Ed Schultz made a particularly intemperate statement that rolled around in a stew of controversy last week.  It’s gotten clipped down to a 15 second youtube clip, thrown around various blogs, I am having a difficult time picturing it discussed on talk radio of the right but who knows?, and found its way to a condemnation by Republican congressional leadership of John Boehner.  I don’t quite know what to make of this as controversy.  Is this projection from the more than fifteen seconds of radio gnashing?  Roll your way across the AM dial and it will be one rightwing host after another in accusatory tones with diatribe that starts around where Schultz’s 15 seconds went.

It is interesting to note that Air America is dead.  Take a look at KPOJ’s schedule, and you’ll see six hours late at night of Air America’s program.  Their two biggest talents have bailed to other syndicates.  Throw in a Senator.  Toss in another person who moved up to MSNBC and has something of a courtesy radio rebroadcast.  Ron Reagan is now the major face of Air America, on more stations than anyone else there.   I would prefer Stephanie Miller to be stuck into their weekend scheduling, 970 booting them out as they changed their name to “Freedom 970”, and apparently Ms. Miller opposes Freedom.

Actually, I suspect that the easy branding of a consciously “conservative” radio station with the word “Freedom” tells us how easy it is to round up fury against Ed Schultz in the “speck in my eye, log in your eye” way.

“No other president in American history has ever addressed school children.  It’s the tradition of Hitler, Castro, and Mao.  We had the Hitler Youth.  Obama now wants to have the Obama Youth.”

That one came from last month’s conservative Movement talk show bloviator keyboard warrior controversy.  Obama offered a speech for the children.  A bit more gist for the mill was offered up last week.  A creepy video from Febuary of a teacher leading her class of second graders to a song about Barack Obama.  The youtube clip findally reaches the shores of Drudge after seven months.  I will go on record as saying that, yes, the song was a bit creepy, and the teacher should be a bit ashamed.  The school, though, has entrenched itself with no apologies.  And, given the disporportionate anger and vitrol from the, and I use the term sarcastically, “Citizen Journalists” of Michelle Malkin on down, in findind the school and turning up the proper addresses — leading to unhinged threatening comments that lead the school to Lockdown, I probably would have to suggest an entrenching against this fury.  Really, I now have to side with one slightly over-eager school teacher against those forces.

The question with these things is always a “Do you really think something can’t be poked out from the Bush Administration of more noxiousness?”  Then again, back to a roll over of the AM dial where these controversies are manufactured beyond the keyboard — the corridors by which such a response are pumped out are smaller, and the echo chamber that leads to Obama being a particularly nasty dictator remain.  And maybe it’s about time I poked my own way to the book “The Cult of the Presidency”.

This is an overly optimistic partisan assessment of Democratic fortunes for 2010.  The Senate map isn’t all that friendly for the Democrats — it is about even, I gather.  Of course, that doesn’t stop things from happening: 2006’s map was sort of Republican friendly, which only meant that disaster could have been worse for the Republicans.  2002 was friendly for the Democrats, which only blunted the Republican gains that night.  How the Democrats are going to pick up three seats (that’d mean Missouri, New Hampshire, and one of several not insane but I wouldn’t really bet on it pick ups — the Republicans nominate Rand Paul and so the Democrats pick up Kentucky?) while losing some House seats, I don’t know.

Of course, this partisan boosterism is nothing compared to the anonymous Movement Conservative wishful thinking in the comments section.  These are the people who take the 60,000 teaparty march on Washington and think those were 2 million.  Of course, such a matter is being encouraged by Republicans in Congress — see Johnny Isakson’s comments yesterday.  There is one stunning thing about Obama’s fortunes: he is never going to encounter a Republican Congress, meaning both Senate and House.  If the Democrats lose control of the Senate in 2012, it would come with a Republican President.  The earliest the Republicans might win the Senate is 2014.  The upshot there is that the threat of a Republican Congress pursuing Impeachment over, say, fevered dreams about Acorn is null and void.

Another thing to consider: after all the noise, the Health Care bill that is likely to be passed is about what anyone would expect.  The equilibrium has set in: it was swerving rightward, now it’s facing a sort of left pressure as the threat of a fiasco in passing Individual Mandates is setting in.  It seems as though the nature of the media and the void of the month wins the month of August for the Republicans (see 1988, 2004, and 2008).  Who knows?  The clearest explanation of 2008 politics was something I saw at the end of 2007 that had the Democratic nominee winning by 7 or 8 points and everything between then and November 2008 essentially a Kabuki Dance.  So, Joseph Biden can be one weird dude.

Bill Sparkman, Census Worker in Kentucky, appears to have been killed inwhat looks probably like a domestic Terrorist shot.  Three names pop to my mind in terms of paranoid spewing about Census workers.  Glenn Beck  and Michelle Bachman  form the firmly connected to the Republican Party branch.  The third name: Alex Jones.

Glenn Beck who once specifically told his audience: “Don’t be a Tim McVeigh”:  And who is himself four years away from saying this:
BECK: Hang on, let me just tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus Do band, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, “Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,” and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, “Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.” And you know, well, I’m not sure.
That’s just a Morning Zoo bit, right?

The Alex Jones Media Constellation will tread where Glenn Beck won’t.  Repeat after me: “False.  Flag.  Operation.”  Roughly the first comment on any page there on these matters will be claims of the “False Flag”.  And somewhere in the mix, another reference will pop up eventually.  I’ll stop when I see it:

Ross Says:  Possible False Flag Op ????

Reply:  I think so.

hellferbreakfast Says:
Could very well be a false flag to be used to blame it on what ever anti-govt. individual or group they have in mind.

Military Industrial Complex has been defunded thanks to that enterprising ACORN busting shoody pimp and ho duo.

I wish.  Then the Pimp and Ho team would be Good Lefties in disguise.   But we know what’s about to happen with the legislation.  It will be spliced back to fit the one political target.

But if you thought ACORN was bad, meet ArmorGroup North America. It’s the private U.S. government security contractor whose employees at the American embassy in Kabul were photographed in drunken revels that included urinating on and sexually molesting each other. It also has been alleged by whistle-blowing employees that ArmorGroup cut corners on security hiring, leaving our embassy personnel vulnerable.

Take a look at POGO’s contractormisconduct.org site for a list of the corporations that could be out of government work under this legislation. It’s a veritable Who’s Who of defense contracting, including Houston-based KBR.

It does the interesting problem with “The Problem With Acorn”, which is to assume the worst — we’re still dealing with piddling crap amongst a sea of bigger concerns.

Incidentally, back to Acorn — the piddling little controversy:
And now we know that the evil ACORN worker who played along with them later spoke to the police about the incident.  ALA
One out of four videos accounted for.  The other three?  Rule of thumb in reading through this account : (and I’d have to go over and watch the video to watch for body clues to see if this is credible) when you’re a political target, don’t play the “Amused Game”.

And, yes, it appears that The Pimp is politically dishonest in falsely claimed that he was never turned away from ACORN offices.  I think that puts the organization down to 3 out of 8.
But next stop for them, I’m sure, is to expose the corruption of Military Contractors.  It’s what his agenda is, right?

During the Bush Administration, it was either Barbara Lee or Maxine Waters who invited Cindy Sheehan to the State of the Union Address.  She was barred.  The reason was pretty much to avoid the display that was just enacted by Joseph Wilson.  On any number of occasions, at Bush election campaign gatherings and through “Medicare Reform” meetings, people with anti-war t shirts or Kerry / Edwards bumper stickers were barred, questioned by officials.  Further, Bush’s town hall meetings were screened far beyond the paranoid conjecture that Obama has for him.  Further, Obama’s gatherings have been met by protesters — off stage at friendly church grounds — brandishing guns, a display which is taxing on secret service attention and resources as they fumble around the 400 percent increase of death threats.

I get the sense of the surreal with some “movement conservative” commentary throwing the charge of hypocrisy in remembering the Bush years.  Take the matter of Joe Wilson.  This has been met with “revelations” and discoveries of, for instance, Pete Stark saying mean things about the president.  He said Bush is a liar, you see, and therefor how can we say that Wilson was off base for calling Obama a liar?  “Wow.  You don’t say?”  Where the equivalence is here, I don’t know.

What happened at Bush’s SOTU addresses?  A few occasions of booing.  Other manners that effectively display one’s displeasure include, for instance, Ted Kennedy shaking his head furiously.  And then there was that moment where he was perhaps dozing off, perhaps not.  The camera loves those to pick those things out.  Perhaps Wilson’s problem was that he had to up the ante in order to get some name and face recognition?  Also workable, in group dynamics,m is the old run of the mill partisan dividing sit up versus sit at various presidential applause lines.  This is more interesting with divided government where it’s immediately apparent without camera roll over — the Speaker versus the Vice President, and was also interesting during the Clinton years when he gave the Republicans almost as many stand-up moments versus the Democrats as he did his Democratic party — the rules of “Triangulation”.

There is a continuum at work here.  I can forsee that moment where it will be de riguour policy to heckle and heckle.  Though, I can’t quite see the shoe throw as being standard just yet.

There is something that has become a reoccuring bit on The Daily Show.  It is reoccuring not as any attachment to a running joke, but because of the repetitiveness of our politics.  Last week’s rendition had footage of the 9/12 tea-party rally with Sean Hannity speaking from out of the Bush Administration years, commenting on how “they’re calling the president every name in the book” and on and on.  It’s a strange one, indeed.  A mindset of manichean qualities, defining “Americanism”.  Incidentally, I probably shouldn’t comment on Nancy Pelosi’s words — not having had a look see myself — but around there might be her weakest point (it has been in the past)– the spirit of McCarthy and the spirit of Calhourn are just as much a part of the American fabric as anything else.

You know what “the Right” and the “Conservative Movement” needs as a sort of tempering force?  Their own fictional president.  Throughout the Bush Administration, your Democratic person would constantly point to President Bartlet and say “That’s My President!”  With that, The West Wing provided a sort of safety valve and equalizer as the nation’s attitudes, from their perspective, swerved off course in that long stretch where Bush’s approval rating stood in the 60s and 70s — some approximate Democratic Administration as opposed to someone approaching Nader territory in politics.

I don’t know that this Conservative version of the West Wing would work.  Think of the problem of the supposed antidote to the Daily Show — Fox’s “30 Minute News Hour”.  Something worth noting about Jon Stewart — his send-up on Acorn is receiving “pleasantly surprised” plaudits from conservative bloggers, which it shouldn’t — that has all the workings that Stewart would jump on.  “Half Hour News Hour” was not equipped to step out of its boundary lines.

The West Wing ended with Alan Alda’s character elected president, Republican.  Maybe Aaron Sorkin can just pick up the show from there and not .  But probably not.  My “temperizing force” theory will fall apart as he’s declared a “RINO”, and requisite bashing of Lawrence O’Donnell.

It’s almost a cliche to comment on Fox News like this.  They continue to commit crimes against legitimate Journalism or News gathering.  Three items

Item #1: In a curious twist to their habit of misidentifying the party of Republicans Behaving Badly, or occasionally stepping out of the Republican line (one might be a mistake, two is a trend, three is a habit, four is a network policy), they designated Max Baucus as a Republican.

Okay.  Item #2.  Obama gave a speech before students at the University of Maryland.  A news outlet can legitimately shun it aside — all Obama was doing, frankly, was pushing his agenda.  Frankly, though, in an arena where the goal is to fill up 24 hours a day, it’s probably better than the adjunct fourth hour of some radio talk host’s three hour radio program.  Fox News didn’t run it, preferring instead overhyping Acorn — worthy of attention, and probably even worthy of an outsized attention for a conservative biased news outlet, if they wanted to be that.  But the thing here is that Fox News would have jumped to any speech from President George W Bush on the drop of a hat.  It’s just what they are.

Item #3, and the real focus of this blog post.  Fox News bought a full page ad placed in the Washington Post.  “How did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN miss the story?”  The answer is that they didn’t.  Frankly, from what I’ve surmised, they paid the gathering of 60,000 or so (Double that figure if you wish; it’s immaterial to me) a bit too much attention.  But what they didn’t do was lay into it as a promotional vehicle.  And why should they?  This was Fox News’s crowd.  Some signs focused against all those networks and praised Fox News for “Telling the Truth”.

What the Hell was the point of this advertisement?
I guess it is a two-fold equation.  Assuage their audience.  Fox “Fair and Balanced” News stands with YOU against those other lying liberal networks.  And, to referee some against the other media outlets.

For his part, Obama is doing a full court press on the Sunday political talk shows.  He is appearing on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Univision.  You notice a conspicuous abesnce there?

Conspicuously absent is … Telemundo.  Obama is snubbing Telemundo.

Hitler.  George Bush was Hitler.  Now Barack Obama is Hitler.  I’ve tried to figure out how Gerald Ford might have been Hitler, but I’ve come up empty.
Also it may well be interesting to explore the differences between the war protests (in 2002 through 2003 organized by Ramsey Clarke’s little outfit, eventually another group came to the forefront and butted them out) and the Tea Party (Freedomworks – Dick Armey.  Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Movement).  The former was larger and had more distance from either of the two major political parties — also generally part of the permanent Protest Culture of the Left and not in any way successful in altering any policy course; the latter probably succeeds in a sort of “murder — suicide” model — everyone’s poll numbers collapse, and probably works for the bottom line interests of the fund-raisings.

Joe Wilson here, along with Dick Armey and others, and see the amusing explanation of Larouche as a “former Labor Party candidate“, is dishonest there — see the video clip I mentioned in a blog post, and libertarian magazine Reason blogger in same for non-Larouchie Obama = Hitler-oids.  But basically Larouche has gone where-ever the “We have a new Hitler” people are, whoever they are at the time.  (Also see the Jon Stewart clip leading up to the Barney Frank confrontation for speakers at some early tea party events.)  I am partial to the “Other side did it” defense, to a large extent.

Now that I’ve gotten that little disclaimer out of the way, I can proceed.  But one last item from the attempted wikipedia edits as it settles into its humdrum stasis position:

Leatherstocking: I had never heard of “ego stripping” until SlimVirgin added the new section.
Once again, I don’t believe him.

The major story in the world of Larouche Politics (sorry, but I can’t take these pronouncements as terribly interesting — though, the phrase here that strikes me as particularly playing with fire is “Obama should back down or he might be hung.“) is the Edmonds, Washington man, a Holocaust Survivor, and his angry reaction to an “Obama – Hitler” sign.  (See also a post here, here, here, :
“I saw Hitler’s soldiers. I saw swastikas every day. To call Obama stupid, even criminal, OK, that’s politics. But Hitler? It’s hurting to anyone no matter who is president,” he said.)

There are over 400 comments left to this Seattle Times article, most of them uninteresting and unilluminating on every level, a lot of straw being burned and nobody has any interest in communicating, some partisan jabs here and there, some arguments I’m terribly familiar with having stared at this for long enough.  I guess this is the first semi-interesting thing I see:

The poster with Adolf Hitler slogan is a clear signal of the evil design of the people working behind the scene be they are political, secret foreign agents or fifth columnist working within the country to foment political unrest with sinister motives, needs immediate apprehension to stop further escalation of their evil designed destructive move.
I love a good conspiracy, don’t you?

They just hate anyone who isn’t LaRouche.
I think there’s a rhyme and reason to some things here.  In the late 1960s, Larouche formed an organization peeling off left wing student activists, where the recruits are.  In the 1970s he “flanked” the sort of liberal president Carter and moved to support some conservative and right-wing causes into the 1980s, where the money is.  In the late 1990s and early 00s, he found recruits where they were, somewhere in a sea of a liberal to conspiracy college aged student base.  And now he’s taken them where the money is, flanking the sort of liberal president Obama (they’re “for single payer”, supposedly.  And in a fictional land, taking control of a broader movement.)  One warning: there are a few glitches to this Grand Unified Theory.

To be fair, susan423, the LaRouche nutjobs that are waving around the Hitler signs are not members of the right or of the left, but are just simple visitors from Planet Crazy.

Do Mr. Gasparian a favor the next time you pass one of the LaRouche tables downtown, along the waterfront or anywhere else. Pick up a pile of their literature, walk away and deposit it in the trash where their messages of hate belong. It’s much more effective than getting arrested.

See also:
LaRouchians remind me of the nuts in Waco and the folks who followed Jim Jones and the tin hatters who thought the Hale Bopp comet was their true home. Where they’re different is that they shove their misguided, ill-conceived theories into the public dialogue. At least the other cults kept to themselves.

But The thing that interests me about this story.
I believe that the Larouche propaganda machine innoculated their membership for this sort of incident.  See the article I cut and pasted here.

At a literature table in the New Jersey region, an older woman was at our literature table, getting briefed on the LPAC fight, and looking at our signs on Obama and Hitler. She looked over the LPAC literature, and exclaimed, “You’re right, his policy is Nazi.” Then she pulled up her shirtsleeve to reveal the numbers tattooed on her arm, put there when she was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland at the age of 9.

And so it goes…
Good for the larouchies that guy had no right to loose his cooll like that, and deserved to be arrested.
Any real organization would recognize this as bad pr.  Ah those LaRouche people; so damn classy!

The mindset is shown with what silverchild57 says (from earlier deployment onto a campus):  I am horrified to witness young people being so “politically correct”, thoughtless, and controlled by popular opinion, as to react to the LaRouche organizers in the same way stupid “liberal” and “right-wing” baby boomers do.
LaRouche has been fighting fascism his entire adult life, even when he was a voice crying in the wilderness, slandered by the rotten news media, unjustly thrown in prison by the George H.W. Bush Administration, etc. A courageous fighter for the truth no matter what was thrown at him. That is one of the things I most admire about him; he fights for what’s right, even if nobody else does! That takes some stones, something virtually nobody in Washington has anymore!

Bleh.  Obama was at the University of Maryland yesterday, rallying his base of youngsters.  One sentence describes something:  A solitary LaRouche volunteer stood at attention with a poster of the president depicted as Adolf Hitler.

In other news, Washington Monthly saw to it to repost their Avi Klein “Publish or Perish” article such that it now surfaces in the google news.  If anybody can illuminate what they did and what thought process went into that, please feel free to do so.