"Years ago, it meant something to be crazy. Now everyone's crazy."
-- C. Manson.
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Heretofore, I've not discussed the rape accusations against IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Although I've no particular affection for anyone connected in any way with the IMF, my initial impression was that this was a probable set-up.

That idea -- always the majority opinion in France -- would have outraged most American readers until recently. Across political lines, Americans have become wedded to an inane set of stereotypes in which every prominent male is seen as a PenisMonster and all females are automatically presumed to be HolyWoman.

The people who remain emotionally tied to this scenario never seem to understand that there are behind-the-scenes manipulators who seek to control the behavior of politicians. These manipulators have at their disposal a limited number of tools. The primary weapons are the four "B"s: Bribes, blackmail, beds and bullets.

(By "bullets" we mean the whole range of assassination options, including the popular jet crash scenario. This choice is no longer favored, except in extreme circumstances.)

We know that Strauss-Kahn's accuser was after money. She lied about the details and may face perjury charges. Moreover, she was tied into drug smuggling and money laundering. Someone with that kind of rap hanging over her head is easily manipulated into participation in a covert operation. So who put her up to it? That's the question which people should be asking.

Think about it. She told her boyfriend that she expected a windfall. From whom?

Keep that question in mind as we return -- yes, once again -- to the Anthony Weiner debacle.

So firmly has the "HolyWoman versus PenisMonster" scenario taken hold of the public mind that everyone immediately presumed that Tony the PenisMonster had cyber-"raped" innocent women who wanted only to talk politics.

Oh, those poor women! As always, they are the eternal victims. Any male barbarian who suggests that they simply could have ended an offensive chat or phone call is simply furthering the culture of victimization.

But a simple review of the timeline suggests a very different scenario...

On April 11, 2011, Meagan Broussard -- the woman who eventually made the explicit photos available to Andrew Breitbart -- first got Congressman Weiner's attention by writing "Hottt" on his Facebook page. In other words, she was the one who signaled from word one that she was sexually interested and available.

On May 4, he sent her the rather innocent photo of himself sitting with his cats. In response, she sent him four photos of herself. Since these photos have not been revealed, we must guess their nature. At some point afterward -- we don't know precisely when -- Weiner sent more explicit photos of himself.

On May 5, Weiner emailed Broussard the "me" photo. The time: 3:08

Later on the same day (6:26), Mike Stack (a.k.a. Goatsred) tweets the following: "A big bomb about to burst: Rumor on the Right Coast is that a "big time" Congressman was caught with a mistress. There are pix and a top five Right-Wing blogger has them."

This announcement was retweeted immediately by PatriotUSA76, the mysterious Dan Wolfe (whom some suspect of being a sock puppet for Stack himself.) Stack later admits that he knew from the start that the target was Weiner.

On May 20, Broussard sent three photos of herself. Weiner responded with the bare-chested photo. Broussard then sent two more photos of herself.

On June 7, Broussard told ABC News that the photos from Weiner came out of nowhere. She never mentions the photos of herself that she had sent immediately beforehand.

ABC News paid Broussard somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 for the photos and private email messages. That fact alone tells you all you need to know about Meagan Broussard.

It is perfectly fair to classify her alongside the Strauss-Kahn accuser.

Before you say it: Yes, I am aware that another woman had previously made accusations against Strauss-Kahn. Whether valid or not, that accusation probably inspired the more recent smear attempt.

Similarly, Weiner had a history (before his marriage) of engaging in cyber-sex. The same can be said of millions of other men and women -- and if you think that you have a right to judge all of those men and women, I suggest that you exit the current century and take your rightful place as a character in a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel.

Weiner then married a woman whose job frequently forced her to travel the world. It seems likely that Weiner's enemies got wind of his earlier history and put together a honeytrap for a lonely congressman.

Why is this important? Because similar honeytraps will occur in the future. And the all-pervasive "HolyWoman versus PenisMonster" stereotype will always work to the benefit of the schemers.

Of course, when more women take seats in Congress, the honeytrappers and smear merchants will invoke a different set of stereotypes -- something to do with cougars and maneaters. These stereotypes will be equally simplistic, equally ugly, and equally false. Then and only then will feminists stop looking at the puppets and start looking for the puppeteers. Permalink

Bend over, here it comes again: Now they are going after the minimum wage. You damned swankpots don't deserve seven bucks an hour: Will you take five? Pretty soon, you'll have to.

Obviously, the thing that's killing this economy is slow demand -- and how can demand rise when fewer people have money to spend on movies, books, booze, cigarettes and other non-essential items?

Demand would rise if the minimum wage rose. If Wal-Mart paid its employees a living wage of $12 an hour, and if every cent of the increase were passed on to the consumer, the average shopping trip would cost a mere 46 cents more. Those decently-paid wage-earners would then have money to spend on consumer goods, which would increase employment.

Instead, libertarian ideology keeps us locked in a race to the bottom.

If Michele Bachmann -- who adheres to an even stricter form of libertarianism than that which we've already had to endure -- gets her way, jobs would go only to those desperate enough to work for subsistence wages. With fewer dollars in the pockets of the average workers, fewer goods and services would be sold. Even more enterprises would shutter for lack of customers, and those few which remain open would pay workers even less.

Libertarianism demands that we spiral to rock bottom. And you know what we call rock bottom? Slavery.

Bachmann believes in two Messiahs, Jesus and Ludwig von Mises. The Von Mises Institute produces incessant propaganda designed to convince the public that prosperity would increase if minimum wage laws were abolished: See, for example, here and here and here. Example:

The minimum wage removes the ability of some workers to compete by accepting lower wages and shuts them out of the labor force. As a result, it reduces job opportunities for these workers. A minimum wage breaks the hinges on the door of opportunity.

Ask the laborers who work under near-slavery conditions in unregulated Dubai whether they appreciate the "opportunity" they have received.

There are many more slaves in the world today than there were before the U.S. Civil War. A high (but reasonable) estimate puts the number of slaves at 27 million. All of them were created by unregulated capitalism. None of them were created by socialism or government regulation.

This interview with slavery expert Ben Skinner reveals what libertarians have in store for us here in America, if given the chance:

I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who'd been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo -- he asked me to protect his identity -- was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

Since he was a child, he and his family and his children, along with the rest of the enslaved villagers, took huge rocks out of the earth. They pummeled those rocks into gravel for the subgrade of India's infrastructure, which is the gleaming pride of the Indian elites.

They further pulverized that gravel into silica sand for glass. There's only one way that you turn a profit off handmade sand, and that's through slavery.

TM: Another method you describe: Someone shows up in a poverty-stricken village saying they need workers for the mines hundreds of miles away.

BS: It's a massive problem in the north of Brazil. What's tricky about this, in many cases these workers want to work. But they don't want to be forced to work under threat of violence, beaten regularly, having the women in their lives raped as a means of humiliating them, and then not being paid anything.

TM: They are transported to the mines, and when they arrive, they have a debt for that transportation, which is greater than anything they will ever be able to repay.

BS: And if they try to leave, there are men with guns. That's slavery.

The Dominionists want to bring slavery back to this country. (But it will be a nicer form of slavery, you see. So that makes everything all right.) Indeed, a strange black Dominionist named Wellington Boone has called slavery "redemptive."

Michele Bachmann has been linked to Dominionism.

Unregulated capitalism is the true road to serfdom. Without regulation, wages will continue to spiral downward until slavery becomes inevitable.

You think life under Stalin was bad? Indeed it was. But when the Randroids, the Dominionists and the Bachmannites are finished ruining this nation, you will envy the lowliest worker laboring in the most brutal year of the Soviet dictatorship. Hell, you'll envy even the slaves in the antebellum South. At least those slaves were considered valuable commodities. Permalink

Not even during the most jingoistic period of the cold war were we subjected to nonsensical hysteria so feverish. I won't embed the video, but the headline speaks for itself: Michele Bachmann interrogates commies Geithner and Bernanke.

Good lord. I...even I...have no idea what to say. Here we are, decades after the fall of the USSR, and "communism" is considered our greatest problem. The nation has gone mad. Permalink

Hope you had a marvelous Fourth of July. Being a Democrat, I spent part of the day trying to teach a four-year-old girl how to sing the Internationale and the French national anthem.

I saw a parade go through a Baltimore suburb. One group of paraders wore t-shirts bearing the words "Thank you, Henrietta!" This message referred to Balmer native Henrietta Lacks, who (unwittingly) provided the "immortal" carcinoma cells widely used by researchers. In this town, it has become fashionable to speak of Henrietta Lacks as if she were a pioneering scientist, even though her only contribution was accidental. Young people who never heard of Jonas Salk seem to be under the impression that Henrietta Lacks cured polio.

Well, never let it be said that Baltimore does not remember her daughters and sons.

The main attraction was the Edgar Allen Poe float, in which several local beauties played teenaged corpses while their boyfriends got drunk. The Nancy Pelosi float (yes, she was born here) became the target of rotten vegetables tossed by Republicans and Democrats. The Alger Hiss marchers handed the kids small plastic pumpkins with free surprises inside. The Spiro Agnew Memorial Float puzzled many: Apparently, he is no longer a household word. I quite enjoyed the pole dancers on the Emily Post float.

Tupac Shakur himself made a surprise appearance when his memorial float broke down in front of the Family General on Shipping Way. He stopped and waved at the fans for about 15 seconds. Too bad you weren't there.

The Dundalk Intellectual Society demonstrated an impressive ability to count to 17 in unison, a performance marred only slightly by the frustrated participant who kept repeating "Thirteen and a half, thirteen and a half." The Dundalk Library Association proudly displayed their book. The Ayn Rand Pamphleteers handed out free copies of Atlas Shrugged while informing spectators that they were guilty of Collectivist Thought if they did not agree with Ayn's philosophy.

All in all, a terrific Fourth. Permalink

Many millions of Americans -- perhaps majorities -- now believe the following:

1. Obama is a socialist.

2. The economic collapse of 2008 was brought about by too much regulation.

3. The New Deal caused the Depression.

4. Hitler was a left-winger.

5. Stalin killed more people than Hitler did.

6. Joe McCarthy was right.

7. In 1970, most returning Vietnam veterans supported Nixon and detested the hippies who spat on them. They especially despised Jane Fonda.

8. Free trade helped America to prosper in the 19th century.

9. A great company like Toyota can grow only if a government follows strict laissez-faire policies.

10. Lower taxes on the rich increase government revenues.

11. A left-wing conspiracy controls the media.

12. Milton Friedman and the libertarian Chicago school economists improved the quality of life in Latin America.

These beliefs constitute the triumph of propaganda over lived experience.

Just a few days ago, I saw a video presentation in which a young professor (all tweed and polysyllables, and missing only the pipe) made the Stalin-outkilled-Hitler claim with calm, jackass self-confidence. The truth is here and in a lot of other places. In fact, on a per year basis, not only did Stalin (monster than he undoubtedly was) kill far fewer people than Hitler did -- he actually killed fewer people than George W. Bush did.

Mark my words: Within five years, the majority of Americans will believe some variant of the "media stab in the back" theory to explain Bush's failed war in Iraq.

Truthout has a good article up today about the propaganda techniques employed by Fox News. I'm particularly concerned by the fourth tactic:

4. Rewriting History. This is another way of saying that propagandists make the facts fit their worldview. The Downing Street Memos on the Iraq war were a classic example of this on a massive scale, but it happens daily and over smaller issues as well. A recent case in point is Palin's mangling of the Paul Revere ride, which Fox reporters have bent over backward to validate. Why lie about the historical facts, even when they can be demonstrated to be false? Well, because dogmatic minds actually find it easier to reject reality than to update their viewpoints. They will literally rewrite history if it serves their interests. And they'll often speak with such authority that the casual viewer will be tempted to question what they knew as fact.

Under such circumstances, how can truth prevail?

It is ironic that in the era of 24-hour cable news networks and "reality" programming, the news-to-fluff ratio and overall veracity of information has declined precipitously. Take the fact Americans now spend on average about 50 hours a week using various forms of media, while at the same time cultural literacy levels hover just above the gutter.

Let's add in another factor: The arrogance of ignorance.

Modern Americans -- particularly younger ones -- feel too insecure to allow themselves to be taught anything. After all, if you allow yourself to be taught, you are confessing ignorance, and people laugh at the ignorant. Therefore, you will feel better about yourself if you hold onto to any rationale, however threadbare or unconvincing, that allows you to think that your long-held delusions are real.

Anyone who has ever argued with a creationist will know what I'm talking about.

Those converted to the twelve points listed above will never revise their opinions, no matter how persuasive the counter-evidence. People believe what they want to believe. They will accept any argument, however absurd, from those who flatter their preconceptions.

I had a small encounter with this mind-set recently. The point under discussion was not political; still, the case is illustrative.

On several websites, I corrected young people new to classical music on their terminology: One does not refer to every composition as a "song." Symphonies, concertos, overtures and tone poems are not "songs." One uses the label "song" only if the composer has first applied that label. Otherwise, in the world of grown-up music, we use such terms as "piece" or "work" or "composition."

My words infuriated many. They resorted to the most inane and abstruse forms of reasoning imaginable to tell me that I had it wrong, that it is perfectly acceptable to refer to Beethoven's 5th symphony as a "song."

The next time some ignorant dullard uses the phrase "for all intensive purposes," try to correct him. Watch what happens. Guarantee: You'll be told that you are wrong. Either that, or you will be called a fool for caring about correct usage.

These days, most egos are thinner than onionskin. The person whom you try to instruct will react with a soul-deep outrage born of a soul-deep insecurity. People will not tolerate correction; they want to have their pwecious widdle egos protected at all times.

Have I strayed from our topic? No. In this case, the personal is political.

The next time some ignorant dullard tries to sell you on one of the propositions listed above, try to correct him. Watch what happens.

The other insurmountable factor is conformity. Like arrogance, conformity is a byproduct of insecurity. All Americans pride themselves on their individualism, yet I am continually amazed to witness the average American's discomfort with himself.

There they are -- in the stands at the football game, lost in a mass, joining in with thousands of others as they engage in primitive group vocalizations and tribal body motions.

There they are -- at the nightclub, where sound levels make personal expression impossible, with drugs expunging hated thought, moving in time with dozens or hundreds of others in a barbaric mass ritual.

There they are -- on the sidewalk, dressed like everyone else and subjecting non-conformists to ridicule.

There they are -- in church, arms upraised and mouthing hymns, taught to despise anyone who applies critical and independent thought to the reading of scripture.

There they are -- watching television. Absorbing. Not doing anything: Just absorbing, like millions of other blobs of barely-animate absorbent material on millions of other sofas all across the country.

There they are -- on Facebook. Willingly divulging their faces to the NSA's facial-recognition software. Willingly divulging their cell phone numbers to massive government computers which use GPS data to track locations. Willingly divulging their political opinions to the data-miners who keep tabs on all who will need to be rounded up when round-up time arrives. Yet they won't consider alternatives to Facebook, because everyone else is doing Facebook.

Americans hate being alone with the self. Individual consciousness is agony. Mass consciousness is the opiate.

Our propagandists understand that, in a culture of conformity, any idea can triumph if it is repeated often enough. Obama is a socialist: The phrase was laughable the first 50 time you heard it. By the 500th hearing, it became conventional wisdom. You can convince the majority of Americans that potato chips cure heart disease. Simply make sure that the phrase "potato chips cure heart disease" pops up every time someone turns on the teevee or fires up the internet.

You moo when you are told to moo.

And yet you think that you think. Permalink

Riverdaughter links to Greg Sargent on the charge of deliberate economic sabotage:

In recent weeks, there’s been some question as to how far Dems are willing to go in making the explosive charge that Republicans are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy in order to improve their chances of defeating President Obama in 2012.

On a conference call just now with reporters, Senator Chuck Schumer made the most aggressive case we’ve heard yet along these lines, leaving little doubt that Dems are locking in behind this message as the deficit talks hit crunch time and as the 2012 campaign looms.

“Do they simply want the economy to go down the drain to further their political gain?” Schumer asked. “They seem to be against anything that may create jobs, because they view a weak economy as key to their political chances in 2012.”

They're right about the plan; wrong about the motive. This isn't about Obama. Most of the deficit was created by George W. Bush -- the tax cuts for the rich, the insane military spending, the bailouts. The trade imbalance and the destruction of American manufacturing were both caused by libertarian policies put into effect long before Mr. O got the oval.

The engineer wants to crash the train. Why? Because he wants to see it crash. The crash is the point; Obama is incidental.

They want to see the economy collapse in a huge spasm of Emmerich-esque Total Fucking Destruction. Financial Ragnarok will bring us to the point that Russia reached after Yeltsin took over. The U.S. will be forced to sell off all of her assets to the oligarchs at ridiculously low prices.

After that comes the formal end of democracy. Obama ain't got nothin' to do with it. Permalink