Of Nabobs and Neds

You know my personal positions on the birther and truther issues, right?

Just in case you don’t, I think the birther issue is coming straight from Rahm and Axelrod, in a lame attempt to create a diversion, a pied piper, to distract the right’s attention away from the President’s policies.  So far, knock on wood, it hasn’t worked.  Some think it came from the Clintons, as a last minute Hail Mary in the spring of 2008 to derail Obama and give the nomination to HRC.  The reason I think it’s a Rahm/Axelrod thing (i.e. Obama himself) rather than a Clinton thing is that Obama has not yet produced the birth certificate that proves that he was born in Honolulu (yes, I think it exists).  I think he would have already coughed it up if it were a Clinton tactic, to discredit the Clintons forever.  That he has not I think is anecdotal evidence that he’s the one who is pushing the issue.  I think that if the birther issue doesn’t gain any more legs on the right, i.e. serious Republican elected officials or non-elected credible figures latch onto it, the diversion tactic will have failed, and Obama will produce the b/c.

As far as 9/11, I don’t think the official story is the complete story.  I think when all is said and done, we will find out that there was some level of perfidy, perhaps deliberate, perhaps incompetence, on the part of the government agencies, intelligence and law enforcement, charged with preventing terrorist attacks.  You can’t have an event as big as 9/11 and someone deep down in the bowels and recesses of the black hat/black suitcase/black budget crowd of the CIA, MI5 and the Mossad not see it coming.  However, I don’t think any President knew, neither Bush 43 nor Clinton, because one of the paradoxes of American government in the last century is that while the Executive Branch grew more powerful, the Presidents themselves who oversee the Executive Branch became weaker relative to the Branch.  The CIA and Federal law enforcement are absolutely out of control, and no President can do anything about it, so it seems, as I found out during the Tom Sell saga.  I could also add that I don’t think that any British PM knew (Tony Blair being the only PM while 9/11 was being hatched), and no Israeli PM knew (Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon were PMs during the 9/11 narrative).   The oft-cited Popular Mechanics rebuttals, which a lot of lamers are e-mailing around and hawking on Twitter, are lame IMHO; most of their bullet points don’t rebut much of anything, and the few kernels of truths in it are things I already knew or deduced through common sense.  I have a lot of other opines about this matter, but they’re too involved for the subject at hand.

The reason my views on these matters are relevant today is because the whole issue of birtherism/trutherism vis-a-vis the Tea Party Movement is starting to come to a head.  What is forcing the issue up to the front is the upstart candidacy of one Debra Medina for Governor of Texas in the GOP primary.  Until now, it was a two-person race, between incumbent Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson.  I am not impressed with either one for the most part.  While Perry likes to mouth off about secession and states rights, it’s only election year posturing.  He’s pro-Mexico and pro-globalist all the way.  If it weren’t for John McCain, Linsdey Grahamnesty and Samnesty Brownback, KBH would be the Senate’s queen of amnesty and open borders.  However, Medina’s move in the polls has now made it a three-way race.  She is very good on most of the issues, and that she is on the fence when it comes to trutherism/birtherism is driving some people crazy to no end, and that has created the row in question.  (DISCONCERTING NOTE:  Medina is against E-Verify.  Perry also.  Strangely enough, KBH is for it, and until then, she was the biggest xenophile of the three.  In case you’re wondering E-Verify is the mechanism which allows employers to extricate themselves from the Catch-22, to get out from between the rock of committing a Federal crime by hiring illegal aliens, and the hard place of committing a Federal tort or crime of racially discriminating.  Being against E-Verify is effectively saying you want amnesty, because E-Verify is by far the best way to keep illegals from getting legit jobs.)

One of those people is someone on Twitter whose screen name is nedryun (http://www.twitter.com/nedryun).  He and I (http://www.twitter.com/countenanceblog) have had an ongoing sniping session at each other over the weekend and continuing into today.  It started when nedryun tweeted “All birthers or truthers should be dismissed out of hand and drummed out of the tea party movement” on Friday.  Saturday afternoon, I responded that “I’ll take 100 birthers or truthers neday of da week over one snobby neocon blogger.”  Since then, it’s been nothing but a food fight between the two of us, replete with slur words, near-personal insults and pejoratives.

The reason I need to bring the issue into the blogosphere is that what I’m about to say is too nuanced to compress into 140 characters.

What bothers me about the rhetoric coming from nedryun and many other neocons and lamestream conservatives about “birthers,” “truthers,” “crackpots,” “conspiracy theorists,” and that they should have no place in “our tea parties” isn’t so much that nedryun and everyone like him has problems with the rhetoric, diction and tone of birthers and truthers.  I have some problems with birthers and truthers myself, as you can read above, and as you have read in this medium many times before.  It’s a free country (at least for a little while longer), and you’re free to embrace conspiracy theories and reject conspiracy theories.  You’re free to default to a conspiracy theory mentality just as you’re free to reject them out of hand as explanations for phenomena.

What bothers me about the nedruyns of the world is their conceit.

The Tea Party movement is just that, a movement.  As such, anyone can organize one, anyone can attend one, anyone can bring any sign or placard they want to one.  And there’s nothing any soi distant “leader” of a tea party movement on a national or local basis can do about it.  As someone who was involved in street theater surrounding an acutal organization (the Council of Conservative Citizens) in the past, I can tell you that organizations can do things that movements cannot.  If the protest or rally is a project of an organization, the org’s leaders can allow and disallow whatever individuals it wants, notwithstanding some other factors.  Nedryun might style himself as a tea party leader on a national basis or in his particular locality (where that is I cannot discern), and Dana Loesch, and someone I have absolutely use for due to a run-in we had in the recent past, as such he can FOAD ASAP AFAIC, Bill Hennessy, might cast themselves as the “leaders” in the St. Louis Tea Parties, but they don’t have any cards or papers indicating that they have some sort official imprimatur.

That the Tea Parties are a movement and not a formal organization is both a good and bad thing.  The good news is that, since it has no central leadership, and no coterie of individuals with agency power of it, it confounds the leftists/Obamaites, because there is no single individual to demonize and besmirch on a constant basis, as the Alinskyite tactic suggests in the Rules for Radicals.  One of the reasons why the GOP in the House and Senate might have had some success in keeping much of the left wing extremist policy agenda of the White House at bay is because the GOP doesn’t have a central face among its elected officials, and therefore, that particular tool in the Alinsky RfR toolbox won’t work.  Can’t nail jello to wall, don’t ya know.  Another positive feature of the TPM being a movement and not an org is just what I said — all bloviating aside, nedryun, Dana Loesch, and Bill Hennessy (FOAD) don’t have any real power outside their ethereal credibility within an ethereal movement, so their mouths aren’t the Bible.  If “birthers” and “truthers” want to bring their selves and their signs to tea parties, nedryun can’t stop them.  Unfortunately, that sort of thing can also be a bad side to the TPM.  If anyone can show up with a sign, then anyone can show up with a sign, including “anarchists,” i.e. neo-Marxist college students egged on by their professors, with signs reading “Heil Hitler” and “Kill all the N*****s,” with TV news crews conveniently in tow.  I predict that, the closer we get to November, and if the TPM stays at its current level of strength and popularity or increases, and if Republicans are leading in the polls, you’re gonna see a lot of attempts at such sabotage from leftist goons/college professors/Democrat Party community organizers.  At that time, the TPM might have to organize formally, but it will have to walk a fine line between pitching a tent too big and a tent too small.

To sum up, nedryun:  It’s not your literal position that pisses me off, it’s your conceited attitude.