Keyser Soze and Bernie Sanders (updated)

The above feed came from this excellent post by John Cole. There you have it, the whole Bernie plan, out in the open: Elect Trump and destroy the Democratic party. Actually, though, it's not really Bernie's plan...

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A certain type of movie has a certain type of twist ending.

At the very end of the movie, we learn that an unassuming minor character was actually the arch-mastermind, the hidden string-puller, the Evil One in disguise. The protagonist suddenly realizes the truth. The film replays brief flashbacks, intercut with the hero's horrified expression: Oh my God... Now I understand...

The Usual Suspects pulls off this trick, as do Unbreakable, The Illusionist and a number of other films. Diabolique is probably the first -- and best -- example of this kind of twist ending, the kind that forces us to re-evaluate everything we've seen.

Reading up on Roger Stone has made me feel like I'm living in that kind of movie. Stone has been a recurrent "hidden" villain in the pages of this blog -- and I didn't even know it.

Stone did not create the PUMA movement of 2008 -- that happened on Riverdaughter's site, and I trust her thoroughly. But Stone's forces were quick to seize upon any fissures within the Democratic party.

It's an old gambit. In 1972, Nixon's men (of which Stone was one) sought to have the Democrat run against a black candidate, just to force the leading Dems to criticize that candidate. Within the black community, those criticisms would be portrayed as racist. Leftist whites would have been of immeasurable help in spreading this Nixonian propaganda.

(Do you recall the GEMSTONE plots from Watergate? This particular plan was code-named "coal." Cute, huh?)

In 2008, a black man was arrayed against a white woman. If the woman won, McCain would have picked a black veep. But the black guy won, so McCain picked a female.

That's how Stone thinks. That's how he operates. His number one ploy is to create divisions within the Dems.

Half the PUMA movement in 2008 (your humble host now understands, as flashback scenes play in the great cinema of his mind) was a Republican ratfucking operation. It's easy to tell who the real PUMAs were: They're the ones who support Hillary now. The ratfuckers were HillBuzz and No Quarter, run by Larry Johnson of the CIA.

Have you seen Johnson's site lately? Pure poison.

Birtherism originated on Johnsons' site. I'm proud to state that I was among the first to demonstrate that Johnson's evidence was a pack of lies.

And now, the Trump sites are claiming that the PUMA crowd (which they falsely construe as a bought-and-paid-for arm of the Clinton campaign) originated the birther trope. Another lie. Riverdaughter, Dakinikat, Alessandro Machi -- we were all opposed to that birther nonsense.

Birtherism was gifted to the world by the ratfucker PUMA sites, primarily No Quarter.

How do we know that No Quarter was working with Roger Stone? In a word: "Whitey."

There were only three sources for the rumor that Michelle Obama was caught on tape using the epithet "whitey" -- Larry Johnson, HillBuzz...and Roger Stone. Stone pushed the meme as hard as he could on TV.

HillBuzz went so far as to claim that Obama had made the outburst at a specific luncheon. I spent an entire day trying to track down people at that luncheon. When I finally got through to two journalists who were there, I found out that the claim was false.

That was my first "Oh my god -- Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze all along!" moment.

I understood who Larry Johnson really was. (Okay, I had suspicions -- after all, look at the guy's resume. I even tried to trick him into showing his true colors. That's a long story best told another time.)

But I did not understand the Roger Stone connection to Johnson, even though it's obvious now. It was kind of brilliant -- introducing the birther meme on sites that could (superficially) be placed in the Clinton camp.

In truth, I should have understood the HillBuzz connection all along. They've been promoting the inane notion that Obama is gay. (Does that sound like Stone or what?) One site referred to "Mr. HillBuzz" as the "craziest homocon since Roy Cohn."

(That's a reference to Stone's mentor -- who, according to Stone, was not gay: "He just liked to have sex with men." Stone, I think, could do it with anything and anyone. That guy could lay a brick.)

Escorts. The flashbacks keep coming: Now I understand...now I understand... 

If you're a longtime reader, you know that I spoke at length with Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called DC madam. She could not understand why she was singled out by the Bush Justice Department when other escort providers were allowed to go about their business unhindered. She thought that one of her girls had formed a relationship with a bigwig on the level of Dick Cheney.

But the facts laid out in the preceding post suggest an alternative scenario.

In order to comprehend my point fully, you should first understand that Stone has gone to amazing lengths to take down any Indian casinos which compete with Trump casinos. His attacks on the Seminoles in particular were quite obnoxious.

By taking down Deborah Jeane Palfrey (a.k.a. "Pamela Martin"), the Bush DOJ made sure that a competing agency -- which just happened to bear the name Trump International -- had a clear field.

Actually, there was another competitor called The Emperor's Club. That escort service was destroyed by the Eliot Spitzer scandal.

And how did that scandal come to light? Roger Stone somehow found out about Spitzer's bad habits and sicced the FBI on him. Funny thing: No-one really knows how Stone learned what he learned. And you certainly can't expect to get a straight story from Stone.

Bmaz at Emptywheel noted that the FBI's investigation into Spitzer pre-dated Stone's letter to the Bureau. I cannot say for sure what the sequence of events was, but I do know that the Bush administration owed a lot to Roger Stone. If not for Stone's "Brooks Brothers" riot, Al Gore might have been president.

We've all thought that Spitzer was the only target of that scandal. But what if it was a twofer? What if one main goal was taking down another competitor to Trump International Escorts?

Now, Roger Stone -- the man who brought down Eliot Spitzer, the worst enemy the Wall Street bandits ever faced -- is trying to portray Hillary Clinton as being in Wall Street's pocket.

Roger Stone is a master of the high hypocri-seas. He has played libertarians against establishment candidates and vice-versa -- at the same time. Everybody must get Stoned.

And that brings us to Bernie. This is not the big Bernie piece I've promised. But we must note that a headline like this one -- Amid Democratic infighting, polls are improving for Trump -- is precisely what Stone wants to see.

This is the reason why Stone created the Sanders movement, just as Stone previously created the movements of John Anderson, Ralph Nader and Al Sharpton. (True, the Sharpton thing kind of petered out prematurely: Roger Stone is not infallible.)

I've learned that the fight in Nevada broke out because Sanders couldn't provide delegates who were both Democrats and Nevada residents. The BernieBots brought in Republican ringers, then tried to force a last-minute rules change.

It's pretty obvious that Bernie Sanders is working with the Trumpian hordes. Why else would a "socialist" hire a hatchet man like Jeff Weaver -- who, according to a number of sites, is actually related to Karl Rove?

Josh Marshall says that the vile behavior of the Bernie movement traces to "the top," by which he means Sanders. No. Bernie is not the top. "Keyser Soze" is the top.

Y'know those shots fired into an empty Sanders HQ in Nevada? An obvious false flag. The idea may even have been whispered into Weaver's ear by his relative Karl Rove. (Remember when Rove bugged his own office to smear an opponent?)

The Clinton camp had nothing to gain from that broken window -- they were, in fact, making headway in portraying the Sanders supporters as maniacs (as in fact they are). Whenever you face a whodunnit of this sort, ask "cui bono?" and the answer quickly becomes pretty obvious.

Now let's go here:

Sean Spicer, the chief strategist and spokesman for the RNC, spent much of the evening tweeting Sanders-friendly commentary on the debate, often with the pro-Sanders hashtag #FeelTheBern. At one point, Spicer gently chided Sanders for what he deemed a poor response to a question and added, “come on we are trying to help u.”

After the debate, the Republican political action committee America Rising promoted the narrative that Sanders won the debate. “Clinton needed a win last night. Instead, everyone is talking about how well Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, did,” spokesman Jeff Bechdel wrote to reporters.

Meanwhile, American Crossroads, a group co-founded by Karl Rove, is airing an ad in Iowa bolstering a core tenet of Sanders’s case against Clinton: that she has received large sums of campaign contributions from Wall Street, and therefore can't be trusted to crack down on big banks. “Hillary rewarded Wall Street with a $700 billion bailout, then Wall Street made her a multi-millionaire,” a narrator in the ad says. “Does Iowa really want Wall Street in the White House?”

These Republican operatives are attempting to pick their Democratic opponent in the general election, and they’re making clear they’d rather face Sanders than Clinton. It is age-old political manipulation tactic, typically used with some subtlety.

Now go here:

The theft of highly valued, early state Hillary Clinton voter data by the Bernie Sanders campaign was unethical, absolutely worthy of DNC sanction, and possibly criminal.

The Sanders’ campaign response to the exposure of getting caught was, on the other hand, surprising and, regrettably, worse than the theft itself. Instead of quickly taking responsibility, mitigating damage, and moving forward, Bernie himself was nowhere to be found [Update: directly challenged at the debate, Sanders apologized], while Jeff Weaver relished the role of a Democratic Karl Rove, projecting the fault of the accused onto the accuser.

Worse still, Weaver carried this message of reverse victimization to Sanders’ supporters, creating an epistemic closure narrative worthy of the worst of conservative media.

From Toobin's classic piece on Stone:

Stone’s rules: “Attack, attack, attack—never defend” and “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”

That's what Weaver and his tools (I'm looking at you, Salon) do all the freakin' time. If Weaver is a lefty, why is he using the Stone playbook?

I've met a few socialists similar to Sanders in my time. They are usually harmless. They've never before been capable of this sort of vileness. No real socialist would ever get within ten feet of a consummate creep like Jeff Weaver.

Now go here for a discussion of Stone's days with NCPAC (a group he helped found):

They would help Ron Paul win his first election in Texas; they would take down John Culver of Iowa, George McGovern of South Dakota, Frank Church of Idaho, and Birch Bayh of of Indiana. It was not about ideology, it was about you winning and the other guy losing. “We want people to hate Birch Bayh without even knowing why,” explained Dolan.

Sound familiar?

(We haven't even begun to look into the spooky links to Stone's ops. Church was the worst enemy the CIA ever had.)

Keyser Soze, I now believe, was the one who rigged the comments of every left-leaning blog in 2008, pitting black against white, male against female.

Keyser Soze is the one rigging the comments now. Keyser Soze freakin' owns Reddit.

Throughout so many years, I've tried -- in my own small way -- to do battle with an enemy whose name I did not know and whose face I could not recognize. Belatedly, I understand.

I know who Keyser Soze is.