The Other McCain

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

Twitter: Foreign Policy Clarity

Posted on | August 18, 2013 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

 

The argument in favor of U.S. hegemony since WWII has been “Well, who else do you trust?”

60 years on, well into the Information Age, it’s no longer clear we trust ourselves: to manage information; to budget; to tell the difference between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.

While I’m on Chapter Four of the new Mark Levin book (which read), part of the come-to-Beevis moment our country needs is a foreign policy review. It’s hard to be the land of individual liberty AND the land of “form up and march”.

As a veteran, I’m perfectly comfortable with the notion that the best defense is a good offense. Also, post-Bretton Woods and the National Security Act of 1947, the U.S. had the ball for protecting the West against the Soviets, in exchange for the privilege of being the world reserve currency.

So, what? The Soviets are gone, the Godless Commies having seeded our rodeos and oval office with clowns, and our military is moving in the direction of incoherence.

Irrespective of consequences, I’d take the position that, if we can’t pull our own heads out of that sunless location, we can’t be much use to anyone else. Keep the Navy/Marine Corps team for traditional sea control, disaster relief, and “gentle reminders”. However, let’s just consider that, 20 years after the U.S.S.R. wheezed its last, the Iraq/Afghanistan-style power projection thing is substantially done.

Hegemony was a powerful drug. And we can support groups of allies standing up against, say, China. Fight their wars, though? Not without the thought given a proper Declaration of War, the last of which was in WWII.

Category: Foreigners

Florida: The Rape State

Posted on | August 18, 2013 | 61 Comments

Why does accused sex offender Kaitlyn Hunt think she has a “right” to have sex with 14-year-olds? Perhaps because she lives in Florida, where some officials seem to think enforcing the law is optional, and dangerous sex offenders are released to rape again:

594 sex offenders were convicted of new sex crimes after being reviewed under the Jimmy Ryce law since it took effect in 1999. . . .
For every sex offender the state has committed under the 14-year-old Ryce law, two others have been released — only to be arrested again for a sex crime.
From South Florida to the Panhandle, these men have cut a fresh trail of pain, molesting more than 460 children, raping 121 women, and killing 14.
Many offenders attacked again only days after Florida let them go. Six found new victims the same day they walked out the prison gates. . . .
[T]he head of the agency that screens sex offenders said she would investigate what changes should be made.
Esther Jacobo said the Department of Children & Families would analyze a sample of reoffenders the newspaper identified to determine what went wrong as it reviews the program from top to bottom.
“The only thing I can hope is that we come up with something better so that we get a larger percentage of these guys not to hurt people anymore,” said Jacobo, the agency’s interim secretary. “The biggest wish would be that we could stop it all. I’m not naive enough to think that that’s going to happen, but I think we can do better.”
Some changes already are under way. The department has convened a team of mental health experts to review how Florida identifies sex predators. And, on a single day in June, the agency suddenly recommended continued confinement for 19 sex offenders — as many as it had in all of 2012.
Those actions came too late to protect 8-year-old Cherish Perrywinkle.
This summer, Jacksonville mourned the little girl who was abducted from a Walmart, raped and strangled, her 60-pound body dumped behind a church.
Her accused killer: A registered sex offender freed three weeks earlier.

You can read the whole thing. On average, once every nine days — 42 times a year, for the past 14 years — Florida has released a convicted sex offender who will commit another sex crime.

 

Category: Crime, Florida, Sex

Barrett Brown’s Overblown Ego

Posted on | August 18, 2013 | 58 Comments

Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

“Uh, I’ve been on Suboxone since then, um, partly because, in fact in large part, um, in preparation for this particular day, or two days as it’s turned out, um, which I’ve also been, uh, preparing for by virtue of the last six leaks, uh, Project PM put out in the last, uh, month or so — the New York Times leaks, there’s two parts of that on Cryptome, and the LA county prosecutor leaks, there’s three parts of that on Cryptome and with more coming on both, uh, by and by.”
— Barrett Brown, Sept. 12, 2012

The Left’s ongoing attempt to turn Barrett Brown into a heroic martyr for First Amendment freedom — the latest issue of Rolling Stone calls him “America’s Least Likely Political Prisoner” — requires his admirers to overlook a lot of things, especially the vast distance between his grandiose claims and his paltry accomplishments.

Also, he was crazy.

Barrett was obsessed with the idea of “leaks,” and seemed to have the idea that he would out-leak Julian Assange, thus making himself a worldwide hero of the online anarchist community who worship at the anti-American altar of Assange, Bradley Manning, et al.

Barrett’s problem was his overblown ego, his habitual bragging, his relentless inflation of the significance of whatever occupied his unbalanced mind at any given moment. Wildly undisciplined and emotionally unstable, his “work” production was never impressive, as he wasted time on subjects that were of no real interest or importance.

Sane people could see Barrett Brown was losing his grip even before he became involved with “Anonymous.” In December 2010, when he outlined his “informational schematic” in Video 153? Go watch that rambling 13-minute video. The phrase you’re looking for is red flag. Here was a young heroin addict describing his plan to create “what should be the best means of obtaining information in existence.”

Riiiiight.

Typical of Barrett Brown’s grandiosity was what he called, in his epic Sept. 12 meltdown rant, “the LA county prosecutor leaks.” This involved Los Angeles County Assistant District Attorney Patrick Frey, who is the conservative blogger known as Patterico.

For years, his various enemies have been trying to get Frey fired from his day job, on the basis of his off-hours political blogging, as though it were somehow unethical — a conflict of interest — which it is not, because there is no relationship between (a) what Frey does on his day job and (b) what he does on his blog. Frey’s day job is as a prosecutor in the anti-gang unit: The Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Kings, and so forth — he puts those guys in prison for their crimes. Maybe you could speculate some kind of psycho-babble theory between that work and what Patterico writes about politics, but he never writes about any of the crimes or criminals he prosecutes. Ergo, no conflict of interest. Q.E.D.

Frey’s enemies either don’t understand this or don’t care about the truth, and so he has repeatedly been the target of various schemes hatched by Neal Rauhauser. Why? Because in 2011 (a) Patterico’s blogging about the WeinerGate scandal made him a central figure in Rauhauser’s theory of a Breitbart-led right-wing conspiracy against Anthony Weiner, and (b) Frey’s employment in a public-sector job seemed to Rauhauser to make Frey a vulnerable target.

This background is necessary to understanding why, in August 2011, Neal Rauhauser used the pseudonym “Carlito2000” in an IRC channel to sic Barrett Brown on Patrick “Patterico” Frey:

[13:50] [Carlito2000] So [Brandon] Darby is under suspicion as being the SWAT caller that triggered #Swatgate
[13:50] [BarrettBrown] And what’s Darby’s deal in particular?
[13:50] [Carlito2000] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe4NCaz4NgM
[13:51] [BarrettBrown] he’s under suspicion of doing swat call on Patterico?
[13:51] [Carlito2000] calls on Mike Stack aka @CryingWolfeBlog
6/23/2011 @Patterico 6/30/2011 @EWErickson on 5/26/2012(?)
[13:52] [Carlito2000] and alleged event for @AaronWorthing [a.k.a., Aaron Walker] on 5/29/2012, but no audio has been released
[13:52] [Carlito2000] SWAT of Stack was done to cover their tracks – they took out Weiner because he triggered the extortion investigation into former FBI agent turned Congressman Mike Grimm
[13:52] [Carlito2000] Ofir Biton, Mike Grimm fundraiser, arrested.
[13:53] [Carlito2000] 2012 calls are due to some stuff with James O’Keefe – Rauhauser appear at some hearing in NJ about him
[13:53] [Carlito2000] @Patterico dox @NadiaNaffe, Rauhauser hooked her up with @LeidermanDevine, epic lawsuit ensued
[13:57] [Carlito2000] So New Hampshire state grand jury on O’Keefe, NY
federal grand jury on Grimm, D.C. federal grand jury on O’Keefe, and Chicago cybercrime task force wants swatters, they get info on Darby
[14:09] [BarrettBrown] okay, so I’ll take a look at these links here

You don’t have to understand Rauhauser’s bizarre conspiracy theories (variously involving Brandon Darby, Mike Stack, New York Rep. Michael Grimm, James O’Keefe III and the FBI’s “cybercrime task force”) to understand what Rauhauser/”Carlito” was trying to do, namely to get Barrett Brown to write something — anything — that Rauhauser could then use as “evidence” against his enemies.

The immediate result of that provocation was a series of online chats between Barrett Brown and Frey, who was profoundly suspicious of Brown’s motives, correctly suspecting that Brown had contacted him in pursuit of a Rauhauser-inspired scheme. And my name kept coming up in these Brown-Frey chats, e.g.:

Only reason I ask [if Frey knows anything about Jennifer Emick] is that she left a comment on Robert Stacy McCain’s blog last year when he did a post about me, during such time as she was both serving as an FBI “informant” and working secretly for HBGary pursuant to their covert campaign to get me “picked up” and discredited despite the fact that I committed no crimes against them, etc.
Right now, I think the only real question I have for you is, do you know if Robert Stacy McCain might have had any discussions at all with either Emick or anyone at HBGary at any time, and do you have any correspondence in which he discusses me?

Now, if you’ll go read the transcript of Barrett’s Sept. 12 meltdown video, you’ll see how this theme of Emick as being an FBI “informant” while also working for HBGary is central to Barrett’s paranoid belief that he was the target of some kind of conspiratorial set-up:

I know what’s legal, because I know what’s been done to me and if it’s legal when it’s done to me it’s going to be legal when it’s done to fuckin’ FBI Agent Robert Smith, who is a criminal, who is involved in a criminal conspiracy that has thank god been revealed, part of which was evident, uh, months and months ago because I told the fucking FBI Agent Daniel Borsuk, who gave me a fake name when his fucking little Jennifer Emick fuckin’ informant, HBGary employees, was bragging about this shit and gave me the number, I guess he wanted to talk to me and see what I’d say. Well, his real name’s Daniel Borsuk, I know that now because of more hacked e-mails that she got that she has not refuted although she is, [laughs] the informant is now claiming she doesn’t work for HBGary even though we, again, we have the invoices, the e-mails, her ex-partner’s been in touch, it was already obvious and we have other proof of it, even besides these things that she doesn’t know about yet. Um, we don’t play all our hands, like they do. Uh, anyway, so that’s why Robert Smith’s life is over.

Four words: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

What do I know about Jennifer Emick? Almost nothing. Never talked to her until October of last year, after Barrett Brown had been arrested for threatening an FBI agent, and Emick sent me an account of her interactions with Neal Rauhauser. Yet you see that this idea — that I was somehow part of Emick and HBGary’s “covert campaign” against Barrett Brown — was part of the conpiracy theory Brown was trying to get Frey to confirm, and was also part of the madness that led to that Sept. 12 meltdown. (See: “Neal Rauhauser as Carlito2000: How Barrett Brown Went Down,” Oct. 26.)

On Sept. 6, less than a week before his final meltdown, Barrett Brown published his “LA county prosecutor leak” — i.e., the transcript of an online chat Brown had with Frey — at Daily Kos with a prologue that included this disjointed 89-word sentence:

As noted, this leak is being conducted in retaliation for Frey’s failure to readily answer questions about a possible connection between Confederate/white nationalist Washington Times editor Robert StacyMcCain and the HBGary criminal organization as well as Frey’s decision to publicly attack an RNC protester who was arrested in possession of a weapon, with the final straw being R.S. McCain’s latest attack on Brown, whom the author and conservative stalwart denounced in public as deserving of FBI attention in 2011 — before later claiming instead that Brown is in fact an FBI informant based on his own misunderstanding of facts known even to many reporters who have covered Anonymous in the last few years.

Again, four words: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Whatever my “misunderstanding of facts,” I always understood that Barrett Brown was a raging narcissist, and what Brown called “the final straw” — my “latest attack on Brown” — was my Sept. 4 response to Brown’s threat to sue me for libel, which ended thus:

You don’t need a lawyer, Barrett. You need a psychiatrist, or perhaps a priest to exorcise your demons. You are traveling a road to destruction, as harmful to yourself as to any of your chosen enemies. Get help.

Can I call ’em, or what? Eight days later, Barrett melted down on YouTube and was arrested by the FBI. But before he got himself arrested, Brown published his “leak” of his chat with Patrick Frey, and announced that with a Sept. 4 YouTube video:

To which America responded with a collective yawn. Who cares anything about Frey, one of dozens of lawyers employed by the L.A. County District Attorney’s office? Why would my “possible connection” to “the HBGary criminal organization” be of interest to anyone, even if there were any such connection (which there is not)? Barrett was obsessed with HBGary, as were Neal Rauhauser and various people associated with Anonymous, but in the grand scheme of things — as far as your average consumer of news is concerned — the typical response is, “HB who?”

In light of his well-deserved obscurity, what shall we say of Brown’s success in convincing his fellow anarchists that he was somebody important who was doing “journalism” that was such a threat to the status quo that he is a “political prisoner”? He has merely proven that there is a sucker born every minute, and that a lot of those gullible suckers are nowadays employed as liberal journalists.

Go read “The Kook Who Knew Too Much.” Is Barrett Brown a political prisoner? Only if insanity is a political ideology.

 

Category: Barrett Brown, Conspiracy Theories

Is Your Child’s Public School Teacher Cruising Online for a ‘Sugar Daddy’?

Posted on | August 18, 2013 | 128 Comments

Reading, writing and rent-a-dates:

SeekingArrangement.com, which bills itself as “the #1 online dating website for sugar babies and generous men,” is now boasting that some 40,000 public school teachers of a certain moral caliber have joined the website in an attempt to . . . seek wealthy, older men for “mutually beneficial relationships.” . . .
According to SeekingArrangement, the top five school districts in the country for sugar-baby teachers are (in order): the School District of Philadelphia, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified School District, the Clark County School District (in the Las Vegas area) and the New York City public schools.

Why aren’t you home-schooling yet?

 

Category: Education, Sex

You’re Accused: ‘Vengeance, Spite, Fear, Denial, Sadness, Insecurity, Whatever’

Posted on | August 17, 2013 | 137 Comments

‘LGBT Injustice’? Kaitlyn Hunt (center), her mother Kelley Hunt Smith (left)
and attorney Julia Graves (right) appear on MSNBC, May 22.

Did you ever read what I wrote about the gay-rights movement in 2008? There is an inherent problem in the language of “rights.” Once you adopt such rhetoric in a democratic polity, your purpose is to de-legitimize opposition: “Shut up, because equality.”

Good-bye, rule of law. Forget any question about the necessity or efficacy of any policy reform proposed by those who, speaking the language of “rights,” cast their opponents in the role of oppressors. Merely to disagree is to inflict social injustice on the victims.

This rhetoric succeeds in liberal culture because the triumphant narrative of Progress is something we are taught never to question.

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
— G.K. Chesteron, 1923

So, Ace finally took notice of the Kaitlyn Hunt story:

People who reflexively support gays will say “don’t prosecute her because you don’t prosecute straight kids in that situation and we have to do what we normally do. We can’t treat gay people worse.”
People who reflexively oppose gay stuff will say “you have to prosecute her because you routinely prosecute straight kids in that situation and we have to do what we normally do. We can’t treat gay people better.”
Well I agree with both final sentences — we cannot treat gay people better and we cannot treat gay people worse. Which means the first sentence of each claim is in contest– do we usually prosecute straight kids in this situation?
If so, we should prosecute her, just like the average kid. If not, we should not prosecute her, just like the average kid. As this all swings on a factual question I have no idea about, I didn’t weigh in.

Florida law is clear that anyone 18 or older having sex with someone 15 or younger has committed a crime. This crime is “usually” prosecuted for the same reason that Kate Hunt is being prosecuted: Parents of the minor victim discover that their young teenager is sexually involved with an adult, object to this involvement, and call the cops.

Will anyone argue that this law is unreasonable?

Is it wrong for parents to be empowered, with the law on their side, to say, “Hey, leave my kid alone, you creep, or I’ll call the cops”?

Let us stipulate that there are probably lots of 18- and 19-year-old guys who may be sexually interested in much younger teenage girls.

This is the typical scenario: A girl who is physically mature but not yet 16 becomes involved with a guy in his late teens or early 20s and this involvement is entirely voluntary — indeed, often quite enthusiastic — on the part of the girl who, in the eyes of the law, is the victim of a crime because she is incapable of legal consent.

Maybe that seems crazy to you. You may say, “But this girl is willing and eager to have sex at 14 or 15, why criminalize this guy, only four or five years older than her, for giving her what she wants?”

The answer is that this is a minor dependent upon, and under the authority of, her parents, who have a duty to supervise her behavior — to make sure she brushes her teeth and does her homework and looks both ways before crossing the street — for her own good. And if the parents of 14-year-old Heather Hotpants don’t want their daughter taking a ride on the one-eyed love monster with 19-year-old Billy the Boner, they are empowered by law to prevent it.

Maybe you think this kind of parental empowerment is a bad thing, but if you don’t have a teenage daughter, well, shut the hell up.

Parents have duties and parents have rights, and if we don’t want total sexual anarchy — horny hoodlums cruising the middle-school parking lot in search of some easy action — we’d better by God stand on the side of parents trying to protect their daughters.

Every year — every month, every week — guys are charged in Florida with violating this law. Most of the time you never hear about it, because it’s just a two-paragraph item in the cops-and-courts column of the local newspaper. The prosecutor offers the perp a plea bargain, the perp takes the deal, end of story.

This didn’t happen in the Kaitlyn Hunt case simply because her parents believed they could rally support on her behalf by claiming that Kate was a victim of homophobia, and so they launched the “Free Kate” campaign, fooled a lot of people into thinking that this was a case about “discrimination,” and rejected the plea bargain.

To such a gambit we must answer: Damn you, and damn your “rights.”

If you buy the argument pushed by the “Free Kate” crowd, anyone has a right to have sex with anyone of any age who will consent to it.

Pay attention to their rhetoric — and I’ve been following this story for three months — and you find a lot of talk about it being OK because both girl attended the same high school, or because they were “in love,” or because other kids are doing the same thing.

There has been talk about changing Florida law, and OK, so what?

In some states the age of consent is 14, and if the citizens of Florida wish to become Utah or Alabama, this 10th Amendment advocate would be obliged to respect their state sovereignty.

As it is, however, Florida’s age of consent is 16. This law is by no means secret and evidence in this case indicates that Kaitlyn Hunt knew damned well her involvement with a 14-year-old was illegal.

WHY DO YOU THINK THEY CALL IT ‘JAILBAIT’?

What first drew my attention to this case was a column at NewsBusters by Matthew Philbin in which he sagely observed that Kaitlyn Hunt and her supporters are trying to make homosexuality a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for statutory rape.  But if you cannot prosecute an 18-year-old lesbian for playing Spin the Dildo with a 14-year-old girl, by the same token you cannot punish 18-year-old gay guys who want to play naked leapfrog with 14-year-old boys, nor could any of the more commonplace heterosexual statutory rapes be punished.

The bottom line of the argument, really, would be tantamount to declaring “open season” on 14-year-olds in Florida.

Honestly, I wish Kaitlyn Hunt had taken the plea deal — like the vast majority of perps in such cases do — rather than subjecting America to this divisive debate, because she’s put me in the position of arguing now that she must go to prison, or else put at risk the legitimacy of age-of-consent laws everywhere. This was the import of my first American Spectator item about the case:

#FreeKate? Movement to Normalize
Pedophilia Finds Its Poster Girl

Folks, these “Free Kate” people have brought us so close to the gates of Hell here, you can feel the heat and smell the brimstone. Once these advocates of pubsecent perversion start talking about “rights,” and accusing their critics of “hate,” we could slide down the slippery slope faster than an Olympic bobsled team. Which brings us to the “Free Kate” supporter who inspired the headline of this post:

 

“If there weren’t ridiculous laws on the books that the other parents [i.e., the parents of the 14-year-old] pushed the state to utilize out of vengeance, spite, fear, denial, sadness, insanity, whatever they may have going on in their minds this would not be up for debate.”
— Carrie Mullinax

Damn you, and damn your accusations. Should parents who try to protect their daughters be exposed to this kind of insulting abuse?

Do you see how the rhetoric of “rights” empowers perverts and thugs to impugn the motives of law-abiding citizens? Laws against sex with 14-year-olds are “ridiculous,” and parents who want the state to enforce its laws are accused of “insanity”! Lesbians have a “right” to have sex with your 14-year-old daughter and shut up, haters.

Happy 14th Birthday! (Batteries not included.)

 




 

Category: Gays, Kaitlyn Hunt

FMJRA 2.0: Totem

Posted on | August 17, 2013 | 13 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Why Does Lesbian @SaraAlcid Want to Help More Women Kill Their Babies?

Our Moral Superiors So Seldom Condescend to Address Us Directly

Slut Walk: Dumbed-Down Feminism and the Politics of Mindless Protest Chic

Blame Joan of Arc

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

Yes, Ma’am, However …

Missing Teen Hannah Anderson Rescued After FBI Shoots and Kills Her Kidnapper

Taking Feminism Seriously

Disagreement as ‘Harassment’? @StephHerold Says Tell the FBI

Prosecutors: Kaitlyn Hunt Violated Order, Sent Messages, ‘Lewd’ Photos to Victim UPDATE: Hunt Accused of Sending Masturbation Video to Teenage Victim UPDATE: Lesbian and Victim Had ‘Intimate Contact’ Until Two Weeks Ago

Rule 5 Sunday: Stratoscape

Tattooed Harlot Sydney Leathers: She’s Totally an Expert on ‘Self-Loathing’

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.12.13

Kimberlin v. Kimberlin: Tetyana’s Lawyer Defeats the Perjuring Criminal Sociopath

Your Vagina Is Sudetenland, and Other Helpful Advice for Young Ladies

FMJRA 2.0: Immolation For The Lord

Mystery Solved–BHO Went To The Rodeo To See The Bull And Fetch Fresh Policy

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.13.13

‘They Were Lonely and Depressed; Their Symptoms Were Psychosomatic’

Pundit Syndication’s Troll Policy

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 08.14.13

OK, So This Happened: ‘Male Feminist’ Hugo Schwyzer Is a Psychotic Pervert

VIDEO: Sex-Positive Feminist Tearfully Explains: ‘You’re All the Man I Want’

Special Snowflake Syndrome

Perversion for Breakfast

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.15.13

Groundpounders

McCain Talks About Kaitlyn Hunt’s Violation and #FreeKate Movement

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.16.13

Michael Hastings Conspiracy Theories: Missing the Real Mystery of His Death

Major Jordan, Carroll Reece, Birchers, Buckley and the Attack on Diana West

Kaitlyn Hunt: Obsessed Lesbian Predator?

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Crazed World (27)
  2. EBL (24 including 8 from Batshit Crazy News)
  3. Dead Republican Party (16)
  4. Regular Right Guy (13)
  5. Badger Pundit 5


Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Links for next weekend’s FMJRA are due by midnight Friday, August 23.


Category: FMJRA Award

Kaitlyn Hunt: Obsessed Lesbian Predator?

Posted on | August 16, 2013 | 240 Comments

A hearing has been scheduled Tuesday:

Accused sex offender Kaitlyn Hunt will appear in a Florida courtroom Tuesday for a hearing on charges that she violated terms of her pretrial release by contacting the underage girl with whom she is accused of having an illegal lesbian affair. In a motion filed Thursday in Indian River County, prosecutors said Hunt, 19, sent “lewd” photos and a pornographic video of herself masturbating to the younger girl. . . .
Hunt has remained free on $5,000 bond since her arrest, but at a hearing scheduled for Tuesday in Vero Beach, prosecutors will present evidence to Circuit Court Judge Robert Pegg that Hunt has violated terms of her release. Prosecutors from state attorney Bruce Colton‘s office are expected to argue that Hunt’s bond should be revoked and she should be jailed until her trial, which had been scheduled for September, but has since been postponed. . . .

You can read the whole story at Viral Read. The question in the headline is prompted by what Ken Shepherd wrote at NewsBusters:

[Prosecutors’ account of how Hunt violated the no-contact order] if proved true in court, shows that Hunt is obsessed with her victim, that she is exhibiting predatory behavior, and that she is attempting to obstruct justice by pressuring her victim into silence.

How does someone get that messed up? What happened to Kaitlyn Hunt to turn her into a sociopathic sex freak? And in other news:

You can look this guy up. Every case I’ve found so far, William Korman’s client has been (a) a pervert, and (b) guilty.

 

Category: Kaitlyn Hunt

Major Jordan, Carroll Reece, Birchers, Buckley and the Attack on Diana West

Posted on | August 16, 2013 | 94 Comments

Diana West, interviewed by The Blaze, July 17

One of the stories Diana West tells in her new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character is about Army Maj. George Racey Jordan, whose tale about Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union you can read beginning on page 110 of the book.

West recounts, on pages 139-140, Major Jordan’s narrative of an April 1943 incident in which his Russian liaison, Col. Anatole Kotikov, put him on the phone with top FDR aide Harry Hopkins. According to Major Jordan, Hopkins told him about “a certain shipment of chemicals,” ordering him to “just send it through quietly, in a hurry.”

Has anyone disproven Major Jordan’s account of that incident, or otherwise contradicted his tale of how, he said, the Lend-Lease program aided the Soviets in stealing U.S. secrets and materials necessary to the development of atomic weapons? I am unaware of any such contradiction or disproof, and the question is why — in the wake of what we have learned about Soviet espionage since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the release of the Venona decrypts — scholars have not done more to investigate Major Jordan’s tale, which made headlines when he testified to Congress in 1950.

Frankly, there are too damned many such questions that ought to be of interest to historians, and too few historians working to investigate accusations made during the Cold War that got laughed off as ridiculous or denounced as “witch hunts.” We should be grateful that Diana West is picking at the dangling loose ends of history.

Instead, she’s been denounced for her methodology and condemned as a conspiracy theorist by both Ron Radosh and David Horowitz. There have been some people who, persuaded by the arguments of Radosh and Horowitz, have condemned Diana West without ever reading her book. And I suppose the reputations and persuasiveness of these eminent critics are such that, if you went and bought American Betrayal right now, it would be impossible for you to view it in an unprejudiced light. How can she be right — an intelligent and honest investigator — if Radosh and Horowitz say she is so wrong?

Let me attempt to answer this by asking another question: How much do you know about the Reece Committee?

This is one of those Cold War mysteries that the John Birch Society has kept alive, God bless them. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be intrigued by such mysteries, and I once knew a fellow, directly familiar with the inner circles of JBS, who explained to me that talk of a communist “conspiracy,” which has given Birchers such a bad name, was simply a mental framework for viewing the problem.

The Law of Inadequate Paranoia

One need not believe any of the more wild-eyed accusations made by Birchers in order to share their general suspicion that the full story is not known, and that if the full story were known, it would shock your socks off, curl your hair and scare you half to death.

This is what M. Stanton Evans has called Evans’s Law of Inadequate Paranoia: “However bad you think it is, it’s probably much worse.”

Start asking certain questions about subversive influences on American policy during the Cold War, and you will find enough evidence of that stuff to make you understand what Evans means by that.

So . . . the Reece Committee, officially the House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, was created in 1952 under the chairmanship of Rep. Edward Cox (D-Georgia) and continued later under the chairmanship of Rep. Carroll Reece (R-Tennessee). Reece believed that Cox had not gotten to the bottom of the matter — there was the suspicion of a “whitewash” — and brought in a staffer named Norman Dodd as the lead investigator.

Please, go read Dodd’s 16-page report of his investigation. And when you’re done reading that, then you’ll be prepared to learn that, according to Dodd, the Reece Committee’s further investigations were shut down and the committee itself disbanded, and Dodd said that this was done as a result of heavy political pressure.

Big money and important people didn’t want any more snooping around into Dodd’s accusation that there had been a “revolution” in the 1930s that had involved the American education system, and what children were taught about government and economics.

Think about this: A congressional committee with subpoena power to command testimony and requisition evidence as part of an investigation into how major non-profit philanthropic foundations — Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc. — had influenced policy in a direction that some have called “un-American” or “subversive.”

And they shut that committee down.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist ranting about Commie infiltrators and pinko subversives to see the implications of this.

Let’s just say that, minimally, Dodd’s report to the Reece Committee raised questions, and that we don’t know all the answers. However, it appears that for many years there was a consensus among leading officials of major philanthropic foundations that U.S. policy needed to be shifted leftward, and that children needed to be taught to accept this shift as beneficial and necessary. In other words, they had their thumb on the scales, tilting everything to the left, and they expended millions of (tax-exempt) dollars for this purpose.

Research it yourself, and see if you disagree with that description.

Say whatever you want about “conspiracy theories.” My point is that if we don’t know all the answers about these things, there is a reason: Important people didn’t want anyone asking questions, and they exercised enough influence that they were able to discredit or shut down anyone who tried to get answers to certain questions.

In the present controversy regarding Diana West and her book American Betrayal, we see a strangely familiar echo of that theme. West is accused of being a conspiracy theorist and an irresponsible demagogue, basically because she calls attention to unanswered questions — which may seem moot to some people — about a shift in U.S. policy that began during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.

What Would Bill Buckley Do?

West’s critics have invoked William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous “purge” of the Birchers from the conservative movement as justification for their campaign against her, thereby inviting others less familiar with the substance of the controversy to dogpile onto their side.

I lamented this controversy when it first arose, and declared myself committed to defending Diana West, and remain resolute. Radosh and Horowitz say that they have serious reasons as conservatives for their crusade against American Betrayal, and despite my general admiration for their work, I think they are misguided in this effort.

Whatever West’s errors, she doesn’t deserve this treatment, and I think serious people need to ask what could be so dangerous about West’s book that it has engendered such extreme hostility.

Well, what happened to the Reece Committee? Didn’t Norman Dodd’s report help answer some of the questions Buckley himself had raised in God and Man at Yale? Isn’t this where the whole modern conservative movement began, with Buckley’s inquiry into why collectivism and secularism had become the prevailing influences in America’s leading educational institutions by the early 1950s?

About 80 years ago, a certain elite in American society decided — more as a consensus than a conspiracy — to bring about this shift that Norman Dodd called a “revolution,” and this shift has proven impossible to reverse, I would argue, because so few educated people are aware of how the shift took place, or what the consequences of that shift have been. This in turn explains why the investigation of Major Jordan’s account, like so many other Cold War mysteries, remains so mysterious to this day: To be “educated” now means to believe that it is impossible for Harry Hopkins to have done what Major Jordan said Hopkins did.

Just by the way, you may be interested to know that in 1946, when Soviet agent Alger Hiss left his State Department job as Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, he did so to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Maybe that was just a coincidence, and maybe it’s just a coincidence that Diana West’s book has caused such a firestorm. But whenever I see a situation like this — where it’s like someone hit the trip wire that set off the Claymore mines on the perimeter — my instinct is to think that the questions being asked are very important, and to disregard those who want to head off certain lines of inquiry.

OK, so here is a 52-minute interview with Norman Dodd, conducted in 1982. Maybe you can dismiss him as a doddering fool:

Was Norman Dodd a crackpot? Was he a paranoid conspiracy theorist? Or was he, as I believe, a man who unearthed some important information that he was not able to explain adequately? The system of organizations funded by major tax-exempt foundations, which was the subject of his 1954 report (if you haven’t read it yet, click here to read it now), may not have been a conspiracy, but neither was the direction of their influence random and coincidental.

Think about it. Try not to get paranoid, but remember what Stan Evans says: “However bad you think it is, it’s probably much worse.”

 

Category: Books, Conspiracy Theories, History
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