although for diplomatic reasons our report paid lip service to the Mexican efforts -- more so than we would have but for the Department of State -- the fact was that the United States was not at all satisfied with the Mexican effort and we were determined to do something about it. As our report said:

Despite this country's encouragement, and the efforts of Mexican authorities to aid in the effective control of illegal trafficking in marijuana and dangerous drugs, Mexican resources and efforts continue to be inadequate....

For a number of years the Mexican Government has employed light observation planes and helicopters on spotting missions, but it would appear that these operations to date have not been of sufficient scope to cover adequately the vast area where these crops can be found. The use of broad-remote-sensing techniques in states involved, with subsequent crop identification by agricultural experts, would appear to be more efficient and effective. If the Mexican Government has such a capability at the present time, it is not being used for this purpose. On the other hand, there is no question that the United States is capable of undertaking such missions. ([Liddy's] emphasis supplied.)

The last referred to a [sic] idea I submitted for the use of sophisticated aerial reconnaissance to spot the Mexican drug crops. We knew that Mexico had no such capability and wanted official Mexican acquiescence in our doing it. Regarding what should be done with the crops once located, here was the heart of what we wanted to do:

...the Task Force is impressed with the potential effectiveness of chemical crop destruction utilizing aircraft.

Right there was the genesis of the Paraquat program, but:

Before embarking on such a program, it would be necessary to obtain the agreement of the Mexican Government.

We rushed to get the report out by 6 June because there was a bilateral meeting between the governments of Mexico and the United States scheduled for 9-11 June to deal specifically with the problems of illicit traffic in narcotics and other dangerous drugs.

When the United States and Mexico met and these recommendations were raised, the Mexicans, using diplomatic language of course, told us to go piss up a rope. The Nixon administration didn't believe in the United States' taking crap from any foreign government. Its reply was Operation Intercept.

Operation Intercept was billed as a program to shut off the flow of drugs from Mexico by maximum application of the right to search persons and vehicles crossing the border for contraband. As part of the effort to convince people that that was what it was all about, I was sent on a speaking tour of every town on the entire 2,000 mile U.S. border with Mexico to explain what was going to happen and why, to citizens whose lives and economy would be disrupted.

When Operation Intercept was executed int he fall of 1969, the result was as intended: chaos. We produced a world-class traffic jam. In anticipation, most of the task force was on the West Coast where Kleindienst had an aging Corvair airliner (used by the Immigration Service to ferry illegal aliens back deep into Mexico) standing by for an aerial look at the thousands of vehicles backed up for miles on either side of the border at San Ysidro/Tijuana. It was the biggest mess any of us had ever seen, and we took perverse delight in our handiwork.

Operation Intercept has been called a failure -- but only by those who never knew its objective. It was actually a great success. For diplomatic reasons the true purpose of the exercise was never revealed. Operation Intercept, with its massive economic and social disruption, could be sustained far longer by the United States than by Mexico. It was an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple, and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will. We figured Mexico could hold out for a month; in fact they caved in after about two weeks and we got what we wanted. Operation Intercept gave way to Operation Co-operation.

And there you have it, straight from the horse's ass. These drug war operations were often about little more than geopolitical bullying. Although the United States has meddled imperialistically in Latin America at least since James Monroe's Secretary of State John Quincy Adams told Great Britain to get fucked in the matter of Venezuela, and even allowing for the odd Theodore Roosevelt here and Woodrow Wilson there, the constant heavy-handedness didn't come until the late 50s-early 60s and then on -- and on. And at first, it was bi-partisan, with Nixon as VP and then P always cheering when not chairing the Republican part of the scheme (fans of the Kennedys still insist, laughably, on relative Liberal innocence in these matters, quite ignoring LBJ's own horror once he discovered the "Goddamned Murder, Incorporated" his predecessor had been running in the Caribbean).

But Nixon as President even had to out-outrage all that. In Liddy's story we can see the future unfold. The delight expressed by Nixon's goons at trashing the Mexican economy presages how Dick promised the CEO of Pepsi-Cola that he would make the economy of Allende's Chile "scream." And Liddy's total contempt of Mexican sovereignty neatly foreshadows Henry Kissinger's remarks apropos Chile: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people," and "the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

* - Cf.

Who Turned on the Spigots?

2008-10-10T23:11:00.003-05:00

Krugman via Atrios:

One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

Yes. And that insane stuff was not just what wingnut pundits said, but what they (at least, the radio nutjobs among them) allowed other people to say. From Howie the Putz's Hot Air: All Talk All The Time:

Uncorroborated gossip [was] retailed as if it were fact. On G. Gordon Liddy's show, Ruth from Silver Spring, Maryland, recount[ed] rumors about Clinton's "dalliances with various Hollywood starlets." She [said] there is as sealed underground tunnel to the White House that has secretly been reopened "to allow young ladies to pass between the Treasury and the White House unperceived." Liddy [didn't] challenge a word.

But then such slander was in perfect harmony with what Liddy had been spewing the whole while, calling Clinton "dreadful, disastrous, venal, corrupt, sleazy... the coward-in-chief," and telling his callers to "send 'em... back there to the chicken-guts, waste-fouled waters of the rivers of Arkansas."

One Big, Happy, Psychotic Family

2008-10-10T21:16:00.002-05:00

Can't any wingnut condemn Gordon Liddy? Of course not. Isn't that right, Senator McCain?

Anyway, the following is from Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?:

Every single one [of the most popular radio talk-show hosts] is a movement conservative with politics located at the extreme far-right end of the political spectrum. So far to the right is the general pack of talk-show hosts that, early in the Clinton Administration, G. Gordon Liddy felt empowered to instruct listeners on the best way to assassinate U.S. government officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms without receiving much in the way of censure from this community. (His exact words were "Head shots. Head shots.") Once, during a joint C-Span appearance with a right-wing talk-show host and activist, Paul Weyrich, I challenged him to condemn Liddy's statement and he refused, as he put it, to "criticize a brother talk-show host," even for advocating the murder of U.S. government officials.

Liddy's Radio Shtick

2008-10-10T19:03:00.002-05:00

More from Howie the Putz's book Hot Air: All Talk All The Time (pgs 267-8, HB edition):

The boundaries of what is acceptable on radio have changed radically... A quarter century ago, G. Gordon Liddy was a Nixon White House aide who moved to the president's reelection campaign, where he masterminded the Watergate break-in. An eccentric former FBI agent, he hatched other preposterous schemes -- such as a secret plan to kill columnist Jack Anderson -- that proved too much even for the lawless Nixon gang. Liddy refused to talk to prosecutors and served nearly five years in prison, longer than any other Watergate conspirator.

That resume turned out to be perfectly suited to a '90s talk culture that thrives on criminal celebrity. The convicted felon who would not talk to the authorities was soon talking to a radio audience four hours a day. Liddy's shaved head, deadpan wit, and hand-over-the-flame intensity quickly won him a cult following. Since going into syndication in 1992 from a nondescript Virginia office building, the G-man has been picked up by two hundred sixty stations.

Liddy's "Radio Free D.C." program, which he bills as "jamming the signal of the liberal establishment," focuses on guns, law enforcement, and personal safety. Liddy tells listeners he can "cut the heart and sever the spine" with one thrust of his two-edged stiletto.

"Mr. Liddy...how many techniques do you have to kill a person with your bare hands?" asks Dave from Fairfax.

"How do I kill thee? Let me count the ways," Liddy says. "Let me see. I have never gone through my martial arts repertoire for lethality and counted, but I can assure you they are numerous." Asked about concealed weapons, he exults: "I like a revolver. A semiautomatic takes much longer to get into operation than does a revolver. A .44 special. Rossi makes a nice five-round one."

Liddy's number one target is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which he says has "run amok" and is conducting a "terror campaign" against gun dealers. Day after day, he repeats the same alleged horror stories about bureau agents: Slamming a pregnant woman against the wall and causing her to lose her baby. Stealing the medicine of a cancer patient and stomping his cat to death. Federal officials flatly deny these allegations, but no matter. Liddy tells his listeners what to do if attacked by these agents. "Head shots, head shots -- kill the sons of bitches!" he says. And if one has insufficient marksmanship to hit the head, "shoot them in the groin."

This sort of ugliness is way beyond the pale of civil discourse. Yet Liddy insists he is only counseling people in self-defense and does not actually advocate "hunting down" federal gun agents. While he speaks of using pictures of the president and First Lady for target practice, "I accept no responsibility for somebody shooting up the White House," he says. Liddy seems to willfully disregard the notion that his violent fantasies might encourage crazed listeners to take the law into their own hands. It's little wonder that Clinton has denounced him by name, or that Al D'Amato, having chosen to honor Liddy at a Republican fundraising dinner, abruptly disinvited him after a storm of criticism.

Gordon Liddy Also Cites The Weathermen as an Excuse to Act as Fascist as He Wants

2008-10-10T15:13:00.002-05:00

More from Will. Liddy's just met with Gerry Ford and some other Rethug bigwigs, and accepted their job offer. His thoughts as he prepares to move to D.C.:

It was March 1969. The nation was at war not only externally in Vietnam but internally. Within the previous thirty months 28 had died in Watts; 40 in the race riot in Detroit, which required federal paratroopers to restore order. In the past year 125 cities had been hit by riots, including the nation's capital, and the army had to be called out. Snipers had shot at police in Cleveland as violence was increasingly directed against them as a "revolutionary" tactic. The Democrats reaped the fruits of their permissiveness as their own national convention was trashed by a radical mob. Huge "peace" demonstrations led to such scenes as army troops fighting off protesters assaulting the Pentagon. Like the millions who had voted for Richard Nixon, I was fed up with the double standard of the left. I had learned long ago the maxims of Cicero that "laws are inoperative in war" and that "the good of the people in the chief law." That "anything goes" concept so beloved of the left-liberals cuts both ways.

Looking back now from a decade later many people think of that time as the era of the "flower-child" and wonder how we could think of them as a war-like enemy. As a reminder that we weren't simply dodging flowers in those days, I offer these lines, spoken by Mark William Rudd, leader of The Weathermen faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. He delivered them in 1969 at a national "war council" of the Weathermen in Flint, Michigan:

"....We have to start tearing down this fucking country. We have to have a revolution in this country that's going to overthrow -- like bombs, like guns, like fire bombs, by anything and everything....The most important thing that the Weathermachine should be right now is to create a consciousness, a political consciousness and the best way to create this is by doing and performing some kind of exemplary action, like offing some pigs, creating chaos in the streets, blowing up pig stations, blowing up banks. Once the Weathermachine begins this and starts the ball rolling, then the Weathermachine will not have to be involved as much. Other white revolutionaries are going to get involved and try to destroy the system that we all hate so much."

That, to me, is war. I was ready. And willing.

Well, that's extreme all around. Clearly, Liddy's trying to find his moral equivalent, his justification. But it won't do: there's a fundamental moral difference between the pirate and the emperor; Liddy's terrorism was in service of the government. And at least Rudd didn't approvingly quote Nazis. Finally, who really thinks that Liddy would have been a decent, law-abiding operative had there been no Weathermen? The fact is, he was "willing" no matter what.

Didn't Frank Whaley's Oswald Say Something Similar in JFK?

2008-10-10T13:40:00.004-05:00

From Howie the Putz's book Hot Air: All Talk All The Time (pg 262, HB):

In Fairfax, Virginia, G. Gordon Liddy of WJFK says: "I and my family and friends were out firing away at a properly constructed rifle range with what the newspeople insist on calling assault weapons...I drew some stick-figure targets and I thought we ought to give them names, so I named them Bill and Hillary. I thought it would improve my aim."

How Gordon Liddy Got His Wings

2008-10-09T21:08:00.003-05:00

The tale of Liddy's first job for Richard Nixon's campaign, as told in his autobiography, Will. He started very much as he ended, by breaking the law and being a reckless dipshit whilst doing so:

I had a friend rent a rebuilt Stearman biplane for me -- one of the fabric-covered, double-winged, radial-engined old-timers with open cockpits, used to train pilots for the military in World War II. It was bright red. My friend and I lay on our backs and, using white water-soluble poster paint, printed a big NIXON underneath one bottom wing and a big AGNEW under the other. Then, wearing leather flying jackets, helmets, and goggles against the November cold in the open cockpits, we took off on election day for the two big cities in Dutchess County: Poughkeepsie and Beacon.

My friend knew me well enough to be worried about his license so I made sure I had the controls when we got over the targets. I buzzed the main streets of both cities. At Poughkeepsie, I couldn't resist climbing out, then rolling into a screaming, redline dive directly down at the windows of Ham Fish's campaign headquarters on the top floor of a corner building on Market Street. I pulled out with a roar of power from the big Pratt & Whitney radial engine after scaring the shit out of Ham's staff, then flew back to the airfield with a grin so big my gums damn near froze from the prop wash. Calls were coming into the FAA in a stream but, as I had figured, the complainants kept identifying the plane as a World War I fighter with NIXON/AGNEW on the wings, and the harried FAA kept answering, "Lady, there ain't no airplanes registered NIXON/AGNEW; you gotta gimme the numbers!"

A quick hosing off with cold water destroyed the evidence, but some reporters caught me coming back into town still carrying my helmet and goggles. When they accused me of breaking the law, I laughed and told them that the election law forbids electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place. "Hell, I always pulled up a hundred feet when I flew over a polling place."

When Gone Too Far Is Not Far Enough Gone

2008-10-09T20:11:00.003-05:00

Gordon Liddy wanted to get into politics. Specifically, he wanted a national stage. So he decided to run for Congress as a Republican. Dutchess County had pretty much always been Republican, even though it was FDR's home. The incumbent was Hamilton Fish, Jr.; Liddy would have to defeat him in the primary.

Ham Fish, Jr.'s father was an old school wingnut (if you've ever seen Warren Beatty's Reds, old man Fish is the most critical of the 'witnesses'), and the apple didn't fall far from the tree. Still, post-Goldwater, the fact was that that kinda wingnuttery wasn't extreme enough for certain kinds of (increasingly mainstreamed) Republicans. Overton Window. Liddy, of course, attacked Fish from the right. He had help doing it:

A man from the Washington-based United Republicans of America, dedicated to helping conservative thinkers secure Republican congressional nominations around the country, approached me with an offer of help. The group promised $5,000 in cash, goods, and services, plus the help of a strong direct-mail machinery. They made the campaign seem possible.

But even G. Gordon Liddy, admirer of Nazis, was thought by some wingnuts to be insufficiently rightwing:

I contacted members of New York's Conservative Party, a potent force in state politics because it had the third line on the ballot. I wanted their nomination; they wanted to know my stands on the issues. I was strong on national defense, supported the Vietnam war in that I wanted to go all out to win it; was against gun control... and no one had to ask my stand on the drug counterculture, civil disorder, and conventional crime -- my record as a prosecutor spoke to that. Still, I had a tough time with the... delegation because I wouldn't advocate elimination of the income tax (I didn't know where the money would come from to run the government), nor would I condemn labor unions, because I believe that they contribute to industrial and political stability and their abuses are curable by legislation.

[Quotes are from Liddy's autobiography, Will.]

Gordon Liddy Prepares to Face the Great Negro Menace

2008-10-08T04:55:00.003-05:00

I'm about to copy one of those passages in Will that one reads and just immediately laughs at -- at first. Because for several generations now we've been conditioned by the entertainment industry to laugh at over-the-top fascist clowns: Otto from A Fish Called Wanda, Siegfried and Shtarker from Get Smart, that "Springtime For Hitler" guy. I make the not-so-radical suggestion that these fictional characters aren't caricatures and we keep laughing at them at our peril. Liddy's my proof of the reality of the rightwing clown, the buffoon, the fascist klutz who has equal chance of slitting your throat or slipping on a banana in the attempt.

He's also a prime example of the rightwing inferiority complex taken to its ultimate level. Liddy at his peak was about 130 lbs soaking wet. He's sawed-off, with the high, nasal, droning voice of a stereotypical nerd. In other words, Liddy's exactly the kind of guy who used to be targeted by those old Charles Atlas ads. So of course in flaming overcompensation he made himself into the most butch stormtrooper EVAR.

By 1967 the national controversy over the Vietnam war had arrived in Dutchess County and added to the divisiveness engendered by the civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King, Jr. announced his opposition to the war and his intention to sponsor massive demonstrations against Vietnam as well as racial inequality, the tension began to build. There was talk of a "long, hot, summer" among the student left at Bard and Vassar and colleges across the county, as well as in the black community, and in numerous police departments.

I was involved deeply in the intelligence work trying to get an accurate picture of what was coming... Day after day, as summer approached, reports came in of agitation in the black community for a demonstration in Poughkeepsie. It would not, the reports insisted increasingly, be peaceful. Details included the alleged stockpiling of incendiary devices such as Molotov cocktails and of firearms on rooftops and in cellars in the lower Main Street area, as well as plans both to close off the ghetto to nonblacks and to march out from it into upper- and middle-class white neighborhoods.

I was ready too, but for a different reason. I knew that when the whole student left, antiwar, civil rights, and anything-goes-so-long-as-it's-against-the-United States movements had coalesced and reached a backwater like Poughkeepsie, the kettle that had been simmering for years was about to boil over nationally. I believed a time of great challenge was at hand for the nation and for me personally. For some years, as I watched all this develop, I had been building my willpower in a manner that was a continuation of the technique of resisting physical pain I had used as a teenager to win a place on a championship cross-country team despite scarred lungs. It was a technique recognized in the East, but not well known to Western civilization. I had begun by using lighted cigarettes, then matches and candles, progressively increasing the time I exposed my body to pain as I built up my will, much as one might build muscles by lifting increasingly heavy weights. By 1967 the exposures had become long enough to start leaving small permanent scars. Still I persisted, always using my left hand and forearm so as never to incapacitate my right -- my gun-hand. Then I made a mistake.

I burned the underside of the second joint of my left index finger so badly it required surgical attention. Fortunately, the surgeon was from India and familiar with the practice, although he found it unusual in an Occidental. He told me that it would take a year before I could fully straighten my left index finger, and then only after repeated exercise to stretch the scar tissue that would form in the angle of the joint. I had, it seemed, nearly cooked out the joint and lost a tendon. If I was going to continue the practice, I would have to be very careful.

Since my will was now so strong I could endure a long, deep, flesh-charring burn without a flicker of expression, I wasn't concerned. I thought I'd gone as far as I reasonably could and saw no need to try to go further; I was ready for anything.

Gordon Liddy Discovers the Perks of Drug Busts

2008-10-07T08:21:00.005-05:00

Before he was Tricky Dick's hired goon, G. Gordon Liddy was a prosecuting attorney in Dutchess County, New York. And he was a drug war enthusiast. Timothy Leary moved into Liddy's neighborhood and promptly set up a fine hippie party pad. Liddy's office decided to raid Leary's house; Liddy himself organized and spearheaded the raid in person.

For the most part, it was a typical drug raid (if on an atypical drug user); the story is also told with Liddy's typical moralizing on the evils of drugs and the evil hippies who use them. But there's a prurient subtext to Liddy's account of the bust, which I think nicely illustrates the mindset of the drug warrior, not much changed since the 60's context in Liddy's book, Will, from which I get these quotes: there are hot chicks with these dirty hippies, hot chicks who like sex. The hippie dudes get to enjoy Rainbow Spacechild's free love; the square cop has to go home to his fuddy wife in curlers. It's envy -- and Liddy's not immune to it. After his men used some force in taking the soon-to-be Mrs. Leary's marijuana from her person, Liddy takes a moment to oggle her a second time:

My attention moved from the evidence to Rosemary, who was still, of course, in her diaphanous gown. Furious, breathing deeply and sputtering, at that range she would have taken J. Edgar Hoover's mind off John Dillinger.

My reverie was broken abruptly by a voice behind me shouting: "Pants! The district attorney wants pants on this man!"

I wrenched my gaze away from Rosemary in time to meet the glance of [Sheriff] Borchers...

There's MOAR:

By now there was considerable activity in the foyer, which lay between the waterfall room on one side and a room of nearly equal size on the other. To no apparent purpose, a large number of deputies was crossing the foyer, to and fro, in what amounted to a slow-motion parade.

I observed this phenomenon for a moment, noting that as each deputy made his crossing, he would glance covertly up the stairway. My curiosity aroused, I investigated.

A walk into the foyer and a quick glance up the stairs and the mystery was solved: on a stair just above eye level sat a woman (later identified as a writer for a woman's magazine there to do a story on Leary, to whom the raid was a bonanza). She was wearing a nightgown hitched up above her knees, wide-spread thighs supporting a lapboard and pad upon which she was writing intently.

And where envy goes spite follows. Liddy can scarcely disguise his glee in relating how a deputy...

Young, eager, and exceptionally fleet of foot... bounded to a top-floor hall where, obedient to the letter of his instructions, he burst through a bedroom door. Landing in the approved pistol-course crouch, massive .357 magnum revolver thrust out before him, he was ready for anything. Well, almost anything.

By the light of a single candle flickering from the top of a Coca-Cola bottle, he saw a young man and woman, nude, upon an ancient mat. She was on her back. He was at his apogee, about to plunge to her perigee, when the officer shouted: "FREEZE!"

For one stunned moment, the man hung there, suspended, as the forces of Eros did battle with those of Smith & Wesson. Smith & Wesson won.

"You're...you're kidding!" the wretch squeaked.

Then, eyes fixed in horror upon the muzzle of the huge handgun, to the complete dismay of the poor girl beneath him, instead of coming he went.

The psychological subtext here is not hard to discern; nor is it difficult to see exactly why this part of the story inspires Liddy to splash so much purple (considering the source) on the page. The cop, with his "huge" gun "thrust out before him" dominates the dirty hippie male, whose gun, as it were, is caused to misfire. Who's your daddy?

Incidentally, Leary and Liddy eventually became good friends. I wonder, though, if Liddy ever thought of busting Leary's hippie pad years later when, on his radio show (in the context of Waco and Ruby Ridge) he advised people subject to raids to "aim for the head."