HBO's John Oliver Blows It Conflating JFK Assassination With Kooky COVID Conspiracies

John Oliver- left- analogized John Hinckley's  1981 attempted assassination of Reagan with the 1963 Kennedy assassination on his show 'Last Week Tonight'.  Alex Jones (center) is the epitome of the low grade morons who create conspiracy codswallop- like his Sandy Hook false flag bunkum. Meanwhile, Mark Lane (left)  has all the attributes of a professional assassination researcher, see e.g.http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/05/rip-mark-lane-one-of-earliest-jfk.html

"How do we know that our own rational rejections of conspiracy theories are not themselves infected with beliefs so strong that they are, in effect, conspiracy theories too?" - Matt Ridley in 'Maybe We're All Conspiracy Theorists', The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10-11, 2011

"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?"-

Michael Parenti in 'The Dirty Truths', p. 174

John Oliver, usually a bright guy, fell into the usual doo-doo trap of conflating unrelated conspiracy phenomena on his July 19th edition of 'Last Week Tonight'. What did he do?   In a whole segment headed 'Conspiracy Theories'- which included the cockeyed ideations about Covid -19 such as spun by  Judy Mikovits in her mockumentary 'Plandemic'-  he included the JFK assassination.   He cited it under the error of what he called "proportionality bias" or the erroneous belief that "big events must have big causes or actors".  

Hence,  Covid 19 has been rendered a huge event (by the media) because  Bill Gates wants to use it as an excuse to mount a vaccination scheme to inject microchips into an unsuspecting population to control them.  By the same token, "the JFK assassination caused such havoc and global shock that people could not believe one lone gunman did it" - so had to confect a much grander conspiracy.   

 Prompted by this misconstrued meme he goes on to compare the Kennedy assassination to the John Hinckley -attempted 1981 assassination of Ronald Reagan.  He plays a clip from a Barnard College "academic psychologist" named Rob Brotherton,  author of the book 'Suspicious Minds' e.g.

 who says:

  "The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was a similar event in all regards except the president survived.  It was a smaller event in terms of its outcome so therefore we're satisfied with smaller expectations.  And so there have been almost no conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan either then or subsequently."

Of course there were no conspiracy theories  after Hinckley's attempt on Reagan. Why would there be?  It's a 'chalk and cheese' difference  which Brotherton would know if he'd done the least bit of serious research into the JFK assassination, instead of making facile assumptions. First, the  two events are not the same in any respect, contrary to Brotherton's bollocks.  In the Reagan attempt it was one lone punk trying to fire a handgun at his target.  In the Kennedy assassination three teams of snipers had taken positions in Deaely Plaza for a triangulated crossfire to take him out.   The chances of success were  essentially 100 percent.

Sketch of Dealey Plaza and 3 of the 6  shots  fired at JFK (from Robert Grodin's 'Killing of a President')

The above  sketch shows the trajectories of 3 of the 6 shots fired at JFK.  Another reason comparing this hit to the attempted assassination of Reagan is imbecilic. Again, just because a person is a professor doesn't mean he can't also be an imbecile.  Certainly in matters of deep politics which requires vastly more familiarity than 'shoot from the hip' takes from dime store psychology.

Let's also note the rifles which fired that day in Dallas featured bullets with full metal jackets.  According to one 2001 echo correlation analysis (by D.B. Thomas) published in the journal Science and Justice (Vol. 41, p. 21), no fewer than 6 rounds had been fired at JFK including the fatal head shot that blew his brains backwards and which exposed the back of his skull -  missing on a Parkland table:

This photo appeared in the David Lifton book, 'Best Evidence', and was supported by Parkland surgeon Charles Crenshaw who attended to Kennedy's wounds.  See the Preface of  his book 'Conspiracy of Silence', a pdf version of which is given below.  

http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Conspiracy_Of_Silence.pdf

Excerpt from Preface:

'Through the years, there have been a thousand instances when I have wanted to shout to the world that the wounds to Kennedy's head and throat that I examined were caused by bullets that struck him from the front, not the back, as the public has been led to believe. Instinctively, I have reached for the telephone many times to call a television station to set the, story straight when I heard someone confidently claim that Oswald was the lone gunman from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book De­pository, only to restrain myself-until now."

So no, with the high powered weapons arrayed against JFK he never had a chance.  With  the lone handgun pointed at Reagan, at least he did.  But I doubt either Brotherton or Oliver ever read a page of Lifton's book, or Dr. Crenshaw's. Why would they if they consider it on a par or spectrum with the piffle churned out by QAnon or the batshit crazy Covid quacks and deniers like Judy Mikovits?

Further, let's note the difference in enemies. Reagan was a hero of the military -industrial complex (MIC) as he proposed to spend trillions for new weaponry.  He did and by the end of his 8-year reign had run up a $2.7 trillion deficit. JFK was regarded as a traitor by the MIC  especially given his plans to pull out of Vietnam by calendar year 1965 under National Security Memorandum 263.

Add to that  his earlier rejection of Gen. Curtis Lemay's demand to bomb and invade Cuba during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when Lemay compared him to Neville Chamberlain.  As per the source article in The Baltimore Sun ('Bomb Cuba! Lemay Urged JFK',   based on the declassified tapes, where we read:

"Blasting Kennedy's cautious approach, the Air Force Chief, Gen. Curtis LeMay, told the President at a White House meeting on Oct. 19, 1962, ‘This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich…"

Kennedy also did something Reagan would never have done, i.e. to sign the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev (in August, 1963)  which prohibited even anti-missile systems.  The Right wing and the military - national security complex went bonkers.   Finally, the coup de grace had to be JFK's effort at a secret rapprochement with Fidel Castro in the spring of 1963.  Key to this was ABC reporter Lisa Howard:

Who had  offered herself as an intermediary for the first bilateral talks between U.S. and Cuban officials in April, 1963.  (This was soon after doing a fairly sympathetic TV special with Castro earlier in the month. )   Further, Ms. Howard offered her 5th Avenue New York apartment as a venue for meeting with the Cuban ambassador to the UN.  This was already accepted as a report by the UK Guardian notes, e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/nov/26/cuba.julianborger

Wherein we learn:

"The administration gave a nod to Ms Howard, who set up a chance meeting between Mr Attwood and the Cuban ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga, at a cocktail party in her Park Avenue apartment.

The apartment then became a communications centre between Mr Attwood and the Castro regime. Castro's aide, Dr Rene Vallejo, called at pre-arranged times to talk to Mr Attwood, and in the autumn of 1963 suggested that Mr Attwood fly to Mexico from where he would be picked up by a plane sent by Castro."

Does anyone believe Reagan would have allowed anything analogous? Say secret meets with Libya's Muammar Ghaddafi? Give me a break. Yet Brotherton is dumb enough to believe the attempted hit on Reagan and the JFK assassination are "similar in all regards" without remotely processing why JFK's enemies were ten orders of magnitude more formidable than the lovesick little loser who tried to kill Ronnie Raygun.  And, of course, given all this, no one would have expected to see thousands of 'WANTED for Treason' posters, e.g.


As JFK faced in Big D the day he was killed.

But John Oliver is so mesmerized by Brotherton's balderdash, i.e. that the two events are similar except in one there was failure, that he responds: 

"Exactly! That kind of makes sense. So one man suddenly changing the world is inconceivable.  But one man failing miserably is not the least surprising."

But again, "one man" didn't change the world.  A coalition of conspirators did, including CIA  assets who had a bundle of reasons (including the firing of Allen Dulles).  For the extensive backstory read:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/ike-jfk-also-hostage-to-national.html

 As I note, what most infuriated the CIA was Kennedy's willingness - after the Bay of Pigs debacle -  to exclude them from critical roles, assignments as well as reorganizing the agency, e.g. 

"Kennedy went further, creating a Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible to him, and soon mandating all overflights of Cuba be done by the Strategic Air Command, not the CIA. He also defined a list of directives on what the CIA could and could not, do. By the end of 1961, JFK's 'Special Group' had no less than 17 recommendations for the "reorganization and redirection of the CIA"."

Oliver's lack of preparation for his 5 minute blitz spot with Brotherton discloses a sad unwillingness to plow just a little into the background of the assassination, including the existence of Oswald's intel  (e.g. 201) files and connections.  Hence,  his arguing Hinckley  was  just "another lone gunman" but in an unsuccessful attempt, while Oswald (coincidentally)  happened to be successful.  Except one minor problem: Oswald never killed JFK.  No way in hell - not with the pathetic excuse for a WWII edition Italian carbine (Mannlicher-Carcano)  he was purportedly using, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/frequently-asked-questions-on-fhe-jfk.html

John Oliver's egregious assumptions  to do with 'proportionality bias' applying to the JFK hit include not only this conflation but trying to put Oswald into the same 'lone nut' mold as Hinckley.  (Who had fantasies of offing Reagan to please his imagined paramour, actress Jodie Foster)  In this way, Oliver also succumbed to what I call  the "A useless nobody kills big shot in random world" meme.  This trope is not new but has been peddled in various forms for nearly 55 years now.  For example, mathematician John Allan Paulos fell for it when he wrote in his book Irreligion,(p. 6):

"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."

But again, in this (JFK)  case there were  'significant perpetrators'  - but not Oswald.  Further we now have all the files available (which we didn't in 1964-65 when the Warren Commission Report came out), to at least know the Kennedy assassination was based on a coherent conspiracy - and also that Lee Oswald was not part of it, e.g.

A Hard Fact: All Necessary JFK Files HAVE Been Rel...

 Problem is the mainstream media was muzzled on presenting the details. (Likely on account of the CIA's 'Operation Mockingbird nexus). As author Michael Parenti opens eyes in his book, The Dirty Truths, Lee Oswald was no John Hinckley:

“Lee Harvey Oswald spent most of his adult life not as a lone drifter but directly linked to the U.S. intelligence community. All of his IQ tests show that he was above average in intelligence and a quick learner. At the age of eighteen in the U.S. Marines he had secret security clearance and was working at Marine Air Control in Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, a top secret location from which the CIA launched U2 flights and performed other kinds of covert operations in China. The next year he was assigned to El Toro Air Station in California with security clearance to work radar. “

Parenti 's claims of an intelligence connection all emerged in John Newman's book, Oswald and the CIA - which I will bet neither John Paulos or John Oliver ever read. Though they feel themselves qualified to speak or write of Oswald:  a) being involved in the first place (other than a patsy) , and b) as a "nobody".   Indeed, examination of Oswald's CI/SIG file showed he had access to:

“The locations of all bases on the west coast, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, strength of all squadrons, the number and type of aircraft in each, names of commanding officers, and authentic codes of entering and exiting all ADIZ radar ranges.”

If then Oswald was as lame as claimed by the likes of Paulos, Oliver  and also  CBS anchor Eric Sevareid  in a special 55 years ago, i.e.

"Who could believe power and majesty can be wiped out in an instant by a skinny, weak-chinned little character".

Then he'd not have been entrusted with the critical material and information noted above.  Here, of course, Sevareid can perhaps be excused for his unprofessional belittling of Oswald's import because the JFK Records Act was still some 25 years away when Sevareid made that remark. But the  two Johns -- Oliver and Paulos -  ought to have known better and at least should have done some minimal serious research before either writing Oswald off as a nobody, or comparing him to the loser John Hinckley or worse, imputing the assassination to him at all. 

Lee Oswald then was no kook but a bona fide intel operative. Most researchers who've delved into this in much more depth than superficial 'buffs' come away with the conviction Oswald was set up as part of ZR/Rifle. A classic decoy.  However,  with the plot now turned against Kennedy. Oswald was likely used as the dupe or decoy so the actual perps (likely Cuban exiles, and trained assassins - from the Army's Ft. Benning Assassin school) could escape .   We also know these assigned mechanics would have used the CIA Assassinations Handbook, available since Operation PBSuccess in 1954, see e.g.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

As noted in Document 1:

"The idea of forming assassination teams ('K' groups) apparently originated with Castillo Arenas in 1952.  Adopting Castillo Arenas' concept the [  ] chief routinely included two assassination specialists in his training plans.  CIA training for sabotage teams in early 1954 also included creating a 'K' group trained to perform assassinations."

There is no doubt such a 'K' group was set to target Castro under ZR/Rifle (in 1962), but could easily be redirected to target Kennedy in late 1963.  The proof in the pudding was the letter ‘D’ – on the cover sheet of Oswald’s 201 file – indicating a  CIA Staff D  SIGINT or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National Security Agency or NSA. As pointed out by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994): 

“In 1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of developing the CIA Assassinations Project, ZR/Rifle.”

When ZR/Rifle was turned from targeting Castro to JFK- probably in late 1962 or mid 1963, it was all over except for the triangulation of gunfire that took the 35th president out.  Far from being a case of 'Oh the JFK conspiracy theorists just couldn't handle a nobody taking out Kennedy' - it was instead a case of  'My God! What have we come to as a nation when a sitting president can be dispatched in a veritable coup d'etat?'  The latter was based on intelligent, energized researchers having the guts and will to dig deep into those earlier assassination templates and files. As opposed to taking the easy way out,  say by erroneously invoking a "proportionality bias" like John Oliver did.  

As Michael Parenti aptly put it (op. cit., p. 156):

“To know the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy is to call into question the state security system and the entire politico-economic order it protects. This is why for over thirty years the corporate-owned press and numerous political leaders have suppressed or attacked the many revelations about the murder unearthed by independent investigators like Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Carl Oglesby, Harold Weisberg, Anthony Summers."

On the face of it, and in hindsight, Oliver would have done better in his main story on CTs to leave the JFK assassination totally out of his examples, and focus instead on the real nutso Covid crap like 'Plandemic'  etc.  

 The end result was that, while trying to focus on how the Covid conspiracy ideations are wreaking havoc on our pandemic response, the interjection of the JFK assassination needlessly muddied the waters via a useless conflation of real and unreal conspiracies.

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-pre-assassination-framing-of-lee.html

And:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-pre-assassination-framing-of-lee_1807.html

And:

Government

The Pro-Trump CIA Man: QAnon Madness and Upward Failure

"America's Debt Disease" - Blame Huge Tax Cuts And Defense Spending!

Let's concede that pointy -headed economists, especially those who totally missed predicting the 2008 credit meltdown and financial crisis, are about the last who should be railing about "America's debt disease".  This is because their fancy models typically  come up short, and fail to process the importance of increasing tax revenue and limiting "defense" spending.

As Paul Waldman in a recent NY Times piece put it:

We all know there’s really no such thing as a Republican “deficit hawk” — they pretend to care deeply about the deficit when there’s a Democrat in the White House so they can restrain spending and hamstring the economy, but when there’s a Republican in the White House, all that goes right out the window. Sure, some ultra-conservatives complained about this bill on the grounds that it raises the deficit, but they all voted for the GOP tax plan."

One would have hoped economist Martin Feldstein might have processed this before writing his op-ed 'Reagan's Cure For America's Debt Disease'- ironic given that Reagan was the one who hurled this nation into debtor status in the first place.. That was in the 80s when he enacted huge supply side tax cuts combined with lavishing $2.2 trillion on defense spending - including rubbish like the SDI - with no tax revenue to pay for it. See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2018/03/jay-keyworth-godfather-of-missile.html

 Ever since then defense spending, actually corporate welfare for defense contractors, has been sucking up lever larger fractions of the budget. e.g. examine this graph for 2013;


This is despite the fact the Pentagon budget- barely 2 weeks ago-  just got handed another $80 billion until September in the new spending bill.  Also, let's bear in mind that the Pentagon still can't account for $1.2 trillion from 2002. (According to former defense analyst Chuck Spinney when he appeared on an episode of Bill Moyers 'NOW').  With the latest largesse, the U.S. now has spent more $ than the next 8 nations combined on defense, as opposed to the next seven. So the problem is excessive military spending. Reduce that dramatically,  and also increase taxes, and you have a nation more like Germany with budget surpluses -  as opposed to massive debt and deficits -and increased social spending capacity, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2018/02/do-americans-really-want-big-government.html

Feldstein insists instead that military spending:

"will contribute relatively little to the increased debt and is a long overdue correction to a military budget that had become dangerously low"

Which is laughable balderdash, since most  $ that isn't defense contractor welfare is wasted anyway, e.g.















Feldstein then turns his deficit reduction guns on Social Security and Medicare, viz.:

"Between 2018 and 2027  Social Security outlays are projected to grow by 1 percent of GDP and Medicare by 1.4 percent of GDP. Together they would account for the entire 2.4 % rise in the deficit as a share of GDP. Cutting their growth in half would reduce the 2027 deficit from 5.2% of GDP to 4 % of GDP. That would start to shrink the future debt ratio  from more than 100 percent of GDP back to today's 76 percent. That isn't good enough but it's a shift in the right direction."

Well, it would also mean reducing millions of seniors to a cat food diet, and also forcing sick seniors to beg for charity or 'Go Fund Me' pages to get basic health care.  (Feldstein's solution for slowing Medicare growth is to pay higher premiums including for inpatient and outpatient visits. For Social Security he wants to raise the full benefits age to 70 from where it is now, and also "pass a law that automatically raises the age for full benefits as life expectancy improves."    But he's somewhat gracious and is willing to "make some exceptions for those in strenuous occupations."

But this is all so much codwallop because first, of all, he never mentions how Reagan himself - and Bush Jr. later- used Social Security monies as a foil to reduce the apparent cost of military spending. This has been by consistent raiding of the Social Security Trust Fund which right wing nuts and libertarians insist is a figment of the imagination. If it is  figment, then why has the gov't take nearly $2.7 trillion from it?  That's some "fictitious" money right there?

But of course in their lexicon it only becomes a "figment" when we demand the raided money be paid back.

Let's also note that the canard that the military budget is "small relatively as a percentage of GDP", may appear so but that it has more than doubled since 2000, from 2.4 % of GDP to 4.9%. has meant pain for many. This uptick in GDP percentage led former Pentagon Analyst Chuck Spinney (the same person who exposed the unaccounted for $1.2 trillion) to remark that the increase was nothing less than "a war on domestic programs, including Social Security and Medicare".

This blatant codswallop is also repeated in another WSJ Op-ed  ('Why America Is Going Broke', Feb. 22, p. A17)  by Hoover Inst. toad John F. Cogan, who has the audacity to write:

"Surprising as it may seem, the share of GDP spent on national defense ...is no higher today than it was seven decades ago."

Adding:

"The contrast between the long term increase in entitlement spending and the long term decline in defense spending reflects the profound transformation of the federal government's priorities from providing for the nation's defense to redistributing income."

If this horse manure is true, and defense spending is in such regression, perhaps Cogan can explain how the U.S. now spends more on defense than the next 8 nations combined - including China and Russia.  The fact is he bloody well can't because he's peddling conservo think tank bull piffle. Like Feldstein, he wants American seniors - those that aren't in the one percent- to be reduced to a cat food diet.

Apart from the false "entitlements are eating up the budget" narrative,  the solution to saving Social Security is to simply remove the payroll tax cap, e.g.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/increasing-payroll-taxes-would-strengthen-social-security

It emphatically will NOT "require records levels of taxation and debt" as Cogan claims (ibid.)

Social Security's cap on taxable wages is now a ridiculous $118, 500 a year despite the fact many people with income much greater are receiving it. Eliminating it would resolve nearly all Social Security's funding problems, many arising from the erosion of its payroll tax base, owing to rising wage inequality. (E.g. as more and more earners bypass the $118,500 threshold they no longer need to contribute to the payroll tax.)

By Feldstein's own admission (par. 4, 2nd column) shrinking future deficits could indeed be accomplished by a tax increase, but which he claims is "economy damaging" which is nonsense. It's nothing of the sort. As economists James Medoff and Andrew Harless observed in their excellent book, The Indebted Society, 1995, p. 84, 'Let Them Eat Cake',

"high tax rates are associated with higher productivity growth"

There is a consistent and strong relationship. By contrast, for the years when Arthur Laffer's supply side dogma held, productivity retreated by more than 30% and debt exploded- exactly the opposite of what we've been sold.  Indeed, an analysis of the Bush tax cuts by The Financial Times (Sept. 15, 2010), p. 24 showed them to be a failure, not achieving what was promised, e.g. these cuts ushered in "the weakest decade in U.S. postwar history for real, non-residential capital investment".

The FT analysis also observed that “during each decade from the 1950s to the 1990s, growth in real gross non-residential investment averaged between 3.5 percent and 7.4 percent a decade. During the 2000s it averaged a mere 1%”

The FT analysis on Bush Jr's tax cuts was among the most devastating, showing once and for all supply side bunkum doesn't work. It is among the "dead ideas" Matthew Miller wrote about in his book 'The Tyranny of Dead Ideas'.  To repeat the same nonsense as with the recent GOP-Trump tax cuts - while expecting a different outcome - is to endorse again the definition of insanity as articulated originally by Einstein.  It also means we won't  soon eradicate the nation's debt disease. This is given we already know damned well the source of it, but economists like Mart Feldstein - for whatever reasons  - won't go there.

Methinks Marty Feldstein and John F. Cogan need to crawl out of their isolate enclaves and  go back to school and re- learn that increasing taxes is the answer for the budget surplus economy, along with drastically cutting back on defense contractor corporate welfare..

Will Mitt's Anti-Trump Broadsides "Shake Some Sense" Into Trump Supporters?

"Here's what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. He's playing the members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.....the bullying, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics...is not the temperament of the stable, thoughtful person we need as leader." - Mitt Romney yesterday at Hinckley Institute

Former Reep Presidential candidate Mitt Romney  tore into The Donald yesterday morning leaving no insult unmentioned and indirectly calling down Trump supporters to halt their addiction to the guy. But will it work?  Will the Trumpy addicts be swayed by Mitt's 17 minute diatribe? Somehow, given nothing else has phased them, I doubt it.

Addressing a Republican National Committee (RNC) meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, Romney opened his speech by drawing on Ronald Reagan’s framing of the 1964 election as “a time for choosing”. The 2016 election, he argued, posed a similar crossroads for the American people. The Mittster conceded:

“I’m no Ronald Reagan, and this is a different moment in time, but I believe with all my heart and soul that we face another time of choosing – one that will have profound consequences for the Republican party and, more importantly, for our country,”

Make no mistake Romney’s speech lived up to all the hype, including lacerating almost every Trump invention, idea or speculation - from Trump University to closed (bankrupt)Trump casinos and everything in between.. Portions of it had already been released to stations (e.g. MSNBC) hours before he delivered it. On 'Morning Joe' it was noted that the purpose was to "shake up Trump supporters and get some sense into them".  

The speech itself marked an unprecedented moment in American politics, with a growing number of prominent Republicans now desperately seeking to stop in his tracks a candidate who increasingly resembles the presumptive nominee. Romney laid out a case that was in equal parts scathing and urgent, while stating that “the prospects for a safe and a prosperous future are greatly diminished” if Republicans were to nominate Trump.

Indeed, Trump's Tuesday victories even have the Europeans going ballistic and dredging up memories of another charismatic, bombastic demagogue from 80 years ago.

The alarm has even made its way to the front pages of Der Spiegel, with the red-lettered word ('Wahnsinn' or 'Crazy Man' ) at the bottom.


Although Romney did not offer an endorsement, he praised candidates Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Ted Cruz and essentially suggested voters should support each of the three and pave the way for a brokered convention. Countering the rabid enthusiasm of Trumpies, Romney declared:

“One of these men should be our nominee,”

Noting the real estate mogul would precipitate another economic recession and weaken America’s standing overseas. Then adding as evidence for Trump's disqualification:

 “He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants, he calls for the use of torture and for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the constitution to limit first amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”

Thursday’s speech was the first time Romney has delivered such comprehensive put down remarks on the state of the 2016 race. Romney weighed in on almost every would be pratfall from Trump’s debunked claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the September 11 terrorist attacks to his mocking of Senator John McCain for being captured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, to the mockery of a NY Times disabled reporter,  e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/11/trumps-mocking-of-handicapped-reporter.html

“Think of Donald Trump’s personal qualities, the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics,” Romney said.

Romney’s appeal to reject Trump arrived less than 48 hours after the splenetic front runner picked up overwhelming victories on Super Tuesday, as Republicans in 11 states went to the polls. But this was not before other conservative media "powerhouses" -  including The Wall Street Journal  - had weighed in, e.g. with Trump-skewering columns by Brett Stephens and Holman Jenkins, Jr..

Brett Stephens in his 'Staring At The Conservative Gutter', wrote (after the KKK misstep):

"It would be terrible to think that the Left was right about the Right all these years. Nativist bigotries must not be allowed to become the animating spirit of the Republican Party. If Donald Trump becomes the candidate he will not win the Presidency but he will help vindicate the Left's ugly indictment. It will be left to decent conservatives to pick up the pieces".

Thereby implying anyone who votes for Trump is not a "decent conservative".

Holman Jenkins Jr. was even more blunt about Trump followers in his WSJ piece ('Trump Voters Need a Mirror', March 2, p. A15):

"To be honest and impolitic, the Trump voter smacks of a child who unleashes recriminations against mommy and daddy because the world is imperfect"

Adding:

"Until Trump and his fans show otherwise, he seems but the latest vessel of denial for voters who don't want responsibility. They want mommy and daddy"

Ouch! But columns like these two helped set the stage for Mitt Romney's lashing of Trump Thursday morning as well as the subtext  for his supporters to wake up from their agitated stupor. Which, let's face it, could also be fed by the desire for an emotional opposite to Obama's "no drama", Spockian, highly nuanced reactions and demeanor. (See: 'President Obama Created Donald Trump', WSJ, p. A13, today). This was an effect even moderate hack Joe Klein warned about in a TIME essay several years ago.

With the probability of a Trump nomination on the rise, the GOP establishment and its media have clearly been desperately in search of an alternative but left without a clear consensus candidate. At the same time, their columnists and spokespersons are incredulous people could actually be taking Trump seriously to run the country. The unspoken, unwritten subtext is 'What the hell are they drinking or smoking?'.  Even moderate media spokesperson(former anchor for NBC)  Tom Brokaw wondered Tuesday night if these supporters had lost touch with reality and didn't understand our checks and balances in the federal system.

"What if Trump can't deliver?" he asked. "What if our dispersed system of power prevents him from getting any of his promises done, like building the wall? What will they do?"

Good question! What indeed? Will they riot in the streets and screech how they were betrayed? Will they express severe buyer's remorse and never vote for anyone again - establishment or other?  But the fact is, Brokaw is correct, and they are all being set up for a massive letdown because the universe in which Trump could carry out his phantasmagorias is not the one that exists. The one we inhabit. . Because short of a takeover of government by Trump there is no way any of his claims to action can be manifest.

Romney didn't hesitate to tell the Hinckley site crowd of 500 that the party’s focus should be on defeating Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton,  “but a Trump nomination enables her victory”. (Well, not quite! At least one rep from Emily's List two weeks ago (on 'All In')  expressed fear and trepidation she would confront a "mad monkey with a gun" and one never knows what such a creature might do.)

Meanwhile, Romney himself, anticipating the Donald's reaction,  asked:

“Will he talk about our policy differences or will he attack me with every imaginable low-road insult? This may tell you what you need to know about his temperament, his stability, and his suitability to be president.”

In fact, Trump referred in a speech to his endorsement of Mitt back in 2012 claiming "If I ordered Mitt to drop to his knees he would have".

So much for vindicating what Romney projected.

Sadly, none of these efforts is likely to have any effect at halting Trump's momentum. So long as his many followers want the macho "tough guy" or strong man to take all the bad guys down. So long as so many are addicted to this sort of brash approach Trump will continue on his road to the magic number of 1237 delegates - which if reached will commit those delegates to stick with him and not to bolt - say for Cruz or Kasich.

As Der Spiegel put it:

"Trump takes every opportunity in this campaign to portray his country as a down-and-out weakling. According to his strategy, when a nation's feeling of self-worth has hit rock bottom, it experiences a growing desire to overcome the "status quo" -- and for a strong man at the top."

SO long as so many believe the Trump narrative that the nation is a weakling, his coalition will continue to build on itself - and may even overturn Hillary's plans to make history. The only way to prevent that would be for every youthful Sanders' voter-supporter to throw his or lot in for HRC if and when Bernie departs.

Whether they actually will is another question.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/66263/an-open-letter-to-evangelical-trump-voters 

The Liabilities of Intellect: More Pervasive Than You Think

It is very nearly an axiom that higher IQ people prevail and are most successful in multiple domains, from academia to business and politics. But this is not necessarily so, as pointed out by Dr. Steven Mason in his article 'Let's Get Dumb' in the most recent Intertel Integra (October, p. 26). Mason, in about 5 pages,  shows that very often being smart isn't the asset so many believe, but an actual liability.

For example, as he observes, to have a reasonable chance of being elected, a Presidential candidate: "must either appear to be a dummy, or as  more often the case, be a dummy. Compare Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan, for example. The first was a university president while the latter (often called the 'great communicator') was someone who even his staunchest supporters would hardly call brilliant."

Indeed, and who can ever forget Reagan asking on one occasion, of one of his Joint Chiefs, if "nuclear missiles launched from submarines can be recalled."

Uh no, Ronnie! Once fired they are on their way! Just in case you had a mind to get trigger happy with the Russkies.

Another canard to do with intellect often expressed in various forums, is a variation on the question: "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?"

The assumption here is if a person truly is a brain he or she ought to also be a rich brain. Why not? S/he ought to be able to outsmart everyone on the planet and make a bundle! Not quite. For one thing, we don't all aspire to be a Mark Zuckerberg who mostly swiped the code basis for Facebook from peers at Harvard - before he left that vaunted institution. Oh ok, he made some tweaks, but basically FB already existed in some form and Zuckerberg brought it a bit further. The idea for 'the Facebook', however, was not his originally.

Next, as Mason points out, in conjunction with this 'why aren't you rich' theme (p. 27):

"There are several reasons for this being the case. One is that employers don't especially like employees who are smarter than themselves. The result is that many of my friends belonging to high IQ societies wind up underemployed, working at jobs far below their potential."

Mason also notes that "kids hate those geeks who screw up the grading curve".  These kids, who aren't afraid to show their smarts are also the most victimized and bullied. No surprise then how back in 1978 my niece Vanessa expressed fear and shame at repeatedly outshining her classmates at St. Joseph Convent school in Trinidad, and asked advice. She was leaning to "dumbing down" her profile and being less conspicuous. I advised against it and told her to do it only if she felt it was critical to her ongoing emotional balance.

Perhaps the most provocative insight rendered by Dr. Mason concerns the communication gap between people of significantly different IQ. He writes (ibid.):

"It's been demonstrated, though not widely publicized in this PC culture, that complete and effective communication between those separated by more than fifteen IQ points is unlikely. It means there is no way, repeat NO WAY, that people with IQs of 115 are ever going to explain to people with IQs of 85 why it's important to graduate high school."

By the same token, it likely means a communication gap will exist between those of IQ 110-115 and those of Mensa or Intertel  IQ level (130-135) on matters of politics, including deep politics  (and I warrant most 115'ers don't even know what it means), science, philosophy, history and economics. The gap is simply too vast to be bridged. It therefore must not surprise us that many - say in discussing American history - will simply cite Larry Schweikart's "48 Liberal Lies" as opposed to entering an actual debate or argument with a person who possesses superior knowledge, insight. They have already ceded, by doing so, that they are not up to the challenge of intellectual engagement.

But taken at a more fundamental level, Mason's thesis indicates that the upper two or so IQ percentile of Americans will never be able to communicate effectively and completely with most of the rest of the population.  This gets most exposed in the political and elections domain. Again, the need of so many voters to base their choices on atmospherics and optics ("Is he a guy I can have a beer with?") is downright disheartening. It makes me want to scream, "No you dummy! Don't worry about the damned beer but what he can do in office!"

And again, Mason points this divergence out in comparing Bill Clinton to George Bush, while noting that the latter guy's followers "rarely refer to the selected hero's SAT scores".  He adds (ibid.):

"And who would have it otherwise with roughly half the voters having IQs below average (I know I am going to get letters from the mathematically challenged on that one!)"

And this surely explains many of the puzzling election results over the years, from electing Gee Dumbya Bush in 2000 (it shouldn't even have been close, though Al Gore did take the popular vote by over a half million), to the most recent farce that transpired Tuesday.  I refer to the following:

- Voters stupidly electing members of a party that: a) has the lowest approval rating ever (20%) and b) has not effected one single positive bit of legislation.

- Voters passing minimum wage ballot measures in five states, while at the same time electing Republican governors who are least likely to let them see the light of day.

I could go on and on, but a relevant point here concerns the general level of dumbing down of the electorate which, let's face it, must have something to do with Mason's observation of half being 'dummies' (below average intelligence).  This is critical given that misinformation in public life isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. This is according to a new study published in Social Science Quarterly  which employed a “knowledge distortion index” and looked at two competing explanations for why this is so — one top-down, the other bottom-up.  The researchers used three Washington state initiatives from the 2006 general election cycle to examine the dynamics of what is going on in this particular sort of political environment.

The study, “How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs,” found that “voters’ values and partisanship had the strongest associations with distorted beliefs, which then influenced voting choices. Self-reported levels of exposure to media and campaign messages played a surprisingly limited role,” despite the presence of significantly mistaken “facts,” which were used to help construct the knowledge distortion index.

But IQ and education level likely have a role too, and as Mason indicates (p. 28), 

"Only a relatively small percent of the voting population is educated beyond the required minimum."

Does this sound amazing to you? Does it really? Then back up and consider how many actually support nonsense like Ken Ham's contention that dinosaurs shared Noah's Ark. Quite apart from the fable nature of the Ark story, did any of these bozos consider how even two of each - Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex- would sink the Ark? Hence the cover of Charles Pierce's book, 'Idiot America'.

But before you castigate these misguided folks, don't forget just as many are Larry Schweikart false history groupies and echo his zany, unhistorical claims, including that Reconstruction was still going on in the 1920s, and that the Pilgrims were Puritans (they were actually separatists), and also that it was a "lie" that the Indians bailed them out - providing enough food to eat for the first Thanksgiving (it wasn't). 

This elicits another question as to why Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are vastly more popular than say, Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes - to the point so many people can't even tolerate listening to or watching the latter while I can tolerate watching the former, although not for very long.  I suspect again, the answer inheres in Steve Mason's postulate concerning the 15 point IQ communication gap, i.e. Maddow and Hayes intellectually articulate positions which are going to be resonant only for those of IQ 115 or above (even leaving out any "liberal" overtones), while any dunderhead can listen to Limbaugh and get stoked, and most can also watch O'Reilly go into his histrionics and find abundant resonance. 

But the dismal take at the end is, as Mason points out, we are saddled with these lower IQ folks in perpetuity. They will keep on voting the way they have been and devil take the hindmost -or devil take America-  if they come out in 2016 in too high numbers.  They are unable, at root, to parse the way their own brains have been manipulated - by the likes of the Koch brothers and their phony Tea Party idiocy, or by Limbaugh,  O'Reilly or god forbid...Jim Inhofe - a total anti-global warming buffoon who now stands to inherit the environmental committee chair from Sen. Barbara Boxer.

From a high IQ woman, to a GOOP  27 IQ points behind her!  Meanwhile, some parting words from Dr. Mason:

"When taken in combination, the fact that high IQ humans are born less frequently and selected as world leaders less often, points toward a Space Age marked by a decrease in those same little gray cells that got us out of the Stone Age."

In other words, we all may still be here - planted on this little orb, having not spread our seed beyond - when that big, planet killer asteroid strikes. The 'dumb' dinosaurs had no way out when their killer asteroid struck 65 million years ago. But humans? Perhaps their excuse will be not enough bright people were generated to design the rockets to get us off world - as opposed to building rockets to deliver more nuclear bombs.