Hack Blog Politico Goes After Bernie Sanders' Past

"It is widely recognized that Politico is little more than a glorified gossip rag, the belly of the media beast, the embodiment of everything vapid, reckless, and petty that drives America’s media rot. Pointing out the latest examples is pointless and redundant."   - Glenn Greenwald, salon.com (see link at bottom of post)

Let's get it out of the way, in the interest of full disclosure and forthright honesty, I have absolutely zero use for the blog Politico. I regard it as a political cesspit composed of a bunch of retreads and former MSM hacks who've resurrected yellow journalism in the digital age to descend to the level of Neoliberal guttersnipes . They, along with the MSM, are one of the primary reasons that decent people never vie for elective office. Why should they if they can expect to have every nook and cranny of their past lives dug up which have NO relevance to the present?

Last year, in one of my recent lacerations of Politico and those who follow it (and believe they're clued in) I referenced a poll it carried out in which 64 percent believed "the country is totally out of control". 

As I observed in that post from October, last year:

"Do these numb nuts even know what "totally out of control" means? Iraq may be "totally out of control" with the ISIS vermin running amuck and pretty much doing what they want. The U.S. is not totally out of control, which shows to me the extent to which certain Americans' minds have been gutted by the Repuke PR machinery.

Even Joe Scarbrough blurted:

"Wait! America, you really believe the country is a runaway beer truck? "

Please don't generalize this to all Americans. It appears to be instead a deranged subset that follows the hack blog called 'Politico'.  And given just the response here one must question whether these people are even qualified to vote in any objective manner. It instead discloses they have lost touch with reality, and we shouldn't trust those apart from reality to cast a realistic vote."

Harsh words but I stand by them. And further, the news this a.m. that Politico dispatched a low grade hack, Michael Kruse, to nose around Vermont to dig up dirt (for a piece entitled 'Bernie Sanders Has A Secret'), reinforces my take. Kruse, talking to Steve Kornacki (who I regard as an "accessory after the fact" - which I will get to later) claims he "went up to Vermont just interested broadly in Bernie Sanders in the 1970s when he went from perennial third party loser to Mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981".

Kruse then claims his "reporting took me somewhere frankly  I didn't expect to go"  and mentions "making a public records request for the birthplace of his son"

WTF?! A records request for his son's birthplace? Are you serious? What the hell has that to do with Sanders' political career or current platform? The only reason to go there would be to dig up some kind of dirt!

This POS hack Kruse then said he learned:

"The mother of the son is not Bernie Sanders' ex -wife, which had never been reported in 44 years of his public political life"

Well, maybe because the people and media of Vermont (which  wifey and I have visited three times on different holidays, including: Burlington, Middlebury, Rochester and Bennington - even considering buying a home there)  have a greater respect for their politicians' private lives than a low grade slime ball from Politico. I.e. a yellow journalist who makes his  dime off sleaze and sensation to further keep Americans' minds in a regressive, knuckle dragger state.

The shameless little weasel then claimed that the context for his story was not about that fact per se, but rather how it managed to "not get reported".

Which brings us to Kornacki himself.

Kornacki, trying to be too clever by half, as he was 2 years ago discussing the JFK assassination, said at the outset of the segment:

"There's nothing wrong with having an illegitimate child outside of marriage. It is only notable in this context to point out that if Hillary Clinton were the parent of an illegitimate child - instead of Bernie Sanders- the nation would have not only heard about it long before now, it would have been dissected over and over and over....Bernie Sanders proves you can keep large segments of your life private if you are a Senator. But can the same be said if you decide to run for President?"

Which is exactly why Bernie kept his private life a secret, because it's no one's goddamned business but his. Also, one has to wonder if now Kornacki is also carrying water for Hillary. Because to compare scrutiny of her with Sanders is like comparing chalk and cheese. One (HRC) has hurled herself into the political limelight from the time she wed Bill Clinton, then - after his 1992 election - insinuated herself into the national fabric as one of the most activist First Ladies ever. (With her health care plan).

By contrast, Bernie's first instincts were never to go into the main stage limelight, including running for President! He only did so after much pushing from progressives - who demanded another contender as opposed to a Hillary coronation. And, btw, this was only after Elizabeth Warren made it clear she had no intention to run - probably expecting the same sort of media shit Sanders is getting now.

Let's wait to see what develops, and hope most Americans now backing Sanders are intelligent enough to ignore this latest Neoliberal ploy to undermine his campaign. In the meantime, one must ask about Kornacki also carrying water for a disgusting, reactionary, garbage -gossip rag like Politico. Has he tossed his show overboard for them in the case of the hit job on Sanders, or is he merely not intelligent enough to see through them? Perhaps, since he also sometimes writes for salon.com,  he needs to read the two links at the bottom.

We deserve better governance, and certainly an end to - or at least mitigation of - inequality. But we will never ever get there if we permit squalid,  irrelevant,  hack reporting to dominate in news cycles. With the only reason to slime and slander a candidate who suddenly poses a threat to the Neoliberal establishment and imperative.

Stay tuned!

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/29/the_politico_culture/

And:

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/30/new_low_for_politico/

Even Liberals Can Be Victims of Conspiracy Phobia - As on Kornacki This A.M.

It's really distressing to the critical thinker to behold the extent to which crappola continues to be spouted on the JFK assassination, particularly the media's consistent disparaging of the whole notion of conspiracy. And while most Europeans think we're idiots for believing that one lone nut killed Kennedy, in America that meme is just fine and dandy. After all, it keeps the hoi polloi in their comfort zones so they can tweet, play fantasy football, and watch 'Survivor' without being bothered.

This was fully on display this morning at the end of Kornacki's 'UP' program where the usual canards, shibboleths were trotted out in abundance. And, of course, who was front and center at Kornacki's  coffee table?  None other than the moron (or dupe) Philip Shenon, still trying to peddle his nonsense about Oswald declaring he wanted to kill JFK in Mexico City.  See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/author-philip-shenon-is-he-idiot-or-dupe.html

Guest Walter Mears, a former AP reporter, and evidently on the verge of Alzheimers is no better, trying to peddle the baloney that "Oswald was the perfect guy for conspiracy theories" then reciting all kinds of idiocy such as "he  defects to Russia, went to Mexico City, kicked out of the Marines, etc." failing to distinguish actual actions from those that emerged from the false defector program I described 3 blogs ago. Mears  goes off the beam, trying to be sardonic or sarcastic, as when he blabs:

"I covered Washington well enough to know that if you have a conspiracy and three people are involved, one of them is going to blow the whistle."

To which all the guests laughed like idiots, unable to grasp how many witnesses were taken out one by one, not only at the time of the Warren Commission, but at the Garrison Investigation and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978-79). Indeed, author Richard Charnin has proven - to a mathematical certainty, these witnesses could not have been offed by "coincidence" or some other claptrap. See:  http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/jfk-witness-deaths-graphical-proof-of-a-conspiracy/

Interestingly, Mears did get the key part of the JFK conspiracy right when he blurted: "And if two are involved, it will keep if one of them dies".

But in the JFK "Witness Death project" - likely carried out by CIA contract  hit men (such as killed William Bruce Pitzer), it obviously will also "keep" if dozens are killed - one by one as they are called to testify before any given investigation. (See Charnin's link and proof.) Mears actually nailed the reason for the lack of evidence he claimed not to see, but was too dumb to understand how or why. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day!

Even Kornacki, an otherwise intelligent MSNBC host on most issues, fell down here,  displaying more ignorance and historical cluelessness than insight.  He made the embarrassing remark:

"Yeah, that's the other part here. We talk about the government as this sort of bumbling, bureaucratic mess. To pull off something as wide scale as in the Oliver Stone movie ('JFK') you try to reconcile that with the government we know."

But Steve K. conflates too many dissimilar factors. For one thing, only one sector was involved- and one clandestine services branch of that. It wasn't like that branch (Richard Helms' DDP) was trying to form an enormous collective involving everyone in gov't! These people didn't "bumble" either, having already shown they could take down the legitimate government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, see:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

Oh, btw, this same branch also took down a Cuban airliner over Barbados, on Oct. 6, 1976 killing all on board. And up to now, the perps involved have never been prosecuted - but we know who the key players were (Freddy Lugo, Hernan Ricardo, Luis Posada), though not the architects within the CIA who dispatched them.  So pardon me, if I have great disdain for any who smirk and laugh at a possible JFK conspiracy.

Steve also misses the boat on 'JFK' which Oliver Stone always maintained was a counter myth to the myth of the Warren Commission. Hence, Stone deliberately interjected all conceivable players to weave that narrative, but at least he was honest in doing so and admitted up front what he was doing (in several interviews I still have on tape, including one with Larry King on CNN from 1991). The WC, meanwhile, deliberately falsified records and evidence, including the autopsy photos and record. (See my FAQ (Pt. 4) on the Warren Commission.)

Both Mears and Kornacki also miss the point that there have been other conspiracies that survived a good deal of time without exposure -including:

- 'Project Stargate' - the DIA and CIA- sponsored program to 'exploit the paranormal' in psy warfare (London Electronic Telegraph, Issue 521,Saturday October 26, 1996) was concealed at least that long.

-MK Ultra which used LSD in secret experiments on military personnel, kept hidden for overt two decades.

-The massacre of South Korean civilians at NO Gun Ri by U.S. soldiers at the start of the Korean War, kept hidden for fifty years.

- The ZR-Rifle Assassination program, kept concealed over twenty-five years.

- The CIA's Report on its own dereliction in the Bay of Pigs, kept concealed over 35 years.

All of these in concert show how anti-conspiracy canards can and do acquire a life and validity of their own simply through repetition. But they're not any more credible from having been repeated - in the media or other venues - umpteen times!

The fact is the government is quite capable of keeping key operations and programs hidden, and the conspiracies associated with them. Indeed, 'black operations' ('black ops') are totally dedicated to that premise! In the JFK case, it is even more possible- given that no formal documents or papers were probably ever generated (by the architects) to sign off on the hit. Though as serious researchers have noted, one can examine exactly who profited in its wake.  We must also bear in mind, as Peter Dale Scott has observed, there are three components here: 1) the fictitious portrayal-framing of Oswald, 2) the actual killing of Kennedy (Executive Action), and 3) the ensuing cover-up, which sadly Kornacki and pals still appear to be part of, if not intentionally.


Then there's Robert MacNeil who chirps in his own two cents - while conceding he's never studied any conspiracy theory ( though he was in Dallas at the time):

"I have never seen any hard evidence that convinces me either that Oswald was not the shooter or that there was a conspiracy around it."

Then, Robert, I suggest you take a careful look at my Frequently Asked Questions, Part 5, related to the bullets and wounds. READ that through carefully, examine the images - and then tell me or write to me with a straight, sober face there was no conspiracy. If you can do that I award you The Utmost Idiot Medal of the Year.

Not content to offer his first "insight" MacNeil continues:

"I think the other piece of this is the emotional radiance Kennedy achieved in the minds of the public, and the inconceivability of that being shattered in this way, by this man."

Which regurgitates a decades long trope that 'Oh me, oh my, we were all so shocked, SHOCKED by the murder of a beloved President at the time - by an alleged filthy commie loner - that it was too much to accept and process'. Horse SHIT.

All MacNeil does here is echo what John Paulos wrote in his book, 'Irreligion' (2008, p. 108) dealing with people's emotional factors to do with belief and non-belief. He wrote:

"Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill-suited for the job of Giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators. Similar remarks apply to the death of Princess Diana"


Paulos’ major error again is in conflating the personal political value of JFK with the value of the assassination. Thus, whether Lee Oswald was an “unprepossessing nobody” or an intel contract agent who tried to warn of an earlier assassination[1], is immaterial to the proposal of a conspiracy hypothesis in JFK’s assassination. The fact is that the assassination as an event had immense historical ramifications.

One of many was the Vietnam War which Kennedy clearly planned to terminate as per his National Security Action Memorandum 263, by the end of 1965.  With Johnson’s ascension to power, his NSAM -273 (allowing for full military engagement) could easily trump JFK’s NSAM-263, and the final touch was the bogus firing on the Turner Joy in claimed international waters in Aug. 1964- the trigger for the massive U.S. military action leading to 58,000 lives lost.

Other historical ramifications can easily be followed if one has the mind, the political insight and the intestinal fortitude. For example, the $269 billion squandered on the Vietnam War meant that the Apollo Moon missions had to be short circuited (last one launched in 1973), since the money wasn’t there to further the early lunar visitations. One can exactly trace that truncated space program arc to the conservative near-Earth Shuttle program.

 

The point is that the assassination was the primary event, not John F. Kennedy per se. It was the assassination that altered the arc of American history for the worse. It was the assassination  that had the high political value, since with Kennedy out of the way, many more nefarious initiatives could be undertaken, including assassinations and launching an 8-plus year undeclared war in Vietnam, for the benefit of war profiteers and oil companies.

 

Of course, because Paulos - and Robert MacNeil likewise- err by mistaking the low political value of the person for the high political value of the assassination,  they similarly err by believing the choice to embrace conspiracy is contingent on the shock effect of an emotional loss to a "loser". But had either enough history and deep politics education they'd see how stupid this sounds. Further, if they knew how hard many of us worked to dig up the FACTS through filing requests, and pouring through the files released they wouldn't be so damned dismissive of conspiracy in this case. Or so brain dead as to embrace Philip Shenon's palpable BS.

What we (including authors James Douglass and Michael Parenti) want is for the nation to finally face this tragedy without pretense or specious rationalizations. No denials, no subterfuge, no deflections and no more excuses for intelligence agency stone-walling and inaction. Or, protecting their asses by specious arguments because it's believed the American people can't handle the truth that their own government (at least one branch) played a major role in Kennedy's killing.

We do so not to "run from reality", a demeaning choice of canard from the pseudo-historians, but confront it. As Michael Parenti has pointedly noted ('The Dirty Truth'. p. 186), we:

"are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy."

Parenti also notes (op. cit., p.174):


" Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: 'Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room, plotting things?' For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers.  But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels?"

 I sincerely hope my Brane Space readers don't suffer from conspiracy phobia, because I believe this 50th anniversary year of the assassination is the time to let it all hang out in terms of smashing through the cobwebs of manufactured delirium and false history with which we've all been saddled. That is a primary reason I am expending a lot of energy on these assassination-related posts which I think people have a right to see, and in the process learn of our real history. Yes, it will often be painful, but unlike Steve Kornacki and his guests I am betting they can handle the truth.
 

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[1] See, e.g. Douglass, op. cit., p 200 (and further) with reference to an “informant named Lee” who phoned to expose the plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago on November 2, 1963- the same day the Diems were to be executed in Vietnam. As Douglass observes, had that earlier plot succeeded, the accused lone-nut assassin we’d be arguing about would be another former Marine, Thomas Arthur Vallee, not Lee Harvey Oswald.

Can We Avoid the "Herd Mentality" This Time Around? Can We Avoid Committing Rational Evil?

Hillary Mann Leverett, professor at American University, came out swinging with facts and intelligence this morning on Steve Kornacki's 'UP' show, that again- we have no business barging into Syria - which effects would arguably be even more catastrophic and dunning than those from barging into Iraq. And whether we're talking "limited strikes" for "two days" or not.

As Prof. Leverett observed, the current drumbeat is "strikingly similar to the lead up to the war in Iraq" and Prof. Leverett ought to know as she was in the Bush White House and also dealing with Congressional Democrats, and with members of the media. She goes on:

"The herd mentality which took over to buy into the Bush administration's narrative that Saddam had to have chemical weapons of mass destruction and was determined to use them, was something unquestioned. ....it was not only a mistake, it was based on manufactured evidence. Here, no one is asking this basic question except our friends in Moscow: 'What if Assad didn't order this? What if this wasn't a Syrian troop chemical attack. What if this was perpetrated by al Qaeda affiliated oppositionists. The consequences here for going into Syria are even more grave than Iraq. Because if we go into Syria and the al Qaeda groups get away with mass chemical warfare- and that's what happened - and we think they're going to stop there - that's the definition of insanity."

But perhaps the country has been in the throes of national insanity since the 1991 Gulf War and ditching the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome"- which up until then had instilled forbearance in our leaders for taking precipitous military action. After that happened, we got "humanitarian" interventions in Somalia (with disastrous results - merely converting it into a rogue state) and Bosnia, which then led the Clinton cruise missile attack in Sudan - which actually struck a pharmaceutical factory and culminating in the lawless invasion of a sovereign state in Iraq. The latter technically no different from the Nazi  blitzkrieg invasion of Poland in 1939 - which also employed the ruse of Polish terror to justify it.

Maybe people need to read 'The Shock Doctrine' by Naomi Klein, or the essay by Henry Giroux, 'The Politics of Cruelty - America's Descent Into Madness' . The problem, of course, is if the political structure has descended into a putative madness, there will be only a few citizens with the insight to see it and the spine to point it out. This very probability makes the "herd mentality" referenced by Prof. Leverett an ongoing reality.

Anyway, back to the 'UP' program. Kornacki interrupted at one point to ask:

"What would be the evidence?" and adding, "John Kerry put a lot of evidence on the table."

To which Prof. Leverett responded: "Compared to Colin Powell, it's a joke!"

Prof. Leverett then pointed out that the Russians and Chinese didn't pull their people out but went to the last chemical weapons attack sites in March. What did they find? According to her:

"They did forensics on the ground themselves and found two striking things which have not been covered here in the press at home: One was that the rockets used to deliver those chemicals were home made rockets. Not military or industrially produced. The other thing they found is that the sarin was not military ordnance or industrially produced, it didn't include stabilizers. So maybe the Russians have a point."

Well, I would say that sane people have a point and anyone claiming not to be foolish would again have to ask: 'Cui bono?' WHO benefits? Would it be Assad, or al Qaeda oppositionists, just itching to get the U.S. involved to help them neuter Assad so they can take over. THEN we will have not a few thousand terrorists to confront, but likely hundreds of thousands. And I can just see the last remnants of our civil liberties crumbling before my eyes as the last vestiges of constitutional protections are gutted .....oh, in the name of "national security."

As Prof. Leverett concluded:

"The rest of the world does not believe what we're saying for good reason: we made it up before!"

Adding:

"This gets back to the whole point in the set up (Kornacki's intro) that this is not peculiar to Bush, Clinton, or Obama. These decisions, taken with very little thought, including under Clinton-  to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, and to continuously bomb Iraq, bomb Sudan and bomb other places- these are not clean interventions."

Indeed, any highly intelligent race of outside observers (say aliens from another world) would regard our actions as meeting even their definition of insanity. They'd ask why this particular enclave of humanity is so obsessed with fighting terrorism when it appears committed to creating more terrorists.

Hillary's final point was the one I made when blogging that the U.S. has no moral authority to unilaterally attack anyone:

"The United States has no authority to punish".

Bingo! We are not the cops of the world, nor do we possess the unique moral authority given our own acts and complicity in past dastardly deeds as I noted three blogs ago.  Besides, if we set this up as a precedent what other "villains" will we be prepared to take out given we are already reaching a $16.7 trillion debt limit next month?

In my new book (Beyond Atheism, Beyond God) in the section Practical Reason and Human Evil  in the final chapter, I note that one of the canards circulated about human evil is that it’s irrational. If the person only knew better, or reasoned properly, he’d arrive at the generic good, and we'd all be better off.  I cited philosopher John Kekes who disposes of this myth quite forcefully (The Roots of Evil, p. 156.)  

As Kekes observes, abundant historical examples disclose that people often robustly justify their actions on the basis of a good perceived in their minds, but which in retrospect turns out to be evil. Therefore it’s not the lack of reason or rationality that infuses their actions but instead the false beliefs that supported the reasoning!

As examples of rational evil  one can cite all supposedly "rational justifications" for aggressive national policy, including military occupations of sovereign states, targeted military attacks, and the implementation of economic evil such as austerity policies- which harm millions.

A case in point for the first is George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, begun after 9/11. Launched after that horrific event nearly twelve years ago, it had been driven with all the best intentions to find and kill all those responsible for the deed that left nearly 3,000 dead in the World Trade Center. But in the aftermath what did we actually see? Well, an invasion of a sovereign state (Iraq) that had nothing to do with 9/11, and which left nearly 600,000 Iraqis dead according to World Health Organization statistics. Added to that, the widespread use of the most debasing torture methods (used by the CIA) to extract information including on bin Laden’s hiding place. The combined American occupations, unpaid for in additional taxes, left the U.S. with nearly $4 trillion in deficits that have now come back to haunt us. These have the nation facing the specter of even more draconian cuts to the most vulnerable citizens under the specious rubric of “sequestration."


Bush and his minions truly believed they were doing good at the time they demanded congress vote on The Iraq War Resolution in 2002, never mind what we later discovered[1]. Bush’s aggressive foreign policies also exposed unsavory aspects about the U.S. as a nation.  For example, one willing to violate Nuremberg Article VI to actually launch a pre-emptive war by invasion as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland. The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushies actually compared Saddam to Hitler! Never mind that Saddam was the one being pounded by the most devastating shock and awe attack since the Blitzkrieg launched by Hitler on Poland in 1939.

But this sort of human evil had been strenuously reasoned and formally justified by Bushie Neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney! In addition, the U.S. corporate media acted as a willing accomplice, fully complicit in spreading the hysteria that led to the Iraq invasion on March 15, 2003.  Hence each and every one of these actors, agents share blame in manifesting human evil, including the devastating costs exacted on Iraqi civilians.

 

Far from malignant human evil emerging without rationality or reason, it instead erupted as if from multiple cancerous cells becoming malignant. We the citizens also played along by being cowed, afraid to speak out lest we be deemed unpatriotic or even terrorist sympathizers.  Many of us also allowed ourselves to be too uninformed, even ignorant of the issues, thereby allowing ourselves to be played. Susan Jacoby, for example, references “two thirds of us can’t find Iraq on a map and many members of Congress don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni[2]”  In a nutshell, too many Americans have “become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions."

 

This is tragic, because if Americans can’t or won’t exercise their minds to think critically, especially concerning our national history and consequences of our actions, then we stand to be led into more reckless wars. This is why Obama's rhetoric that this proposed strike will be "limited" is bollocks. What if, after his "2- day" strike,  another nerve gas attack happens a month later and kills more than 1,429? What then? Obviously, having gone in once under this 'humanitarian" pretext, Obama will have to go in again... and again.....and again! There will be no end especially as he has no intentions of actually removing Assad (which itself would be as reckless as what we did with Saddam).

 

Enough "red lines". Remember one thing and one only: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

 

Hackneyed, but as true as ever. Let us have no more rational evil expedited with the best intentions! Under Obama, or anyone else.
 

 See also: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/1934

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1] We now know an Iraqi (codename ‘curveball’) made the whole WMD baloney up in order to trigger regime change to replace Saddam, oblivious to the human costs.

2] Jacoby, op. cit., 310.

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