A Letter to the Editor in Tuesday’s Oregonian: 

The Sunday “In My Opinion” article by Steven Wojcikiewicz was the most despicable, self-serving piece of verbiage that I have ever read in your paper (US forfeits its ideals, moral high ground”).

He equates the brute force interrogation methods used on the crew of the USS Pueblo by North Korea to the so-called enhanced interrogation used today against our country’s enemies.  In short, he is saying that we are just as guilty as North Korea in the use of torture.

The cruel treatment of the Pueblo’s crew is well documented.  Having a person beaten so brutally that his head was as big as a basketball is graphic enough evidence to put North Korea in a torture class of its own.

The evidence that our country is engaged in torture should not come from the front page, the evening news or some web blog.  If America is to be equated with North Korea in any manner, I think a conscious, responsible and learned citizen would require more than that.  The crew of USS Pueblo deserves more than that.
Imon L Pilcher
US Navy, retired, McMinnville
……………………

First off, I admit to not having read the editorial he is referring to, but I think I — and any semi-literate– can piece together the general thrust of what was said.

There are two lines that throw me here, the latter one a standard dismissal of the media in the “Stabbing in the Back” motif with the dismissive”the front page, the evening news or some web blog”.  But I can basically ignore that because the other line strikes me as more telling and thus more important.

“So-called enhanced interrogation”, notably the use of the qualifier “so-called”.  “Enhanced Interrogation” is a term which serves as an apologia for various interrogation techniques; dropping the phrase “so called” in front of “enhanced interrogation” suggests the term as a euphemism for Torture, and his use suggests he knows even as it doesn’t arrive at the torture techniques of the North Koreans…

I suspected Barack Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton by a rather large margin in South Carolina, but I under-estimated the extent by about ten points.  The storyline became something about Bill Clinton using racial polarization, and a dime-store prognastication tells me this can’t lead to anywhere good.

Actually we’re lead to believe we have a fight between the black electorate and the female electorate.  Meaning the swing vote is… um… either black women or white men — hard to say.

I have looked over the presidential candidates, and have made a decision.  I will be supporting full fledged the Man With A Plan, no-nonsense

Fred Thompson.

Oh, wait.

Okay, Man with Experience, World Weary,

Bill Richardson.

Problem?

Duncan Hunter.

Okay, a little bit out of left field, a man of tremendous integrity…

Dennis Kucinich.

tap tap tap tap…

Okay, I will settle for nothing less and nothing other than

Bob Dole.

BOB DOLE FOR PRESIDENT!  Woot!

I am having trouble finding a description of an item from the Mitt Romney campaign.  I do believe it comes with the same event as the one where Romney awkwardly shouted out “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, which whatever you can say about — never mind the idea that it would be the first thing Romney apparently scans out of his mind to associate with while entertaining a predominantly black crowd on Martin Luther King Jr, Day is a one hit wonder anthem from 2001 or therabouts — is better than an anecdote I cannot immediately locate on struat.com where someone on a long bus ride name checked to a black passenger Arsenio Hall — this being a few years ago, 2003 or 2004.  And it is not on par with Mitt Romney pressing the flesh and…

… smilingly telling a mother that her baby son looks like Michael Jordan.

The two characteristics which make one look like Michael Jordan, I suppose, would be #1: black skin, and #2: Baldness.

Most babies are bald, I believe.

Maybe he had previously displayed a good vertical leap?  That’s… Michael Jordan-esque.

Incidentally, in scanning to try to find this, I note that Michael Jordan has sent donations to Barack Obama’s campaign.  I also note the news-report refers to Jordan as co-owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, because, you know, um… that’s the NBA franchise everyone will always associates him with.
Next, Mitt Romney will join with an event full of Hicks and compete with Huckabee by telling them that his popcorned squirrels were…

I don’t know what might be more impressive in the arena of popcorning squirrels, and further dredge someone to the common clay.  Can one assuage Mormon concerns by suggesting it was picked up in the days of the Mormon fore-fathers for survival?  I don’t know..

It would have had to have been fifth grade when my class was handed a MLK – Civil Rights – History of Broad Subject and Where We Are Now essay assignment.  Nothing particularly inspired on my part, but by the standards of generic elementary school mish and mashing a lot of secondary sources and writing in complete sentences essaying, mine stood out.  After all, it was longer than anyone else’s — something which amounted to something and spoke to at the very least some cognitive ability — sitting down to type the thing out on the computer lab, my hunt and peck typing was much quicker than everyone elses’, and yet I ended up having to sit there roughly to the end.  So it was that at the start of having to write this the teacher told us that she was going to send a few of these to some statewide judging committee, and so it was that mine was the only one she bothered sending.  This had no effect on me one way or the other.

Weeks later, a sheet of paper came in the mail, essentially a Certificate of Participation.  It had stamped on it, in the background, an image of Martin Luther King, Jr. and it had on the governor’s signature and it said not much more.  It was the type of thing I would draw some cartoons on a few years’ later, and in the meantime just slide into a box paying no mind whatever toward.  Nonetheless, my mother caught sight of it, or perhaps even opened the letter in the first place, and asked why I had not shown it to my teacher.  There was no good answer to the question because it was a stupid question.  My mother somehow attributed shyness to my marked indifference, when it was more a matter I don’t know what this could possibly signify.
That aside, I thought about that essay a few years’ ago when reading a piece by an English professor expressing her annoyance at judging elementary school Martin Luther King, Jr. essays and reading the same cookie-cutter tripe, depoliticized Triumphantalist Journeys which ends with all issues of equality more or less, and more on the more side, settled — a nod to a vague need to continue, though we don’t really know where we are continuing toward.  Likewise, I recall name-checking any black entertainer I could think of, which ends up sort of cloying, and if I were mature as opposed to an idiot eleven year old, you’d be justified in hitting me over the head.  A satisfying piece it was as it justified my fifth grade indifference.  The only thing I can’t quite put my finger on is how things could be different — teach your elementary school children something and see if you can lead to something besides a bit of polly-annaism and awkwardness.

On MLK Day I don’t know if I want to hear is the “I Have A Dream” speech.  Better to hear something from “Beyond Vietnam” or… something somewhere else.  Besides which, the number of lines the average American knows from “I Have A Dream” stands at… two.

So.  Um.  Hillary Clinton received more votes in the Nevada Caucuses.  Barack Obama received one more delegate.  And, um, this is an amazing comeback for Clinton because after falling from a 20 point lead to her 6 point victory, she won with the Culinary Union endorsing Obama.

Our electoral system is just a bit dumb.

The storyline we’ve been treated to, as exemplified by the thrust of the debate questions attempting to instigate a Race Riot, starts somewhere with the Clintons floating the name of Lyndon Johnson as an unsexy grunt-figure in pushing civil rights and then ends… ends roughly with with the heckler shouting to get to something more important.

Or maybe it commences with Rush Limbaugh trolling through the political zietgeist for any hook at all so he can do a “comedy” bit based on strong enunciations of the words “spade” and “ho”.  Hillary Clinton says that Obama has not done the “spade work”, and that is enough for Limbaugh.  We can expect more of this from that man, the ruse being something about “liberal hypocrisy”.  I can’t say I would have noticed had anyone come forth with the term “spade work”, and further I can’t say Limbaugh is on the winning side of the political fence at the moment — his antics I’m more bemused by and find just kind of sad — this is 2008 as opposed to 1994.

But.  Maybe one has to explain Obama’s reference to Ronald Reagan.  There are a number of directions to take that, starting with the reality that Reagan won two landslide elections, and that Reagan spent the 1980 election quoting FDR, Truman, and Kennedy, lest he be saddled with Nixon.  But the problem comes in further with his commentary, his Audacity, in referencing himself as a “transformative candidate”.  Which is something he sort of needs to be as opposed to say, if he indeed is.

Stylistically, I get a tad stunned by Obama, and I gather it is costing him votes in the primaries.  His particular message and brand of “Changes” suggests that the Republican Party will “change” right along with him.  In the realm of practical politics, there is no getting around the dirty and uncomfortable and necessary reality of partisan politics, and the Partisan Fight, which Obama’s Rhetoric seems to preclude – unless he is planning on bowing down to that which his partisan opponents believe, incorporated into what he is following through with.  It is sort of flumoxing and disappointing, and something Obama is probably going to have to figure out, lest he watch the primary voter gravitate toward Clinton…

… Though that brings up a particularly odd irony of figuring out what policies they were brawling through in the 1990s…

This is all glass half empty stuff.  The Glass Half Full is to simply point out that Huckabee wants God’s Law to supercede the Constitution and made that old Gay Marriage = Bestiality Marriage canard, and that McCain is going to follow our enemies to the Gates of Hell, wherever that is in his mind.  Mitt Romney is the best bet on the Republicans,  because he’s just phoney enough he might just be phoney to where he doesn’t quite believe himself right now.

And so it goes.

“Maybe one day it’ll be like that. Maybe one day it’ll be like, “Wow, SPs… They’ll just read about those in the history books.”

Just so you know, Scientology is wild and wooly.  And Tom Cruise is all about “KSW”, the Scientology equivalent of “Keeping It Real”.

SPs?  This line, of course, means that Tom Cruise wants you to die.  He wants all of us to die.  I do not know how this great purification happens, and I can only guess that L Ron Hubbard has prophesized it, and it will be followed.  At the hands of Tom Cruise and John Travolta and Will Smith.

Under the soundtrack to Mission Impossible.

Perhaps the closing credits to the Scientology Apocalypse can be Bob Seger’s  “Old Time Rock and Roll”.

SPs is interesting, because Bill O’Reilly has taken to using that term, in an awkward attempt to get the two letters into the commonly used lexicon.  The “Secular Progressives” who are out to destroy Christmas and force twelve year olds to take birth control.  The clean people are the “Traditionalists”, or I guess God’s Special People — the Great Silent Majority, perhaps.  At any rate, the market on “SP”s, sorry to tell Bill O’Reilly, has been cornered by the Grand Estate of L Ron Hubbard.

No word yet on O’Reilly imagines his version of SPs will someday be simply a part of the History books.  Or if he’s managed to K whatever it is he is keeping W.

I suppose any number of people will pop by and think the sarcastic “Wow! News Flash! Larouche is Insane! Again!”.  Also … you know… irrelevant to the day to day operation of everybody except the, um, 80 cult members and times a few former cult members.  I also suppose that the 80 cult members ordered off the Internet after following a handful of websites are… well, probably still around, I suspect. But, you know, I think there is something in the following about meme production in running such an operation.

For more tan thousands of years, from the rise of Sumer, a colony of Dravidian India, which spoke Dravidian, not a Semitic language, through the Semitic empires of Mesopotamia, and Canaan, the Middle East had become the cockpit of the greatest evil the planet had known, perhaps even to the present day. It wasn’t as well known as the modern versions of evil, but it was evil: so evil that it seemed the human species had no chance, as long as this evil existed.

All so very brilliant, in it’s way. But does it mean anything? You can be excused for shrugging it off, assuming he’s referring to the Jews, and walking away to engage in something more productive — staring blankly at a White Wall for a couple of hours, for instance, or — um — opening up a myspace account? But. Evil. A different variety of Evil than the one we know today, a more potent type of evil, yet… somehow… obscure evil. Okay. Gotcha!

The points of resistance were northern Egypt and Greece. Northern Egypt, or forces in Northern Egypt, collaborated with forces in Greece which we call republicans. The forces in Greece associated with the Ionian city-state republics, associated with Solon of Athens, associated with Plato, and Socrates; notably: These are the forces of civilization; these are the forces that gave us the first step to an alternative to Mesopotamian imperialism, the Mesopotamian oligarchical culture.

The syntax is kind of funky. Maybe this might be acceptable if this were a transcript of words spoken. For a moment I thought that the “first step to an alternative to Mesopotamian Imperialism” — need I say that this was Evil — is “the Mesopotamian Oligarchical Culture”. Surely this cannot be. Oligarchy is a 4-letter word, after all.

Everything we’ve achieved on this planet, in terms of better conditions of life, political freedom, freedom from insanity for the human species throughout the the planet, is derived, directly or indirectly, from the success of what was begun in collaboration of certain Egyptians, and certain Greeks, the Greeks identified with the Ionian city-state republics, with Solon of Athens, Plato, Socrates, and so forth.

But this didn’t work, this great republican scheme. It didn’t work because of democracy, like a kind of democracy, like Project Democracy, a democracy represented by those who indicted and committed judicial murder of Socrates. Those democrats who called themselves the Democratic Party of Athens, were actually Persian Agents, or Magi agents. This failure to understand how to deal with democracy, this weakness, doomed Greece. Conquered by Macedonia, the Greeks struck back, the friends of Socrates and Plato struck back, through Alexander the Great. Alexander was destroyed, and {Plato struck back, through Alexander the Great. Alexander was destroyed, and the great idea remained, but it was unsuccessful, until Christianity.

Okay, it is here that we find our Cult Leader discussing his prison sentence, railing against those who “committed judicial murder” not so much of Socrates as of SocRouche. The Persian Agents and the Magi Agents, who we can now sort of update here in the year 2008 as not even so much being George Herbert Walker Bush as of being Molly Kronberg.

The de facto conversion of Socrates posthumously to Christianity, by Christianity, the adoption of Plato, the recruitment of Plato to Christianity, a conversion of Plato to Christianity posthumously, effected by the Christian church, revived and made possible the success of all that was good in the Greek republican idea. And, this led to the emergence of European republican Christian culture.

Wait. Defacto conversion of Socrates posthumously to Christianity? Also Plato? Do they know they now accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior? Did somebody exhume them and baptize them?

But it wasn’t that simple. Because the enemy of this Christian tendency was pagan Imperial Rome, the tradition of Tiberius, and Augustus before Tiberius: of Nero; of Diocletian; of Julian the Apostate, and so forth. The tradition of the Third Roman Empire, people who believed in a Third Roman Empire, who believed that Christianity, the God of Moses, again a reflection of the Egyptian – Greek fight against the evil Mesopotamian gods in those cultures, the Mesopotamian Pantheon, of Beelzebub and similar people: the Mosaic God is also the Christian God.

I can’t quite tell what is going on here. Little help? Something about good Jews and Bad Jews, the former conveniently don’t exist, and the latter all literally personifying Beelzebub?

The anti-Christians, those who believed in Pagan Rome, from then to the present day, fought to exterminate Christianity and to exterminate those aspects of Judaism which were Mosaic, and thus linked, as the same thing as Christianity, in the eyes of these fellows.

That war goes on. Bolshevism and fascism, or communism, and so forth; many socialist parts in the Socialist movement generally, and all parts of this Paganist movement against Christianity, such that if Christianity today were to be suppressed globally, or suppressed in the places where it has been dominant, it is probable that the human race would go under pagan Roman influence, called fascism, sometimes called Bolshevism, the New Age: the rock-drug-sex-neo-ecologist culture, the Gaia worshipers, similar scoundrels. That’s the end of the human race.

Bolshevism = Fascism = Communism = So forth = many socialist parts of the Socialist Movement (and not = other socialist parts of the Socialist Movement, and feel free to explicate which parts belong to which category) = all parts of the Paganist Movement (ALL!!!) = the New Age = the rock-drug-sex-neo-ecologist culture (rock = drug = sex = neo-ecologist) = Gaia worshipers = similar scoundrels = suppressors of Christianity globally, or at least where Christianity is dominant (maybe not so much where Christianity does not flourish?) = bringing human race under Pagan Roman Influence = The end of the human race. Gots that?

What is being fought out, curiously, in the Middle East, fought out again, is precisely this battle. Some may call it the Battle of Armageddon: well, don’t take it too far, don’t be too literal; you might be right, that’s what’s threatened. (Okay. It’s not the Battle of Armageddon. I was taking that too far. LIterally speaking, we’re not battling over Armageddon. That’s alarmist talk. Oh, wait. I might be right? It is the Battle of Armageddon? That is what is threatened? Whiplash!) A war whose purpose is to exterminate Christianity, to bring about the rule of that which has prevailed in the Middle East, prior to Socrates, and Plato, a way to establish that Middle Eastern tradition, the Third Rome policy. That means the end of humanity; at least, a New Dark Age, whose effects on humanity are beyond description, at least from our poor standpoint. That’s what’s at stake in the Middle East: the old issue, and the new one. Because the people in Britain, in the United States, and in Moscow, who are for this United Nationss Condominium, who are for the geopolitical policy of Castlereah, of playing Russia against Germany, as a way of controlling Germany; who are for economic warfare from the United States against Germany and Japan; who are population wars to reduce the number of persons of darker hues of skin on this planet: those people are the true followers of pagan Roman Imperialism, admirers of that tradition. This is what one-worldism is, that’s what the so-called Moscow-London-New York detente is, the New Yalta Agreement is.

This is a bit confusing. The war’s purpose is to exterminate Christianity, apparently. To destroy the memory of the Christian Greats such as, um, Socrates and Plato? End Humanity. New Dark Age. The Dark Ages before the Christian Era of… um… Socrates and Plato. The rest of the pamphlet tells us it’s all some oil Scam from the British. (As the paragraph goes on, part of Britain’s long standing desire to bring down Germany — which is why Germany needed to fight World War Two, right?) Pushing aside those parentheses, that is a far more mundane matter than this War of the Gods the Cult Leader has set up. Maybe they’re not mutually exclusive, but there is something about human motivation that’s being pushed asunder round about heres — Earthly pursuits of power politics need not apply.

So, let’s hope that the Anglo-American-Muscovite faction loses. The fate of humanity — whether your family has any future at all — may depend upon it.

The whole thing is dizzying — which I assume to be the desired effect, and — in the right frame of mind — amusing. There is an Apostle’s Creed quality to these two pages of text (even if dated — we’ve lost the “Muscovite” threat with the collapse of Communism and a new Authoritarian Russian Government), a “This I Believe” creation of Myths which belies whatever mission the denziens are on at the moment, whatever economic or political insecurity they have been wound up to confront. Sing Choral songs about the Mortgage Crisis, what they are thinking is somewhere from this odd little essay from “Bush’s Global Crisis: The Beginning of World War 3, an EIR Special, September 1990”.

My sense is that the sexism regarding Hillary Clinton is more overt and thick than the racism for Barack Obama, speaking in as far as Media Punditry delivers. This is as I would guess it — casual sexism is more fashionable than casual racism, and so many personas out there are based on an element of Machismo.

I do note that there is a contradictory storyline going on with Hillary Clinton. The touted Experience she claims, she lacks, and she cannot take her eight years of service as First Lady and claim it as meaning anything. (The same, I guess, is the case with her first ladyship of Arkansas). Posing the question — so, with nary a record in sight, why did you hate her through the 1990s? The Health Care thing sustained you for eight years?

I suppose one can think of the “shuck and jive” as… an unfortunate choice of words, something on par with the particular choice of the word “Lynch” to describe what young golfers ought to do to Tiger Woods to get ahead. What words ought be utilized to describe Obama’s dearth of Senatorial deeds and the idea that we have “Style over Substance”, I guess he could have just stated that Obama is a case of Style over Substance —

— better to suggest Poetry and Prose, but these have no intrinsic values.

But the thing is: nobody has felt empowered to pinch Obama’s cheek.

Anecdotally I can say that on this blog some confluence of higher and lower case letters which roughly equate to the “n” word followed by a “H8R” left a comment to express vitrol toward a black commenter responding to a couple of racist comments.  Partially this is the power of anonymity that comes with the Internet.  I have yet to have a similar thing happen with Hillary Clinton, but that may stem from the peculiarities of a post pointing out that Obama was officially “Assassination-Worthy” (when he received early secret service protection).

John Kerry has endorsed Barack Obama.

John Kerry, otherwise known in the parlance of 2004 politics as “Not Bush”.  The campaign that Democrats looked the other way during, and whose status is best represented in this photograph.

So, is this a good thing?  Better than an endorsement from Dukakis, I suppose.  But probably not as good as one from McGovern.