Mystifications

Sorry for the irregular posting; I've been fighting a bug. (No, not the kind you'll see in Them!)

Zandar directs our attention to a particularly hilarious conspiracy theory which has been making the rounds on the Libertarian blogs. You can find said theory in its primal form on Liberty.com, a popular site run by a Tea Partier. The video embedded above appears to be the source for that report.

Basically, the story holds that American right-wingers have somehow gotten hold of a memo prepared originally for Vladimir Putin, a memo that exposes Obama's full, terrifying scheme.

Most interesting to note in this memo is its saying that the “master plan” Obama intends to use in disarming his citizens has already been openly discussed and published by the highly influential progressive American political blog Daily Kos, that is said does not repeat Democratic “talking points,” it generates political talking points that later are found in mainstream publications and from Democratic politicians themselves, and is now opening advocating indiscriminate armed raids to be used as an “example” to frighten other citizens into obeying their Washington D.C. masters who will order them all to disarm.

The “death squads” being deployed throughout the United States under Obama’s orders, this memo continues, are frighteningly called VIPER teams, which is the acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Team, a programme run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and whose agents terrify millions of Americans with Nazi-like Gestapo tactics on a daily basis at airports and who report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Russian military analysts contributing to this memo further note that the Obama regimes saying that these massive DHS ammunition purchases are for “practice and training purposes” is “preposterous” as all firearms training done by military and/or police forces “always” use less expensive rounds. Retired US Army Major General Jerry Curry, likewise, agreed with his Russian counterparts when he stated that the Obama regimes “explanation about the bullets fails to pass the smell test”.

Most ominous, perhaps, in this memo is its stating that the “exact” plan for the Obama regimes disarming of its citizens appears to have been predicted by the famous martyred American dissident William Cooper (1943-2001), who in his 1991 book “Behold A Pale Horse” wrote...

You get the idea. A lot of the above doesn't make any kind of syntactical sense. The writer seems to have reached an advanced stage of consciousness which places him beyond such petty concerns as grammar, logic and comprehensibility.

Being a former man-about-town, I had a couple of unpleasant run-ins with Cooper; the first meeting occurred long before anyone reading these words is likely to have heard of the guy. (Truth be told, if you've ever heard of the guy, you've probably spent too much time in low company.) He was, beyond doubt, a psychopath. I remain stunned that anyone can continue to believe his lies, since he contradicted himself incessantly and was often caught cribbing riffs from other paranoia-peddlers.

He certainly wasn't martyred. Cooper shot a cop in the head, and the cop's partner returned fire.

Alas, that fact will never penetrate the consciousness of a Libertarian or a Tea Partier. These freaks have crawled into their own sick alternative reality-space and that's where they're staying.

The "Putin memo" illustrates the point. You would expect a Russian document to include at least a few references to purely Russian concerns, to speak of things unfamiliar to Americans. Not here.

Instead, the Liberty.com text hits all the buzzwords that matter to right-wing fringe-dwellers -- there's even a dig at the Daily Kos, which, we are told, has openly discussed Obama's plan for takeover. (Oddly, the Liberty writer refuses to provide a link.) The idea of home-invading SWAT-like teams being run by the TSA (!) is, of course, too ludicrous for words.

Here's more from Mother Jones:

This supposed Russian memo purportedly identifies two gun rights activists who already have been murdered by Obama's death squads: John Noveske, the owner of Noveske Rifleworks, which makes assault weapons, and Keith Ratliff, a cult sensation for his work on FPSRussian, a popular YouTube video channel devoted to high-power weapons and explosives.

Both men were, in fact, killed last month in separate incidents. Noveske died after his 1984 Land Rover crossed the center line in Grants Pass, Oregon and hit some boulders. He wasn't wearing a seat belt and was ejected from the vehicle.

Ratliff's body was found at a weapons testing and developing facility he operated in rural Georgia, among piles of firearms, with a single gunshot to the head. His death has indeed been ruled a homicide.

I don't know anything about Ratliff beyond this, but mysterious deaths happen all the time, and one such death hardly justifies so grand a conspiracy theory. Most people think that the guy was shot by someone he knew.

If you read the Liberty.com piece, the writer doesn't make clear which allegations stem from the Russian text and which come from other sources. He seems desperate to toss into the pot every factoid burbling through what he is pleased to call his mind. If schizophrenic authors produce "word salad," then writers of this sort produce "conspiracy stew."

I haven't seen the original of this alleged Russian memo. Has anyone? The lack of a link makes me suspect that no original exists. The video embedded above may be the closest thing to an original text that we will ever see. If an actual document does turn up, it will no doubt contain obvious indicators of fraudulence. We are dealing with a hoax of the kind familiar to anyone who has studied The Protocols, "Silent Weapons," Iron Mountain, Alternative Three, Psychopolitics, the Zinoviev letter, Satan in the 19th Century, Pastor Chiniquy's ramblings, and various similar texts.

A hundred-or-so years ago, European writers had a word for such productions: Mystifications. Although the term has fallen out of use, it's due for a revival.

What is it about Libertarians? They consider themselves the apostles of sweet reason -- in fact, Reason is the name of their leading journal. Yet today's Libertarians are suckers for every new mystification that comes down the pike.

They didn't always advocate paranoid horsecrap. Whatever else you may say about (for example) Milton Friedman, he wasn't a big believer in conspiracy theory. If anything, Friedman aided and abetted a massive (and very real) conspiracy against the Chilean people, when he joined forces with the fascist dictator Pinochet.

Nowadays, the Libertarians and the Tea Partiers have become conspiracy theory addicts. Paranoia is their smack.

Behold the Tea Partiers: Still alive, still tripping, still flopping about in the urine-soaked back allies of America's unconscious while that yummy-bubbly CT juice courses through their needle-tracked arms. In their hallucinations, they remain popular and powerful -- powerful enough to take on Karl Rove, whom they consider a socialist elitist, emblematic of everything currently wrong with the GOP.

I'm not kidding. Check THIS shit out:

Why didn't Rove and company tell the Times that they were interested in training conservative candidates in media fluency? Why didn't they approach the Tea Party instead, and offer their get-out-the-vote services and electoral strategies?

Because, at root, there is a clash at the heart of today's Republican Party. The Tea Party wants to change tactics. The establishment wants to discard principle.

The question is whether this will be the party of Ronald Reagan or the party of George W. Bush. The establishment opposed Ronald Reagan in 1980; they backed George H.W. Bush, convinced that Reagan was too extreme, not quick enough on his feet, no match for the more intellectual Jimmy Carter. Thank God they lost.

Wait a minute. Isn't that the same Ronald Reagan who, during his presidency, was castigated as a sell-out by Tea Party maven Richard Viguerie? And yes, I know that a faction of the conservative movement never could stand the Bush family. I can't stand the Bushes either, but that doesn't mean I have anything but disdain for those far-right lunatics who hate the Bushes for their own far-right lunatic reasons.

The Tea Partiers can't face up to the facts. The Republicans lost an easily winnable election in 2012 because a huge chunk of the public believed that the GOP had gone fucking nuts. The conspiracy crazies of the Tea Party had a lot to do with creating that perception.

Romney didn't lose because he veered too far to the left. He didn't lose because there was an insufficient GOTV effort among rural Alabamian gun-toters and the whackadoodles who use George Noory as a primary news source. Romney lost because the primaries turned into an extremist shouting contest, and the shouts echoed long after the primaries ended. After being forced to pass so many far-right purity tests, Romney could not segue toward the middle-of-the-road for the general election -- a segue that every successful presidential candidate must make.

If I were on Team Obama, I'd order up more "mystifications" to spread around the Libertarian blogs. Maybe something with aliens in it. Yeah. The alien angle worked for good ol' Bill Cooper for years.