One of my favorite pastimes, in the past anyway, was to find the mirror opposite for any accusation that one of our two permitted parties hurl at each other. If one is playing dirty, so is the other. If one is up to its neck in bribes, the other is up to its ears. If one goes after the other with a knife, the other will come back with a gun. They are all dirty. American politics is a playground where only wealthy financiers are allowed in the game. Consequently, we are corrupt up to our receding hairlines.

Here’s an amazing example of Democratic Party politics, as played in Montana. It’s now up at Intelligent Discontent: Astonishing Look at American Tradition Partnership’s Campaign Coordination in Montana from ProPublica, Questions automatically arise:

• A Box of documents found in a meth house in Colorado? Please. Even I suspect planted evidence, and I’m an accountant. Mr. Progreba, do you allow cops to look in your trunk without a warrant? This is very strange.
• Frontline documentary on October 30, 2012? One week before the election?
• March 2011? Box delivered to Montana Commissioner of Political Practices 19 months ago? And they just now come to light?
• “My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that WTP was running a lot of these campaigns,” said investigator Julie Steab of the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices. Steab holds an official position in Montana, has known about the this for 19 months, and now speaks off-the-cuff. Very strange, Julie. What’s your official action on this matter?
• “Direct Mail and Communications is a print shop in Livingston, Mont., run by a one-time key player in WTP and his wife. After naming so many names, why not name a “key player and his wife?”
• “The records are in the hands of the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, which considers them public and reviewable upon request. There is a slight problem here – by the time anyone has a chance to review them, the election will be over.
• “Folders labeled with the names of Montana candidates held drafts and final letters of support signed by candidates’ wives and drafts and final copies of mailers marked as being paid for by the campaigns. The folders often appeared to have had an accounting of what had been sent and paid for scrawled on the front.” This sounds suspiciously like … nothing. If there is indeed big money behind WTP, which there no doubt is, they are not going to hit up campaigns for printing costs! That is not only a stupid thing to do, but really, really … strange.
• “Use this one,’ someone wrote in red pen next to a cut-out rectangle on a page with five signatures from one candidate.” But then again, I overstate the meaning of the word “nothing.”
• “For the general election, the group appears to be targeting Montana’s attorney general, Steve Bullock, the Democratic candidate for governor. As attorney general, Bullock fought the partnership’s lawsuits against the state, including the one that ended up in the Supreme Court.” Of course, he didn’t fight hard, and didn’t even lose so much as fail to show up before the final nine. He merely restated arguments that the court had already decided on in CU. He knew this! He was warned.
• Contest!!! Winner to be announced on November 7! Enter now. First prize: Brownie laced with some really good weed. There are at least 15 dead links in the Intelligent Discontent article. See if you can locate them! Entries must be in writing and postmarked no later than November 6. Official contest rules apply. Not valid in Vermont, New Hampshire or Puerto Rico. Must be eighteen years or older to qualify. See web site for contest rules.

This is American politics. Everyone is dirty. I take it from this that Bullock is dirty too. Of course he is distanced from this, has no comment, knows nothing about it, and oh, before I forget, Mike Taylor – your hair dresser called.

I like Pro Publica. They’ve done good work. But honestly, this is a hit piece done for Montana Democratic politicians, most notably Steve Bullock, the guy who, despite very good contrary advice, offered up a crappy case against Citizens United, almost designed to fail. If you want to know how a box of dirty-looking but non-incriminating documents end up in a meth house in Colorado and get forwarded to Julie Steab of Montana Office of Political Practices and who discloses them one week before the election after not taking official action, then I suggest you administer a blood test on Bullock. He looks dirty to me. He might be on meth.

If nothing else, check his teeth.

A commenter at 4&20 remarked yesterday

First, jhwyGirl, let me say it is nice to see you back posting again. You seem to be one of the few Bbirders who remembers there are any Montana state elections happening this year.

From there ensued a long thread containing the usual duckspeak. 4&20 is back in business! Prior to now it has been dominated by Lizard, one of a more philosophical bent and who keeps a necessary distance between his writing, poetry and party politics. That does not set well with most, especially in an election year. No doubt readership is way down over there.

Elections matter, to partisans anyway. Democrats and Republicans will draw either validation or disappointment. Winning is all that matters in that sphere. What happens in between cycles draws interest but vanishes in the biennial contests. When the ads are running on the TV screens, that’s reality.

In the meantime … I was remembering this morning a friend of ours in Bozeman who is a retired doctor. We spent a weekend with them, and when we got there he was reading Don Quixote. It wasn’t the first time, he said – perhaps the third. For myself I cannot read fiction. I don’t say that with any pride – the job of the writer of fiction is to describe large reality with small characters. That takes a special intelligence. I could cite great authors like Henry James, but I haven’t read him either. My sphere is hard, cold reality. Our doctor friend, reading Quixote, lives on a higher plane than mine. Continue reading “Fiction is a better reality than reality itself” →

“Conspiracy theorist” as an all-purpose term of ad hominem argument to dismiss arguments which cannot be refuted and thus goes back to the years after the Kennedy assassination, when the public was expected to accept that it was US government policy that this great crime, along with the further assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, would remain permanently unsolved, and that those who objected would be vilified. (Webster Tarpley)

(See footnote 10/25) Testimony to the truth of Tarpley’s assessment is the laughable conspiracy theories that are accepted and believed. There are the 19 Arabs who shut down the air defense system and brought down seven buildings. As ludicrous as that sounds (and even discarding the fact that at least four of the nineteen were still alive on September 12, 2001), it is not questioned in public. Tea Party members who believe that Obama was born in some foreign land are probably expressing a deeper contempt for the color of his skin, but nonetheless harbor a widely accepted theory. I once interviewed a prominent right-winger in Montana, Tom Keating, who assured me with thoughtless ease that environmentalists all conspire to bring down capitalism by means of lawsuits. This idea is legal tender among his friends of the right wing. Continue reading “The psychology of tyranny” →

• Much is made of lying in political campaigns. Partisans can easily spot lies told by the opponent. But neither lies nor truth matter. Only voter response does. If it takes lies to motivate you, then lies it will be. If spotting the other guy’s lies works, that will be the issue of the day.
• Campaign professionals are doing private polling at all times determining the effect of ads, talking points and demeanor. It’s all a show.
• What I find so discouraging is how invested the sentient public is in the campaigns. We sat in Colombo’s Pizza in 2004 as the Bush/Kerry debate was on in the next room. It was a sporting event with cheers and groans. It was spectacle.
• Very few are even looking at this blog right now because it is not about party politics. That has taken over our media, ads, letters and, sadly, even the good blogs.

Continue reading “A postcard from Realityville” →

Is this dirty deed done by MI6, Mossad, CIA, NATO, or all of the above.

From “Steve W” at 4&20

Jill Stein is getting my vote this cycle. I live in Montana, Montana isn’t a swing state, and I’m voting like I don’t live in a swing state.

There’s that fighting spirit! It reminds me of Mel Gibson’s blue-faced William Wallace, defiantly mooning Longshanks shouting out the rebel yell “Maybe you better watch it! I might be mad at you!”

Please take a moment to skim the following two stories regarding the Syrian conflict, one from AP, a U.S. propaganda outlet, the other from Voltaire Network, a French propaganda outlet.

The contrast could not be more stark. AP propaganda makes no mention of NATO, the driving force behind the uprising, nor does it give any hint that the attack might be failing. It completely frames the war as a natural uprising. It refers to western infiltration of the country by western state/corporate interests as “free market reforms” in the same fashion that Pravda might once have referred to Russian state farms as “people’s” enterprises. This is an extreme example of submission to the state/corporate correct posture. American news is quite worthless, generally.

Voltaire offers an interesting perspective, framing the conflict as a NATO-inspired undertaking in retreat, sacrificing the “insurgents” to Syrian forces merely to unload them. Thierry Meyssan, the driving force behind Voltaire, also speculates that Prince Bandar, the Bush family intimate and sponsor and trainer of “Al Qaeda” insurgents, might be dead. If that is the case, I wonder of he might have to be officially “killed” in some PR spectacle down the road.
Continue reading “American journalism on top of its game” →

The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his “co-conspirators” is delayed now. It’s meant to be a media show, as the men have already been found guilty by our judge/jury media circus. The problem that US prosecutors are having is that elements of truth might slip through and spoil the show. So they are insisting that all proceedings be put on a tape delay system so that they can edit as they go. This is the same system that radio and TV stations use to filter their output in case someone yells “Bullshit!”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a basket case, probably mentally debilitated by physical and psychological torture, and maybe even a psychotic to begin with anyway. If he is insane, by means of abuse or otherwise, he’s a perfect patsy now that the biggest patsy of them all, OBL, was officially killed on a reality TV show.

These five men did not have anything to do with 9/11, or let’s say if they did, they are hiding their little lights under a bushel basket. Imagine these clowns arranging the event in coordination with war games and exercises that effectively shut down the US air defense system that day. Imagine that they caused passenger airliners to perform physically impossible feats, brought down three buildings and destroyed five others by means of some miraculous process. Better than Penn and Teller, they put a jet airliner through the wall of the Pentagon and then made it vanish! These are not criminals. These are geniuses!

But they don’t look like geniuses. Oh well, whatever they did has to remain classified, so that if they spill the beans the US national security state can intercept their words before they get out to the world. We would not want this information to fall into the hands of Evildoers

I had an exchange over the weekend on another blog, and the subject of Guantanamo came up. Here’s what was offered to us:

As to Guantanamo – I have always opposed its continued functioning, but as I stated before, I don’t know how to close it. Look at a list of current detainees – most of them cannot legally or morally be transferred to their home countries, as their home countries are known to practice torture or lack a reliable court system or simply don’t want them. We could maybe send back a Kenyan and a couple Kuwaitis, but the rest of them really have little hope of going home and being treated humanely or getting a fair trial (though the Afghan detainees could legally be held as POWs by the government of Afghanistan). And I doubt their lives would be improved by moving to US prisons, even if the states running those prisons could be persuaded to take them.

There are many errors and false assumptions in that statement – it’s pretty damned naive. Actually, it’s adorable! But it did force me to think a little harder about what is going on at Gitmo. I’ve taken it for granted that they were holding prisoners posing little real danger to anyone as an element of the PSYOP aspect of 9/11, our permanent state-of-fear regime.

But it is troublesome, as they are holding some of those poor schmucks for over a decade now. It costs untold millions of dollars to house, feed and abuse them, and since the world is watching, they must at times give the appearance of good behavior in their treatment. True, there could be abuse and torture whenever the Red Cross is not looking, which is most of the time. But there must be more to it than that. Under normal circumstances, these men would simply have been killed on the spot rather than detained indefinitely. There is no force of law in sub-radar U.S. military aggression. Capturing and holding these men at great expense must serve some other end.
Continue reading “Over-thinking Gitmo” →

Looking over readership for the past few weeks, I have ascertained that writing about the American election produces the great volume of hits. Along those lines, I have decided to set up two discussion threads:

Obama good! Romney baaad! In this thread we’ll discuss our hatred of Muslims, advocacy of military aggression world-wide, fears that social programs are too burdensome, and minor issues like gaffes, demeanor at debates, references to cultural icons and advertising strategies and weekly football picks.

The other thread is

Romney good! Obama baaad! In this thread we’ll discuss our hatred of Muslims, advocacy of military aggression world-wide, fears that social programs are too burdensome, and minor issues like gaffes, demeanor at debates, references to cultural icons and advertising strategies and weekly football picks.

Please chime in. Also, for those who are less astute politically, I offer a third thread:

Offbeat issues: Military aggression, attacks on social programs, dumbing down of political debate, campaign finances, Citizens United, Wall Street crime and no punishment, erosion of civil liberties, political campaigns as a distraction from real political issues.

I expect the latter thread to have few participants.