I'm certainly relieved to hear that only 200 people were murdered in El Salvador.
I weep for the Guatemalan-sweater-wearing teachers who find themselves confronted with students who don't care, man, about the evils of the Reagan administration's Central American policy.
I keep waiting for some indication that Carson's general cluelessness is more reflective of my own perceptive biases than his actual capabilities because hey: head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins is some serious stuff. But man, every day I'm more convinced that he's some sort of idiot savant.
3
I don't know. I'm starting to think that he might have just been a normal, highly-educated person who was kidnapped by the RNC and deprived of sleep and forced to watch Glenn Beck clips with his eyes taped open for a few months and then set out on the campaign trail.
According to the Huffington Post aggregator Carson has been dropping off pretty sharply in the last week or two (and Trump has been moving up again somewhere into the low thirties). Coincidentally RealClearPolitics hasn't updated their way more limited set of polls in about two weeks so I'm guessing they were hoping for a Trump/Carson head-to-head thing and aren't sure what to do now. I don't know how permanent it is, or why it's happening, but it looks like Carson turning out to be a big fat liar may actually have hurt him.
"Sometimes he overthinks things" is not an explanation I was expecting for Carson.
The article reads like someone trying to "not" write an article about how Carson is just a confused imbecile. But it looks to me like the better story there is how Carson has managed to surround himself with people who are just as demented as he is. I mean, I guess Clarridge is an expert in.. something. But I strongly doubt understanding the details of what's going in the world is one of those.
Was it back in the spring, when Carson visited Israel and was totally perplexed by the concept of a Parliament? "Why don't they just use our system?"
But it looks to me like the better story there is how Carson has managed to surround himself with people who are just as demented as he is.
There is also the question of what kind of shitty campaign is he running that the people who work for him don't have the sense or discipline to not blab to the press about how stupid he is?
When the last time you've even seen the word Soviets?
At the Yakov Smirnoff Theater in Branson, MO.
9: Hey, the Ark was built by amateurs remember?
Clarridge is the least of Carson's advisors. His one paid national security advisor, one Robert Dees, is a nutjob who's drunk the evangelical koolaid, proposing that the US military be used "as a vehicle to eventually "indoctrinate" the American public at large to evangelical Christianity":
These views are consistent with the work Dees pursued after retiring from the military as a two-star general in 2003. For nearly six years, beginning in March 2005, Dees served as executive director of Military Ministry, a division of Campus Crusade for Christ, now called Cru, a Christian evangelical organization with an annual budget of almost half a billion dollars. His Military Ministry was dedicated to converting members of the military to Christian evangelicalism.
"We must pursue our particular means for transforming the nation -- through the military," he noted in a 2005 newsletter published by Military Ministry. "And the military may well be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure. Militaries exercise, generally speaking, the most intensive and purposeful indoctrination program of citizens."
Dees also had troubling international ambitions for Military Ministry, in line with the organization's "sixth pillar" to "change continents for Christ." In the 2007 YouTube video, Dees described his group's goal of converting foreign countries to Christianity by evangelizing their militaries. "We seek to transform the nations of the world through the militaries of the world," he said. "And we're in twenty different countries around the world, recognizing that if you could possibly impact the military, you can possibly impact that whole nation for Jesus Christ and for democracy and for proper morality and values-based institutions."
Oh - the linked article provides quite a bit more information about Dees, but I'm afraid it may require you to decline its invitation to subscribe first.
Fuuuuuck those guys. And Kasich for talking about a government agency for spreading judeochristian values. Somebody find me some dolphins.
Kasich did that? Huh. And here I thought he was the only remotely reality-based one.
Uh, my first thought is that they're just going after the evangelical vote, thinking toward 2016 electoral politics. (Not Carson - he's actually a true believer.) But Kasich and the rest who are insisting on a war of civilizations narrative and so on? Pandering. It won't work, of course, in the general election.
It might be pandering, but my guess is that Kasich's moderate-explosive-common-sense-whatever stuff is more pandering than the stuff he says about judeo-christian values or whatever. He came in with a lot of good look-how-Jon-Huntsman-he-is press and was well set up for press love. But aside from that one medicaid thing that gets heavily sold he's basically a less ugly more charismatic Scott Walker.
Disagree about his charisma, but otherwise fully agree. He's a fucking toad and has always been.
Agreed on the toadhood: he just seemed least bad. Who's least bad? Among Republican candidates.
But I shouldn't ask a question when I'm off now anyway.
Hey, lots of toads have more charisma than Scott Walker.
To be fair to the NYT, being a moral monster does not preclude one from being color and legendary.
Hey, the Ark was built by amateurs remember?
Well, we don't know that for sure. The Bible doesn't say that Noah wasn't a qualified marine architect. And it would make sense for him to be one. If God had decided "I am going to destroy the human race except this one family, who I want to survive" he'd logically choose a method of destruction that his chosen family would (with adequate forewarning) have a good chance of surviving, wouldn't he? If Noah had been a Sherpa, he'd have flooded the Earth except for one mountain, and told Noah to go and climb to the top of it. If Noah had been a skilled gardener, God would have sent a plague of triffids.
If Noah had been an inexperienced boatbuilder the Ark would have sunk and God would have felt jolly silly.
Plus, marine architects are, in my experience, of a uniformly high moral character.
On the OP: there's another NYT article from 2011 about Clarridge which is quite something. I've just finished "Billion Dollar Brain" - sequel to "The Ipcress File" - and its hopeless US right-wingers running a private intelligence service sound very like him. (It also mentions his indictment during Iran-Contra and his involvement in massive procurement fraud. But not the El Salvador thing.)
"Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge's suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict, associates say.
His dispatches -- an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports -- have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. [jesus christ] They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck."
He even got to the point of trying to overthrow Hamid Karzai!
"Mr. Clarridge maneuvered against the Karzais last summer [2010] by helping promote videos, available on YouTube, purporting to represent the "Voice of Afghan Youth." The slick videos disparage the president as the "king of Kabul" who regularly takes money from the Iranians, and Ahmed Wali Karzai as the "prince of Kandahar" who "takes the monthly gold from the American intelligence boss" and makes the Americans "his puppet."
And this (the article is from January 23 2011) makes me wonder if Clarridge had unknowingly come very close to a rather important truth...
"For instance, his private spies in April and May [2010] were reporting that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive cleric who leads the Afghan Taliban, had been captured by Pakistani officials and placed under house arrest. Associates said Mr. Clarridge believed that Pakistan's spy service was playing a game: keeping Mullah Omar confined but continuing to support the Afghan Taliban."
UPDATE: Clarridge is a senile old fool, says Carson campaign!
(Politico, from the splendidly named Hadas Gold):
http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2015/11/ben-carson-elderly-gentleman-duane-clarridge-215997
"Mr. Clarridge has incomplete knowledge of the daily, not weekly briefings, that Dr. Carson receives on important national security matters from former military and State Department officials," Carson spokesperson Doug Watts told the site. "He is coming to the end of a long career of serving our country. Mr. Clarridge's input to Dr. Carson is appreciated but he is clearly not one of Dr. Carson's top advisers. For The New York Times to take advantage of an elderly gentleman and use him as their foil in this story is an affront to good journalistic practices."
Mr. Clarridge has incomplete knowledge of the daily, not weekly briefings, that Dr. Carson receives
"I believe whatever nonsense is told to me seven times more frequently than you said I do!"
would this be the half brother who is supposed to be running the entire country's smack trade? Figures
28: that's the fellow. Horrible person. Doesn't surprise me that he's on the CIA payroll; he's probably on everyone's.
planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge's suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict
BRING ME THE BEARD OF HAMID KARZAI!
THE HUNT FOR KARZAI'S MOVEMBER
SINGING THE PRESIDENT OF AFGHANISTAN'S BEARD
...and I can only assume this is the NY Times being illiterate/ignorant because you can't tell if someone is a heroin addict from DNA samples ffs. You need the hair or beard to test for deposition of heroin metabolites in the hair as it grows.
30: Barber, Hipster, Taliban, Karzai
I don't know why you would assume it was the NYT being ignorant when an option like Duane Clarridge is right there.
33: Seeing as Clarridge thinks there are such people as "Soviets", I suspect it's probably him.
2: I have to tell you, I gave a presentation to some Kids Today and they were fascinated and aghast about Reagan, among other things. I think we've moved past the "don't care, man" to "that was long enough ago that it comes as a shock". It was my generation who didn't really care, because Clinton was president now, it was the nineties, man, etc etc.
Those Guatemalan sweaters are too itchy, though. They were all the go among certain people when I was in college and I just could not wear them. The people of Guatemala either have really fantastic traditional undershirt technology or no one has wool allergies there.
It really is strange how there is that recognizable gap between something happening (some people are outraged), right afterwards (everyone shrugs and doesn't care), and then a generation or so later (when people start going "wait what?"). I guess it's that these things often get carefully vanished by the organizations that supported it/the news agencies that downplayed it/etc., and then when people discover it afterwards it comes as a kind of crazy shock, due to having been told over and over that recent political nastiness by (usually) the Republicans is unprecedented and whatever happened to the old reliable Republicans and so on?
I can't wait till "Wait the press openly mocked Clinton for trying to go after Al Qaeda? And then Bush, with even scarier information completely ignored them!? And then when they attacked the world trade centers literally every public figure pretended that none of that had happened even though it was like less than three years before?" becomes a thing.
36: What's interesting is the ebb and flow of the gap. For instance, I grew up in the post-Watergate era, and the crimes of Nixon were (almost) universally-acknowledged. Further, the Church hearings resulted in at least some widespread understanding that the CIA had done some shit in our names. But meanwhile, the whole era between Truman and Nixon--aside from McCarthy--was largely whitewashed.
By contrast, kids born in '99--the same age relative to 9/11 as I was to Nixon's resignation--don't, I think, have any idea about the history in 36.3. They'll find out in college, maybe, which was when I started to learn about Mossadegh and Allende (although I didn't really learn about Allende until after 9/11, when people used the coincident date to push the story; also good timing with the Pinochet denouement).
It would be interesting to chart the various shameful episodes of our past, and how long they were swept under the rug.
37: maybe teachers steer clear of stuff that their pupils' parents are likely to have strong views on?
I've recently had reason to read a lot of dismissals of cert petitions as improvidently granted and damn Nixon generated a shit ton of litigation.
Jeet Heer recently brought out that commonplace that at one time Republicans were the staid, responsible party on foreign policy. When was that supposed to have been exactly - a few weeks in 1956?
39 is an impressive bit of mid-sentence code switching.
You're a clerk in a blaxploitation-themed appeals court?
Autocorrect failed me when I needed it most.
at one time Republicans were the staid, responsible party on foreign policy.
Harding? Coolidge? Hoover? Just guessing what he might mean. Maybe Grant.
at one time Republicans were the staid, responsible party on foreign policy.
What this means is: my parents were Republicans and/or I used to be one, and I am trying to find a way to deal with this fact without admitting that they were nuts.
36: I can't wait till "Wait the press openly mocked Clinton for trying to go after Al Qaeda? And then Bush, with even scarier information completely ignored them!? And then when they attacked the world trade centers literally every public figure pretended that none of that had happened even though it was like less than three years before?" becomes a thing.
Yes, it would be nice for that time to get here soon, because we're still in the period during which the press and press discussion that follow's Bush's brother's claim that his brother "kept us safe" pretty universally ignores those facts.
In my experience there are usually a fair number of "history will not be kind" things going on at any moment that seem "obvious" on a moment's reflection*; but then there are the occasional ones that really do only come into focus in hindsight.
*One of my favorites is that Repubs mocked and the mainstream press had "concerns" that the Fed was being overtly political by its taking measures** designed to help the economy in the wake of the GFC.
**Despite those measures being quite underdone.
37.last: I guess I could do some internet research on the topic, but I'm thinking Japanese Internment in WWII fit that pattern.
48: I'm guessing the extent to which the press was openly mocking Clinton's attempts to get Osama Bin Laden before Bush's arrival is going to delay that moment for an awfully long time. Certainly long enough that none of the reporters/etc. are around or in positions of authority, and probably past that point until the institutions themselves don't feel embarrassed about it either.
43, 44: I am not a big fan of aging, see eg my recreational-competitive fight against wrinkles, BUT I do look forward to being that 82 year old step-/grandma who says things like Awesome! Dude! etc.
"the press was openly mocking Clinton's attempts to get Osama Bin Laden"
I honestly don't remember this - any handy examples?
There a general questioning of the emphasis on Al-Qaeda/OBL compared to state actors like PNAC's favored bogeyman, China. However, the thing that really brought to the fore was the timing of the 1998 retaliatory strike against a target in Sudan.
On Aug. 20, 1998, anchor Brian Williams introduced NBC Nightly News's "In-Depth" segment with a reference to the movie: "It had some invoking the title of a recent movie in which just that happened. Wag the Dog, it's a work of fiction, but that same thought today had a real feel." Also that night, CNN's Wolf Blitzer took a "look at the presidency with attention split between the sex scandal in the White House and the military strikes aimed at the terrorists responsible for the U.S. embassy bombings."...
On the Aug. 21, 1998 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato told anchor Chris Matthews: "Yeah, Chris, two things strike me about it. The first is -- and I think this is an amazing figure -- 36 percent of Americans believe that the Monica Lewinsky scandal had something to do with the president's action to strike in Afghanistan and the -- the Sudan. That is an amazingly high percentage. That's a product of cynicism, and it's cynicism that Bill Clinton has helped to create and to stoke. He is, after all, a self-certified liar now."
Dredging up old editorials/etc. is tricky, but this showed up pretty quickly, and I definitely remember this endless speculation/constant talking about the movie.
It's tricky to get ahold of too much because they went straight to that well every time Clinton did something (Al Qaeda/Kosovo/Iraq were the main ones I found) along with classic passive aggressive "people are speculating" and "but it changes the way people see what's happening" stuff (both links on Iraq), "the talk around the water cooler..." (except for apparently the far more interesting talk about Socks), doing surveys on how many people believe that that's what he's doing and the classic but doesn't this scandal detract from national interests by forcing reporters against their will to talk about nothing else? stuff. A lot of pieces mention it even when it's blatantly irrelevant (right in the middle of a detailed discussion of what's going on they take a moment to explain that someone asked the press secretary about it and he was annoyed). There's enough mention of it that I suspect it was more cable news than print, or at least in its most direct form though.
Thanks! I remember the "Wag the Dog" business now... what made that film particularly annoying was that the book it was made from was about the first Gulf War and George Bush wanting re-election, rather than a fictional president wanting to cover up an affair, and a made-up war in Albania.
And then after 9/11 the story changed in the RW media to "Clinton was too distracted by blowjob inquisition to pay attention to OBL/Al-Qaeda." IIRC that take got less pickup in the mainstream media.