I’m guessing that the prima facie evidence that I know nothing about Lyndon Larouche is that I have not donated $2000 to any of his campaigns and am not standing with box-cards hawking his literature on street corners or on college campuses.

This is in in reference to Brian.  I believe in free will, and I believe we can hand that free will to anyone or anything we want to to whatever degree we want to do so.  (Is Mike Gravel a better successor to FDR?  I don’t know.  He couldn’t be worse.)
My response to “dcreporter”, and I am tempted to give out the name of the publication — actually in a sly manner where I invert the words of the publication and toss in a few participles, was essentially a deferal.  In terms of rummaging through old EIR publications, there is something I would do if I could stomache these things: collegate and trace the history of Larouche’s use of the word “baby-boomer”.  Googling “larouchepub” and “baby boomer”, and what seems to predominate are a bulk of interviews held between two people discussing the greatness of Lyndon Larouche.  (Larouche’s publications are odd in that way.)  For some reason the word “baby boomer” is not highlighted, as per the regular google functions, and I am not willing to wade through this crap to be able to sort through the use of the word “baby boomer” as a pejorative.  (The earliest appearance using this minimal technique is 1995.)
A few years ago, after Larouchites succeeded in aggrivating the campus of Portland State Unviersity (a tactical guerilla operation beyond the typical setting up of a card table), and made enough of a nuisance of themselves, the school newspaper ran the article “Who Is Lyndon Larouche?”  In retrospect, I do not believe the article was particularly insightful, even with a bit more meat on it than I’ve come to find out is usual for these things.  It seemed to be dragged down by explanation of the nature of Larouche’s opposition to the wars in Iraq.  (1991 and 2003).   What is weird is that I think there should be just be one form item written, easy to be used by any college whenever it seems necessary with a handful of bullet point items on the history of Larouche.  Out of the student forment of SDS at Columbia University, lead a group of self-described Trotskyites, lead a campaign of violence against Communists with billy-clubs and machettes in “Operation Mop Up”, any number of items can be plugged in from there to te 1986 and 1988 California ballot measures that would have quarantained AIDs patients, prisioned for fraud and served 5 years of a — 15 year?– sentence, and now we can touch upon Jermiah Duggan, if we want to.  Badda bing badda boom, write it someone, let it out to fair use, and don’t think too hard when the topic of Larouche comes up on campus.  (The vast majority of students and everyone sees a charlatan operation intuitively anyways.  point oh oh oh oh one percent notwithtanding.)

I must say that I find Mitt Romney’s answer to the question of what his favorite book is, the answer being Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard — with the caveat that he doesn’t think much of the religion or Hubbard, kind of refreshing.  It is impossible to peg this answer in any way as being in any way pandering, which means that … Mitt Romney evidently answered the question honestly, smirking from science fiction fans and anyone else be damned.  It’s not a George W Bush Summer reading list created for public consumption, believable to nobody.

To mock this answer is to run into the age old riddle of politics: we either want completely polished and smooth politicians and attack mericilessly anything that smacks of a gaffe, or we want to pry the consultants away.

From wikipedia:

On May 1, 2003 George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, in Navy One, a Lockheed S-3 Viking, wearing a flight suit. A few minutes later he gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in the Iraq War. Clearly visible in the background was a banner stating “Mission Accomplished.”

Bush’s historic jet landing on the carrier, the first by a sitting president, was criticized by opponents as an overly theatrical and expensive stunt. For instance, they pointed to the fact that the carrier was well within range of Bush’s helicopter, and that a jet landing was not needed.[1] Originally the White House had stated that the carrier was too far off the California coast for a helicopter landing and a jet would be needed to reach it. On the day of the speech, the Lincoln was only 30 miles from shore but the administration still decided to go ahead with the jet landing. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer admitted that the president “could have helicoptered, but the plan was already in place. Plus, he wanted to see a landing the way aviators see a landing.”[2] The Lincoln made a scheduled stop in Pearl Harbor shortly before the speech, docked in San Diego after the speech, and returned to its home base in Everett, Washington on May 6, 2003.

I am tempted to consider this the most obnoxious piece of agit-prop of the wars that George W Bush has shuffled under “War On Terror”.  Perhaps the mythologized stories of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch better qualify, but they at least had the possibility of never being tested and prodded away to full exposure of their very artifice.  In the case of the Tillmans, it was the wrong family to concoct a story out of — what with Pat Tillman being the stereotype-breaking Noam Chomsky accolade NFL star, a dichotomy I saw some indymedia posters as well as Ann Coulter unable to grapple with.  Theoretically, the Pentagon thought they saw unsophisticated West Virginia hicks in the Lynches — easy to be persuaded that hyping up a story of Jessica Lynch’s heroism is good for the morale of the nation, so let it be — it will work out for us all.  But sometimes you just have to trust American’s (and anyone in the world’s, for that matter) ability to push out the BS when necessary.

The “MIssion Accomplished” banner was flawed from the beginning.  Bush’s accompanying speech was full of mixed messages, and again the wikipedia article explains the problem:

Whether meant for the crew or not, the general impression created by the image of the President under the banner has been criticized as premature — especially later as the guerrilla war began. Subsequently, the White House released a statement saying that the sign and Bush’s visit referred to the initial invasion of Iraq. Bush’s speech noted:

“In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

Bush appeared to have been hedging his bets.  Even then, guerilla fighting was moving forward, deaths were coming, and surely someone somewhere in Bush Administration knew this was going to continue.  Perhaps they had the apologia in mind — they did not say “Mission Accomplished” because they said “we still have difficult work”.  Weak in a visual world, and for that matter in an audio world where you can splice the contradiction together in five seconds.

I always thought that if Bush had lost the presidential election, this would have been when he lost it.  There was a measure of managing expectations that he screwed up, within the time-frame that he could float the electoral math of the Iraq War in his favor.  (That pretty well expired just after election day, actually, with help from John Kerry’s contradictions.)  But this presidency is impulsive in this regard: anything for a cheap and temporary thrill.

Four years hence, the Democratic Congress sends a bill of non-binding timetables to meet with Bush’s second veto.  The debate over the nature of the Democratic Congress — they sent us a bunch of conservative Democrats, right? — is somewhat beside the point.  The Democratic class of 2006 was a smidgen to the left on economic matters than their predecessors– if you want to say protectionist I don’t particularly care right now to quibble –, a bit over the map in social issues, and… the only real common denominator no matter how they stack up on the other matters — the voters gave them a Prime Directive to deal with Bush’s obstinance with the Iraq War.  And that battle commences, awkwardly.  To Accomplish a Mission, or not to accomplish a mission.

The “Mission Accomplished” banner has finally come back to Bush.  As we had to have known it would.