The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The CIA, JFK and Clay Shaw: Paranoia and the Conspiratorial Worldview

Posted on | November 29, 2013 | 84 Comments

Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested after an August 1963 pro-Castro protest

Why did Jim Garrison indict Clay Shaw for conspiracy? It was as ridiculous as it was simple: In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald consulted a New Orleans attorney, Dean Andrews, to see if he could do something about his undesirable discharge from the Marine Reserves.

“Andrews . . .claimed that Oswald was referred to him by a young blond homosexual named Clay Bertrand.
“Although the FBI was never able to find a trace of this person, Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, erroneously identified him as Clay Shaw, who was neither young nor blond, and indicted him on conspiracy charges. Shaw was subsequently found not guilty.”
— Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (1978)

That’s it, period. From this simple misidentification, Jim Garrison spun an implausible conspiracy theory that became the crux of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. Who was “Clay Bertrand”? We do not know. The FBI couldn’t find him and we don’t even know that such a person actually existed. It may be that Dean Andrews was confused. What we do know is that in 1967, Jim Garrison indicted Clay Shaw, a businessman who had served as a major in the U.S. Army and founded the New Orleans International Trade Mart, charging him with conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Beyond the fact that Clay Shaw was not the (possibly non-existent) “Clay Bertrand,” there was no reason on earth to suspect him of wanting to assassinate JFK, nor was there any evidence that he had anything to do with Lee Harvey Oswald. The American Spectator‘s Tom Bethell spent months working as a researcher for Garrison’s investigation:

Over the next year Shaw’s trial was repeatedly postponed. Garrison’s assistants were in no hurry to try the case because they didn’t have a case. . . .
Garrison was reckless, utterly irresponsible, willing to charge a man with the crime of the century regardless of the truth. Above all, he loved to shock people. Occasionally he claimed that Oswald was innocent. Small problem: Shaw’s guilt depended on Oswald’s guilt. When this was pointed out, Garrison waved the objection away. “You can argue it differently in court,” he said. One day he filed charges against Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. No one in the office would sign the papers, so Garrison had to do it himself. . . .
As for Clay Shaw? I agree with the jury that he was totally innocent. There was no credible evidence that he knew either Oswald or [David] Ferrie, let alone planned to shoot JFK. Shaw was homosexual and everyone knew that, but it never came out in the newspapers. Garrison’s people didn’t mention it, but the deal was that Shaw couldn’t produce character witnesses at his own trial.

In other words, Shaw’s homosexuality made him uniquely vulnerable to Garrison’s “reckless” prosecution, because if his defense had introduced character witnesses, those witnesses would have been subjected to cross-examination in which they might have been asked, under oath, about Shaw’s homosexuality — a scandalous fact that Shaw did not wish to make a matter of public record.

Such was the calculation of the “reckless” Jim Garrison, but perhaps you missed this crucial sentence about Garrison’s investigation:

“One day he filed charges against Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.”

That’s really the crux of the whole thing: The CIA loomed large in the minds of Jim Garrison and others who wanted to believe that somehow the Agency, as the result of a policy disagreement with the Kennedy administration, had decided to have the President of the United States assassinated. And because Clay Shaw apparently had some contacts with the CIA, making him “Clay Bertrand” and connecting Shaw to Lee Harvey Oswald would thereby serve Garrison’s purpose of blaming JFK’s assassination on the CIA.

All of this comes to mind because today I watched C-SPAN coverage of a conference of JFK conspiracy theorists held in October at Duquesne University. One of the “experts” was Temple University Professor Joan Mellen. Her presentation was entitled, “Clay Shaw Unmasked: The Garrison Case Corroborated.” You can read that (don’t miss Page 2) and if you think that Professor Mellen has “unmasked” Clay Shaw or “corroborated” Jim Garrison’s case, you should seek professional psychiatric help immediately.

It is a loopy, disorganized mess.

To the extent that Mellen makes any point, it’s this: At his trial, Clay Shaw denied under oath that he worked for the CIA, but CIA records seem to indicate otherwise, and therefore . . .

Therefore, what?

Damned if I can figure it out. Joan Mellen has evidently never heard of Occam’s Razor, nor of any other principle of logic, and exactly how she thinks she has proven anything is a mystery. Let us stipulate that during the Cold War, the CIA utilized a lot of “assets” who weren’t at liberty to disclose their relationship with the Agency, and that if Clay Shaw was such an asset (as records do seem to indicate) he sure as hell wasn’t going to say so in public — not even when testifying under oath — because that’s just not how the CIA rolls.

It is, however, an implausible leap from (a) Clay Shaw did some work for the CIA to (b) Clay Shaw conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate the President of the United States, when there is no credible evidence that Shaw ever even met Oswald.

But that’s how it goes, see? If you attribute sinister magical powers to the CIA — if the Agency exists in your mind as a sort of omnipotent bogeyman — anything is possible. And if anything is possible, then all that is necessary is to allege that something happened (e.g., a secret meeting between Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald) and, unless someone can prove it didn’t happen, then you have the basis of a conspiracy theory. Also, since the CIA is allegedly all-powerful, they can make evidence disappear, so if you don’t have any proof of your theory, you can just blame the CIA for that, too.

Laugh if you want to, but there are a surprising number of people who think that way. There is a non-profit organization, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, devoted entirely to promoting the kind of “critical thinking” (their term) behind this kind of paranoid nonsense.

 

 


Category: Conspiracy Theories, History

Helping Dr. Helen Sort All This Out

Posted on | November 29, 2013 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Let’s lay down a few Lefty assertions that, while not absolutely true, may have some explanatory power:

  1. The federal government, staffed with ‘officials’ and ‘experts’, is your parent.
  2. You are a sheep, lacking free will, and are a sort of hormonal robot.
  3. You are a guilt-free slut-o-matic, or dildo with feet, and should both consider the natural plumbing a mere going-in position (heh), and indulge every hedonistic whim in the name of “liberty”.
  4. All of the traditional moral frameworks are, like, over 100 years old. Who can understand them? If you feel a transient confusion, see #1. In any case, do not keep your hormones to yourself, reach a proper adulthood, and attempt to rise above your 20g chocolate ration.
  5. All women are victims, and all males are oppressors. Building upon #4, the notion of equality before the law, irrespective of the selected gender identity of the moment, is dispatched to the midden-heap of history. (How can Democrats build a permanent political hegemony if treating everyone truly equally?)
  6. You are a victim. You didn’t build that family, you’ll never build that family, but if you give everything to #1, the feddle gummint can ensure that nobody else can, either.
  7. So eat, drink, be merry: for that is the career the feddle gummint has set for you.

Dr. Helen is mystified at the asymmetry of college kids, booze, and sex:

Why is it that women can’t think if drunk but men can? Why is it always about men controlling themselves and being responsible for any sex act while women are treated as children?

Given the aforementioned assertions, what we have in modern college is a cultural grinder whose chief product is Democrat sheep who will do several things:

  • make a lot of money, as they are rendered too stupid to grasp heterosexuality and the joy of parenting, and
  • give that money to the Democratic party, and finally,
  • never question what their Progressive Overlords say, as they’re too intellectually stunted.

Of course, that’s idiotic. It’s a purely myopic, culturally destructive, near-term approach. Following such an approach would lead to things like a “knockout game”, and holiday shopping spectacles indistinguishable from a rugby scrum. What country would be stupid enough to buy into all that?

via Instapundit

Category: Culture, Instapundit

The Crisis of the Obama Cult

Posted on | November 29, 2013 | 58 Comments

“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

Ace nailed it the other day:

[T]he Liberal Chattering Classes are facing a question now: “Will my reputation and sense of pride survive Obama’s incompetence?”
And: “How absurd am I willing to make myself in order to cover up for this arrogant buffoon’s incompetence?”
Some people may begin to peel off — not because they’re not in-the-tank partisan shills, mind you, but because they’re in-the-tank partisan shills who still have some functioning sense of self-respect left in them.
They are beginning to realize that loving Obama means, in the end, hating yourself. You have to sacrifice everything for him — your honesty, your integrity, your autonomy. Your reputation, your legacy, your pride.
His incompetence and deceit are at such a level that he will not permit you to support him and retain a shred of self-respect for yourself.
Devotion to Obama requires destruction of the self. Obama is a jealous Messiah, and will not permit you to love anything else — even yourself.

Josh Marshall has gone all-in on self-abnegation. Other cultists may be less willing to “step out on faith” so boldly. Remember that the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” is a reference to the means of mass suicide at Jonestown. And remember that Jim Jones was a leftist.

 


Category: Barack Obama

Bareback Butt Sex Increases 20%

Posted on | November 29, 2013 | 62 Comments

Donald Douglas calls our attention to this startling news:

Federal health officials are reporting a sharp increase in unprotected sex among gay American men, a development that makes it harder to fight the AIDS epidemic. . . .
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of men who told federal health investigators that they had had unprotected anal sex in the last year rose nearly 20 percent from 2005 to 2011. In the 2011 survey, unprotected sex was more than twice as common among men who said they did not know whether they were infected with H.I.V. . . .
The findings are worrying because “unprotected anal intercourse is in a league of its own as far as risk is concerned,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the disease centers, said on Wednesday as the figures were released. . . .

Read the rest at the New York Times.

You see, this was a fundamental objective of ObamaCare. During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, infected people simply died by the thousands. During the 1990s, however, treatments were developed that made long-term survival possible — but quite expensive — for the HIV-positive. This is why it was absolutely imperative that the Democrats (beholden to the gay lobby) forbid insurance companies to deny coverage for “pre-existing conditions.” Thus, people who are at zero risk for AIDS are forced, through higher insurance rates, to foot the bill for preventable diseases spread by irresponsible behavior.

Nobody wants to admit this, however, because facts are now “hate.”

 


Category: Gays, Health Care, Sex

Perhaps It’s Time to Ask Again, ‘What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?’

Posted on | November 29, 2013 | 40 Comments

The infamous ‘Group of 88’ ad in the Duke Chronicle, April 6, 2006.

Michael W. Chapman at CNS News:

When Crystal Mangum falsely accused several Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, there were 160 major television news stories in the first five days after the players were arrested, but in 2013, when Mangum was convicted of murder and sentenced to 14 years in prison, there were only 3 major television news stories, a difference in coverage of 5,233%.

The bottom line of the Duke lacrosse rape hoax was that two strippers had an argument with some college boys. A dishonest district attorney, who was up for re-election, turned the false accusations into a witch hunt, enthusiastically assisted by Duke faculty and the media.

The district attorney, Mike Nifong, was subsequently disbarred, but the Duke University faculty are still teaching and, of course, the reporters, editors and commentators who got the story completely wrong have never been held accountable. When the false accuser Crystal Mangum was convicted of murder last week, Instapundit’s comment was, “THE GROUP OF 88 WERE UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT.”

Indeed. But the signatories of the “Social Disaster” ad — including such academic humbugs as Wahneema Lubiano and Karla Holloway — continue miseducating students at Duke University, a prestigious private school where the annual tuition is $45,620. The errors of professors Lubiano, Holloway, et al., were not random or accidental, but rather were the product of an Ideology of Error, the cluster of leftist doctrines lumped together under the category of critical theory, otherwise known as Cultural Marxism or political correctness.

Who can forget how Amanda Marcotte covered herself in shame?

“I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN
blaring throughout the waiting area and
good f–king god is that channel pure evil.
For awhile, I had to listen to how the
poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being
persecuted just because they held someone down
and f–ked her against her will — not rape,
of course, because the charges have been
thrown out. Can’t a few white boys
sexually assault a black woman anymore without
people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.”

But this false accusation — the Duke players did not have sex with the strippers, much less hold them down and f–k them against their will — is not enough to discredit Amanda Marcotte in the eyes of those who share her worldview. This is how the Ideology of Error operates: As long as one speaks, writes and behaves in accordance with the ideology, any resulting errors are written off as if they never happened.

Amanda Marcotte can be absurdly wrong and crudely offensive and yet still be endlessly applauded by her fellow leftists. This hate-filled lying fanatic is a valued contributor at Slate and a welcome guest at MSNBC not despite her fanaticism, but because of her fanaticism.

Only in this context can we understand how Crystal Mangum’s false rape accusation in 2006 could get five thousand percent more coverage than her recent murder conviction. Do not expect a Duke faculty committee to call for a “national conversation” about such bias, because the news media are deliberately misinforming the public in exactly the same way that the Duke faculty are miseducating their students.

This is the “social disaster” that the liberal elite are unwilling to address, because it is a “social disaster” they have purposefully caused.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: Black Friday

Posted on | November 29, 2013 | 19 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho




CLASSIC THANKSGIVING LEFTOVERS
The Desolate Wilderness
The New Land


OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: Democrats Lie; What Else Is New?
Proof Positive: Pilgrims Elect To Receive
Dead Republican Party: Official Obamabot Thanksgiving Litany
Michelle Malkin: Thanksgiving 2013
Twitchy: “Best Pic Captions Of The Day” – Oprah vs. Dr. Ben Carson On Obamacare


RIPPED FROM TODAY’S HEADLINES
American Power: Depraved Leftists Escalate Assault On Thanksgiving
American Thinker: The Knockout Game – What Took Conservative Media So Long To Notice?
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: This Actually Happening
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – Check Out The Contractors
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, November 27-28
Jammie Wearing Fools: Goofing On Joan Walsh For Saying She Knows More About African-American History Than The Average White Person
JustOneMinute: It Takes A Village – To Find Hillarity’s Accomplishments
Pat Dollard: State Department Blames Closing Of Vatican City Embassy On Benghazi
Protein Wisdom: Documents – Karl Rove Gave Grover Norquist $26 Million In 2012
Shot In The Dark: Equity
The Jawa Report: Obamacare Bureaucracy Cancels Little Boy’s Life-Saving Cancer Treatments
The Lonely Conservative: NLRB Gives Unions The OK To Pay People To Protest At Walmart
Megan McArdle: A Fight Over Contraception Won’t Help Obamacare


Deadline to submit links for tomorrow’s FMJRA is noon Saturday; it used to be midnight Friday, but I don’t get up as early as I used to on weekends any more. Anyway –
DO IT.


Category: Linkagery

The Nadir of Hackery

Posted on | November 29, 2013 | 33 Comments

Fail, failure, failing — anyone who has paid attention to the ObamaCare rollout knows that it has more that justified the criticism of its opponents. The president’s signature legislation is a policy disaster for the nation and a political liability for Democrats. Any attempt to ignore that objective truth is simply dishonest. And speaking of “simply dishonest,” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

For years, Obamacare supporters weathered at best tepid support for the President’s reform in the expectation that once people experienced the actual law, rather than the right-wing fever dream, opinions would change. Then they were hit with the wholly unexpected surprise of a botched website roll out that set the whole public opinion war back on its heels and then a wave of cancellations that were reported in a misleading way (and only affected a tiny portion of the population) but nevertheless further soured public opinion.
But for all that, here’s why I think the generally cataclysmic press is overblown and why the law will be a success. . . .

He goes on from there, but you get the general idea — Josh Marshall begins his argument with the conclusion and then, ignoring all contradictory evidence, scrounges up whatever excuses and rationalizations can be made to serve his conclusion. Whatever else he may be, Josh Marshall is a partisan Democrat, and his is a partisan argument. Anyone who doubts him is pre-emptively accused of buying into “misleading” reporting and “the right-wing fever dream.”

Josh Marshall is as objective about ObamaCare as a Baptist evangelist is objective about Jesus. Yet in this tent revival, Josh Marshall preaches only to the faithful, and offers this as his altar call:

We didn’t pass Health Care Reform for it to reap electoral gains for Democrats (though I think it still will) or to have it be popular, per se (though I suspect it will be). The aim was to get people covered, make the health care provision system more efficient and reduce the scale of human suffering, especially the spectrum of suffering tied to your wealth and your luck.
By that standard, I think it will be a success and I think there will be no going back. And that’s the only standard that matters.

If you don’t accept the eternal salvation of ObamaCare, Preacher Josh is saying, it’s because you don’t want to “reduce the scale of human suffering.” You are morally inferior, a sinner.

What was that he said about a “fever dream”?

 

Category: Health Care

‘Forget About Repealing #ObamaCare. Repeal Obama’

Posted on | November 29, 2013 | 31 Comments

by Smitty

Emphasis original:

Below is a note from Bill to C. Steven Tucker. Bill is the man stricken with cancer who Tucker helped out after seeing Bill on Megyn Kelly’s show talk about how ACA mandates caused him to lose his coverage in the middle of cancer treatments.

“Steve, the company decided to keep me active. Since it is a chronic illness. Until this illness kills me. Battle #1 is won. Now the hard part. You literally saved me. Thank you so much.”
Those are the greatest words I have ever heard in my 20 year career as a licensed health insurance broker. I couldn’t be a happier man today! – C. Steven Tucker

That’s the good news. Now the bad-

Bill is now being audited by the IRS.

And now for the 2nd punch line-

C. Steven is being audited back to 2003.

THAT’S what happens when you do the right thing, and in the process embarrass that bastard in the white house.

Forget about repealing Obamacare. Repeal Obama.

My concern is that repealing Obama isn’t enough, either. #OccupyResoluteDesk has taken every wrong thing about our lest century of Progressive collapse and turned it up to 11. This IRS thuggery is precisely the sort of heavy-handedness this country was founded to preclude, not enable.

As Politico was noting the other day, “Tea party unscathed in early GOP civil war“. I hope that proves true. The GOP needs to reclaim Congress in 11 months, but with the understanding that the last century is indeed over. It’s time for reform. Time for an honest appraisal of just how jacked up this experiment in self-government has become, and how many dozen bureaucracies need to go under the bus to restore it.

Ideas like the Fenwick-Sugden Plan–let’s give it a catchier name, say, Single Patient–need to be fleshed out an implemented.

The IRS as we know it needs to go, and take the DOE, EPA, and large swaths of the DOJ with it.

If we don’t do this in 2014, folks, it’s not unlikely that we can kiss our country goodbye.

Via BigFurHat at iOwnTheWorld

Category: Barack Obama, Health Care
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