The Try-Works

(Note: This is a guest editorial by Ward Churchill.)

I’m still chuckling over the bang-up job Law Professor did yesterday in ripping the quivering innards out of Jim Paine’s idiotic contention that the Right’s favorite neonazi inebriate, Joe McCarthy, had nothing to do with blacklisting.

For me, though, the real howler in the latest batch of Painian drivel came amidst his gleeful commentary on the “unexpected pleasure” he experienced upon “learning that Hamilton College stopped payment on Churchill’s speaking fee check” back in the spring of 2005.

The source of this interesting factoid? An “exercise in mythology”—Paine’s evaluation—I published in Social Text a few months back. Well, ho-ho-ho.

We can afford to be charitable with this one, boys and girls. Let’s start by setting aside the fact that most English-speaking folks tend to refer to a “speaking fee check” as an “honorarium” (you can look it up, Bubba). The boy may well have been trying, as would even the most half-assed of editorial writers, to calibrate his prose to degree of literacy manifest in his readership.

And, since it’s obvious that neither Fred or Noj had the least idea what Paine was saying, even when he geared things down to the level of “see Jane run,” it seems appropriate that cut the guy some slack on this score.

Similarly, we shouldn’t poke fun at the glaring illogic of Paine’s managing—in the same sentence—to both declare my article to be an “exercise in mythology” and to gloat over what he obviously takes to be certain of the facts recited therein (hint: “factual” is an antonym of “mythic,” Bubba; do look it up).

After all, a pronounced inability to follow a coherent train of thought has been a hallmark of the “analyses” delivered on Pirate Ballerina since day one, and, given the intellectual impairments of it’s audience, the consistently with which it has offered self-contradictory argumentation has proven to be one of the blog’s most attractive features for readers like PhD Anthro and, er, Mickey Mouse.

No! No, I say. A thousand times no!

We must refrain from indulging in cheap laughs, since, as I’m sure we can all agree, they’re far beneath the dignity of the mighty Try-Works. Besides, they’re entirely unnecessary in this instance.

What’s really funny—at least in my admittedly twisted estimation—is Paine’s open endorsement of what, under Colorado law, adds up to a criminal act on the part of Hamilton’s “liberal” president, Joan Hinde Stewart.

Ho-ho. Talk about a fella stomping on his own dick. So much for your effort to pose as a “law and order conservative,” eh, Bubba? At this point, you’re coming off a lot more like some sort of weird cross between Charlie Keating and Glenn Spagnolo in drag (i.e., Spagnolo stripped of both his moxie and his balls).

Ye gads, man, have you no shame?

It gets better. Since Ms. Stewart’s check-stopping gambit was flagrantly illegal, she—or, rather, Hamilton College—did end up paying me the full and duly-contract amount. It also had to pay my attorney. And it was stuck with the tab for all costs associated with the case, which, to be sure, included a stable of sleek—and very pricey—Manhattan mouthpieces retained to try and stave off the inevitable.

That was in the fall of 2005, Bubba, about six months after the low-rent maneuver rousing all those warm and tingly sensations in your grubby little loins. So stop yankin’ on that pitifully undernourished nub you call a “luv muscle” and listen up. Your miniature woody’s already wilted, and I promise that the tale I’m about to tell will not be told in a manner too turgid for your notoriously tasteless sensibilities.

Here goes (ho-ho).

By the time all was said and done, President Stewart—or “Phoney Joanie,” as she was called by those who knew her best—had taken to emitting eerie howls over her cellphone, the result, it’s said, of noticeably spastic bowels, caused in turn by an increasingly vast sense of despair and personal humiliation—dare I say “degradation and defilement”?—that seems to have grown ever deeper—maybe even worse and worse—as the weeks rolled by.

While the onset of Joanie’s malady generated much astonishment among those unversed in such things, it came as no great surpise to who bothered to examine her situation in a rational manner.

I mean, what other outcome might reasonable people have expected to obtain from the facts that she’d authorized the expenditure of roughly triple the dollar amount the college originally owed me, all to prevent my receiving a cent, only to find herself staring in the face of the ugly prospect that she could even wind up being cuffed and jailed like a two-dollar whore for her trouble?

Well, sure, judge, your honor, sir. You bet. I’ll be happy as a clam to press charges against President Stewart. You know me, judge. I’m up for doing whatever I can to preserve and protect the integrity of America’s academic institutions from morally corrupt sleaze-bags like her. Clearly, there’s not a moment to lose. The sooner this wretched woman is in a holding tank, the sooner we can all breath easier about the example being set for our kids. Where do I sign?

The Great Wheel of Karmic Justice having thus begun to turn in earnest, Joanie was reduced to a frantic spate of telephonic grovelings, imploring me to please, please, PLEASE accept her supplications—not to mention a nice fresh check, certified this time and couriered to my lawyer—rather than having her publicly flogged, shorn, and placed in stocks.

How mortifying do you reckon that must have been for someone who’d figured to establish herself as a Heroine of the Right by putting me quite firmly in my place? Ho-ho.

Worse still, at the point she was compelled to figuratively assume that posture of craven submission most commonly associated with baboons (you can look that one up, too), she’d been unable even to secure the usual quid pro quo agreement that the whole transaction would remain secret.

Really, Bubba, long before her prematurely palsied hand put pen to paper, Joanie knew she’d gone and fucked the monkey, big time. Her defeat was, well, total, her bright future as an omnipotent administrator resembling a turd swirling in a toilet bowl on full flush.

Immediately after the check was sent, Joanie’s deterioration became much more conspicuous, or so I’m told. Her slide into the abyss was grim, amazingly swift, and apparently marked by an unremitting series of barks, shrieks, and moans, eventually subsiding into mewls, then gurgles.

Yes, it’s a savage and brutal story, Bubba, even tragic by some estimations. But, what the hell? Veni vidi vici, right?

I hear that the crumbling husk of what used to be the president of Hamilton College has been subjected to an intensive therapy regime involving regular injections of Ibogaine and constant emersion in icy baths for more than two years now, but, alas, it’s been all to no avail.

The prognostic consensus is that Joanie’s condition has become quite intractable, impervious to treatment, as if she’d chosen to enter a realm of true mindlessness, most likely as a means of freeing herself an intolerably anguished situation from which she saw no other possible escape.

As I understand it—although I might be wrong—the last coherent words she’s known to have uttered were, “Oh my god, they’re laughing at me again… Won’t that man ever stop? Please, can’t you make him just go away?”

What she may have meant by that is of course unknown, but they say the look of horror on Joanie’s face when she said it was simply indescribable, and those unfortunate enough to have witnessed her ghastly visage have suffered recurrent nightmares about it ever since.

Well, maybe not…

But one thing is certain: Whatever Joanie’s actual circumstances, she’s got plenty of company. Several of her peers have tried to run similar scams on me over the past three years, and I’ve got framed color copies of their now-cashed checks hanging like so many coonskins on the wall of my office to prove it. Right beside hers. Ho-ho.

There’s a lesson to be learned from all this, Bubba, but I think I’ll just let you sit around and fester for a while, trying to figure it out. You will, eventually. You can trust me on that score. I know about such things, and I doubt you’re going to find it especially amusing.

Editor’s Note: In a remarkable validation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, it appears that Jim Paine may have at last and no doubt unwittingly stumbled into a useful ecological niche. Hence, we’d like to thank Mr. Paine for the fine job of proofing he did on this article—pro bono, we might add—and note that we have entered the appropriate corrections. This being so, we feel it only fair, since proofing is one of the functions often associated with copy-editing, we hereby reward him for his services by formally crediting him as copy editor. It also seems fair to inform him that, since questions concerning authorship of the article have been raised on PB, the copy editor will be held responsible for any and all plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, misrepresentation contained therein. The basis for assigning such responsibility to a copy editor is of course the bizarre precedent established in the recent Ward Churchill case at CU, heartily endorsed by, among others, Jim Paine.

(Note: This is a guest editorial by longtime Try-Works commenter, Law Professor.)

No matter how often he announces that Dr. Ward Churchill has become “irrelevant,” Pirate Ballerina’s Jim Paine simply can’t stop talking about the man (so, too, PB’s dwindling number of readers, but that’s another story).

Whatever the reason for Mr. Paine’s obsession—anal compulsion? a sexual fixation of some sort?—we should perhaps all be grateful for it, given the richly comical results it often generates.

Take, for example, Mr. Paine’s “analysis” today of an article by Churchill published in Social Text. Therein, Mr. Paine informs us, among other interesting things, that “Senator [Joseph] McCarthy compiled no blacklists.”

This, of course, is an assertion roughly on par with the Right’s current pretense that UC Berkeley Con Law Professor John Yoo’s grotesque distortions of the U.S. Constitution in the “torture memos” he wrote for the Bush regime has “nothing to do with his scholarly integrity.”

Or claiming that Hitler had nothing to do with the Holocaust simply because he never personally ordered it in writing.

In fairness, it may be conceded that likening Mr. Paine to a Holocaust denier is a sense unwarranted, at least in this instance. Far more likely, he simply—and all too typically—had no idea what he was talking about.

By his own admission, Mr. Paine has been prone to confusing the Senator McCarthy whose activities he purports to explain to us—JOE, a right-wing Wisconsin Republican who died in 1957—with Minnesota Senator EUGENE McCarthy, a Democrat and “leftist” antiwar candidate for President in 1968.

Some “expert,” this Jim Paine, similar in quality to those on Fox News who confused the “Mr. Douglas” debated by Abraham Lincoln—a white senator named Stephen—with the black abolitionist leader, FREDERICK Douglas, this week.

So much for the lofty “standards” of the Right.

Anyone wanting to assess McCarthy’s actual involvement in blacklisting might find it useful to begin with the chapter titled “The Academic Blacklist in Operation” in Ellen Schrecker’s fine study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press, 1986) pp. 265-82.

There are several more good references, for those wishing to delve deeper still. Just let me know. (Sorry, Mr. Paine, but you and yours will actually have to acquire—and read—the books. Mere googling will not suffice.)

So, dear reader, I got an interesting anonymous tip over the weekend about the identity of Pirateballerina clone and anti-Churchill crony, the appropriately named William T. Sherman. (”The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous.” — William T. Sherman)

See, Mr. Sherman recently left the following comment on Pirateballerina:

Anyway, I don’t need a committee or a specialist to tell me that the Mandan smallpox blanket claim was fabricated. The claim is illogical on its face, and for some reason, the Churchill rashly gave a recorded interview where he could not point out the evidence in the book he used. The reporters opened the book to the page he cited, and he just hemmed and hawed and got pissed. Squirm-inducing stuff.

The rest.

What’s so interesting about that, you ask?

Well, according to my anonymous tipster, though such an interview did indeed take place, it was never published.

Meaning, it only stands to reason that Pirateballerina’s most prolific commenter is none other than the person or persons who gave the interview, right?

So who gave the interview? Well, according to my tipster, none other than the Rocky Mountain News’ very own ace reporters Berny Morson and Kevin Vaughan. And since Kevin Vaughan is the author of the Rocky’s horseshit smallpox piece, my money’s on Mr. Vaughan for the pseudonym William T. Sherman.

Which would go a long way towards explaining the, shall we say, cozy relationship between the Rocky and the anti-Churchill blogging bloc. (A cozy relationship, it’s worth remembering, that led to such bizarre decisions as the Rocky using entirely unqualified anti-Churchill blogger Jim Paine of Pirateballerina as their genealogical expert.)

Update: the anonymous tip is doubly interesting, in that the IP address indicates it comes from the Rocky Mountain News. Just so you know.

Update II: It’s also interesting that the Rocky Mountain News never published this interview. That in itself, is enough to make one doubt the authenticity of Mr. Vaughan’s account.

Since we’re doing music.

Dead Prez will be holding two benefit concerts for Tent State University and Re-create 68 to support the Festival of Democracy and peaceful protests during the Democratic National Convention

• Tuesday, May 6, 8 pm at the Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder
• Wednesday, May 7, 8 pm at Cervantes, 2637 Welton St., Denver

My favorite Dead Prez song.  Which probably hopelessly dates me.

If you’re ever in conversation with a truther, you’re gonna make it about five seconds before you hear reference to a rather insane, self-produced flick called Loose Change. (Trust me.) The truthers have it memorized. And before you know it you’ll be sucked right into a conversation about the structural engineering. Granted, I’m just guessing that neither you nor the truther will know jack shit about structural engineering, but that won’t stop ‘em. (That’s why they’re a truther, after all.)

But, in the interest of saving you a little time, dear reader, I offer a list of the top 41 lies in Loose Change, from a pair of rightwing bloggers who, though I’d probably disagree with them on just about everything else, have devoted their lives to wreaking glorious havoc on truthers.

Part one.

Part two.

Part three.

Part four.

My favorite:

30. Claim: Wally Miller, a Somerset County coroner stated that there were no bodies found at the crash site of United 93

Truth: There were no “whole” bodies, but over 1500 body parts were found, and most of the passengers were identified through the use of DNA. Mr. Miller later reported his findings on this.

As you’ve probably heard, at least if you live in the Denver area, Rush Limbaugh went on a tear yesterday, dreaming of riots at the DNC.

Rush Limbaugh says he is not calling for a riot in Denver during the Democratic National Convention — he only “dreams” of it, to the tune of “White Christmas.”

The conservative talker discussed the possibility of Mile High unrest in August on his national radio show for a second day in a row Thursday.

“Now, I am not inspiring or inciting riots. I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming of riots in Denver,” he said mimicking the holiday tune.

He explained on air: “Riots in Denver at the Democrat convention would see to it we don’t elect Democrats. And that’s the best damn thing (that) could happen for this country as far as anything I can think.”

Glenn Spagnuolo, an organizer with the protest group Re-create 68, called Limbaugh “a fool.”

“We don’t need another 5,000 illiterate Limbaugh listeners coming to Colorado,” he said, mocking a comment this week by state Rep. Douglas Bruce, R-Colorado Springs, who called migrant workers “illiterate peasants” as he debated a bill to accommodate up to 5,000 guest workers in the state.

The rest.

Now, as you’d expect, the fucking dimwits over at Alex Jones’ Infowars have posted their take (reprinted, of course, by the nuts at TruthAlliance.net).

It would seem Mr. Limbaugh has shared notes with “Re-create 68,” the COINTELPRO group that has vowed to make the convention in Denver more raucous and bloody than the Democratic Convention in Chicago, circa 1968. According to the Rocky Mountain News, the intel op masquerading as a grassroots activist group “is expecting up to 50,000 protesters from across the country [and] plans to march from Civic Center to the Pepsi Center, where the convention will be held, on Aug. 24, even though a parade route or a security zone hasn’t been announced.”

Is it possible Limbaugh will be with them?

Rush Limbaugh needs to be arrested as a threat to the peace. I’m not holding my breath, however, as neocons seem to have a get out jail free card and rabble-rousers such as Limbaugh and Savage are free to call for the most outrageous things, including violence and mass arrest of dissidents for the crime of exercising their rights under the First Amendment, now almost completely dead in the water.

The rest.

Now, I do hate to be a stickler for details, but I feel have to ask the author, Kurt Nimmo, a respectful question. Here goes.

Yesterday, you drooling fucking lunatic, y’all were painting Re-create 68 as a CIA operation. Today, you’ve got ‘em pegged as an FBI COINTELPRO. Which is it? Are you alleging that Re-create 68 is both a CIA and an FBI operation? Or is your tinfoil helmet just on the fritz?

I don’t demand a whole lot of coherency from you lunatics, but at least try to keep your smear attempts consistent.

From the comments.

I think both of the aforementioned posts fail to recognize that believing rational discourse might make the “seekers” any more amiable partners in the struggle against injustice is akin to thinking K-Y Jelly might make a cinder block a better sexual partner.

The thrust seems to be that if the dipshits didn’t exist, the Bush administration’d have to create ‘em.

Most of you have probably read this — hell, I’ve probably even linked to it before — but Alexander Cockburn’s critique of the 9/11 truth seekers.

(See, I made it the whole way through a sentence without calling ‘em fucking idiots or lunatics.  Be proud, ma.)

These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx via the small, mostly Trotskyist groupuscules. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse, peripatic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly “rogue” agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11 “conspiracy”, or “inside job”, is the Summa of all this foolishness.

One trips over a fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists in the first paragraph of the opening page of the book by one of their high priests, David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor. “In many respects,” Griffin writes, “the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official account involves the events of 9/11 itself In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them.”

The operative word here is “should”. A central characteristic of the conspiracists is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief in American efficiency. Many of them start with the racist premise — frequently voiced in as many words in their writings — that “Arabs in caves” weren’t capable of the mission. They believe that military systems should work they way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work. They believe that at 8.14 am, when AA flight 11 switched off its radio and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called the National Military Command center and NORAD. They believe, citing reverently (this is high priest Griffin) “the US Air Force’s own website,” that an F-15 could have intercepted AA flight 11 “by 8.24, and certainly no later than 8.30.”

They appear to have read no military history, which is too bad because if they did they’d know that minutely planned operations — let alone by-the-book responses to an unprecedented emergency — screw up with monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality and all the other failings, not excepting sudden changes in the weather.

History is generous with such examples. According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command, an impending Soviet attack would have prompted the missile siloes in North Dakota to open, and the ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred targets. The four test launches actually attempted all failed, whereupon the SAC gave up testing. Was it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defense contractor venality or conspiracy?

Did the April 24, 1980 effort to rescue the hostages in the US embassy in Teheran fail because a sandstorm disabled three of the eight helicopters, or because the helicopters were poorly made, or because of agents of William Casey and the Republican National Committee poured sugar into their gas tanks in yet another conspiracy?

Have the US military’s varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn’t intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes stemmed from absolutely predictable attempts to cover up the usual screw-ups, or because of conspiracy? Is Mr. Cohen in his little store at the end of the block hiking his prices because he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went up or because the Jews want to take over the world? Bebel said anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools. These days the 9/11 conspiracy fever threatens to be the dominant politics of the left.

It’s awful. My in-box overflows each day with fresh “proofs” of how the WTC buildings were actually demolished, often accompanied by harsh insults identifying me as a “gate-keeper” preventing the truth from getting out. I meet people who start quietly, asking me “what I think about 9/11″. What they are actually trying to find out is whether I’m part of the coven. I imagine it was like being a Stoic in the second century A.D. going for a stroll in the Forum and meeting some fellow asking, with seeming casualness, whether it’s possible to feed 5,000 people on five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

Indeed, at my school in the 1950s the vicar used to urge on us Frank Morison’s book, Who Moved The Stone? It sought to demonstrate, with exhaustive citation from the Gospels, that since on these accounts no human had moved the stone from in front of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, it must beyond the shadow of a doubt have been an angel who rolled it aside and let Jesus out, so he could astonish the mourners and then Ascend. Of course Morison didn’t admit into his argument the possibility that angels don’t exist, or that the gospel writers were making it up.

It’s the same pattern with the 9/11 conspiracists, who proffer what they demurely call “disturbing questions”, though they disdain all answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos, torturing the data ­- as the old joke goes about economists — till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories–like witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon — is contemptuously brushed aside.

There are some photos of the impact of the “object” — i.e. the Boeing 757, flight 77 — that seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. It WAS a missile. It wasn’t smoke in some photographs obscuring a larger rupture in the fortified Pentagon wall.
.
On this last matter, Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of brilliant government service exposing the Pentagon’s budgetary outrages, tells me that “there ARE pictures taken of the 757 plane hitting Pentagon — they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon’s heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen themboth stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One was ID’d by dental remains found in the Pentagon.”

This won’t faze the conspiracists. They’re immune to any reality check. Spinney worked for the government They switched the dental records The Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a rendez-vous with President Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave Spinney’s friend’s teeth to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon.

In fact hundreds of people saw the plane — people who know the difference between a plane and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the plane was hauled out from the site. Why does the obvious have to be proved? Would those who were wounded or who lost friends and colleagues that day would assist in the cover up of a missile strike? Why risk using a missile, when you had a plane in the air and ­- to take the bizarre construct of the conspiracists — had successfully crashed (by remote control!) two into much more difficult targets — the Trade Towers?

How difficult is it to learn how to fly the jetliners if you didn’t have to land them on a runway? The short answer from commercial pilots is: not very difficult. In fact, you can learn about all you need to know from spending a few weeks in front of the Flight Simulator computer program.

What do we make of Osama taking credit for the attacks? That he’s still on the CIA payroll? And so it goes, on and on into the murk. But to what end? To prove that Bush and Cheney are capable of almost anything? Actually, what Bush and Cheney Bush haven’t proved is the slightest degree of competence to pull anything like this off. They couldn’t even manufacture weapons of mass destruction after US troops had invaded Iraq, and when any box labeled “WMD” would have been happily photographed by the embedded U.S. press as conclusive testimony.

At least what these recent elections may help to do is remind the left that Bush and Cheney are not that much different from the politicians and overlords of U.S. foreign policy who preceeded them or who will follow them. There was already a bi-partisan consensus about Israel, Iraq, et al.

Ultimately, the 9/11 conspiracists want us to believe that the Bush/Cheney gang is a new breed of evil. This might be the most dangerous deception of all, for it fosters the fantasy that a new adminstration, a Hillary or Gore administration, would pursue more humane policies

The WTC didn’t fall down because they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, shout the conspiracists, they “pancaked” because Dick Cheney’s agents–scores of them–methodically planted demolition charges in the preceding days. It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom–party to mass murder–have held their tongues ever since.

Michael Neumann, a philosopher, and CounterPunch contributor, at the University of Trent, in Ontario, remarked in a note to me:

“I think the problem of conspiracy nuttery has got worse, and is part of a general trend. There really were serious questions about the Kennedy assassination, an unusual number of them, and it wasn’t too crazy to come to the wrong conclusion. There wasn’t a single serious question about 9-11. But this is the age of angels, creationism, corpses all over Kosovo, Arabs suspiciously speaking Arabic, Satanic child abuse, nucular Eyraquees, and channeling. The main engine of the 9-11 conspiracy cult is nothing political; it’s the death of any conception of evidence.”

The rest.

RAIMD responds to the latest horseshit from lying motherfucker Jonathon Elinoff and moron motherfucker Alex Jones. Jesus Christ, is this fun. We’ve jousted with some incompetent, lunatic liars in our time here at the Try-Works, but Mr. Elinoff makes the likes of John Martin look positively credible.

Elinoff, credible or not? You be the judge.

Our characterization of Elinoff’s interview on Alex Jones:

It was news to us that Elinoff had a beef against Recreate 68. We gather from Elinoff’s own statements that he is upset about not getting the spotlight for the 9-11 Truth Movement at the DNC protests. For Elinoff, if he doesn’t get the spotlight for 9-11 Truth, then, all of a sudden, everyone else is an agent, according to his logic. If he doesn’t get his way, then he’ll try to wreck the hard work of others. So, Elinoff spouted off a number of sensational lies against RAIMD (and others) in order to try to wreck Recreate 68. RAIMD is a natural target because our politics are already considered controversial even within the activist scene. Not to mention that in the interview Elinoff often mixes up various individuals and groups. None of this mattered to Alex Jones, who is hardly concerned about accuracy. Jones is just looking to make a sensational splash. So, Elinoff was given airtime on national radio by Jones to bully the local Denver activist community, of which Elinoff is not even a part. (Italics ours.) (2)

On April 22nd, Elinoff describes his appearance on Alex Jones:

No one from Truth Alliance or We Are Change Colorado are making accusations that because 911 Truth was not given a fair presence at the R-68 demonstrations that they must be agents. Concerns were raised as to when R-68 said they were still looking for speakers and talent for their event, many truthers include musicians and talented speakers. Why wouldn’t they want to give 911 Truth a fair presence on their stage with their speakers and talent? No one is upset that they weren’t given that opportunity, but thought that other groups should be aware that R-68 is working with many activist groups that promote all kinds of messages, including those that are extremely controversial, to say the least, to which will be granted time on the stage. (Italics ours.) (3)

Excerpts, rough transcripts from the Elinoff on Alex Jones:

17:30 Elinoff: This is RAIMD, its a violent anarchist group that is attending the Recreate 68 meetings. They are given open arms. By the way, they [Recreate 68?] gave us the stiff arm when we asked if 911 truth could have any speakers… Our movement is huge.  He said, “no we don’t agree with 911, you stay away from us.” You give every activist group an invite and an open arm and you stiff arm us?

18:00 Jones: they’re operatives… they’re operatives.

18:10 Elinoff: eh. yeah. The whole thing stinks, it just not adding up this, RAIMD.

18:15 Jones: They’re state police. They’re operatives. There are Defense Intelligence… Army, Navy.. There’s Homeland security in there… Very dangerous, very dangerous.

19:15 Jones: Black ops, exposing the enemy’s tactics. (Italics ours.) (4)

Elinoff’s April 16th Statement on the Alex Jones radio show reasonably matches up with our characterization. If people can stomach hearing Elinoff and Jones attack the Denver activist scene for nearly twenty minutes, they should listen to the Jones show in its entirety. In the full show, Elinoff and Jones engage in twenty minutes worth of badjacketing against local activists. Both sought to bring the police down on local activists. This in spite of posturing as against the “police state.” Elinoff’s tame presentation of his appearance on Jones is a lie.

Elinoff makes a fool of himself, can’t keep his lies straight

As we have already stated, Elinoff simply made up the story about blood, urine, and molotov cocktails. It was based on absolutely nothing at all. In fact, RAIMD has never engaged Elinoff in a conversation.

Elinoff exposes Elinoff; he can’t keep his lies straight. In the following passage from the April 16th article, Elinoff claims that he spoke with RAIMD directly about the urine and blood:

After speaking with RAIMD, We Are Change Colorado became aware that they intend to throw bags of urine and blood on cops at the DNC protests, all under the name of the umbrella organization ReCreate 68. See their website here: http://raimd.wordpress.com/. (Italics ours.) (5)

In the following passage from his Alex Jones appearance, Elinoff again claims that he spoke with RAIMD. In addition, he claims he has a video of the exchange! Of course he doesn’t have video because the exchange with RAIMD never happened. He only says so to gain credibility with Jones, who uncritically laps up everything Elinoff says:

15:20 Elinoff: We did go to the meeting Sunday here for Recreate 68. We able to find a group — RAIMD — who we got all of this on camera and we are going to get it up on truth alliance… We are still editing it and basically they admitted to us first of all I said are you familar with Ghandi and the success of Martin Luther King being peaceful and that’s when the founder of RAIMD — these are the guys running Recreate 68 heads up — he says to me, “Violence is he only thing these f’in cops understand.” I looked at him and I said, “are you kidding me?” So that is what kicked off the whole debate about violence and nonviolence being effective. He handed me off a dvd called “Troublemaker” that he’s been handing out at Recreate 68 meetings. This DVD is put out by this RAIMD group – revolutionary anti-imperialist movement Denver — … It’s all verified, they even admit all this, they are telling people to bring bags of blood and urine and throw it on the cops no joke this is against the law. (Italics ours.) (6)

After we exposed Elinoff in our latest post, all of a sudden, Elinoff changes his story. No longer does he have a video as he claimed on the Jones show. Now, he is no longer even claiming to have heard the conversation! Rather, Elinoff now says that this is all a potential misunderstanding and that his knowledge comes from “two confidential sources.” Elinoff tries to shift the blame for the lies onto two non-existent confidential sources:

RAIMD has made statements denying that they were planning to throw bags of blood and urine on police at the DNC protests, which Truth Alliance has 2 confidential sources for, including a witness who overheard a conversation involving police. If these sources were lying or inaccurate, we apologize for the misunderstanding. (7)

Again, we don’t have to refute Elinoff because he can’t even keep his story straight. Anyone with any sense should be able to see what is going on here. Elinoff is changing his tune after being exposed.

The rest.

So, how’s about it, Mr. Elinoff?  Why’d you lie about the fucking video of RAIMD threatening to throw bags of blood and urine on cops?

And I’m seriously tempted to do just that. Their latest: Re-create 68 and RAIMD are a CIA black ops front constructed to discredit activists everywhere — particularly, I’m assuming, truth seekers.

Which I find kinda fucking amusing, in that the easiest way to discredit truth seekers is to, well, point to material provided by truth seekers.

In that interest, an interminably long, Godawful PowerPoint presentation, set to one and a half interminably long, Godawful folk songs, and presented to you, dear reader, without the benefit of copyediting or basic punctuation.

Enjoy.

One might assume the truth seekers had been stealing pages from Vernon Bellecourt’s playbook. Y’know, if one could possibly arrive at the conclusion that the dumb motherfuckers could read.

I’m twenty minutes into one of the Alex Jones movies and taking notes; I’ll be posting soon. I owe the world an apology for not having fun with these pinheads earlier. I’d always considered truth seekers rather harmless, if not the brightest bulbs burning. Twenty minutes with Alex Jones, and I’m convinced these motherfuckers are as batshit crazy as a barrel full of Britney Spears.

Dr. James Benjamin shares his impression of the truthseeking crowd.

I’ve encountered a few of these “truthers” on the web and in real life, and can think of a grand total of one who can actually discuss the issue in a civilized manner. My basic take is that “truthers” are convinced that the attacks that occurred in NYC and DC were part of a government conspiracy to essentially impose even more of an authoritarian police state than had already existed, and of course give the Feds and Big Oil an excuse to invade Iraq. I tend to be skeptical of these folks’ claims - applying Occam’s Razor, it seems the sort of all-encompassing conspiracy theory requiring unnecessary layers of explanation. I’ve yet to read anything that would cause me to reconsider my view that the 9-11 attacks were anything more than an example of the birds coming home to roost.

The presenter was an individual named Alan A. Johnson, who apparently is a faculty member at a junior college in the University of Hawaii system and who holds a doctorate from the unaccredited and now defunct Professional School of Psychological Studies in San Diego. The guy passed out (or more correctly, had his wife/girlfriend pass out) a handout that was lifted directly from www.ae911truth.org, and proceeded to plug the film “Loose Change” and mumble about the presumed plot for a couple minutes before folks started asking questions - keep in mind this is a room full of social scientists, and we tend to be a rather skeptical bunch to begin with. Turned out that a couple of the audience members had at least some knowledge or connection to others with the requisite technical expertise to offer up some substantive challenges. We’ll also keep in mind that the onus is on presenters to make their case, whatever it may be. It took only a couple questions for Johnson to completely lose it - dropping the “f bomb” at one of his questioners (something that does not fly at academic events) and violating the personal space of others in a manner suggesting he was spoiling for a fight. It wasn’t even entirely clear if he had bothered to read the material that he had passed around to his audience in the first place. In any case, he certainly cleared out the room. He apparently had his wife/girlfriend videotape the whole thing, so perhaps one day that particular shining moment might make its way to YouTube.

The rest.

Thanks to our fine commenters.

Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy in an audiotape Tuesday accused Shiite Iran of trying to discredit the Sunni al-Qaida terror network by spreading the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

The comments reflected al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri’s increasing criticism of Iran. Al-Zawahri has accused Iran in recent messages of seeking to extend its power in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and through its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

The authenticity of the two-hour audio recording posted on an Islamic Web site could not be independently confirmed. But the voice sounded like past audiotapes from the terror leader, and the posting where it was found bore the logo of Al-Sahab, al-Qaida’s official media arm.

The rest.

Truth seeker Jon Elinoff, who seems to have dedicated his life to outpigging the pigs by secretly recording activist groups who shun him (because he’s fucking nuts), has another post up about how, like, Re-create 68 and RAIMD are violent troublemakers!

At least I think that’s what Mr. Elinoff is alleging. See if you can figure it out.

ReCreate 68 confirms that the anti-war protests that they were denied the permit for on the first day of the DNC will be violent, but states that it will not be in an offensive way from them that it will be the result of the police instigating it, which he shouldn’t know the information of anyway:

MP3 Download click here

M3U Stream click here
The rest.

What the fuck was that, again?

Like the rest of the articles on TruthAlliance.net, I know what most of the words mean, I see the punctuation marks, and yet I still can’t read the fucking thing. Is it just me or is Mr. Elinoff’s prose entirely fucking gibberish?

There’s something about watching the truth seekers work which makes me feel like I’ve come in contact with some fundamentally and irreducibly retarded portion of the human brain, some vestigial remnant of our legless past.

So, I’m reading Philip Roth’s Counterlife, a damn fine book about, as you probably guessed, alternative lives.  It’s a lot of fucking fun, both as a novel and a meditation on the possibilities and limitations of personal, religious, and national regeneration — whether as a result of our own volition or our author’s whim.

And, in one of the many scenes that gets replicated to counter purposes, I came across the following line, as given us by an insane literary fan of the protagonist, who is pretending to highjack a plane with the intent of closing down all holocaust museums, believing (or pretending to believe) that it is because the gentiles always see Jews as judging them for the holocaust that they will eventually destroy them (clear?).

Israel is their prosecutor. The Jew is their judge.  In his heart, every Goy knows, because every Goy, in his heart, is a little Eichmann.

Any Zerzan fans out there?  When did he first use the term?

Just geekish curiousity.

Larry Brown’s recipe for squirrels, biscuits, and gravy.

The late Larry Brown, the author of Joe, Billy Ray’s Farm, and seven other classics of Southern literature, had a saying. When things were difficult, complicated, aggravating, or vexing in one way or another, he’d say, “They ain’t squirrels, baby.” Squirrels, for Larry, were the antithesis of all that: They were a joy to hunt, a joy to cook, and a joy to eat. Hunting and eating them was one of life’s simple pleasures-along with bream fishing, slow back-roads driving, drinking with pals, and cradling his grandchildren. On numerous mornings he greeted me with a plate of squirrel, biscuits, and gravy, his signature dish, usually made with grays his sons had killed. Nothing ever tasted better, or will again.

2 squirrels (about 1 pound each), dressed and quartered
2/3 cup flour for dredging, plus roughly 1/4 cup for gravy
5 slices bacon
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Biscuits
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup vegetable shortening, chilled
3/4 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons butter, melted

The rest.

It’s a good ‘un.  (Thanks, Mr. Hawkins.)

(Thanks, trm49.)

Two of my favorite moments from this barely literate, jackass screed about RAIMD and Re-create 68 posted over at TruthAlliance.net.

After speaking with RAIMD, We Are Change Colorado became aware that they intend to throw bags of urine and blood on cops at the DNC protests, all under the name of the umbrella organization ReCreate 68 . . . The RAIMD activist group has asked people to prepare for throwing bags of blood and urine on cops and they have discussed how to build molotov cocktails.

Yeah, because what activist wouldn’t want to throw urine on an armed man with a license to beat your ass into a bloody pulp? And, by the way, if you can’t figure out how to build a Molotov cocktail without assistance, perhaps you oughtn’t be playing with fire. Somehow I don’t see the folks at RAIMD holding seminars on, like, rag, gasoline, fucking bottle.

By attending, these groups do not yet realize they will be giving up their message and name for the ReCreate 68 name which is permitted to protest. The problem with this is that ReCreate 68 has been inviting more radical groups and violent anarchist groups as well. To add to this, ReCreate 68 has not told other activist groups the extent of which these demonstrations will endanger the safety or security of any peaceful demonstration.

Bear in mind while reading this horseshit that the dribbling morons spent the first half of their article whining because Re-create 68 would NOT let them attend.

Seriously, there is a reason nobody wants you, truthers. It’s the same reason no one holds cocktail parties in lunatic asylums. Nobody needs you milling aimlessly around, walking into fucking lightpoles and drooling all over all the signage. You’re needed right where you are: in your fucking parents’ basement, eating your own feces.

Anyway, RAIMD has promised to respond, but, shit, how could I pass up the opportunity to poke at these fucking pinheads?