TBR News March 2, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C., March 2 2016: “Vox populi, Vox Deo, (‘The voice of the people is the voice of God’) There is nothing more entertaining than to watch the believers in popular wisdom get a good kick in the private parts. This is the case of the ascendency of Donald Trump. He is very obviously resonating with the American voters while at the same time, causing spastic colon to professional conservatives and liberals alike. Trump is most certainly the Man on the White Horse whose arrival has been long anticipated by the more rational observers of the American political scene. Inbred and corrupt, American political figures spew platitudes, false promises and general bovine fecal matter at election times and when their vehicles are passed by another, scream with frustrated rage. But at the same time, their howlings are echoed by cynical laughter from the more observant.”
How the Republican elite turned a blind eye to the rise and rise of Donald Trump
March 2, 2016
by Emily Flitter and Luciana Lopez
Reuters
WASHINGTON- One evening last June, some of the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors gathered for a cocktail party at an exclusive resort in Deer Valley, Utah, during a three-day retreat hosted by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
They had just heard from six presidential hopefuls. Tom Duncan, the CEO of tool-maker Positec Tool Corp, chatted with a few attendees about a fantasy ticket to secure the White House in November 2016: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as his running mate.
Duncan, for his part, liked Ohio Governor John Kasich, but also had his eye on former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. No one mentioned Donald Trump, even though he had been signaling for months that he planned to run. Four days later, the New York property magnate declared his candidacy and within weeks had shot to the top of the polls, eclipsing all of his Republican rivals.
The story of Trump’s rise has played out day after day on television and on social media, but the conversations behind closed doors among members of the Republican elite during this period have been less well documented.
Many of the conversations had one thing in common: a stubborn refusal to take Trump seriously, even as fans packed sports stadiums to see him in the summer months, as he dominated media coverage of the election, and as polls showed him winning wide support among young and old, men and women.
Scenes like the one at Deer Valley would be repeated in rarified enclaves of the party elite around the country again and again in the coming months. Many in the Republican establishment believed he would eventually self-destruct or that Americans would lose patience with his bombast, his free-wheeling insults and lack of firm policies to back up his promises to “Make America Great Again.”
They were wrong.
Trump won a majority of the states holding nominating contests on Super Tuesday, accelerating his march to the Republican nomination.
Republican donors, strategists and campaign operatives interviewed by Reuters admitted they had misjudged the mood of voters who have thrown their support behind Trump after he promised to build a wall on the Mexican border, temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States and block Syrian refugees because they might be militants.
Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined to comment for this story.
ISOLATED INSIDERS
Trump’s rise seemed to take place entirely outside the structures of the normal nomination process within the Republican party.
For example, many attending the Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering of grassroots activists, in February 2015, were excited by presidential hopefuls Wisconsin governor Walker and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. The annual convention is a must-stop for any Republican White House contender.
In his speech, Trump tried out a now familiar pledge: build a giant southern wall to stop illegal immigrants, a vow that would later ignite his insurgent campaign and propel him well ahead of the main pack of Republican presidential hopefuls.
“His speech was well-received, but he didn’t do that well in the straw poll,” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC each year. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul won the poll.
CPAC’s attendees were mostly conservative political activists already engaged in the electoral process. The fans who would drive Trump’s success were not. The candidates favored at CPAC have languished. Walker left the race just two months after officially entering it. Paul dropped out after the first nominating contest in February. Cruz has won just three of more than a dozen contests so far.
Early in his run, Trump was a source of puzzlement for rich Republicans, such as those who gathered one Sunday in early August in the Hamptons, New York’s gilded summer retreat destination, to discuss the 2016 race. They met for lunch at a billionaire hedge fund manager’s estate near a body of water nicknamed “Goldman pond” for the concentration of financiers’ houses around it.
Among the guests were former defense department officials, the chief executive of a big real estate firm, a prominent private equity partner and conservative academics, according to one of the guests, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The source, like many other guests, backed former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
“A variety of subjects were discussed, but chief among them, I would say, was the concern and consternation over the candidacy of Donald Trump,” the source said. At the time, Trump’s rating in national polls was twice his closet rival’s, according to Reuters/Ipsos data.
The attendees discussed Trump’s rise and observed he had struck a chord with many Americans, the source said. They fretted over whether his presence would force other candidates to go negative. They hoped he wouldn’t hijack the first Republican presidential debate, then less than a week away.
But they decided, however it had begun, Trump’s reign atop the polls wouldn’t last.
“I think it’s literally just a matter of time before his NASCAR careens into the wall – and hopefully not into the other drivers,” the source said in an interview on Aug. 6.
Trump has not crashed.
And on Monday, the CEO of NASCAR, Brian France, endorsed him.
MISSED WARNING SIGNS
Right to Rise, the outside spending group backing Bush, built up a massive war chest of more than $100 million to attack opponents who could thwart his bid for the nomination. Trump was not identified as a potential threat, not in the summer, nor in the fall of 2015, even as he eclipsed Bush, according to multiple interviews during that period with a member of the group’s leadership team.
“I don’t think he’s hurting us,” the official, who did not want to be identified, said in an interview last fall. Trump would be a footnote in the race by January or February 2016, he predicted.
Bush bowed out on Feb. 21 after months of struggles were capped by a poor showing in the South Carolina primary.
Duncan, the Positec CEO, said conversations he had with representatives from three campaigns as recently as November and December barely touched on Trump.
“There was so much time left,” he said. “I honestly thought that he would implode.”
Now there is little time left, and the party’s establishment can only look back at early warning signs they missed.
One came in January 2015 at the Iowa Freedom Summit, a Republican “cattle call” for White House hopefuls that marked the unofficial start of the 2016 presidential race. Attendance spiked after organizers added Trump to the agenda.
“When we announced Donald Trump, the event took on a life of its own,” said David Bossie, the president of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United and the conference’s organizer.
“I don’t believe it’s possible, if you were not in a coma, for anyone in the establishment, or the media, or on planet Earth, to have missed Donald Trump’s ascendancy to be the leading Republican for the nomination.”
As Donald Trump Rolls Up Victories, the G.O.P. Split Widens to a Chasm
March 1, 2016
by Johnthan Martin and Michael Barbaro
New York Times
Democrats are falling in line. Republicans are falling apart.
The most consequential night of voting so far in the presidential campaign crystallized, in jarring and powerful fashion, the remarkably divergent fortunes of the two major parties vying for the White House.
The steady and seemingly inexorable unification of the Democratic Party behind Hillary Clinton stands in striking contrast with the rancorous and widening schisms within the Republican Party over the dominance of Donald J. Trump, who swept contests from the Northeast to the Deep South on Tuesday.
Now, as the parties gaze ahead to the fall, they are awakening to the advantages of consensus and the perils of chaos.
“If the Republican Party were an airplane, and you were looking out a passenger window, you would see surface pieces peeling off and wonder if one of the wings or engines was next,” said Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota and a Republican candidate for president in 2012.
Even as he rolled up commanding victories in seven states on Tuesday, Mr. Trump confronted a loud and persistent refusal to rally around him as leading figures in his own party denounced his slow disavowal of white supremacists, elected officials boldly discouraged constituents from backing him, and lifelong Republicans declared that they would boycott the election if he is their nominee.
“I could not in good conscience vote for Trump under any circumstance,” said Blake Lichty, 33, a Republican who worked in the George W. Bush administration and now lives near Atlanta.
“If this becomes the Trump Party,” he added, “we’re going to lose a lot of people.”
Not since the rupture of 1964, when conservatives seized power from their moderate rivals and nominated Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, has a major party faced such a crisis of identity.
“History is repeating itself,” said the historian Richard Norton Smith. “The party changed then as permanently and profoundly as can be in politics, effectively becoming two parties.”
Even as Mr. Trump’s performance Tuesday illustrated his strength, Senator Ted Cruz’s success in Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska underscored the broader Republican dilemma: There is no consensus among Republicans about who could be Mr. Trump’s most formidable opponent, and there is probably not enough time for one to emerge.
The cultural and ideological fissures opening in the party could take a generation to patch, according to Republican leaders, historians and strategists — and many are convinced that Mr. Trump will guarantee Democrats another four years in the White House. “Nominating Donald Trump would be the best gift the Republican Party could give to Hillary Clinton,” Bobby Jindal, the former Louisiana governor, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Democrats are now poised to exploit a fortuitous intersection of forces: an improving economy with low unemployment; a Democratic president with a nearly 50 percent approval rating; a Supreme Court battle in which Republicans are energizing liberal voters with vows of obstruction; and now, what is likely to be a relatively smooth nomination process that will give Mrs. Clinton a chance to bring together the party’s disparate strands.
Of course, Mrs. Clinton, should she prevail in the primary campaign, has plenty of repair work left to do: wooing the thousands of liberal supporters whose feelings of alienation with the Democratic establishment drew them to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. She began that effort on Tuesday night, in a victory speech that focused heavily on the Sanders campaign theme of economic justice. And there is little indication, so far, that these voters will spurn Mrs. Clinton for a Republican.
And Mrs. Clinton needs to navigate a series of potentially damning investigations into her use of a private email server that have raised enduring questions about her judgment and management. Those inquiries have introduced a level of unpredictability that her campaign can do little to control.
But officials in both parties acknowledge that Democrats are now better positioned to capture the presidency in November.“The Democrats are having a loud squabble, but the party is broadly unified behind certain themes,” said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist. “The Republicans are engaged in a full-out civil war, fundamentally riven by mistrust, and it is very hard to see how they put the pieces back together once this fight is done.”
With every nasty turn of the Republican nominating contest, Mrs. Clinton’s position seems to strengthen. Day by day, the anti-Trump forces are marshaling, vowing to drag the primary process out until the convention in July.
In an extraordinary show of defiance toward a potential presidential nominee, Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, just wrote an open letter to Trump supporters explaining why he could not support the real estate mogul should he become the party’s nominee. “I sincerely hope we select one of the other G.O.P. candidates,” Mr. Sasse wrote, pledging not to vote for Mrs. Clinton. “But if Donald Trump ends up as the nominee, conservatives will need to find a third option.”
In the past 48 hours, Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia appealed to fellow Republicans in his state to reject Mr. Trump, calling him “a bully unworthy of our nomination,” and Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico would not commit to supporting him if he won the nomination.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s vice-presidential nominee four years ago, took the unusual step of scolding the Republican front-runner from the halls of the Capitol building for failing to reject the support of David Duke. “If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party,” Mr. Ryan said, “there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.”
In a discussion with little modern precedent, several high-profile Republicans are expressing uncertainty about how aggressively they would support Mr. Trump as the nominee, suggesting they might need to lose the campaign to save the party.
“President Trump, which I don’t believe is possible, would be an unmitigated disaster and would set the party back decades,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist who oversaw the “super PAC” that supported Jeb Bush this year. “It’s like a computer designed him to lose elections for us. Who does he offend? College-educated white women and Latinos, the groups we need to win.”
But any move to deny Mr. Trump the nomination risks further provoking the angry movement that he has ignited.
Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor and the author of a new history of the Republican Party, predicts a violent rupture that cleaves the party in two: a hard-line conservatism, as embodied by Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Mr. Trump, and an old-fashioned strain of moderate Republicanism that recalls Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller. “It is going to be really ugly,” she said.
For now, the revulsion for Mr. Trump could produce a nightmare scenario for Republicans on Election Day: abandonment by rank-and-file voters who, like a growing number of party leaders, cannot stomach the concept of the mogul as their standard-bearer. “I think it’s a sad day for the Republican Party,” said David Phillips, 72, an executive recruiter and longtime Republican from Avon, Conn., who called Mr. Trump “a tremendous divider.”
“If he were the nominee,” he said, reluctantly, “I would probably vote for Hillary.”
Jeremy W. Peters, Matt Flegenheimer and Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.
Super Tuesday Funeral: Neoconservatism, An Obituary
Trump sweeps the primaries
March 2, 2016
by Justin Raimondo
AntiWar
March 1, 2016, will go down in history as the day the incubus of neoconservatism was banished from the Republican party – and, in effect, destroyed as a viable political force. It’s the day Donald Trump swept the GOP’s Super Tuesday primary, taking – as of this writing – Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Vermont, and Tennessee.
Three realities are clear from the results:
1. Marco Rubio is finished.
The great white hope of the neocons, Marco Rubio, only managed to eke out a minor win in Minnesota, which is a caucus state, and inconsequential insofar as delegates are concerned. He failed to mine the rich delegate cache in Texas, where he failed to make the 20 percent minimum, and received not a single delegate.
The much-vaunted “Marco-mentum” exists only in the minds of a few neocon pundits: insofar as the voters are concerned, that conceit is a joke. But then again, the neocons have always existed in their own world: these are the same people who, to this day, insist that the Iraq war wasn’t a disaster, it was actually a great victory. Rubio’s vicious – and often ridiculous – attacks on Trump are the result of his neocon advisors telling him he has to get down in the mud with The Donald. But the fact of the matter is that this style doesn’t suit him – and it had no effect on the Super Tuesday primaries.
The bottom line is that Rubio won very few delegates. Trump won a minimum of 258. Rubio and his neocon supporters are generals without an army. And he is now 20 points behind in his home state, Florida: in two weeks, when that primary is held, his goose is going to be thoroughly cooked.
2. The anti-Trump vote will continue to be divided.
In any case, Rubio – with millions in neocon money pouring in — will stay in until March 15, and perhaps even beyond, further dividing the anti-Trump vote.
Cruz, on the other hand, won two states: Texas and Oklahoma, and is clearly the “movement conservative” alternative to Trump. Cruz is going to come in second as far as he delegate count is concerned. Yet the GOP Establishment (i.e. the neocons and their enablers) find Cruz almost as unacceptable as Trump: after all, the Texas Senator has openly attacked the neocons by name, and those folks hold a grudge.
So Cruz is going stay in, too. Adding to this confusion, John Kasich, who is picking up a few delegates here and there – and further dividing the anti-Trump vote – is on a personal crusade. He’s staying in no matter what.
3. The neocons are determined to split the GOP.
The neocons have started a campaign, “Never Trump,” which even has its own Twitter hashtag. Senator Ben Saase (R- Nebraska), has declared that he will never vote for Trump, and he posits – along with Bill Kristol, the little Lenin of the neocons – a “conservative” third party. Others, like neocon foreign policy mavens Robert Kagan and Max Boot, have openly declared for Hillary Clinton, whose interventionist impulses can easily be accommodated to the neoconservative vision of “benevolent global hegemony.”
Boot, the author of a screed calling for the creation of an “American Empire,” surely knows who his enemies are. In an interview with Vox.com, a liberal web site in the bag for Hillary, he says Hillary is far preferable to Trump because:
“I think he is a descendant, basically, of Charles Lindbergh, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace – who was a Democrat, not a Republican – and Pat Buchanan. He is a direct descendant of that intellectual lineage … His impulses are derived from the same well that people like the America First Committee and Joe McCarthy tapped into, which is essentially a form of isolationism, xenophobia, and racism.”
Of course the America First Committee is the biggest bogeyman in the neoconservative imagination: it represents everything they hate – a foreign policy that puts this country first. That’s because an empire is a slave to its clients and protectorates: the wealth of the country goes out to protect and defend them, and never comes back. Our young men and women die on their shores – and for what?
Trump “saves his venom for democratic allies like South Korea, Japan, and Germany because he thinks they’re freeloaders,” says Boot. Yet how else can one describe them? Japan is a pacifist country, with no military to speak of: they are still occupied by US troops. The same is true of Germany – more than half a century after the end of World War II. As for South Korea, the United States intervened when it looked like the North and the South were about to effect a rapprochement. So the 30,000 US soldiers currently stationed there are sitting ducks, who would be sacrificed in the event of a North Korean invasion – effectively hostages to the conceit of people like Boot, who want US troops stationed all over the world.
The neocons hate Trump because his foreign policy is the exact opposite of their imperialist delusions. He wants to withdraw US troops from Europe. He wants to do the same in the Pacific theater. He demands that these countries start paying for their own defense. This is treason as far as the neocons are concerned.
Both Rubio and Cruz are attacking Trump for his declaration that he would be “evenhanded” when it comes to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The neoconservative orthodoxy that insists on unconditional support for Israeli actions, no matter how vicious and cruel — and in spite of how inimical it is to American interests – is being successfully challenged by Trump. What has everyone surprised is that evangelical voters, who were supposed to be in Cruz’s camp, have been won over by Trump – and this in spite of his supposedly “anti-Israel” stance.
The neocons especially hate Trump’s declared intention to get along with Putin. They despise the Russian leader because he’s been critical of American hegemonism, driven the thieving oligarchs out of his country, and prevented the US-sponsored regime-change campaign in Syria from succeeding. Trump welcomes the Russian attacks on ISIS, disdains the Syrian rebels so dear to Rubio’s heart, and challenges the idea that overthrowing “bad guys” like Assad, Libya’s Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein has led to anything other than the growth of terrorism. The “Emergency Committee for Israel” ran an ad attacking Trump over this issue, but the result was very odd: if you look at it, you’ll see that any ordinary American is going to agree with Trump and not the neocons. Indeed, the ad probably helped Trump – that’s how blind the neocons are to the unpopularity of their warmongering.
What really horrifies them, however, is Trump’s sharp critique of the Iraq war, which he calls “a complete disaster,” and his condemnation of George W. Bush’s legacy. He dared not only to question the dogma that “Bush kept us safe,” but he also targeted the neocons who surrounded him:
“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”
This is why the neocons are determined to destroy Trump. After all, if The Donald says he’s ready to prosecute Hillary over her emails, why wouldn’t he go after the neocons for lying us into war – for causing the death of many thousands under false pretenses? Trump can be vindictive – and this is one area where one can only hope that he lives up to his reputation.
The President of the United States has strictly limited power when it comes to domestic affairs: he must get the consent of Congress – and, when challenged, the Supreme Court comes into the equation. However, when it comes to foreign policy he has virtually a free hand: Trump can really implement his foreign policy views. He can put America first, rid us of the burden of empire, and stop the new cold war with Russia dead in its tracks.
This is why they loathe and fear him. And he beat them badly. Their smear campaign failed. Their candidate, Rubio, was humiliated. As Trump moves to consolidate his victory, and moves in for the kill in Florida, their squeals of pain will get shriller. They are already abandoning any hope of winning at the polls, turning toward a strategy of denying Trump the nomination by fair means or foul — and given the character of these characters, you can bet it will be the latter.
Liam Donovan gives us the script in National Review. Never mind those who voted in the primaries. They don’t count. The nominee will be decided at a brokered convention:
“So we’re going to Cleveland. The only question is what happens after the first ballot. The race will be on to master arcane procedure, woo delegates, and mine the lessons of 1976 for whatever nuggets of precedent might be gleaned. Trump will beat his chest and demand the GOP crown him as the likely plurality leader. Cruz and Rubio will jostle for position in the interim and look to secure friendly delegates. Kasich will use the Ohio Republican Party apparatus to gain whatever edge he can as governor of the host state. Rules will be challenged and changed to great fanfare, the most notable being Rule 40, which now requires candidates to secure a majority of delegates in no less than eight states. Bedlam is pretty much assured. On the second ballot, more than half of convention delegates are unbound. By the third, nearly 80 percent are free agents.”
Translation: The rules? They’re made to be broken. The only unbreakable rule is that the neocons must get their way. It’s rule or ruin – that’s the neocon credo. Just ask the people of Iraq.
Will they get away with it? I don’t think so. It looks to me like Trump, if he continues to do as well as he’s doing, will be able to secure the 1,237 delegates necessary to win on the first ballot. This, of course, is the neocons’ worst nightmare.
No matter what happens, however, the power of the War Party in the GOP is broken. The obituary of neoconservatism is being written – and its author is Donald J. Trump.
Don’t Cry for Me, America: What Trumpism Means for Democracy
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Tom Dispatch
Whether or not Donald Trump ultimately succeeds in winning the White House, historians are likely to rank him as the most consequential presidential candidate of at least the past half-century. He has already transformed the tone and temper of American political life. If he becomes the Republican nominee, he will demolish its structural underpinnings as well. Should he prevail in November, his election will alter its very fabric in ways likely to prove irreversible. Whether Trump ever delivers on his promise to “Make America Great Again,” he is already transforming American democratic practice.
Trump takes obvious delight in thumbing his nose at the political establishment and flouting its norms. Yet to classify him as an anti-establishment figure is to miss his true significance. He is to American politics what Martin Shkreli is to Big Pharma. Each represents in exaggerated form the distilled essence of a much larger and more disturbing reality. Each embodies the smirking cynicism that has become one of the defining characteristics of our age. Each in his own way is a sign of the times.
In contrast to the universally reviled Shkreli, however, Trump has cultivated a mass following that appears impervious to his missteps, miscues, and misstatements. What Trump actually believes — whether he believes in anything apart from big, splashy self-display — is largely unknown and probably beside the point. Trumpism is not a program or an ideology. It is an attitude or pose that feeds off of, and then reinforces, widespread anger and alienation.
The pose works because the anger — always present in certain quarters of the American electorate but especially acute today — is genuine. By acting the part of impish bad boy and consciously trampling on the canons of political correctness, Trump validates that anger. The more outrageous his behavior, the more secure his position at the very center of the political circus. Wondering what he will do next, we can’t take our eyes off him. And to quote Marco Rubio in a different context, Trump “knows exactly what he is doing.”
Targeting Obama’s Presidency
There is a form of genius at work here. To an extent unmatched by any other figure in American public life, Trump understands that previous distinctions between the ostensibly serious and the self-evidently frivolous have collapsed. Back in 1968, then running for president, Richard Nixon, of all people, got things rolling when he appeared on Laugh-In and uttered the immortal words, “Sock it to me?” But no one has come close to Trump in grasping the implications of all this: in contemporary America, celebrity confers authority. Mere credentials or qualifications have become an afterthought. How else to explain the host of a “reality” TV show instantly qualifying as a serious contender for high office?
For further evidence of Trump’s genius, consider the skill with which he plays the media, especially celebrity journalists who themselves specialize in smirking cynicism. Rather than pretending to take them seriously, he unmasks their preening narcissism, which mirrors his own. He refuses to acknowledge their self-assigned role as gatekeepers empowered to police the boundaries of permissible discourse. As the embodiment of “breaking news,” he continues to stretch those boundaries beyond recognition.
In that regard, the spectacle of televised “debates” has offered Trump an ideal platform for promoting his cult of personality. Once a solemn, almost soporific forum for civic education — remember Kennedy and Nixon in 1960? — presidential debates now provide occasions for trading insults, provoking gaffes, engaging in verbal food fights, and marketing magical solutions to problems ranging from war to border security that are immune to magic. For all of that we have Trump chiefly to thank.
Trump’s success as a campaigner schools his opponents, of course. In a shrinking Republican field, survival requires mimicking his antics. In that regard, Ted Cruz rates as Trump’s star pupil. Cruz is to Trump what Lady Gaga was to Amy Winehouse — a less freewheeling, more scripted, and arguably more calculating version of the original.
Yet if not a clone, Cruz taps into the same vein of pissed-off, give-me-my-country-back rage that Trump himself has so adeptly exploited. Like the master himself, Cruz has demonstrated a notable aptitude for expressing disagreement through denigration and for extravagant, crackpot promises. For his part, Marco Rubio, the only other Republican still seriously in the running, lags not far behind. When it comes to swagger and grandiosity, nothing beats a vow to create a “New American Century,” thereby resurrecting a mythic past when all was ostensibly right with the world.
On two points alone do these several Republicans see eye-to-eye. The first relates to domestic policy, the second to America’s role in the world.
On point one: with absolute unanimity, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio ascribe to Barack Obama any and all problems besetting the nation. To take their critique at face value, the country was doing swimmingly well back in 2009 when Obama took office. Today, it’s FUBAR, due entirely to Obama’s malign actions.
Wielding comparable authority, however, a Republican president can, they claim, dismantle Obama’s poisonous legacy and restore all that he has destroyed. From “day one,” on issues ranging from health care to immigration to the environment, the Republican candidates vow to do exactly this. With the stroke of a pen and the wave of a hand, it will be a breeze.
On point two: ditto. Aided and abetted by Hillary Clinton, Obama has made a complete hash of things abroad. Here the list of Republican grievances is especially long. Thanks to Obama, Russia threatens Europe; North Korea is misbehaving; China is flexing its military muscles; ISIS is on the march; Iran has a clear path to acquiring nuclear weapons; and perhaps most distressingly of all, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is unhappy with U.S. policy.
Here, too, the Republican candidates see eye-to-eye and have solutions readily at hand. In one way or another, all of those solutions relate to military power. Trump, Cruz, and Rubio are unabashed militarists. (So, too, is Hillary Clinton, but that’s an issue deserving an essay of its own). Their gripe with Obama is that he never put American military might fully to work, a defect they vow to amend. A Republican commander-in-chief, be it Trump, Cruz, or Rubio, won’t take any guff from Moscow or Pyongyang or Beijing or Tehran. He will eradicate “radical Islamic terrorism,” put the mullahs back in their box, torture a bunch of terrorists in the bargain, and give Bibi whatever he wants.
In addition to offering Obama a sort of backhanded tribute — so much damage wrought by just one man in so little time — the Republican critique reinforces reigning theories of presidential omnipotence. Just as an incompetent or ill-motivated chief executive can screw everything up, so, too, can a bold and skillful one set things right.
Juan and Evita in Washington?
The ratio between promises made and promises fulfilled by every president in recent memory — Obama included — should have demolished such theories long ago. But no such luck. Fantasies of a great president saving the day still persist, something that Trump, Cruz, and Rubio have all made the centerpiece of their campaigns. Elect me, each asserts. I alone can save the Republic.
Here, however, Trump may enjoy an edge over his competitors, including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. With Americans assigning to their presidents the attributes of demigods — each and every one memorialized before death with a library-shrine — who better to fill the role than an egomaniacal tycoon who already acts the part? The times call for strong leadership. Who better to provide it than a wheeler-dealer unbothered by the rules that constrain mere mortals?
What then lies ahead?
If Trump secures the Republican nomination, now an increasingly imaginable prospect, the party is likely to implode. Whatever rump organization survives will have forfeited any remaining claim to represent principled conservatism.
None of this will matter to Trump, however. He is no conservative and Trumpism requires no party. Even if some new institutional alternative to conventional liberalism eventually emerges, the two-party system that has long defined the landscape of American politics will be gone for good.
Should Trump or a Trump mini-me ultimately succeed in capturing the presidency, a possibility that can no longer be dismissed out of hand, the effects will be even more profound. In all but name, the United States will cease to be a constitutional republic. Once President Trump inevitably declares that he alone expresses the popular will, Americans will find that they have traded the rule of law for a version of caudillismo. Trump’s Washington could come to resemble Buenos Aires in the days of Juan Perón, with Melania a suitably glamorous stand-in for Evita, and plebiscites suitably glamorous stand-ins for elections.
That a considerable number of Americans appear to welcome this prospect may seem inexplicable. Yet reason enough exists for their disenchantment. American democracy has been decaying for decades. The people know that they are no longer truly sovereign. They know that the apparatus of power, both public and private, does not promote the common good, itself a concept that has become obsolete. They have had their fill of irresponsibility, lack of accountability, incompetence, and the bad times that increasingly seem to go with them.
So in disturbingly large numbers they have turned to Trump to strip bare the body politic, willing to take a chance that he will come up with something that, if not better, will at least be more entertaining. As Argentines and others who have trusted their fate to demagogues have discovered, such expectations are doomed to disappointment.
In the meantime, just imagine how the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, no doubt taller than all the others put together, might one day glitter and glisten — perhaps with casino attached.
Conversations with the Crow
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever
After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.
Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversatins with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.
These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.
Conversation No. 3
Date: Saturday, February 24, 1996
Commenced: 1:30 PM (CST)
Concluded: 2:11 PM (CST)
GD: Good afternoon, Robert. Been to church today?
RTC: And good afternoon to you. Not today. Have you?
GD: I’ve been in many churches in my life but for the architecture, not the services.
RTC: I’ve never asked you, Gregory but are you Catholic?
GD: In taste, Robert, but not in faith. I told Bender1 what you had to say about the UFOs but did not credit you. I called you a senior intelligence official.
RTC: I appreciate that. What did he say?
GD: A subject that will be covered but in its place. Your point of view is that there were so-called official saucers used by the military and unofficial ones that no one knows anything about. Correct?
RTC: Correct.
GD: But by unofficial I don’t mean Russian.
RTC: Yes.
GD: I don’t suppose there’s paper on this?
RTC: The Air Force would have it but we don’t. We had nothing to do with it but it was common knowledge that there were visitors not from this world.
GD: I don’t want to spend much time on this because if I do, the critics will jump on it and claim I’m a Flying Saucer Nut. They already hate me and this would only give them more ammunition.
RTC: When I read your first book, didn’t I tell you this would happen? You can’t claim you were surprised.
GD: Yes, but they are so fucking stupid, pardon the French. ‘Oh hello Mr. Douglas! My name is Edgar Quince and I’m a reporter for TIME magazine. We were really thrilled to read your landmark book on the Gestapo fellow and we want to do an interview with you. Do you have any documents proving he worked for the CIA? We could put you on the cover of TIME! Wouldn’t that be exciting? We could fly a team out to see you tomorrow. And we want to see any CIA papers. By the way, what’s your home address?’ When I said stupid, that’s a typical example.
RTC: Well, they really aren’t all that bright, unfortunately. Don’t forget, Gregory, I had to deal with the media for years. Cord and Frank did the publishing companies and I worked with media corporate. We had a death grip on them. Couldn’t and wouldn’t print a word if we told them not to or ran puff pieces we wanted out.
GD: My late grandfather told me that once a newspaper man, always a whore.
RTC: Let’s call them sluts, not whores. We rarely paid them and they just did it to make us happy.
GD: That’s a difference without much of distinction, Robert. Did you have to take a shower after each and every meeting? Use Lysol to get off the stench?
RTC: I’ve had to work with business executives, Gregory, and they’re worse. Believe me, the Mafia are more to be trusted. Don’t forget I was raised in Chicago and my father was a cog in the Kelly-Nash machine so I got to know some of the mob people.
GD: My grandfather was a Chicago banker and I remember him saying once that the Ambassador belonged in Alcatraz along with his crime partner Capone.
RTC: Your grandfather was right. Kennedy was tied up with the Chicago mob in the liquor business. Capone got crossed by Kennedy and put out a hit on him. Kennedy took the next train to Chicago with a satchel filled with large denomination bills. Paid Capone back the money with great interest and Alfonso forgave him.
GD: Some history we have never heard before.
RTC: How did your grandfather know about this? Was he involved?
GD: No. He was involved with the Merchandise Mart and I guess that’s where he met Kennedy. Grandfather said he was an unconvicted bootlegger.
RTC: True enough. Joe wanted to run his oldest for the White House but Roosevelt put a spoke into that plan. Franklin wanted to die in office…
GD: Which he did…
RTC: And the eldest son had a fatal accident in England.
GD: I know. I covered that in the first book.
RTC: The kid was supposed to pilot a plane full of explosives to a German V bomb base, parachute out and let the plane blow it up. Churchill, ever a good friend when Franklin was alive and giving him support, arranged for a radio station near the airfield to send out a trigger code and blew young Kennedy into cat meat. One hand washes the other, doesn’t it?
GD: Bloodthirsty amoral shits, all of them. Müller told me once that when a man has achieved a certain elevation, morality goes down the tube. I remember his exact words. ‘Morality and ethics are excellent norms but not effective techniques.’
RTC; I met him several times. An impressive man to be sure. Speaking of Müller, I ran into someone several days ago at the National Archives. A wonderful man and a great supporter of your book.
GD: I didn’t think I had great friends inside the Beltway. Who was it? Corson?
RTC: No, that butt-licking Wolfe. Sidled up to me and went on about how evil you were and how much damage you were doing to his friends at the CIA. And probably were a secret Nazi who longed to shove Jews into the ovens. He wants to think that the CIA loves him but he’s just another stool pigeon to them. They give gift pens to ones like that.
GD: He’s always so nice to me but I trust him as far as I could throw him by his ears.
RTC: I wouldn’t. Anything you say to him, goes straight to Langley.
GD: Tell me I’m surprised. Wolfe’s as subtle as a fart in a spacesuit, but I keep filling him full of entertaining stories. I should send him a box of dignity pants before every phone session. Did you know that he got a top secret document for me out of the Archives? It was a ’48 Army General Staff report on top Nazis, listed as war criminals, that they and your people hired and brought over here?
RTC: Could you give me chapter and verse on that one?
GD: I’ll have to dig it out but I will.
RTC: Top secret you say?
GD: Release forbidden by presidential order.
RTC: Probably Truman’s doing. Yes, would appreciate a copy.
GD: No problem.
RTC: What do you plan to do with it?
GD: Publish the contents. Why not?
RTC: Oh somewhere out there a George Brown, actually a top Gestapo official who ran a death camp, is an analyst for the Rand people. You’ll shock his neighbors.
GD: The Gestapo didn’t run any camps but I take your meaning.
RTC: Ah the images of Gestapo men in black overcoats with Dobermans, rounding up screaming Jews and shoving them into the showers is pretty well fixed in the American mind. If it ever gets out the degree and extent of those types we gratefully used, the Jewish community here will scream for months and, worse, use their papers to blast government types.
GD: I doubt that. They don’t want to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs. I see them turning on me as the announcer of matters they would rather ignore. Money and weapons have that effect on people.
RTC: You knew their Stern gang tried to kill Truman once? Harry may have gotten their ball rolling but he stopped shipments of explosives over there to stop the wave of bombings and so on. So they decided to kill him. As I remember, they sent anthrax to Harry in a letter but someone else got it. Kept very quiet. The secret service tracked the doers to Montreal and turned it over to us. We found five of them living in a safe house and nailed all of them. Ironically, they got rid of the bodies by dumping them into a local hog farm where the pigs ate them.
GD: Pigs will do that. I heard a farm person, who raised pigs, once say that his uncle disappeared. He said he went to shit and the hogs ate him. When I worked in Northern California, I could see that that was not really a joke. The outhouses are built on the side of a hill and open in the back. The pigs run wild up there and when they see someone going to the outhouse with a newspaper, they flock to the site. For them, it’s manna from heaven.
RTC: Have you no shame, Gregory? And the other one has escaped to Cuba so we got Batista’s people to ice him. By the way, did you know that the CIA put Castro in office? No? We were tired of Batista and some moron thought Castro would cooperate better with our business interests. He did not and both big business, Alcoa mostly, the mob and the Company tried for years to kill him. You don’t need to write about that if you please.
GD: Fine.
RTC: And the JCS was planning to fake Cuban attacks on American targets to justify a military attack? I didn’t think so. Eisenhower thought it was a wonderful idea but Kennedy killed it. Considering that his father was such a crook, it’s amazing how uncooperative his son was.
GD: You don’t have any paperwork on that on, do you?
RTC: No but believe me, it’s true.
GD: Did that have anything to do with the Kennedy business?
RTC: A contributory factor.
GD: Perhaps sometime we can discuss this.
RTC: Perhaps later.
GD: Eisenhower was a shit after all. He would have let tens of thousands of German POWs starve to death after the war but Truman saved them.
RTC: I went to the Point and under Ike’s picture in the yearbook, it referred to him as a Swedish Jew. I think they were German but you can see why he might have been upset with the Germans.
GD: Well, long ago, the Roosevelt family was Jewish. The name was Campo Rosso, changed to Rosenfeld and then to the Dutch, Roosevelt. I mean that was back in the 1600s but Franklin had a second cousin who was Orthodox until he died. If you dig back far enough, it’s amazing what you find.
RTC: Where did you dig that up?
GD: The Congressional Record, German genealogical agencies and so on. I do dig, Robert, don’t forget that. I never accept anything as fact until I’ve checked it out. The Costello business is an example. Murdered by the Russians? Try his black boyfriend he kept in a flat in Soho. Costello’s own brother was a British naval officer and he refused to take custody of the body. They probably cremated John and shipped the remains back to London. The boyfriend went to the post office and hauled John’s ashes for the last time.
RTC: (Laughter)
GD: Well, it’s apt.
RTC: You are a mean person, Gregory, very mean.
GD: Yes, I am. I once poured water on a drowning man, Robert. I have devastated small children by my revelations about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Cruel.
RTC: You’re a social Darwinist, Gregory, just like the rest of us.
GD: I agree but let’s not get the religious freaks exercised by mention of that awful name. The world is only 6,000 years old according to Bishop Ussher, and we dare not even question Holy Writ. I keep away from that when I write because God hath no fury like a Jesus freak deluded. Anyway, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof and on that uplifting note, I have to take the dog out or he will desecrate the carpet. Regards to the wife.
RTC: Always happy to hear from you, Gregory.
(Concluded at 2:11PM CST)
SECRECY NEWS
From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2016, Issue No. 19
March 1, 2016
ODNI ERECTS COST BARRIER TO MANDATORY DECLASSIFICATION
Anyone who submits a mandatory declassification review request to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking release of classified records “shall be responsible for paying all fees” resulting from the request, according to a new ODNI regulation.
And those fees are considerable.
A search for a requested document costs from $20-$72 per hour. Document review runs $40-$72 per hour. And photocopying costs fifty cents per page, the new ODNI regulation said. It was published in the Federal Register on Friday, with a request for public comments.
The mandatory declassification review (MDR) process was established by executive order 13526 to permit requests for declassification of information that no longer meets the standards for national security classification. The executive order’s implementing directive states that fees may be charged for responding to MDR requests for classified records.
But the proposed ODNI fees seem extravagant on their face. No commercial enterprise charges anything close to fifty cents to photocopy a single page. Neither do most of ODNI’s peer agencies.
The Department of Defense permits (though it does not require) DoD agencies to charge fees for search, review and reproduction (pursuant to DoD Manual 5230.30-M). But the DoD schedule of fees is well below the proposed ODNI rate.
Instead of fifty cents per page, DoD charges thirteen cents. Instead of up to $72 per hour for search and review, DoD charges no more than $52.60 per hour. ODNI wants $10 for a CD, but DoD asks only $1.25. (See DoD 7000.14-R, Volume 11A, Chapter 4, Appendix 2, Schedule of Fees and Rates, at page 4-13).
And while ODNI would make requesters liable for “all fees,” DoD says that “Fees will not be charged if the total amount to process your request is $30.00 or less.”
Similarly, at the Department of State, “Records shall be duplicated at a rate of $.15 per page.”
In a 2011 rule, the Central Intelligence Agency did mandate a fifty cent per page photocopy fee for MDR requests, as well as a $15 minimum charge. But the CIA policy was suspended in response to public criticism and a legal challenge from the non-profit National Security Counselors. That challenge is still pending.
“There is nothing unusual about these [search and review] fees,” CIA told a court in 2014 in response to the legal challenge. “And the reproduction costs are similar to those employed by other agencies.” CIA noted that a National Archives regulation sets reproduction costs as high as 75 cents per page. (Last year it reached 80 cents, although a self-service copier is sometimes available for 25 cents per page.) Furthermore, CIA said in 2014, “neither set of costs reimburses the CIA for the full cost of providing the declassification review service to the requester.”
Public comments on the new ODNI rule are due by March 28.
AN EIGHT-MEMBER SUPREME COURT, AND MORE FROM CRS
A new report from the Congressional Research Service examines the implications of having only eight members on the Supreme Court following Justice Scalia’s death.
“This report provides an overview of the Supreme Court’s procedural rules and requirements when the Court is staffed with less than nine members. Included in this discussion is an overview of the Court’s quorum requirements, rehearing procedures, and vote count practices, with a focus on how the Court has traditionally responded to a change of composition during a term. The report concludes by highlighting over a dozen cases from the current term that could result in an evenly divided Supreme Court.”
See The Death of Justice Scalia: Procedural Issues Arising on an Eight-Member Supreme Court, February 25, 2016.
Other new and updated CRS reports that were published (but not publicly released) in the past week include the following.
DOD Releases Plan to Close GTMO, CRS Legal Sidebar, February 23, 2016
The United Kingdom and the European Union: Stay or Go?, CRS Insight, February 24, 2016
Court-Ordered Access to Smart Phones: In Brief, February 23, 2016
Health Care for Veterans: Suicide Prevention, updated February 23, 2016
Prescription Drug Abuse, February 23, 2016
Overview of Labor Enforcement Issues in Free Trade Agreements, updated February 22, 2016
Senators’ Official Personnel and Office Expense Account (SOPOEA): History and Usage, February 25, 2016
U.S. Trade Deficit and the Impact of Changing Oil Prices, updated February 25, 2016
The 2015 National Security Strategy: Authorities, Changes, Issues for Congress, updated February 26, 2016
Ukraine: Current Issues and U.S. Policy, updated February 22, 2016
Federal Court Declines to Bar the Resettlement of Syrian Refugees in Texas, CRS Legal Sidebar, February 26, 2016
Iraqi and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Programs, updated February 26, 2016
Iran-North Korea-Syria Ballistic Missile and Nuclear Cooperation, updated February 26, 2016
IT’S A PLANE: VISUAL AIRCRAFT RECOGNITION
The U.S. Army yesterday issued an updated manual to assist soldiers in identifying aircraft on the battlefield so as to determine whether they are friendly, hostile or something else. “Soldiers must be knowledgeable in the identification of all types of aerial platforms ranging from fixed wing attack aircraft to unmanned aircraft (UA), in order to protect friendly forces and to prevent fratricide.”
The task is easier said than done, however, even for an experienced observer.
The new manual characterizes the wing, engine, fuselage, and tail (or WEFT) of “a multitude of both hostile and friendly aircraft platforms.”
But due to national security classification, the catalog of aircraft is incomplete.
“This publication, by nature, has a built-in time lag, and some aircraft may still be under development or classified at the time of writing, but may be fielded or unclassified at, or after, publication.”
See Visual Aircraft Recognition, TC 3-01.80, February 29, 2016.
The new edition of the manual was released by the Army for unlimited public distribution. The 2006 manual that it replaces (FM 3-01.80), by contrast, was intended only for U.S. government agencies and contractors.
Moody’s lowers China government bonds outlook
Moody’s has cut its outlook on China’s sovereign bonds, warning of higher government debt and the likelihood of further capital outflows. It said reforms were required to remove structural deficiencies.
March 2, 2016
DW
Moody’s on Wednesday changed its outlook on China’s government bonds from stable to negative, questioning Beijing’s ability to implement necessary economic reforms.
A negative outlook means that there’s a higher likelihood of a rating change over the medium term, with a potential downgrade of Chinese bonds to push up borrowing costs for Beijing in international markets.
The ratings agency said continued weak growth in the world’s second-largest economy was likely to see liabilities mount at big “policy” banks, such as the China Development Bank or the Export-Import Bank of China, as the state-owned entities fund projects according to government instructions.
Moody’s added it was concerned about a considerable increase of borrowing across the economy.
Huge reserves
Government debt jumped to 40.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of 2015, up from 32.5 percent in 2012, Moody’s estimated.
But China’s foreign exchange reserves are still the world’s largest, although they fell to $3.2 trillion (2.94 trillion euros) in January, hitting the lowest level in over three years.
Moody’s kept China’s credit rating at a solid Aa3, the fourth-highest investment grade, pointing to the large size of buffers in the nation’s economy, including high domestic savings.
“In a largely closed financial system, buffer erosion would most likely be gradual, providing time to address key areas of reform,” the agency argued.americanloons
Strange but True: The Oddballs on Parade
from The Encyclopedia of American Loons
blog#1056: Ralph Reed
Ralph Eugene Reed, Jr. is best known as the first executive director of the Christian Coalition during the early 1990s, as the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition (which arranges an annual Conference dutifully attended by plenty of central political figures), and for fortunately failing the Republican nomination for the office of Lieutenant Governor of Georgia in 2006.
He allegedly became a born again in 1983 when “the Holy Spirit simply demanded me to come to Jesus,” and was hired by Pat Robertson as executive director of the Christian Coalition in 1988, an organization he led until 1997, when Federal prosecutors began investigating charges by the Christian Coalition’s chief financial officer, whereupon Reed resigned from his post to help various campaign efforts by conservative religious candidates, often with quite a bit of success (Saxby Chambliss, for instance). During his reign The Coalition was heavily involved in organizing former Robertson supporters and other religious conservatives to oppose political liberalism, making Reed one of the movers and shakers of the modern religious right. His own nominations ran into problems in part because of his deep involvement in the Abramoff scandal – his close contact with Focus on The Family ensured that this organization was implicated as well, though Richard Land has actually managed to try to argue that Reed was victimized by Abramoff. The mess that was the aforementioned 2006 Lieutenant Government campaign is described here. Reed’s money-making schemes continues to exist, however – his recent involvement in helping the Boy Scouts soft sell their upcoming change in policy on gay scouts to the religious right was not motivated by compassion. Reed retains a stunning level of influence and power among the religious right, illustrated for instance by how he could command the GOP presidential candidates (Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Paul, and Romney) around in 2012 as well as by his connection to McCain in 2008 and by this.
According to himself Reed attempted to project a “softer” public face for Christian conservatism (like this?), which means specializing in “guerrilla warfare” to put “enemies” in “body bags” before they even realized he had struck (it is presumably meant to be a “spiritual battle plan”). Despite this general strategy, and his recurrent and systematic involvement in corruption schemes, Reed managed to complain about Obama’s cynicism during the 2012 presidential campaigns.
It seems pointless to cover his political and moral positions in detail, since they are precisely what you’d expect, and the reasoning is precisely as dumb as you’d expect as well. Reed has argued that when the government creates programs to help the poor or senior citizens, it takes away our liberty, that making divorce harder for women is a “better solution” than food stamps, that divorce (which he compares to drug use, human trafficking and legalized gambling) is proof that the country is in decline, and he has dismissed dominionism as a liberal conspiracy (despite his own close ties). In “The Case Against Gay Marriage” he declared that “all the statistics and data that we have” prove that children of intact, loving families do better than children who do not grow up in such families (the fact that gay marriage would lead to more intact, loving families wasn’t relevant since “we have not tested that thesis on a national level,” an admission that sort of completely undermines his own previous argument), and cited an unnamed CEO who claimed to have studied the most productive staff in the company and discovered that “the number one determinant of how hard they worked and how dedicated they were” was coming from an intact, loving family. That’s apparently what counts as rigor for Reed; indeed, although demonstrably false, Reed has claimed his evidence is “irrefutable”.
As so many people of his ilk, Reed is in possession of and feeds off a serious persecution complex; that many people disagree with him – and has the audacity to actually say so in public – means that he is persecuted; according to Reed “bigotry against evangelical Christians is the last acceptable form of bigotry left in the country.”
Diagnosis: Extremely influential and hence extremely scary. We don’t want to indict anyone purely on the grounds of cynicism, evil, or political position, of course, but Reed has ensured for instance through his reasoning about gay marriage that he deserves to be included
#1050: Jon Rappoport
Jon Rappoport is a deliriously insane “independent researcher” and blogger. According to his bio, he “has lectured extensively all over the US on the question: Who runs the world and what can we do about it?” For the last decade, however, he has “operated largely away from the mainstream” because, as he puts it, “[m]y research was not friendly to the conventional media.” Indeed. His independent research encompasses “deep politics, conspiracies, alternative health, the potential of the human imagination, mind control, the medical cartel, symbology, and solutions to the takeover of the planet by hidden elites.”
He is, for instance, a germ theory denialist, and in his post “Germ theory and depopulation” he argues that “[i]n general, so-called contagious diseases are caused, not by germs, but by IMMUNE SYSTEMS THAT ARE TOO WEAK TO FIGHT OFF THOSE GERMS” (yes, the capitalization is in the original). Indeed, “GERMS ARE A COVER STORY. What do they cover up? The fact that immune systems are the more basic target for depopulation and debilitation of populations.” The main tool is of course vaccines, which are weapons the nefarious powers that be use to kill off, well, it is a bit hard to see, partially because Rappoport’s post is mostly all-caps from there. At least HIV is a cover story as well.
He has a similar screed on flu vaccines on whale.to if that’s the kind of stuff you fancy reading. It is barely grammatical, but at least he gets his enthusiastic anger across rather well.
Currently Rappoport seems to write on various topics for InfoWars. Recently, for instance, Rappoport and InfoWars dubbed Rep. Tim Murphy’s bill seeking to reform the way the government addresses mental health services a “diabolical legislative package,” since Rappoport thought the legislation would require almost all children to take “psychiatric meds,” and that the bill will ultimately give the federal government “a monopoly of the mind.” Yeah, that’s the way he rolls.
Diagnosis: Hysterically crazy; and his influence is probably not quite as limited as his level of crazy should suggest.
#1047: Rainbow Eagle
A.k.a. Roland Williston (real name)
Rainbow Eagle is apparently an Okla-Choctaw American Indian alleged Wisdom Keeper, honored with the responsibility of an Ancient Native American Peace Shield, storyteller, teacher and author. That is, according to generally trustworthy sources, he is not actually an elder or medicine person recognized by any Native tribe, but a former social worker who at some point decided to adopt a rather strikingly New Age-ish version of what some people think Native American names sound like, and to use the New Age popular Twilight version of Native American beliefs and practices to gain authority in the most ridiculous New Age circles.
He is also a member of MUFON, and seems to have given several talks in various places on things related to alien abduction (there is an interview here). Suffice to say, his claims are as incoherent as they come. Apparently, according to Rainbow Eagle, humans were planted on Earth some 12,000 years ago (so for what it’s worth he’s got some 6000 years on the young earth creationists). Why? Well, Rainbow Eagle uses an argument by elimination; there are three possible scenarios for how we got here:
1) Aliens put us here to mine gold for them, until we rebelled. So, they genetically programmed us with loyalty to them so that we’d think of them as gods.
2) Aliens came and helped humans develop technology, so we worshiped them because we thought that that was a very nice thing to do.
3) Evolution.
The third option is apparently out, because “Man-to-ape. Somehow an ape stood up, lost its hair, got more brainpower, or whatever all that technical stuff is.” Clearly not. So that leaves us with the others, though the distinctions seem to get a little murky. Apparently, according to Mr. Eagle, it has something to do with quantum mechanics, vibration and energy, though exactly what it has to do with anything remains murky, to put it mildly. Oh, and the original races were different colors. Native Americans used to be red, blacks used to be blue, Asians used to be green, and whites used to be transparent. How come? Who knows.
Diagnosis: Astonishingly incoherent moron. His impact is probably limited, but I can certainly see why people who care about Native American culture are angry at these kinds of idiots.
#1064: Harry Riley
We feel compelled to throw in a brief entry on Harry Riley as well. Riley, as you may recall (or not), is a retired US army colonel and the leader of Operation American Spring, a May 2014 rally in DC intended to stop President Obama’s attempt to turn America into a “socialist-fascist-communist-Marxist dictatorial, tyrannical system”, oust him from office and put him in Gitmo. The operation was supposed to proceed in several stages; first the event would draw 10 million attendees (activist Jim Garrow suggested 30 million). Then at least a million activists would remain in DC until their demands were met. Of course, the turnout was somewhat lower than expected (in fact, the estimation was off by approximately 10 million) numbering in total around 100 people (according to Riley “I think we probably had three or four thousand the first day,” but he has shown himself to be less than ideally trustworthy on this matter). Organizers blamed the weather, but prior to the event Terry Trussell, Operation American Spring’s chief of staff, and far-right radio host Mark Hoffmann warned attendees to prepare for violence and possibly even a drone strike to “destroy the capital just to get rid of us,” so perhaps they were just scared. After the event Riley claimed that “probably 1,000” activists are still on the National Mall pushing for Obama’s removal from office as part of stage two of the operation. People who were actually there suggested that Riley’s estimate was off by approximately … 1,000, describing instead a total number somewhat “less than ten”.
At Phase 3 of the operation “[t]hose with the principles of a West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson, Lee, DeMint, Paul, Gov Walker, Sessions, Gowdy, Jordan, should comprise a tribunal and assume positions of authority to convene investigations, recommend appropriate charges against politicians and government employees to the new U.S. Attorney General appointed by the new President.” Which is ridiculously illegal and serves to confirm the suspicion that despite Riley’s claims to be defending the Constitution, he really doesn’t have the faintest clue what’s in it.
Actually, Riley suggested that he wasn’t really behind the operation – the main strategist was God, and the main reason the campaign would succeed in forcing President Obama out of office was that the campaign was “bathed in prayer” and “under God”.
Diagnosis: Delusional nutter. Evidently pretty harmless