The first thing I note in The Weekly Standard insta – piece from William Kristol on Sarah Palin’s resignation…

… Hey!  Finally The Weekly Standard is looking to someone besides Reagan as a historical model to connect.  Margaret Thatcher! 

Which is good, because otherwise I’m stuck with Kristol’s clever “unconventional thinking”.  Sarah Palin is off and running for president.

I suppose she’ll take a hit for leaving the governorship early – but how much of one? She’s probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor.

I will now farm out to an Alaskan the question of what it is Palin has accomplished.
I will give Kristol this: We do live in a system which rewards electoral mediocrity.  A presidential candidate has to step aside any political controversy that may undo him/her.  And avoid leaving a record to pick apart.  It looks like the future lies with single-term Senators and governors who can step away before the effects of an economic down-turn force harsh decisions.
Palin may also be truncating the Nixon approach, I suppose.  Out of office, you shore up a “machine” and obstensibly campaign for the party in the mid-term.  It strikes me as a debased version of that, but then again the “Experience versus New face” campaign of Clinton versus Obama bama versus Clinton as a reprise of Johnson versus Kennedy seemed kind of shaky — Clinton’s tenure of Senatorial experience matching the “new face” Kennedy.

All in all, it’s going to be a high-wire act. The odds are against her pulling it off. But I wouldn’t bet against it.

I would.
In other news, Palin is threatening to sue for libel irresponsible rumor mongerers.

The type of rumor which stems from trying to make sense of puzzling mid-term resignations.

Wait.  This is another clever Nixonian ploy!

Palin… will… be president.  Just you watch!

I guess by making her announcement on one of the biggest News Dump Day of the year, the day before Independence Day Weekend, Sarah Palin foregoes the pontificating of the chattering class.  The “A Team” on the Cable “News” networks are on vacation, and the “B Team” is probably pushed aside for various to be unwatched Patriotic Specials.

But there’s not too much commentary to give.  What little I see is pretty obvious:  “It’s hard to see how this helps a presidential run.”  You think?  That is the point, I gather.  To speculate further, I sort of assume something is coming down the pike that would make that a moot point:  is something about to blow up in her ethics investigation, perhaps?  The wildest of the conspiracy theories regarding Trig’s birth on the verge of being proven true?  I assume we’ll find out sooner or later, and probably sooner.

If it’s not too bad, I assume she has some sort of future on a conservative speakers’ circuit, and the type of cruise ship tour which smittened Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard gang that helped push Palin into her year in the political spot-light.

In the end, I’m left wondering what the year of Sarah Palin meant.  She probably raised McCain’s vote percentage by giving a base something they could vote for, even as it negated the most intellectually honest nonideological line of attack against Obama (one year in the Senate before manuevering a Presidential run?  Really?) and thus effectively capping his support somewhere below the 50 mark.  What does it say that she had that base and how does one dice that item of Identity politics?  My lingering impression is the SNL sketch which was an unaltered and unexaggerated enactment of her Katie Couric interview, none the worse for comedy.  She now fades away.  We no longer have Sarah Palin to kick around — unlike Nixon.

Okay.  I’m a couple of days later in changing my calendar page from June to July, so I guess I’ll do so now.

Hey.  July 4 is tomorrow.  Independence Day!   Great!

Hm.  I wonder if August’s photograph will be the one that went around the Internet last election season.  Flag based, focused on the season.

(Photograph from the 2009 Sarah Palin calendar taken from Andrew Sullivan, who I think cited it from somewhere else.  And, yes, it is nauseating.  But no worse than the 2009 “Joseph Biden Calendar”, I suppose.)

Apparently stung by the net effect of sparodic blogs reporting, in combination of mock and irritation, meetings with Larouche card-table deployments, LPAC has stuck this report — a distillation of some scattered comments into something of a rallying call.  It is… funny, in that moribud way all of these things tend to be funny.

Generation that Fought the Nazis: LaRouche Is Right on Obama!
July 1, 2009 (LPAC)—Lyndon LaRouche’s webcast call to arms on fighting Barack Obama’s Nazi policy on medical treatment, profoundly touched the souls of his generation—those who fought in World War II, or lived through it. But many boomers and younger people were protective of Obamamania, and fearful of what their “friends” and peers will think about calling Obama’s plan “Nazi.”
Among the older people, whether it was those who attended the Washington-area meeting where LaRouche spoke, the regional meetings, or watched it on the web, or learned about it in the field, there was a powerful response. 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.
At the Washington, DC-area event, an Italian-American man from Philadelphia, said, “Lyn has to win. I know, I lived under Mussolini. Lyn is right.” Two men in their 80s had the same response. One, at a field site in Los Angeles said, referring to Obama and the Administration, “I’m 80 years old. They’re out to kill me!” Another World War II veteran, attending the New Jersey office showing of the webcast, said, “I’m in trouble … I’m over 80 … they want to be rid of people like me.” In Chicago, a 79-year-old man, who had retreated into religion from politics, listened by phone to Lyn’s webcast, and later said, “That speech should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country! What he said about the British is absolutely true! In fact, everything he said is true! He’s the smartest man in the world!!”

Hm.  Frankly, they could play the “Current events remind person alive during WW2 of Nazi Germany” game since at least Nixon, probably before.  A note to the family of the elderly persons referenced in this item:  it may be time to take over some of their financial decisions.

Granted, if one cares one probably has read these things, but I draw your attention to the factnet posts of  Hylozoic Hedgehog  under the “Old Mole Files” and the “New Mole Files”.  I gather part of the purpose here is carrying on an argument against  Dennis King (“quit lying” about “Larouche’s ideological orientation”), such as I’m left with the belief that it promised more than it delivered on that score.

I assume this was the purpose of putting in bold type and adding a paranthetical “emphasis added” to the phrase in Larouche’s stated purpose of finding “Leninist Boomers”.  Of course, a secondary purpose is to put the context of the org as being a forty year history of yanking a small cadre of “Leninist Boomers” around in various fashions, which I guess would argue for the cult orientation over any ideological consideration.

To review how the “left” and “right” strait-jacket is reconciled, here are two quotations from Tim Wohlforth in his memoir The Prophet’s Children:

“In fact it is quite remarkable how the ‘new’ Larouche organizes his followers in a Leninist cadre fashion, drives them with a vision of the historic tasks and the necessity of their actions and successfully reaches layers of society with “transitionl” slogans that appeal to economic needs or old prejudices.”

“The Larouchites began mouthing anti-Semitic phraseology, promoting the nuclear program and arms industry, advocating a Star Wars defense, and baiting gay people.  The old Trotskyite, a member of my own small organization, had emerged as a Fascist!”

I hesitate to say Wohlforth over-stepped his bounds in referring to various mainstream causes of the 1980s into the realm of “fascist”, though the “gay baiting” in particular may have the “matters of degree” on a one dimensional “left / right” spectrum.  The “anti-semitic phraseology” is what remains constant.  Also I wonder what “layers of society” he refers to here — surely the elderly people in the LPAC release and the similar credit fraud victims of the 1980s, and the college aged recruits, and a larger number I guess anyone who’s quoted a single line from Leon Strauss in the past eight years and talked and blamed Hitler on Prescott Bush over the past two decades.

As for the Nazis?  Well, we can move further afield from King, who  — cavalier about posting a photograph of the man’s arms out-stretched though he may be (ironically transforming Larouche into an ordinary politician).  I have no opinion on Plato and his “Golden Souls”, except that Plato’s Republic has served as the rationalization for a number of despots.  I have no opinion on Nazi Space swirls, except to point to nazi courtship.  And I’m hard pressed to figure out what else the org’s effect, outside its orbit of spending membership’s lives [Jeremiah Duggan the extreme example], has been besides stirring these conspiratorial items into public discourse.
Across the spectrum of what it means for Larouche to be defined as a nazi:  On the far edge you have European’s “researchers” and “reporters” who insist to him that they know they all read Mein Kampf and sit before portraits of Hitler.  An edge inward and you have this admitted tin-foil hat wearer’s conspiracy theory that the org was financed by fleeing Nazis’ Gold and there we have Dave Emory’s program which sticks him in as part of that “Underground Reich” (though, Emory would also hold forth about Prescott Bush on that score.)  At the opposite end, “European” had denied any existence of anti-semitism until recently.

Bear with me.  There will be at least two more posts of this type.  Relating to the news coverage and debate surrounding the assassination of James Garfield, from July of 1881… on a couple months.  Why?  It seems to provide provides some tangeantal historical context for current debate surrounding political violence, and the problems of where to place blame and what to fault.  The debate seems to reverberate and rhyme.

Next post for this mini-series, when I get around to it.: a couple of preachers.  Fall of Rome and all that, unless we change our wicked ways.
New York Tribune
A second president lies stricken down by assassination.  President Lincoln was murdered, not by rebellion, but by the spirit which gave the rebellion its force.  President Garfield has been shot down, not by a political faction, but by the spirit which a political faction has begotten and used.  But for that spirit, there was hardly a man in this country who seemed at sunrise more safe from murderous assault. […]
“Was he crazed by political excitement?,” then, as many say?  At what point, if ever, did the madness of faction become the madness of irresponsibility?  Do the leaders of factions ever intend all the mischief which grows from the wild and desperate spirit which they create, feed, and stimulate week after week?  Is it not their constant crime against self-government that, by kindling such a spirit, they send weak or reckless men beyond the bounds of right or reason? […]
As a “Stalwart of Stalwarts” his passion was intense enough to do the thing other reckless men had wished were done.  So the assassin Booth put into a bloody deed the malignant spite of thousands of beaten rebels.  His deed stands in history as the cap-sheaf of the rebellion.  So the spirit of faction which fired the shots of yesterday gave in that act the most complete revelation of its real character.
…………………….

Richmond Dispatch
Well is it for the man who sped the bullet of the assassination that he did not do it in a Southern city; for hot Southern blood would have terminated his life without waiting to learn whether he was a maniac or not — as he was, we take it for granted.
……………………..

Louisville Courier Journal
It is fortunate that the hand which dealt that blow was not that of a Southern man, because if it had been we should have from one end of the land to the other a Stalwart outcry against the South.  The author of this dire crime claims to be a Stalwart, and what is there in the character of the man in whose name and interest the deed was done and whose desperate fortunes it saves from destruction to rescue them from a suspicion which would, by a change in that author’s nativitiy, firmly attach itself to the most innocent people?  Mrs. Surratt was hanged on less circumstantial evidence than occurs to the mind as to Roscoe Conkling and Chester A Arthur.  The vile nature of the contest at Albany, the despicable rancor of the combatants, and the base methods adopted by both parties, render murder as likely a weapon as any other; and while we should be slow to accuse anybody, and prayerful that the man Guiteau is not the instrument of a conspiracy, we should not be eager to assume the innocence of a body of political wretches whose hands are stained by every other crime — not preciptate in wishing to hurry into power a hand of bandits and plunderers who may have planned this assassinatino as their last resort.

………………………………
Atlanta Constitution
The news is unquestionably startling, but no thoughtful man will deny that it is the natural and appropriate outcome of the political insanity which goes by the name of Republicanism.  Frenzy and fanaticism are the streams which have fed this remarkable organization from the first.  The fury with which the Southern people have been pursued, the stupendous fraud of 1876, the acknowledged corruption of 1880, the tremendous struggle between the factions, and the marvelous greed for office, all go to show the life of an individual, even though the individual be the Republican President of the United States, will not be allowed to stand in the way of those who are seeking place and power.  There are thousands of Republicans in the North today as insane as the “Stalwart of the Stalwarts” who shote the President, and as ready to be made tools of.  There are thousands of Republicans who would welcome a period of anarchy that would place in control of affairs the restless and revolutionary spirits who are determined at all hazards to control the Government.

It’s always interesting to see how the parties position their fund raising pitches, tending toward an unrealistic Villiany.  Try this story for instance.

The Democratic Governors Association sent a fundraising e-mail to supporters Tuesday highlighting Minnesota, Alaska, Florida and Georgia as “top pickup prospects.”  […]

He also invoked DFLers’ biggest opponents — Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Sen. Norm Coleman — in his pitch.

“Bachmann, you may remember, called for an ‘armed and dangerous’ revolution against President Obama’s policies,” Glendening wrote. “And when Norm Coleman lost his 2008 Senate race, he wasted millions of dollars on legal maneuvers designed to keep Al Franken from being seated.

“Can you imagine what Bachmann or Coleman would do if they took control of Minnesota and its eight congressional districts?”

A bit hard to fathom.  I am willing to bet neither will be running for Governor, or if one or the other does (particularly Bachman — though Coleman would be exempt from my bet if he had lost the election a bit more cleanly), the Republican Party of Minnesota and nationally would be unofficially backing somebody else for nomination.  And that’s not just because of the sentiment expressed with:

Although the names of both Bachmann and Coleman have been bruited about as potential candidates, both have demurred about the possibility.

So why bring the dire warnings of a Bachman or Coleman Governorship into a fundraising pitch?  Was George W Bush pre-occupied?

Rush Limbaugh explained Mark Sanford’s affair as an opt out of the Obama’s Destuctive System of Governance.

Michael Savage furthered along to the grand Obama Political Destruction Conspiracy:  “We’re also going to talk about the hit job on Gov. Sanford. Yes he committed adultery by admission, but you have to ask yourself a few questions. How did his local paper get his private emails, number one? Number two, they say they have known about this since December, but they held off releasing this information until now. So you have to ask yourself, why did the press just now get around to exposing the scandal of Gov. Sanford?”

Of the two, I’m guessing there is more to the Savage conspiracy than the Limbaugh theory.  Consider the history, and consider this bit of hypothesis.

Obama’s political career began with a special election in the Illinois Senate which opened up when US Congressman Melvin Reynolds was indicted and runned out of office — as the Illinois State Seantor Alice Palmer jumped up to run for the Congressional seat.  Famously, after Palmer lost, and after she assembled the requisite number of petitions to get on the ballot, Obama aggressively challenged Palmer’s name of the ballot.
Melvin Reynolds was indicted for  sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse for engaging in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer.  Perhaps Obama noticed this opening of sex-related scandals, as his next career rise was certainly aided and abetted by sex scandals.

The early Democratic front runner for the US Senate seat in 2004 was Blair Hull.  Then… A month before the primary elections a news story broke regarding his divorce from his ex-wife. The controversy ended up destroying the Hull campaign.^  Hull tried to keep the divorce records sealed, but pressure from journalists and his opposing candidates forced him to release them.  And so Obama was nominated.
The Republican nominee was Jack Ryan.  Some of his divorce records had been opened up to the public; others not.  Then…

On June 22, 2004, after receiving the report from the court-appointed referee, the judge released the files that were deemed consistent with the interests of Ryan’s young child. In those files, Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had taken her to sex clubs in several cities, intending for them to have sex in public. […]  Jim Oberweis, Ryan’s defeated GOP opponent, commented that “these are allegations made in a divorce hearing, and we all know people tend to say things that aren’t necessarily true in divorce proceedings when there is money involved and custody of children involved.

In short order, Ryan dropped out of the race.  Obama had no opponent on the ballot.  Then the Republicans selected Alan Keyes to fill the ballot, improving Obama’s electoral fortunes even more.

Obama gets elected president four years later.   Sure enough, within half a year, two of his possible opponents are destroyed by scandals involving extramarital affairs. One John Ensign starts to work on raising his profile, and as such gets touted as a Republican presidential possibility.  He ten has to admit to an extra-marital affair with a a female staff worker to avoid threats of blackmail.  One Mark Sanford emerges as a leading opponent of Obama in striking against his stimulus bill, and becomes a favorite of some conservatives for a presidential run.  But he disappears for five days and is caught in a web of lies involving hiking the Appalachia Trail, and thus is forced to confess to an extra-marital affair in Argentina.
Two down — ten more to go!

It might behoove me to mention that Obama won the Democratic nomination from something called “the Clinton Machine”, a towering contraption which had various  vulnerabilities to it that the media tended to gloss over in early explanations of Hillary Clinton’s “Inevitibility”.  The residuals of the Monica Lewinsky scandal were probably one permetation, though it’s hard to measure against the whole body of work.

I suppose, to connect the dots, to challenge Obama on his way to the Power is to expose your infedility skeletons in the closet.  The one man Obama could not vanquish was his Congressional opponent, Bobby Rush.  Maybe the media wasn’t on Obama’s take yet?  Or mabe Rush was good at hiding any extramarital affair from Obama’s Hunger-Lust hand?

Out of the Matt Taibbi – Goldman Sachs dust-up — a bit of it here,
he brings to the attention that Goldman Sachs is set to profit from the Cap and Trade bill.

Of course, Mr. Goldman Sachs would.  He’s very much plugged in to the trends, and can hedge his bets every which way in Congressional pieces of legislation.  So he’s moved forward based on that one, so intricately tied to the US Government that he is.

Not really a good argument either way regarding Cap and Trade, as against some Goldman Sachs bashing in — for instance — the Dennis Kucinich question at the time of the first bank bail-out “Is this the U.S. Congress or the Board of Directors at Goldman Sachs?”.

Actually, I am left wondering about the greasing of the wheels for support from Big Corn in advancing the great savior “Ethanol”, skewing and disfiguring the policy unnaturally.    I have read a small amount of literature decrying Ethanol, and a smaller amount defending it.  My guess is that this geo-politically convenient energe source had better match the defenders’, lest this make “Cap and Trade” ever more useless, and…

… Obama’s legacy turn out to be one of swatting flies.

Maybe it matters not so much.  It barely passed the House.  Anything is supposed to be apt to pass the House.  I have a difficult time seeing the headlines as “Legislative Victory”, seeing the future in the Senate.  Maybe a “Clean Coal” allowance can be greased through to keep Byrd on board.

“Thicket of Lies Sank Adams Case”.  The Oregonian reports.  Either dishonestly or misleadingly.

Well, the primary lie comes out of Beau Breedlove’s credibility problem.  Adams’s lawyer grabbed him at the go and had him sign an affadivit declining any sexual conduct before the age of 18.  This conflcited with his later admission of the bathroom stall kiss.  And couple this with Breedlove’s perceived flakiness in his fifteen minutes of fame.

But that headline.  Surely the Oregonian has made up its mind on whence where Adams should go.  And they can turn over their editorial page to a nonstop drumbeat of “Oust Adams Now” and remain firmly in their right.  Meanwhile, the front page headline “Thicket of Lies Sank Adams Case” is as narrowly correct as the Kroeger case was narrowly legalistically founded.  Clearly the Oregonian would like an implied apostrophe — “A Thicket of Lies” having indeed sank “The Adams Case” as opposed to “Adams’s Case”* having been sank by “A Thicket of Lies”.

Back to Breedlove for a moment.  Regarding this sentence in the Willamette Week’s pull:
Beau Breedlove is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.

Perhaps you can say that, but there’s nothing in the following to support such.  He’s cahsed in on his 15 minutes of fame for a small fortune, and has developed a passive / aggressive stance toward the media — the latter aided in part with being pitted with, for instance, the Oregonian text message taunt of — what was it?  “Forgot to mention that one, eh?”, when such and such a revelation was made.

Really, I get the feeling the reporters of various news outlets are so entrenched in this media bubble that they can’t quite get outside of it and recognize a more than one-dimensional interaction with them.
(Incidentally, The Oregonian back-tracked.)

————–
* My Junior Year High School English teacher “finalized” my understanding of the rules of apostrphes.  Though, if a superior demands no “s” to follow a name/word that ends with “s”, I’ll comply — ’tis the one lesson I picked up from my Sixth grader teacher.  Which brings me to some Style and Grammer news:  The British have dropped the ‘I Before E Except after C’ rule due to “Too Many Exceptions”.

To clarify my Sanford posting in the “Horse Race” post, when I saw the hoop-lah over Mark Sanford’s disappearance I knew what was happening was a lot of sharks circling around looking for a sex scandal.  I didn’t really believe the “Went hiking the Appalachia” story, but I didn’t disbelieve it either — I don’t know the fellow, and despite what people seem to think, a governor has a bigger field of privacy than a president!, nor was I particularly dismissive that an affair wasn’t the source of a cover-up, I just would much prefer to allow a politician, or whomever, to have the opportunity to jump away for a spell and hike the Appalachias, or whatever, without a presumption of something unsordid.

It’s a characteristic of the Internets that the reaction was to tap the “Hike Naked Weekend” and ponder that storyline.

When it turned out he dashed over to Argentina, I gathered that the sharks swimming around looking for dirt were about right, though it’s a curious affair.  So we have two Republican falls from grace within a week.  Two Republican Presidential Hopefuls?  Not particularly — Sanford would surely have run for office, as that sort of messanger candidate that doesn’t really accumulate a nomination, and Ensign’s Presidential Bubble was a nugget of a bored ever flowing chattering class apt to notice a politician ducking into Iowa.

But the bottom line is that I need to do a dusting off of this here.

I think I can safely pluck away the Kid — that was a case of kicking ’em while they were down, and Joe the Plummer is no longer a Republican.  But for the life of me I don’t know who to replace these three with.  I’ll get back to it, I guess.