thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
this. The distance from observable reality is rhetorically required; indeed, that you havent quite seen anything resembling any of this in your everyday life is a kind of evidence all by itself. It just goes to show how diabolical the enemy has become. He is unseen; but the redeemer, the hero who tells you the tale, can see the innermost details of the most baleful conspiracies. Trust him. Send him your money. Surrender your willand the monster shall be banished for good.Scaling UpThis method highlights the fundamental workings of all grassroots conservative political appeals, be they spurious claims of Barack Obamas Islamic devotion, the supposed explosion of taxpayer-supported welfare fraud, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.And, in an intersection that is utterly crucial, this same theology of fear is how a certain sort of commercial appeala snake-oil-selling oneworks as well. This is where the retail political lying practiced by Romney links up with the universe in which 23-cent miracle cures exist (absent the heros intervention) just out of reach, thanks to the conspiracy of some powerful cabala cabal that, wouldnt you know it in these late-model hustles, perfectly resembles the ur-villain of the conservative mind: liberals.In this respect, its not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coinwhere the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitchesthe come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains.Dear Fellow Conservative,Do you know which special interest has given more money to the Obama and Clinton campaigns than any other?If you guessed trial lawyerswell, okay, thats too easy. But can you guess which special interest came in second?Labor unions? Nope. The Green Lobby? Nope. AARP? Wrong, again. NEA? Nyet.Give up? Okay, heres the answer: Wall Street.Thats right. According to CNNMoney.com, Wall Street securities and investment firms have given over $35 million to Democratic candidates this election cycle. . . . If youve been wondering why the financial industry has been in meltdownand taking your 401(k) or investment portfolio down with itnow you know.Lets face it: The former frat boys who populate Wall Street today understand economics about as well as the pinko professors whose courses they snored through. . . . Trusting them with your money is like trusting Bill Clinton to babysit your underage niece.But I know someone you can trust to manage your investments. . . . His name is Dr. Mark Skousenthats Dr. as in Ph.D. in Economics and Monetary History, something you dont get by playing Beer Pong with your frat buddies. For the past 28 years, subscribers to his investment newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, have profited enormously from his uncanny ability to predict major market trends before they happen. . . .For instance: In the early 80s, Dr. Skousen predicted that Reaganomics
one of those breakthroughs). It all makes its own sort of internally coherent sense when you consider the salesman: James Dale Davidson is a founder of the National Taxpayers Union, a Richard Mellon Scaifefunded enterprise that gave Grover Norquist his start as a professional conservative. Davidson himself is a producer of Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster. There is overwhelming evidence that Foster was murdered, he told the Washington Post. They obviously have reasons they dont want this to come out . . . obviously theres something big theyre trying to protect.Of course, the childlike appeals wont work their full magic without the invocation of the conservative movements childlike heroes. The Gipper appears in another splendid specimen received by Human Events readerswhich is appropriate, because Human Events is where Reagan himself got a lot of the made-up stuff he spouted across his entire political career. When President Ronald Reagan got cancer during his presidency, this one begins, the great German doctor Hans Nieper, M.D., treated him. It would have been frontpage news if it hadnt been hushed up at the time. (German doctors cook cancer out of your body while you nap!) Many American cancer patients lose their hair and their vitality. But Reagan kept his famous pompadour hairstyle. He also kept his warm smile and vigorous style. (CLICK HERE to requestGerman Cancer Breathrough: A Guide to Top German Alternative Clinics.) Reagan lived for another 19 years. He died at age 93, and not from cancer. (Fortunately, as a journalist Im protected by the First Amendment. I can tell you the truth without having to risk persecution from the authorities.)Miracle cures, get-rich-quick schemes, murderous liberals, the mystic magic mirage of a world without taxes, those weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden somewhere in the Syrian desertonly connect.Untruth and ConsequencesAnd what of Willard M. Romneys part in the game? Theres a lot going on with Romneys lying, not all of it related to his conservative identity; he was making things up as a habit, after all, back when he was a Massachusetts moderate. To a certain extent, Romneys lies are explicable in just the way a lot of pundits are explaining them. When youve been all over the map ideologically, and youre selling yourself to a party now built on extremist ideological purity, it takes a lot of tale-telling to cover your back. But that doesnt explain one overlooked proviso: these lies are as transparent to his Republican colleagues as they are to any other sentient being. Nor does it account for a still more curious factfor all the objections that conservatives have aired over Romneys suspect purity in these last months, not one prominent conservative has made Romneys dishonesty part of the brief against him.Its time, in other words, to consider whether Romneys fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of heartsbut
the description he made of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy: good, healthy, right-wing exuberants.I gave half a dozen examples of latter-day conservative exuberance, in my own admitted exuberance to rain down the shame: the phony middle of the road caucus formed to secretly take over a National Student Association meeting from the right; the fliers the RNC put out during the 2004 election announcing that a President John Kerry would institute a plan to ban the Bible; the time Jerry Falwell lied that hed never argued for the elimination of the public school systemlying for the Lord, as Mormons call it. Then, as the question-and-answer period approached, I trembled, anticipating the conservative elites chastened response. Yes, reader: I was once just that naive.M. Stanton Evans, a legendary movement godfather, stood up. He said my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Richard Nixon had never been a conservative. He proceeded, though, to make a striking admission: I didnt like Nixon until Watergateat which point, apparently, Nixon finally convinced conservatives he could be one of them.And that, at last, may be the explanation for Mitt Romneys apparently bottomless penchant for lying in public. If the 2012 GOP nominee lied louder than mostand even more astoundingly than he has during his prior campaignsits just because he felt like he had more to prove to his core following. Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, its like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the rewardand then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeeperswere not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers, as one Romney aide put itis another part of closing the deal. For years now, the story in the mainstream political press has been Romneys difficulty in convincing conservatives, finally, that he is truly one of them. For these elites, his lyingso dismaying to the opinion-makers at the New York Times, who act like this is something newis how he has pulled it off once and for all. And at the grassroots, his fluidity with their preferred fables helps them forget why they never trusted the guy in the first place.http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_long_con/
file remained a troubling mystery inside Nixons White House, but Nixon still lived up to his pre-election agreement with South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to extend U.S. military participation in the war with the goal of getting the South Vietnamese a better outcome than they would have received from Johnson in 1968.Nixon not only continued the Vietnam War, which had already claimed more than 30,000 American lives and an estimated one million Vietnamese, but he expanded it, with intensified bombing campaigns and a U.S. incursion into Cambodia. At home, the war was bitterly dividing the nation with a massive anti-war movement and an angry backlash from war supporters.Pentagon PapersIt was in that intense climate in 1971 that Daniel Ellsberg, a former senior Defense Department official, gave the New York Times a copy of the Pentagon Papers, the secret U.S. history of the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967. The voluminous report documented many of the lies most told by Democrats to draw the American people into the war.The Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, and the disclosures touched off a public firestorm. Trying to tamp down the blaze, Nixon took extraordinary legal steps to stop dissemination of the secrets, ultimately failing in the U.S. Supreme Court.But Nixon had an even more acute fear. He knew something that few others did, that there was a sequel to the Pentagon Papers that was arguably more explosive the missing file containing evidence that Nixon had covertly prevented the war from being brought to a conclusion so he could maintain a political edge in Election 1968.If anyone thought the Pentagon Papers represented a shocking scandal and clearly millions of Americans did how would people react to a file that revealed Nixon had kept the slaughter going with thousands of additional American soldiers dead and the violence spilling back into the United States just so he could win an election?A savvy political analyst, Nixon recognized this threat to his reelection in 1972, assuming he would have gotten that far. Given the intensity of the anti-war movement, there would surely have been furious demonstrations around the White House and likely an impeachment effort on Capitol Hill.So, on June 17, 1971, Nixon summoned Haldeman and Kissinger into the Oval Office and as Nixons own recording devices whirred softly pleaded with them again to locate the missing file. Do we have it? a Nixon asked Haldeman. Ive asked for it. You said you didnt have it.Haldeman: We cant find it.Kissinger: We have nothing here, Mr. President.Nixon: Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.Kissinger: But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.Haldeman: We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file on it.Nixon: Where?Haldeman: [Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that theres a file on it and its at Brookings.Nixon: Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Hustons plan [for White House-sponsored break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.Kissinger: Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.Nixon: I want
it implemented. ... Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.Haldeman: They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need to Kissinger: I wouldnt be surprised if Brookings had the files.Haldeman: My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesnt know for sure that we dont have them around.But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he had ordered Rostow to remove it in the final days of his own presidency.Forming the BurglarsOn June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into Brookings and take it [the file] out. Nixon even suggested using former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.You talk to Hunt, Nixon told Haldeman. I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. Youre to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. ... Just go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 oclock.Haldeman: Make an inspection of the safe.Nixon: Thats right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never took place, but Nixons desperation to locate Johnsons peace-talk file was an important link in the chain of events that led to the creation of Nixons burglary unit under Hunts supervision. Hunt later oversaw the two Watergate break-ins in May and June of 1972.While its possible that Nixon was still searching for the file about his Vietnam-peace sabotage when the Watergate break-ins occurred nearly a year later, its generally believed that the burglary was more broadly focused, seeking any information that might have an impact on Nixons re-election, either defensively or offensively.As it turned out, Nixons burglars were nabbed inside the Watergate complex on their second break-in on June 17, 1972, exactly one year after Nixons tirade to Haldeman and Kissinger about the need to blow the safe at the Brookings Institution in pursuit of the missing Vietnam peace-talk file.Ironically, too, Johnson and Rostow had no intention of exposing Nixons dirty secret regarding LBJs Vietnam peace talks, presumably for the same reasons that they kept their mouths shut back in 1968, out of a benighted belief that revealing Nixons actions might somehow not be good for the country.In November 1972, despite the growing scandal over the Watergate break-in, Nixon handily won reelection, crushing Sen. George McGovern, Nixons preferred opponent. Nixon then reached out to Johnson seeking his help in squelching Democratic-led investigations of the Watergate affair and slyly noting that Johnson had ordered wiretaps of Nixons campaign in 1968.Johnson reacted angrily to the overture, refusing to cooperate. On Jan. 20, 1973, Nixon was sworn in for his second term. On Jan. 22, 1973, Johnson died of a heart attack.Toward ResignationIn the weeks that followed Nixons Inauguration and Johnsons death, the scandal over the Watergate cover-up grew more serious, creeping ever closer to the Oval Office. Meanwhile, Rostow struggled to decide what he should do with The X Envelope.On May 14, 1973, in
a three-page memorandum for the record, Rostow summarized what was in The X Envelope and provided a chronology for the events in fall 1968. Rostow reflected, too, on what effect LBJs public silence then may have had on the unfolding Watergate scandal.I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways to the Watergate affair of 1972, Rostow wrote. He noted, first, that Nixons operatives may have judged that their enterprise with the South Vietnamese in frustrating Johnsons last-ditch peace initiative had secured Nixon his narrow margin of victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968.Second, they got away with it, Rostow wrote. Despite considerable press commentary after the election, the matter was never investigated fully. Thus, as the same men faced the election in 1972, there was nothing in their previous experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn them off, and there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit and beyond. [To read Rostows memo, click here, here and here.]What Rostow didnt know was that there was a third and more direct connection between the missing file and Watergate. Nixons fear about the file surfacing as a follow-up to the Pentagon Papers was Nixons motive for creating Hunts burglary team in the first place.Rostow apparently struggled with what to do with the file for the next month as the Watergate scandal expanded. On June 25, 1973, fired White House counsel John Dean delivered his blockbuster Senate testimony, claiming that Nixon got involved in the cover-up within days of the June 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee. Dean also asserted that Watergate was just part of a years-long program of political espionage directed by Nixons White House.The very next day, as headlines of Deans testimony filled the nations newspapers, Rostow reached his conclusion about what to do with The X Envelope. In longhand, he wrote a Top Secret note which read, To be opened by the Director, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, not earlier than fifty (50) years from this date June 26, 1973.In other words, Rostow intended this missing link of American history to stay missing for another half century. In a typed cover letter to LBJ Library director Harry Middleton, Rostow wrote: Sealed in the attached envelope is a file President Johnson asked me to hold personally because of its sensitive nature. In case of his death, the material was to be consigned to the LBJ Library under conditions I judged to be appropriate. ...After fifty years the Director of the LBJ Library (or whomever may inherit his responsibilities, should the administrative structure of the National Archives change) may, alone, open this file. ... If he believes the material it contains should not be opened for research [at that time], I would wish him empowered to re-close the file for another fifty years when the procedure outlined above should be repeated.Ultimately, however, the LBJ Library didnt wait that long. After a little more than two decades, on July 22, 1994, the envelope
newspapers largely ignored the findings and did nothing to help rehabilitate Webbs career, eventually contributing to his suicide in 2004. [For details on the CIA report, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]The major newspapers have been equally unwilling to rethink the origins and the significance of the October Surprise/Iran-Contra scandal. It doesnt matter how much new evidence accumulates. It remains much easier to continue the politically safe deification of Gipper Reagan and the fond remembrances of Poppy Bush.Not only would rethinking Iran-Contra and Watergate stir up anger and abuse from Republican operatives and the Right, but the process would reflect badly on many journalists and historians who built careers, in part, by getting these important historical stories wrong.However, there must come a point when the weight of the new evidence makes the old interpretations of these scandals intellectually untenable and when treasured sayings like the cover-up is worse than the crime are swept into the historical dustbin.http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/shocking-new-evidence-reveals-depths-treason-and-treachery-watergate-and-iran?paging=off
Jake, Farrell, Bobby, Tony @ Charlack 4.04.2012 from Jake Naumer on Vimeo. The Old Act of RepudiationPerhaps you dont know because not everything is related in a blog but the first act of repudiation that I saw in my life was when I was only five. The commotion in the tenement caught the attention of the two girls we then were, my sister and I. We peered over the railings of the narrow corridor to look down to the floor below. People were screaming and raising their fists around a neighbors door. As young as we were, we had no idea what was going on. Whats more, now when I recall what happened I have barely the memory of the cold railing under my fingers and a brief flash of those who were shouting. Years later I could put together that kaleidoscope of childish evocations and I knew I had been a witness to the violence unleashed against those who wanted to emigrate from the port of Mariel.Well, since then I have experienced several acts of repudiation up close. Whether as a victim, observer, or journalist... never I should clarify as a victimizer. I remember a particularly violent one that I experienced with the Ladies in White, where the hordes of intolerance spat on us, pushed us and even pulled our hair. But last night was unprecedented for me. The picketing of the extremists who blocked the showing of Dado Galvaos film in Feria de Santana, Bahia, was something more than the sum of unconditional supporters of the Cuban government. They all had, for example, the same document printed in color with a pack of lies about me, as Manichean as they were easy to refute in a simple conversation. They repeated an identical and hackneyed script, without the least intention of listening to any reply I could give them. They shouted, interrupted, and at one point became violent, and occasionally launched a chorus of slogans that even in Cuba are no longer said.However, with the help of Senator Eduardo Suplicy, and the calm in the face of adversity that characterizes me, we managed to start talking. In short: they only knew how to yell and repeat the same phrases, like programmed automatons. So the meeting was very interesting! Their neck veins swelled, I cracked a smile. They attacked me personally, I brought the discussion back to Cuba which will always be more important than this humble servant. They wanted to lynch me, I talked. They were responding to orders, I am a free soul. At the end of the night I had the same feelings as after a battle against the demons of the same extremism that fueled those acts of repudiation in 1980 in Cuba. The difference is that this time I understood the mechanism that foments these attitudes, I could see the long arm that controls them from the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana.http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy/?p=3321 [I don't know how I missed this article.]A Former Brazilian Presidential Chief-of-Staff Gets 10 Years in Vote-Buying Schemeby Simon Rimero, The New York Times,