I may as well acknowledge this comment left from a Bebe:

I’m happy I found this blog. My friend is currently investing more time than I’d like with the Larouche kids that haunt our campus. I originally thought she might be interested in a boy in the group, but she is becoming a lot more politically active and actually spending time reading the pamphlets.

I want to rescue her from the group (maybe i’m not in the position to rescue her, but I don’t want her getting brainwashed or anything), so reading this blog I hope will help me argue and articulate with her how much of a crazy psycho this guy is and why she shouldn’t get involved.

A while ago I stumbled upon the realization that, like it or not, I had established myself into a source of either information or simply frustration — starting by reposting comments left by a “Scott” and continuing by reposting comments left by other frustrated ex-Larouchites. And thus last December through January wrote what seemed like an insane number of posts on the topic of Lyndon Larouche, to make myself at least relevant in that regard.

It is a little strange. There have been a twinkling of posts (as correlated on bloglines) from spectators laughing at the sight of Larocuhite’s latest cause: anti-Al Gore blustering on the hoax of Global Warming. The queasy feeling I have is that I saw this coming before it started happening: I saw the very first twinkling of messages coming out of Larouche that, apparently he was shifting from an anti-Cheney message to storm out at the people to an anti-Gore one. Am I doomed to know every stupid change of message and movement from this stupid cult I have never had any association with?

At any rate, I have from time to time skimmed the FACTnet board, link right there on the right sidebar — and have pasted away a few things into a folder in my email files. Here’s something regarding his relationship with the media:

In 1976 we succeeded in getting Lyn on a Meet the Press show for independent candidates where he proceeded to make every other candidate look rationale. In the 1980 New Hampshire campaign the staff started to trick Lyn into not doing interviews by telling him that there were security threats. They did that because when you sent Lyn to a Kiwanis club the first thing he did was demand to be treated like the Queen of England and have the place swept for bombs and insists that the security detail could be fully armed when meeting little old ladies for tea.

Lyn hated this stuff as he really thought that he was above all of this and through a top leaders like Gus and Ken Dalto, had the election bought from Mafioso figures from Detroit. As we made more money it became quite apparent that Lyn and Helga were now Philosopher King and Queen while everybody else was beneath them. Lyn really had a hard on for now liver diseased and buried Graham Lowry as Lowry knew how to do the New England Patrician act very convincingly.

The people lyn best got along with were the hoardes of security contacts and Liberty Lobby kooks who would share Jew Jokes with us. This was very interesting as your future master Jeff Stenberg and Paul Goldstein, the heads of security, had to guffow with these people during the festivities.

It wasn’t until I left years later that I began to read about how much money these security spooks scammed from Lyn and Steinberg. We shuffled millions to these guys as they knew how to inflate Lyn’s ego to gargantuan size and convince him that everyone wanted to assasiante him. Of course for a price, Lyn could be saved. In one infamous scam, Lyn had us pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a guy who siad that he could get Lyn on a NSA “Do Not Asssasinate List”.

AS the money came in, Lyn and Helga’s taste became richer. At one point, Lyn occupied a few rooms of an exclusive Park Ave, Hotel, devouring casees of Rheingau, while members who lived a few miles away in the NYC area were being evicted.

In the 1980 campiagn we kept Lyn from interviews in public because the press was having a field day showing what a kook he was. They would start off the conference with a couple of softballs and then start him up with Queen of England assassination questions . Lyn would go off the deep end screaming “Where do you get these lies you drug dealers”. The press would just hold up our publications and show the circled quotes from fearless leaders own writings.

To stop this travesty we convinced Lyn that “MISTER ED” told us that it is dangerous doing these press interviews and he needs to stop.

The Morton Downey show was one of the best where Lyn had a melt down as he was pelted with his own quotes on Jews and other groups. The members were told that Lyn is being boycotted by the oligarchy because of how dangerous he is. the truth is that there is only so much time for fools on TV and we had to keep him from going off the deep end time and time again.

We sent him to India where after years, we had a meeting with Indira Ghandhi. Lyn went nuts during the meeting with whatever crazy paranoid assassination plot was after him and a scared Indira yelled at her staff for having her waste her life meeting a Madman.

No matter where you go in the history of the org, Lyn shows up, goes crazy and you never see the person again. One by one, each sector person dropped out as it became apparent in these meetings and in private meetings with Lyn that he was truly nuts.

A group of six early to mid twenty-somethings.  All things considered, moderately dressed in the sense that a goth-looking grouping can be dressed — which is to say simply — their clothes were black and there might have been one or two accessory of some sort, but they could pass as — well, I suppose respectable figures in society, not that anyone particularly wants to be in that category.
They are taking photographs, posing in various places in this room.  It’s a strange place to be taking photographs, but maybe not — everyday life happens to get you here and if there’s no occasion, so much the better to get photographs of how you actually lived your day to day life.

So, they pose in front of a contraption I am purposefully vague on.  (An ugly painting if you must know — seemingly one created with shock value in mind).   A couple of them smile, somewhat wickedly.  The photographer stops before she take the photograph.  “Hey!  You can’t do that!  Remember:  We’re goths!”  The smiles are wiped out, stern expressions (profound?) are adapted in the pose, and the photograph is taken.
Identity politics, I suppose.

Somewhere as the Peter Defazio should take on Gordon Smith bubble started to boost, with the Democratic Party releasing an internal poll showing Defazio would beat Smith — taken as an indication that the DNC is recruiting hard for Defazio to enter the rae — a question popped up in the blueoregon blog comments.  Some commenter was a bit perplexed at “Why Defazio?”, asking “Is there any particular reason Defazio is better than Blumenauer, Wu… or even” whatshiname, that man who made the Willamette Week cover saying how he would run and win?

I found myself shaking my head.  Yes.  Purely in terms of electoral chances, Defazio is better than Blumenauer, or … Wu… or anybody else in this state   The simplest explanation for why is that Blumenauer’s track record is a series of election victories of basically uncontested elections in the most Democratic district in the state.  The alternative weeklies in the city are weary of him at endorsement time, and the type they give him is of a sort of “No brainer, and to go on about why he fits Portland is redundant.  NEXT!”  He has proven appeal in Portland, Oregon.  Which does not necessarily transcend Portland, taking on issues of urban growth.  He is, as of the moment, narrow — his dream reportedly has always been to be Portland’s mayor, which I assume might be his if he ever wants it and might likely have been his if he had jumped into the race in 2004.  (Deferred because he deemed it necessary to stay in Washington because “needed to fight the Bush Administration” at this point in history.  History’s call beckons, I suppose.)

Defazio has won consistently in a district which narrowly went for Bush in 2000, narrowly for Kerry in 2004.  I suspect that it may have gone for Bush in 2000 with Eugene, Oregon as part of the district, and thus a large Nader contingency.  (The implications of that statement are only a bare contradiction with my previous post.)  His constituency is a bit broader than Blumenauer’s — which includes some series of libertarian-ish homesteaders along which he has folded in with common cause issue positions with his “progressives” and greens.  It is better representative of Oregon, and is a better match of getting a high enough percentages of rural voters to defeat Gordon Smith.  (Beyond which, he comes off as less dull for the “progressive” voting mass.)

There is nothing to say about David Wu, who appeared to show interest in the race but the DNC appears to have wisely side-stepped in favor of Defazio.  (I don’t quite know his constituency.  His district almost seems to be an accidental district there because you have to stick borders up somewhere to cover the population.)  But I think Blumenauer would end up losing in a race against Gordon Smtih.  I think Defazio would probably win.
But what do I know?
(I put quotation marks around the word progressive because I instinctively hate the word.  It comes across like an apology and equivocation by liberals.)

“Many people lavished hate on Ralph Nader for presumably taking votes away from the Democratic front-runner in the 2000 presidential election,” said Scott Highhouse, who has studied the decoy effect at Bowling Green State University. “Research on the decoy effect suggests that Nader’s presence, rather than taking votes away, probably increased the share of votes for the candidate he most resembled.”

I have said this before, posted it here before, and will say it again.  Ralph Nader seemed to sharpen Al Gore and force him to come to enough of a definition of his candidacy — which had been floundering until the Convention and the unveiling of the, for whatever it was worth or even meant, “People versus the Powerful” theme, thus Nader’s candidacy ended up a net benefit for Gore.  While I suppose what I am saying is that it forced him somewhat leftward to where the votes are, the “left — right” axis is immaterial — if he could have defined himself boldly — or in the case of the Gore candidacy more boldly — in a “centrist” measure, that would have been fine as well.  But Nader forced him somewhere, and without Nader — Gore would not have won the popular vote.  It is not a one or two dimensional electoral map — the populace are divided against themselves, and mobilized in various ways.

I keep hearing, most recently by Eric Alterman on an Air America Radio show — Sam Sedar — last night saying that Liberals and Democratic candidates have been unable to define visions or be , and tend to go into policy details instead of soundbytes of “core values”.  He cited Gore and he cited Kerry.  This is a bit incorrect — true enough for Kerry, but Gore — whatever else he was — settled on “People versus the Powerful”, which connotated some vageuly populist theme — awkwardly but I don’t think a candidate like Gore could have posited anything less awkwardly.  (Vice presidents succeeding presidents look to be in a strange spot of defining themselves against their bosses.  George H W Bush’s call for a “Kinder, Gentler America” raised ruffles from Nancy Reagan — but posited him as a more caring and moderate Reagan with the same nostalgic tinge of America begone.  Al Gore slid awkwardly to something slightly to the left of Clinton, which made as much sense as anything else.)
The disgusting thing is no variety of hypotethical positionings would have much effect on how Gore/Lieberman would have actually governed.  Actually there’s a simple matter in national elections (that would be the presidency) which is that the goal is to fool enough people into thinking that you are where they are at.  I see this weird debate about Clinton’s 1992 election between DLC types and more straight forward Democrats — his “centrist” policies won him the election versus his economic populist message won him the election.  Both, contradictory though they were, are true — look back to the 1992 Clinton campaign and it’s sort of stunning how duplicitious and two-faced Clinton was.  As all politicians are — how did George W Bush win as a moderate beloved by his fundamentalist base?
In summary to untangle a complicated muddle:  Nader came in.  Brought in his constituency of “Blast those two corporate stooge parties” voters.  And some of them decided to vote for the lesser of two evils once the lesser of two evils feignted somewhat their way.  It was enough to offset whatever number of voters who drifted from Gore to Nader, and was then more than offset by the voters who decided, either through smirks or with no sense of irony, that Al Gore is on the Side of the People and not the Powerful and is better experienced in that regard than “Compassionate Conservative” money-bucks Bush, friend of all Corporate Interests.

Link provided by thirdpartywatchblog.

I heard that Newt Gingrich is showing up well in the New Hampshire primary polls.  Looking this up, I see that this is basically not the case, but then again why would any of his supporters declare for him — He’s not officially running.  Still, he is just about tied with wunderkid non-candidate Fred Thompson, and Thompson is supposed to save the GOP.

Newt Gingrich was and is hyped up in the Weekly Standard, who praised a bunch of words he spoke at a meeting of political minds as compared them favorably with Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill in terms of vision, vision, vision.  This is the same bunch, and with the same spirit, that promoted a sort of “Dick Cheney for President” boomlet.  I have to admire their spirit in advancing unpopular politicians for president whom they agree with to an nth degree.

And I would have to dig up the poll numbers of Gingrich.  Trust me when I say — Hillary Clinton’s negatives, famously high, are not nearly as bleak.  I have seen the Weekly Standard columnists refer to Nancy Pelosi as the most unpopular politician — which jarred me as both wishful thinking and forgetting the president and vice – president … and … Newt.  But maybe Newt didn’t count, because he hasn’t actually been elected to anything since 1998 — and that he walked away from.  His current controversy is a strange case of me being able to defend him until he makes awkward and baffling explanations on what he said.
Nonetheless, I think a Newt Gingrich candidacy would be a fascinating exercise for the Republic.  Particularly if he was matched up against Barack Obama.  The reason I like this is because I look at the election result of the only political race for a seat in the federal government Barack Obama has and see that he beat Alan Keyes 70 to 27.  I think it would be interesting to see if that result can be duplicated, and it would be amusing to muse about a strangely green politician having never sweated in nationally followed elections.

The absurdity of John McCain and Lindsey Graham’s photo op in Iraq — securing an area and employing 100 soldiers and snipers to keep the market safe — where Lindsey Graham purchased five rugs for five dollars — and so John McCain could announce that Iraq is safe because they could walk right in and — um — “go shopping” (what we need to do in the War on Terror).  It was just like an open-air market in Indiana, or so said another figure in the delegation, Representative Mike Pence.
Yes.  Much progress since, I suppose February when the market was attacked.  78 dead, 166 injured.  That was then.  The security has gotten better, I hear.  At least when John McCain is walking around.  Afterward, well…

The merchants are American collaborators now and 36 hours later… the place was attacked.  All injuries and all deaths in that attack (which I cannot find the numbers off hand) are directly attributable to John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and company’s pointless stroll through the neighborhood to get a series of photographs that are not even particularly flattering.  (Really.  Go to the image of John McCain in the body vest.  It doesn’t look impressive at all to his stated message.)
Such is the price of attempted political profiting from war.

In a time of war, it’s irresponsible for the Democrat leadership — Democratic leadership in Congress to delay for months on end while our troops in combat are waiting for the funds. The bottom line is this: Congress’s failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to. That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it is unacceptable to the American people.

That does take quite a bit of chutzpah for Bush to say, what with the liberal use of the Stop Gap through our Grand Iraq Adventure.  It is unacceptable to him, he says, to redeploy the troops (National Guard, mind you) for a third term with little leeway between deployments.  Cue Laugh Track.  Dick Cheney, who is literally over in the bushes as Bush spoke, has to make a concerted effort not to smirk.