In the diary Bush authorized illegal wiretaps pre-9/11, ejmw wrote:
Once again…this is not news.
This is…and HAS been at least since J. Edgar Hoover’s time…simply business as usual.
Read on for more.
“Bush authorized illegal wiretaps pre-9/11?”
So did:
Clinton
Bush I
Carter
Reagan
Ford
Nixon
and probably Eisenhower as well.
Maybe Truman too, for all I know.
BET on it.
The operative trick word here is “authorized”.
If you do not not tell someone NOT to do something (the results of which you or the people and organizations of which you are the supposed head use regularly and to great effect), are you not tacitly authorizing them to do so as long as they do not get caught? (The “Don’t ask, don’t tell” gambit.)
And/or…if you have pet judges who will give you any damned warrant you wish (“The fix is IN” gambit) any time you wish, is THAT not “authorization” on a certain level?
If you believe otherwise I’ve got two woids for ya, and they ain’t “Happy Birthday”.
J. Edgar.
Two more.
NSA + CIA.
Another?
IRS.
BET on it.
This has been going on for YEARS.
The ends justify the means. These people really believe that. And if a President is too damned stupid and/or innocent to truly understand what is being done in his name…is THAT any excuse?
I think not.
How about one who is too AFRAID?
Those are not visions of sugarplums dancing in these peoples’ heads.
That a sitting US President can be blatantly assassinated by the same forces that are doing this kind of wiretapping (I mean…BLATANTLY. On purpose blatantly. Do you think that this plainly forged “picture” of Lee Harvey Oswald holding the Carcano that supposedly killed JFK…I say “supposedly” because the misdirection of the whole magic bullet idea was just another part of the same message, as was the plainly fixed Warren Commission…do you really think that this lame forgery was the result of sheer incompetence???!!! On the part of a group of people who have not been caught and punished for this crime 40+ years later? Please. It is a message, to those who can read it. Put this photo together with maybe 20 other black and whites from the same period, ask any group of five year olds which is the fake and see which one they choose. Really, people…wise up, here.) And the message reads “We can do whatever we damned well please, and we do not even have to hide it very deeply. Do NOT fuck with us.”
So ALL of this wha wha wha about “wiretapping” is just the usual set of liberals holding their habitual blindfolded circle jerk party about yet ANOTHER so-called outrage.
Get real here.
Wake the fuck up.
The PermaGov does whatever it fucking well FEELS like doing, and HAS done so since President Eisenhower woke up one day and realized that Allen Dulles had him checkmated. (Ike called it the military-industrial complex. They killed his successor.)
And the President/Administration/call it what you will can either use their info or not. Or somewhere in between, which is where most of them sit.
Q-How do you get elected to the office of President of the United States?
A-Sit on fences.
Nothing new here, except that now…as was the case in the Reagan, Bush I, Ford and Nixon administrations…we have a President (a VICE President in this case.)…who is really in charge, has deep, DEEP roots into the secret PermaGov, and will use any means necessary to get his way.
ANY means.
Bet on THAT too.
Legality?
The peaceful triumph of rule of law?
Do not make me laugh. It hurts too much. That is a fiction promulgated by Hollywood movies like “A Few Good Men”. In the real world, Nicholsons’ s Colonel would have had Cruise’s snotty-nosed Harvard brat lawyer so stymied by the full force of the PermaGov that he would have ended up driving a Good Humor truck in Tulsa Oklahoma or someplace for the rest of his life.
Or dead, if necessary.
Maybe…maybe if he was backed by DISSIDENT parts of the PermaGov the way it appears Patrick Fitzgerald is being backed today…MAYBE Cruise’s character might have had a shot.
Otherwise…fuggedaboudit!!!
So…let’s get real, here, folks.
This is business as usual, and the U2 was some PRIMITIVE spy shit compared with what they’ve got now.
If they felt secure in eavesdropping on Martin Luther King Jr.’s bedroom performances in the ’60s…what the HELL do you think that they are doing with your phone calls if they so desire today?
Please…
Wake the fuck up.
This is a WAR.
InfoWar I.
No sense even FIGHTING it if you do not know that it is on.
REALLY on.
BET on it.
Later…
AG
Once again…please rec this up. We need to talk, here…
AG
I think I know youare right, then again, I get very scared of what is going on. I try hard not to get scared..I think of myself as a brave person, then again, I read what you say and I truly get set back on my haunches and have to take a deeeeeep breathe. I know you are right..What hoover did was horrible. I personally do not want to get back to those days..but that is where we are headed, I am afraid. Hugs and keep up the good work..thanks for your thoughts.
BACK to those days?
Brenda…let’s get real here.
It would be a REKLIEF to get “back to those days.”
That was NOTHING compared to what is going on now.
Child’s play.
hey actually had to send an agent out to put a tap on the phone.
Now they just sic a computer on you. And a couple of million others. From the comfort of their bureaucratic, middle management, mortgaged up the asshole good German desks.
“Ve did it for de FATHERLAND!!!”
Right.
They did it for a job.
AG
AG
Only news to people who continue to believe in the myth of America as opposed to how this country/government really operates and who is really running the country.
I certainly figured from the day bush took office that anyone who might be speaking out against him or doing any kind of online activity-signing petitions, being on blogs like this were being monitored. And I don’t particularly consider myself any kind of conspiracy nut-just someone who reads a bit about how the government really works and the whole long history of secretly monitoring anyone who dares to have a differing view of whichever current person is in office. The question might be more along the lines of ‘why wouldn’t they be spying on people who didn’t agree with them?’.
It’s certainly beyond past time for a real revolution here in this country…the problem is the general public isn’t aware and continues to believe the ‘myth’ of America or even if confronted with some basic and rather nasty truths will refuse to believe it. Can’t have a revolution if no one shows up.
You can’t have a revolution if no one shows up?
Why not?
They had one in 1963…
AG
P.S. Oh.
You mean THAT kind of revolution.
Oh.
Nevermind…
This was it, for me:
Want to spy on a TBI survivor on SSD/I? Go for it!!! After all of the shit I have been thru, wtf else have I got to lose?
Give me a hand then Art. I am sitting on 500 pages of laboriously converted PDF FOIA files along with scores of videos, hundreds of articles (both on the site and the RSS scraper – the latter takes a minute to load sometimes). Jason Leopold is using the research as is Chris Floyd.
What kind of hand do you need, ghandi?
Really.
Do you mean applause, or help?
Or both?
AG
Well is that snarky?
I don’t know.
Do you know Mambo/Joomla?
I am getting, to be honest, tired, of pro bono work.
But hey – It’s my choice to throw my skills for nothing behind Floyd.
Wasn’t snark.
An honest question.
AG
to add a little counterpoint here . . .
Did you see the Counterpunch articles about the FBI’s spying on the palestinian-american Ivy League literature professor & political activist, Edward Said (whose book on Orientalism should be required reading for anyone involved in US foreign policy)?
Alexander Cockburn has more today:
Nice sig.
Yup.
AG
Oops, forgot the link to the first article by Davis Price.
…the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that restudied the JFK assassination in 1978. Indeed, that committee found there WAS probably a conspiracy, but its panel of photographic experts said the backyard photos were NOT faked, and that they were taken with Oswald’s Imperial Reflex camera.
I was spied on, and three organizations I was a member of were infiltrate by police and/or agents provocateurs during the ’60s and ’70s. I know many, many others who were not only spied on but also had organizations they were members of infiltrated, and sometimes nudged into illegal activities by the infiltrators, a trick at least as old as the Pinkertons. I was a target of Cointelpro. So I am no pollyanna regarding government spying and related activities.
But you do not do your argument any good when you make claims that do not stand up to scrutiny.
Oh, I am SO happy to hear from you, Meteor. I so miss you and your prevaricating, backwards pulling compatriots over at Big Orange and The Last Hurrah.
You can take your experts and shove ’em.
Literally.
There is not a “House Select Committee” in in the WORLD that could reliably find its own ass in a blackout, and your panel of photographic experts plus all the King’s men could not convince my own eyes of what I plainly see in that photograph.
I would consider it a fake if it purported to be a picture of my long-lost Uncle Cletus, let alone of a supposed presidential assassin who was conveniently assassinated by a mafia connected underworld guy who HIMSELF conveniently died before he could be thoroughly investigated..
And as part of a TOTAL intel op from beginning to end…give me a BREAK!!!
Go away.
You are either totally misguided or some kind of mole.
Either way…I have no use for you and your boys whatsoever.
Go away.
This government is and has been almost totally corrupted since before Eisenhower’s farewell speech.
If you either do not have the line level common sense to see the truth of this or have ulterior motives that lead you to oppose any and all attempts to point this out…and bubba, you and your boys have done a REALLY good job over a dKos, which has turned into a total joke…then I have no wish to hear a damned thing from you.
Go away and preach to the sleeping choir, because THIS choirboy does not take being messed with by the orthodox clergy very damned well at all.
Nor do I think will the majority of people here at BT. Many of whom are refugees from your eyes wide shut efforts over at dKos.
Go away, Meteor.
Y’bother me.
Go confer with some House Select Committees.
Whadda buncha maroons!!!
AG
is with this hostility?
It baffles me that you attack MB for his associations.
In any case, if you follow his links you can see the conclusions of the select committee. We know the committee was infiltrated by a handler of the Cubans. But, at the same time, they did do a thorough investigation (as thorough as the CIA’s dishonesty allowed). Read the part on the photos and decide what you think.
My conclusion? If they were fakes they were world class fakes.
“…as thorough as the CIA’s dishonesty allowed.”
i am sorry, Booman, but the entire government is and HAS been infiltrated by intelligence interests. Just as has the media. And the conclusions DRAWN by such a committee…especially about so important a turning point in the domination of this government by PermaGov interests…are to my mind totally suspect.
And as far as my “hostility” towards Meteor Blades, DHinMI and their Last Hurrah allies…if you can’t see why, I can’t tell you.
As I implied in the above post, I believe that their oh-so “realistic” positions…as if THEY are the reality-based community and all those who do not agree with them are loonies, quacks and tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy nuts…has totally rendered dKos useless as far as really changing things is concerned, and to my mind they are either simply unimaginative, uncomprehending middle class dupes and fools or…worse…some sort of organized attempt to cripple the blogs.
I have no proof of the latter.
But if it quacks like either one of those ducks, it doesn’t really matter which one they are to me.
Either way, they are devolutionary influences on what to my mind is the only remaining place on earth where citizens can have a place to think and discuss that is…was, anyway…free of overt or covert censorship.
“Hostility” hardly expresses my feelings about that turn of events.
And…remember, I was just about the first one to be offed several days before the July 4th massacre over there, it, after a running battle with head Hoorah DHinMI over a period of several months.
I watched first hand.
A nasty bunch, in my view, and I am, sorry to see ANY of them here.
Sorry, Booman…there it is.
If you don’t see it..look again.
It’s there.
Beware your OWN blog.
AG
I’m no friend of DHinMI but I don’t hold it against MB that he posts with him. Give me any example to hold against MB? You won’t find it.
Moreover, his critique of your post is spot-on. The Oswald photos have been studied exhaustively, and the conclusions are mixed. It is not a slam-dunk case at all.
I very much doubt that Oswald wsa the lone gunman, and I have some dount he was a gunman at all, but I don’t agree with you that the photos are strong evidence either way. They are contentious.
When all “evidence” is inconclusive and contreadictory…use your OWN SENSES.
LOOK at it, Booman!!!
Phony as a three dollar bill.
AG
…your personal attacks with a response. If you think I’m an agent or stupid, that’s your problem. If you think I’m a liar, then I suggest you prove it.
But when it comes to the Kennedy assassination, I’ll be happy to debate the issue with you at length. I’ve read perhaps 100 books on the assassination since Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment was published in 1966. Books that claimed all kinds of things, some of them extremely well-reasoned, some of the outright insane. I’ve read the conspiracy theorists, I’ve read the Warren Commission’s defenders. I’ve read all the forensics evidence that’s in the public domain and I’ve followed the latest forensics tests done to examine the “jet effect” and the “magic bullet” trajectory. I’ve read the Clay Shaw trial transcript and the critics’ take on it.
I’ve heard people claim it was the CIA, a rogue element within the CIA, the Mafia together with the CIA, Castro’s agents, KGB, a cabal at the Pentagon.
The trouble with all these theories is that they can’t all be true. Yet people like you take a little bit from one theorist and a little bit from another and stick it all together and get what? Nothing coherent.
Your “plainly faked” photograph is not seen as faked by large numbers of reputable, credentialed people with no ax to grind. You can argue with them if you like, citing your own expertise or that of others, but saying that 5-year-olds would select this photograph as a fake shows just how bankrupt your take on this is.
Y’know, Meteor…I really haven’t had much contact with you.
Nor do I plan to have much.
But I had a great deal of contact with your Last Hurrah associates on dKos. ALL of it unpleasant. Especially DHinMI, who is one of the rudest educated bullies it has ever been my pleasure to tell to go to hell. I do not like their act. Therefore I assume that I am not going to like yours either.
So it goes.
I too have read widely.
Lived widely, too.
And observed a great deal.
I have come to my ongoing conclusions; you to yours.
One of my conclusions is that anybody who uses any sort of “evidence” whatsoever from governmentally connected agencies of any kind regarding the JFK, RFK and MLK Jr. assassinations as proof of anything…pro OR con who what where when or why the conspiracy did or did not involve anybody…is full of it. The “investigation” was a massive put up job, compounded to unbelievable lengths by the sheer incompetence of most of the agencies used to pursue it.
However, going from the RESULTS of those assassinations plus the investigations of any number of independent reporters, one thing can be said with perfect accuracy.
They resulted in something akin to a coup, and the people who are now in charge of this government are largely the inheritors of the effects of that coup.
Whether or not that picture is a fake…the whole SETUP was certainly a fake of some kind, and your act of isolating that image and questioning my take on its reality or falsehood from a diary that had a much broader focus…the claim that there has been quondam “illegal” spying going on in the US since the McCarthy era and even before…smacks precisely of the same tactic of misdirection that your boy DHinMI used on dKos over and over and over again when attacking people who did not ascribe to HIS narrow little view of the world.
Since I do NOT think that you are “stupid”…your syntax is too clear for that…then I only have a few conclusions left that CAN be drawn from your position and from your alliance with people like DHinMI.
None of those conclusions are pleasant. At best, you are unable synthesize facts into a logical whole. Quite probably due to your position in society. “Well” educated, more than likely. Bought into the validity of that education, no doubt. In a system that does not educate, only indoctrinate. Left, right AND center. My first guess? You are an academic or mainstream professional of some sort.
Dr. Meteor, I presume?
At worst…you are some sort of mole, as I suggested earlier. Either way…on the evidence of your associations plus what you have said here I have no interest in anything you say, nor am I willing to spend the time to figure out just how you can remain simultaneously so intelligent and so blind.
You are certainly not alone in that state.
In fact…on the liberal left you reside among a decided majority.
So it goes.
So goes the ineffectual left that has ALLOWED these people to take over this country over the last 60 years or so while dithering about a thousand little “evidences” when the BIG evidence was staring them right smack in the face.
Too bad.
I presently have my say here on BT in the hopes that I can reach at least a FEW people. I reached many more on dKos, until your friends managed to stop me. (Which I am SURE that they did. Y’see…somebody ratted them out to me.)
So I simply do not want to have much to do with you at all.
Dream on in peace.
Or…continue to comment on my postings.
And I will continue to comment upon your lack of perception.
Either way…
Have it YOUR way.
Later…
AG
…misdirection. You assert that people in the government had JFK killed. Not simply that there was a conspiracy, but a conspiracy of a specific type. And you use a photo that you claim was “plainly” doctored without telling anyone that numerous independent experts unanimously concluded otherwise. When called on this distortion that you use to back up your broader assertion, you engage in an ad hominem, ex concessis attack.
As someone with a 200+ page FBI file, who personally felt the whip of racial segregation, faced the dogs and Klansmen during Freedom Summer, spent more than a year in a prison camp for refusing to be inducted into the Army during the Vietnam era, was targeted by Cointelpro and saw the American Indian Movement of which I was a 16-year member be destroyed in part by still-unrevealed government activity, I really enjoyed your engaging in a special brand of McCarthyism by calling me a “mole.” This is the typical discrediting approach of those who claim that grand conspiracies run everything; to wit, anybody who suggests other explanations is obviously stupid or actually a member of the conspiracy.
My four+ decades of public and published criticism of the U.S. government and various corporadoes has been predicated on the notion that talk is cheap unless backed up by deeds. Criticism without activism is null.
I’ve read dozens of your Diaries over the past six months. You know how to put together a good polemic. I’ve agreed and disagreed, depending on the subject. Only now have I commented because this time you made a specific claim that is easily refuted, a claim that even most of those who say JFK was killed by someone in addition to or instead of Lee Harvey Oswald concede isn’t true. Yet you use this “evidence” to back up your broader charge, a charge that itself is no doubt true, but that – despite your hatred for Daily Kos – has been discussed in depth at that site for weeks, including by numerous Diarists who themselves have been spied on by the government or worse.
None of your Diaries prescribes anything practical to be done, only that what others suggest is lame, futile or ridiculous. You repeatedly argue that all but the tiniest minority of Americans are blind or stupid to what’s really going on, and what’s really going on is the grand conspiracy you say is going on. Those of us who argue that history is more complex than you’d like to make it are blind, stupid, or part of the conspiracy.
OK. Believe what you will. But if you’re going to spread your views using debunked “evidence,” expect to get called on it.
Meteor…
I do not know if you are a mole or not. I said that quite clearly.
I only know that you and your compatriots are consistently wrong in your approach to what ails this country. It is immaterial to me whether you are a mole, a fool or both.
Your mainstream lefty “intellectual” approach should have been thoroughly discredited by its overall failure over the past 40 years, and the more I come into contact with people like you the more I understand at least the MOTIVES behind Mao Tse Tung’s failed Cultural Revolution. I would love to see how long people like you and DHinMI would last on the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn.
My bet…a week at the outside.
White OR black.
You would eventually condescend to the wrong motherfucker, and you would be OUTTA there.
You say I “hate” dKos.
I do not.
I only hate what has happened to it.
You say I offer no alternatives.
The main alternative that I DID offer…a concentrated boycott of the mainstream corporate media and its advertisers/owners by the left, a left that is THE prime demographic for much of the big ticket advertising that goes on in this country…was consistently pooh-poohed by your allies at dKos, and the more traction it gained, the more you/they opposed it.
The last posts I made there had comments in the several hundreds and were on the rec list for quite a while. When what I was saying reached a sort of critical mass over there after about 6 months of posting…bada-BING!!! I suddenly disappeared.
So be it.
And now I find you over here, running the usual Damnocrat bullshit nitpicking about a picture I used to illustrate the point that any sitting President with an OUNCE of sense would be scared shitless at the idea of a vast and permanent secret government apparatus that sees no problem in killing people who manage to effectively oppose its ideas.
As above, so below.
Just like on dKos.
Bada BING!!!
HE gone.
Arthur who?
Now…let’s get back to the REAL issues.
Discussing whether or not we should fail one way or another at opposing the policies of this government as they now stand.
Great.
Blather away.
The other 4/5ths of the world is arming itself…outside AND inside this country, believe it…and they are coming to GET ya, Meteor.
In your safe little house with your stories of how oppressed you have been by the bad ol’ right wing.
I got yer “oppression” right HERE!!!
How’s your bank account, Meteor?
Got good health insurance?
You and your Hurrah buddies have tenure somewhere?
A good retirement plan?
Nice.
You say I write a good polemic.
You are right.
I do.
But it is not an EMPTY polemic.
You say that I “repeatedly argue that all but the tiniest minority of Americans are blind or stupid to what’s really going on.” I do NOT say that. It is a LARGE minority of Americans who realize what is “really going on”, only they are mostly working class and of shades other than white. Every smart….street smart, not necessarily book smart…person I know realizes that there is some sort of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” (Thank you, Ms. Clinton) in place in America, and that its effects filter down from the highest levels right through to the Bernie Kerik cop on the beat. My impression is that people like you and DHinMI never get to speak to these people as equals, let alone LEARN from them/. Maybe you did at one time, but I think that was long ago and far away. Now your contact with them seems isolated to giving a cabbie directions or asking the busboy for some more water. I could be wrong about that, but it is my impression that people who talk your talk generally walk that walk no matter WHAT their supposed “radical” history may have been. (Which history, lby the way…like everything ELSE on the net…is on the level of that old “The check’s in my mouth, and I won’t come in your mail” routine. Mine too. Maybe you chickenshitted your way through the ’60s. Maybe I’m an 80 year old woman in Des Moines with an attitude. All we have is words to go on here, Meteor. Written words and the emotional information that can be gleaned from them.)
You say I claim that there is a “grand conspiracy” going on.
It is vast, but it is not grand.
And it is not necessarily a “conspiracy” as the term is most often used. Two or three or four men in a room somewhere “conspiring”.
It is a conspiracy of dunces.
A conspiracy of greed.
Of fear.
Of dishonor.
And of cowardice.
A conspiracy of silence, a conspiracy of willfully closed eyes. a conspiracy of empty talk about whether a picture is or isn’t a “fake” when the ENTIRE SYSTEM IT IS BEING USED TO ILLUSTRATE IS A FAKE!!!
And I say to you once again, Mr/Ms. Blades…anyone who argues about anything and uses as “proof” of their argument something that some bullshit congressional blue ribbon panel of front runners and habitual thieves has approved as officially “true” is ALREADY beyond the reach of reason.
Beyond effective hope of redemption without serious reality re-programming.
Which was what the root of the Cultural Revolution was all about. That maybe if people like you were forced to take part in the lives of those who do real work you would somehow come to your senses.
Didn’t fly too well.
Back to the drawing board of Life.
I personally think that most of you are BEYOND redemption. And on that subject, you are right. I have no practical program to change that situation. (Life appears to be preparing something to address that problem as we speak. We shall see. Keep your eye on the alliance between the southern hemisphere of the Americas and radical Islam. It’s going to get very interesting in the next few years. Imagine terrorists named José. Imagine trying to find THEM in the ghettoes and barrios of the US.S caaaaaaary…)
In light of all of this…in my professional life I just keep on trying to make great music, and in my private life I take an hour here, an hour there and try to talk some sense on the largest forum I can find that will have me. The opposition to that kind of sense IS “the conspiracy”.
Once again, as above, so below.
It is the same in the art world as it is in the political one.
So it goes.
And so I goes, too.
Gotta go write some music.
Despite the same sort of opposition in the music world as I find from people like you.
The “opposition” that worked against Gil Evans and Charles Mingus and Beethoven and van Gogh and every other artist in history who has attempted to say something a little…different.
And then co-opted their work into the establishment museum of “Great Works” after it was no longer dangerous.
As above, so below.
Bye-bye…
AG
…what is this silly macho bit about who could and could not survive on the street, Mr. Gilroy? About who really talks to “the masses”? Having been raised in a home in the days when food aid wasn’t stamps but “in kind” contributions of lard, bean and orange cheese, having spent 23 months in reform school, having been beaten by the police in five cities, having been arrested 50+ times, having served 13 months in a prison camp, having worked closely with people on three Indian reservations, having firsthand seen U.S. foreign policy close-up in Central America, and having every day right up to yesterday having had discussions over meals with new immigrants to the United States, I’ll match my understanding of “the masses” with yours any old time. As well as my chances for surviving on the street.
As for your belief that the Cultural Revolution was about anything other than sheer power, I recommend a little additional reading. The people who programmed the Red Guards – and gave them privileges for their destructive, murderous behavior – were not exactly in tune with the workers or peasants. Their policies cost thousands of lives and millions of people were imprisoned. THIS was a program whose motives you can understand? Good grief.
– – –
[For the record, I had nothing to do with your banning (or the banning of anyone anytime) at Daily Kos.]
Agreed.
Using Arthur’s reasoning we should all assume OJ was set up without looking at the series of steps and co-conspirators that would be required to carry it out.
Okay: the Oswald photos are fake. What does that mean about the analysts employed to inspect them?
While I am sympathetic to his overall criticism of the HSCA, it is still possible to draw valid conclusions on various points about where they did a thorough job, where their work was compromised, and where they dropped the ball.
It seems to me that they did a thorough job on the Oswald photos.
It seems to me that that mixed blood was found in OJ’s Bronco, and could not have been planted.
To assert these things is not to reject the fact that the LAPD is known to plant evidence, or to reject the possibility that JFK was killed by a domestic conspiracy.
…view of HCSA and your final two comments. There ARE real conspiracies in the world. As for government spying domestically, I’d be just about the last person to argue that it hasn’t been going on since way, way back.
That’s not where Mr. Gilroy and I disagree. We disagree when he makes claims that only he and a few other people REALLY understand what’s been going on in America and flames anyone who raises an objection. And, of course, when he poses have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife type comments, as in, “I do not know if you are a mole or not.”
I find his flaming of you to be irrational, based on a very tilted interpretation of your writings (almost as though he has never read you), a use of guilt by association, and a violation of the ‘don’t be a prick’ rules of the site.
I can’t explain it. In my view, he owes you an apology.
And his basic point is valid, if not all the particulars. It’s not nitpicking to point out the flaws. It’s a service.
P.S.
Check out Arcturus’s sig above.
“…the more educated you are, the more indoctrinated you are. After all, propaganda is largely directed towards the privileged.” -Noam Chomsky.
Yup.
Sound like anyone YOU know, Meteor?
AG
Mole, schmole.
Here is a diary that posited a perfectly clearly stated position…that this wiretapping thing is not only not NEW, but that the usual liberal claptrapping and NY Timesing/Washington Posting “They’re GOOD!!! They’re BAD!!! He’s up!! He’s down!!” rigamarole is not only useless, it is positively devolutionary.
It allows the perpetrators to create a NEW reality while we blabber on about the old one.
Which is old news already.
And here comes the meteor shower…about A PICTURE!!!
Not about the diary.
Not about my own overall thrust towards trying to find new ways to combat the media that DRIVES this foolishness. but about my own long held belief that a particular picture is a composite. (A belief that I am by no means alone in holding.)
Once again…mole, schmole. If a mole DID want to hijack a topic, that would be a perfectly good way to go about it. Like I’m talking about a murder, and some lawyer takes offense at the kind of car I drive. Anyone foolish enough to drive that kind of car can’t POSSIBLY know anything about any murder!!! And…there goes the topic, off to NeverNeverLand.
It really makes no difference to me whether Meteor Blades is or is NOT a mole. OR whether (s)he suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous right wing fate a hundred times over.
“T’ain’t Whatcha Do, Hits the Way ‘Atcha Do It.” (Trummy Young w/the Jimmie Lunceford Band, mid 1930s. Yup.) The Last Hurrah people ran the same game on dKos. On EVERYBODY with whom they disagreed or wanted to silence.
Picking on spelling or grammar or style or recerché points of history and then ridiculing the posters for their supposed inadequacies while trumpeting to the skies their own liberal/radical credentials and their exalted position as sachems of academia and Left Blogworld..
DHinMI brought that act to a high art. And when it didn’t work on me, he agitated to have me offed. Bet on it.
I do NOT owe Meteor Blades an apology.
Nor have I accused him/her of BEING a mole.
Only of having the same EFFECT as a mole, and of allying himself/herself with a group of others who use the same tactic regularly and spectacularly well.
Are they “conscious” of what they are doing?
I don’t know.
Do they believe that they are “right” in what they are doing?
Yes, I suppose so…
Have they got ulterior motives…???
Well…I once spent a couple of hours on the Last Hurrah after some people emailed me and said that they thought the entire group of people there were covertly working for Wesley Clark. I found no evidence of that on the blog, but one VERY strange thing eventually struck me at the time. In the whole blog, there was not ONE overt statement of support for ANY 2008 Presidential candidate.
The dog that did not bark.
Why?
That is a VERY unnatural stance on a Democratic website. Almost unthinkable, actually. But there it was.
I personally found that to be VERY spooky. I believe it was DHinMI who had some glib answer about “We’ll support whomever the party chooses” when I brought that idea up, but it remained a serious question as far as I am concerned.
Now I am about finished here. I have had my say, and I have a GREAT deal of preparatory work to do for a tour I am about to take, so I will bid you all my fond farewells until late January/early February.
Have fun…
And…wake the fuck UP!!!
Later….
AG
actually, fucking up the main example of gullibility totally screws your point whether or not MB or I bring it up.
It’s one of the main services of the comments section that it allows an author to quickly correct the record on points they have gotten wrong.
This prevents the reader from throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It’s too bad the NYT doesn’t have a comments section.
But Booman…
1-It was NOT my “main point.”
and
2-I do not believe what the “experts” say about MUCH. And I am by no means alone in that general stance.
I thought I made that clear.
If I had said that Ike made his farewell speech in 1984 I would have been quite happy to retract that. It would have been a FACTUAL mistake.
If I had said that I have [i]proof[/i] that the Last Hurrah is a cabal of spooks and moles that met one day in Wesley Clark’s basement to organize an ongoing attack on left blog-world (***IMPORTANT news for the not-so-hot, high gullibility and irony-proof readers out there…I do not believe that to be true.) and could not back that up, I would be happy to retract that as well.
But THIS???
C’mon…it’s a judgment call, plus it is not central to my point.
AG