JBS: Fanning the Flames of a Race War ?

(This is adapted from an e-mail I sent to a number of friends and professional acquaintances; for links and other supporting documentation, see earlier installments of this blog. -- WNG)

Are the people running the JBS actually EAGER to see a race war erupt?

They've been peddling reheated alarmist nonsense about the Mexican Peril for years They continue to do so now, even though both immigration and violent crime are sharply DOWN from five years ago. But it's an election year, and -- just as in 2006 -- the GOP is cynically trying to stir up an electoral wave with the immigration issue.

The pathetic fools in JBS upper management (as distinct from the membership and field staff) are hoping to ride that wave, because they have neither the character nor creativity to make waves of their own.

Sampling the comment threads on thenewamerican.com leaves the impression that the message being sent by TNA and the JBS isn't about the need for a change in policy regarding "border security" or welfare, but rather the need to perceive Mexicans as an internal enemy that must be expelled or exterminated. I can't say that this leaves me perplexed, given that TNA's treatment of immigration issues habitually depicts the "enemy" as poor brown people -- rather than members of the Power Elite of whatever background.

"In only 25 years Whites will be a minority, not only here in the USA but almost in all the White Countries," fretted one recent commenter. "There is no time to loose [sic] for decisive action. No more `christian' [sic] love. Arizona should be the starting point for our total liberation. It's either get rid of 95% of the non-White masses and the subjugation to our laws and our will of those 5% allowed to stay or our painful disappearance from this planet."

One commenter appears convinced that every Mexican residing in the U.S. is a sleeper agent of the Reconquista, just waiting the signal to rise up and slay the Gringos:

"Judging from the general attitude of Hispanics I encounter in the course of everyday business it is becoming evident that they feel as though they already own America. To say that they are acting like unwelcome guests is an understatement. The general feeling of US citizens in my area is that they are just waiting for a signal of some sort to embark on a physical takeover."

Even Mexicans who aren't militant are a plague, according to another contributor to a TNA comment thread:

"Living in New Mexico, I have watched this develop over the last 10 yrs. At first there were few Mexicans around, now they are everywhere. I hate to go to Walmart, it is full of them.... I have seen lots of young females with their `anchor babies' at Walmart.......just really disgusting."

"Mark my words," warned yet another, "if this comes down to an internal war, I am willing to fight tooth and nail to defend my country against this scourge."

Of course, the authors of those sentiments -- not TNA or JBS -- are primarily responsible for them. But TNA does filter out "offensive" content from its comment threads (the first was initially approved, but removed only after I had made an issue of it on my blog and in e-mails to people associated with TNA).

My username was blocked by TNA because of substantive criticisms I had posted regarding specific articles on the website. THAT sort of thing just can't be tolerated! But unfiltered bigotry and unabashed promotion of inter-ethnic conflict? Why, sure -- bring it on!

This is the kind of stuff I saw coming back in 2006, and my complaints about TNA's handling of this issue probably had a lot to do with the decision to throw me under the bus. I warned that the immigration issue was being exploited to build the Homeland Security State, boost the GOP's political fortunes, and inflame ethnic hostilities that could erupt into outright inter-ethnic violence as the economy collapses.

Four years ago,when JBS upper management rebuked me for publishing that warning, I asked them to tell me what I had gotten wrong. "Shut up!" they explained, a few weeks before I was fired. Now they seem content to let the comment section of The New American degenerate into a passable imitation of what we can find at NewSaxon.org.

It's Not What Is Said -- It's Who Said It That Matters

 From the Birch Blog, July 9, 2006 (and republished here):

"Unless your Congressman is named Ron Paul, he doesn't deserve to be re-elected.

On at least one occasion during the last congressional term, every member of the House of Representatives – Dr. Paul being the sole exception – violated his oath of office by voting in favor of unconstitutional legislation; this is documented by the most recent installment of The New American's Conservative Index (CI)."

 From The New American on-line, July 23, 2010 (and republished from here):

 "[T]he 2,000-plus people attending this year’s FreedomFest crowd made it clear what they wanted: less government, less spending, lower taxes, fewer bureaucrats and no deficits. And they also want every incumbent running for office defeated this year… with the possible exception of Ron Paul."


The instrument has yet to be invented that can identify a substantive difference between those two statements. The second was written by Chip Wood, a former news editor for Review of the News, a forerunner to The New American.

The first was written by Yours Truly, a former Senior Editor at The New American -- in a blog post that was taken down a few hours after it had been published, but not before I endured a barrage of angry e-mails complaining that the post ran afoul of the "corporate consensus" that it was necessary to ride the Republican wave in order for the JBS to survive and prosper.

My insistence that Republicans revealed to be incorrigible collectivists by their Conservative Index scores was a significant example of what Art Thompson, the stentorian suck-up who swans about calling himself the Society's CEO, would later call an unacceptable "nuance." Once that nuance was "rejected," Thompson would insist, publication of it constituted a firing offense, but only of limited application: As far as I can tell, that was a category of "offense" specially created to justify firing one TNA employee.

Three years later, Chip Wood is not only free to write such things on his own blog (hey, wait a second -- you mean he doesn't have to pre-vet what he writes in his own webspace?), but they are welcome at TNA as well. (The other guy, incidentally, is blocked from so much as posting on comment threads below articles on the TNA website.)

Of course, there is an important difference here, at least where the wave-riders in Appleton are concerned: When I wrote that Ron Paul was the only incumbent (of either party) who deserved to be re-elected, there was a Republican in the White House and a Republican congressional majority. Now there's a Democratic president and Democrat-controlled Congress. Apparently that makes all the difference. Well, that and the fact that nobody in Appleton is trolling for excuses to get rid of Chip Wood.

   White Nationalists Welcome on TNA Comment Threads...

... but banished TNA Senior Editors? Not so much.


In today's (July 23) editor of TNA on-line, there is yet another press release-generated missive in support of Arizona's "arrested for driving while brown" ordinance. The first two comments posted in reply are from a fellow calling himself "Allisio Rex," an individual whose views are quite akin to those of a former JBS member who has been in the news recently.

Here are Mr. "Rex"'s contributions, with emphasis on some particularly noteworthy passages:

Allisio Rex said:

States Rights ans Arizona Immigration Law Nothing in the U.S. Constitution says that enforcement of Immigration Laws or other Federal Laws is the exclusive responsibility of the federal Government. Furthermore, Amendment 10 of the same Constitution don't expressly prohibit any State from doing so and should be left alone to pass,within their States, any laws necessary to maintain law and order. This admimistration is anti-Whites and anti-America and its aim is to destroy Western Civilization. States very soon,regardless of who is in power,whether Republicans or Democrats, will have to withdraw their allegiance (secede),not from the other States but from the Federal Government if we want to continue to exist as civilized people. And all third-world immigration,including the Muslims, must stop.

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July 23, 2010
Votes: +1

Allisio Rex said:

... In only 25 years Whites will be a minority, not only here in the USA but almost in all the White Countries. There is no time to loose for decisive action. No more "christian" love. Arizona should be the starting point for our total liberation. It's either get rid of 95% of the non-White masses and the subjugation to our laws and our will of those 5% allowed to stay or our painful disappearance from this planet .Read Pat Buchanan on this subject. By the way, of course, I fully agree with the above well-written article.

(End of comments.)

Granted, no website or blog can be held accountable for opinions expressed in comment threads.The problem here, of course, is that TNA is willing to provide a forum for the expression of proto-genocidal views about immigration, while maintaining a barricade against comments written by the Banished One (that would be, once again, Yours Truly).

In reaction to an earlier piece promoting the impending pogrom in Arizona, I wrote the following comment, only to be informed by the screening program that my "username had been blocked":

Bad premises and hyperbole

The state's central defense against the federal complaint is that it is not usurping federal authority, rather it is reluctantly filling a void caused by years of federal disregard to the hordes of invaders (armed and unarmed) swarming across the desert and into the private land of Arizona’s ranchers.  [/i]

Regulation of immigration is not among the "few and defined" federal powers, but part of the "numerous and indefinite" police powers reserved to the states, as Joseph Baldacchino documents in a tightly-reasoned essay published by the National Humanities Institute:

http://www.nhinet.org/epistulae10.htm

Is the point here to defend Arizona's reserved powers, or to pressure the Feds into exercising supposed "authority" nowhere delegated to them? Or is TNA too busy seeking to ride an election-year "wave" being churned up by the GOP to think such matters through?

It is rank and childish hyperbole to refer to the "geometric expansion of illegal immigrants throughout the country," given that immigration -- both legal and illegal -- have tapered off since 2007.

Readers interested in a treatment of immigration that doesn't traffic in facile sloganeering about "hordes of invaders" (good grief -- did someone recently reissue the Know-Nothing manual?) or bad constitutional premises should check out Butler Shafer's recent essay at LewRockwell.com:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer221.html

(End of comment.)

It was only the stalwart vigilance of the people running TNA that spared their readers from exposure to such shocking sentiments. Meanwhile, all that stuff about beginning the genocidal "liberation" of the white race by expelling all non-white from the country, beginning in Arizona? It whistled right through. Good to know the heroes in Appleton have some standards....

UPDATE, 11:54 July 23 --

After "Allisio Rex's" comments were republished here, TNA deleted the second, more overtly proto-Nazi posting while leaving the other one on the thread. 

UPDATE, July 24 --  Here's another specimen of permissible commentary at thenewamerican.com:

Jimmythewelder said:

Things are out of hand Judging from the general attitude of Hispanics I encounter in the course of everyday business it is becoming evident that they feel as though they already own America. Open contempt for our laws, our way of life and Americans in general manifests itself in every facet of their behavior. To say that they are acting like unwelcome guests is an understatement. The general feeling of US citizens in my area is that they are just waiting for a signal of some sort to embark on a physical takeover. The fact that the president of the US and his administration seem ready and willing to give this signal is most disturbing.

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July 24, 2010
Votes: +6

OOOOOOoooooohhhh -- Beware the Brown Peril! They're EVERYWHERE! They're beheading people in the vast, trackless Arizona desert, and just waiting for the signal from the White House to rise up and slay Whitey!


And another example-- this one should be entitled: "Ooh, Ick - Mexicans!":

I will help out... Living in New Mexico, I have watched this develop over the last 10 yrs. At first there were few Mexicans around, now they are everywhere. I hate to go to Walmart, it is full of them. I call it "The Peoples Store". I have seen lots of young females with their "anchor babies" at Walmart.......just really disgusting. New Mexico, is a "sanctuary state" for Mexicans. We even give them drivers licences. I am hoping that this November, we can elect a conservative government and make wholesale changes here.

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July 24, 2010
Votes: +4

I don't know how I missed this offering:

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Valerie said:

Compliance with the law is NOT OPTIONAL Looking at these photos I have to wonder if our journalists aren't doing their best to inflame this issue even more than it already is. The open defiance and hostility of these NON citizens of this country is ASTONISHING!!!!!!~ Who in the world would welcome foreigners who not only are not here legally but are stating that they will not comply with any law that says that they MUST GO?? Mark my words.......if this comes down to an internal war, I am willing to fight tooth and nail to defend my country against this scourge. The other day my daughter in law told me that two hissspanic girls threatened her as she walked by the photo dept. saying "what the f--- are you looking at bit--?" This is becoming and ugly turf war and guess who is going to lose in the end? Yes businesses may suffer at first, but this will pass and the end result will be that this country can begin to recover from what the influx of Mexico's poor has done to us. I live in SC where illegal aliens are all over. Either something is done now or forget about it, this country WILL BE LOST FOREVER. Hang in there my fellow Americans and don't forget to VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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July 24, 2010
Votes: +13

I simply have to ask: Are Art Thompson and Jack "Torquemada" McManus deliberately sabotaging the JBS, or is the organization drifting into overt racialism because of some combination of stupidity, timidity, and opportunism on the part of upper management? 

"Correction, Please!" Redux

Item:

In a brief essay that did little more than repackage a press release from the Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff's Department, The New American reported on July 8 that Sheriff Paul Babeu has bravely declined a personal security detail despite threats on his life "from the Mexican Drug Cartel and Drug Cartel members." Those alleged threats, which are deemed "credible," were provoked by Sheriff Babeu's bold efforts "to secure the United States border," readers were told.

Correction, Please!

Perhaps this should be described in terms of a correction made necessary by subsequent developments that impeach the credibility of Paul Babeu and his department, at least where gathering and assessing "intelligence" is concerned. 

After former* JBS member, unabashed neo-Nazi, and accused federal provocateur J.T. Ready assembled a militia-like group to patrol Pinal County in search of illegal immigrants, Sheriff Babeu told the press that he neither encouraged nor invited Ready and his chums to act as a law enforcement auxiliary. He mentioned the possibility that Ready's little knot of knuckleheads "may have gotten the attention of the Los Zetas drug cartel in Mexico," reported Arizona's KPHO-TV, a CBS affiliate. 

Babeu referred to an article supposedly written by "Michael Webster, [a]columnist with the LA Times," describing a sit-down meeting with a member of Los Zetas. "During the interview," reports KPHO, "the cartel member specially mentioned Babeu."

"`We're going to hold Sheriff Paul Babeu personally responsible,' Babeu said quoting the article," recounted KPHO. "I've never seen threats made publicly, using our media to make threats south of the border to us," the sheriff concluded, emphasizing that "the threat will not intimidate his department."

One problem here is that Michael Webster doesn't write for the Los Angeles Times, and never has. No article of the sort referred to above was ever published by that paper. Mr. Webster, who describes himself as a "syndicated investigative journalist" -- and who may, indeed, so some worthwhile reporting -- publishes most of his work through an on-line news aggregator called U.S. Border Fire Report.

Webster's essay refers to a conversation he claims to have had with "One of my informants that I have called Juan" in which the 35-year-old man, "who claimed to be an officer in the Los Zetas drug cartel organization," criticized Babeu for not properly investigating the killings of drug couriers, which were supposedly committed by vigilantes.

"The Los Zetas officer said `I believe there is a cover-up by sheriff Paul Babeu by protecting the Americans who did the killings. If the true facts of this case are not revealed publicly and the guilty ones are not brought to justice I will hold the sheriff personally responsible."

Taking this account at face value, it's difficult to discern an actual death threat, as Sheriff Babeu clearly intends. But there is nothing about this story to elevate it above the status of printed rumor: While we may be justified in accepting Webster's claim to have met and spoken with "Juan," we're given no reason to believe that this man was what he reportedly claimed to be. 

The Zetas presumably know enough about operational security, and have sufficient organizational discipline, to deny their cadres the luxury of mouthing off in detail to bloggers regarding their malign designs against U.S. law enforcement officials.  

Babeu or his office misrepresented Webster as a columnist with the Los Angeles Times, and repackaged his intriguing but dubious account as legitimate intelligence regarding a plausible threat against the sheriff.

Obviously, the Pinal County Sheriff's Office has pretty emancipated standards of "credibility" when it comes to assessing supposed threats to Sheriff Babeu's life.TNA would be wise to run a clarification or retraction of its earlier PR story about Babeu, but it won't.

Santayana famously said that "skepticism is the chastity of the intellect." When it comes to assessing sensational claims made by opportunistic Republicans seeking to exploit nativist impulses, The New American's editorial "leadership" is a pushover. This is the sort of thing we'd expect from people content to repackage "news" from undisguised tabloids like the Globe -- assuming that the "news" item resonates with the narrative being written by the GOP-aligned media apparat regarding the evil deeds of the foreign-born usurper Barack Obama. (Mr. Obama, I hasten to point out, is at least as despicable as his Republican predecessor, whose policies he has continued with almost perfect fidelity.)

Back in the 1960s, when the Feds through COINTELPRO and other initiatives were creating the conditions for violent racial conflict, the JBS used what influence it could to put out or contain the fire.Today, the weak-willed opportunists running things in Appleton are helping to spread accelerant. 

As recently as  1996, when TNA was still in the business of investigative journalism and the management of the JBS was burdened with principles of some kind, the organization actually exposed cynical efforts to pit Americans against each other through engineered racial conflict (see, if you can find it, the July 22, 1996 cover story "Behind the Burnings: There is More than Racism at Work"). Of course, that was about a decade before the organization fell into the hands of people content to ride waves because they were too timid to make them.

*Ready claims that he wasn't expelled by the JBS, which has a black-letter policy forbidding members to be active in white supremacist organizations. By his account, Ready simply allowed his membership to expire. 

They Just Don't Care, Do They? (Updated and expanded, 7/13)

(See additional update below)

Correction, Please!

Mexican Anschluss in Arizona?

Item: 

In a June 29 essay burdened with the alarmist title "Eighty Mile Swath of Arizona Surrendered to Cartels," The New American addressed what it called "the menacing terror of drug traffickers and human smugglers that have all but taken adverse possession of the region."

"Eighty miles from the border with Mexico in Arizona, the federal government has posted signs warning Americans not to approach any closer to the border, as it is a region of `active drug and human smuggling' and that those that ignore the warning may “encounter armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed,'" wrote TNA contributor Joe Wolverton II.

Those warning signs, he insisted, are "white flags of surrender flying 80 miles within the border of the United States of America. Is [sic] such examples of federal contempt of the border crisis enough to convince those who scoff at cries of treason and invasion?"

Correction:

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any territory in Arizona has been surrendered to Mexico, or to narcotics gangs operating out of Mexico. A Border Patrol agent stationed in the supposedly surrendered territory responded to a question about this supposed cession by dismissing it as "false information." 

The claim that the Obama administration turned over the territory to Mexico originated with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, a publicity-fixated Republican neo-con and ally of John McCain. Babeu's jurisdiction does not abut the border with Mexico. Clarence Dupnink, sheriff of neighboring Pima County, which does share a border with Mexico, insists that border violence has actually decreased in recent years. 

Drug smuggling and related violence -- which are unavoidable bi-products of the demented "war on drugs," an unconstitutional and counterproductive effort to regulate the bloodstream of Americans -- are a problem for Arizona (albeit a smaller one now that it was several years ago). The same is true for sections of Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere.

Many crime-ridden urban neighborhoods are controlled by drug-dealing ethnic gangs; for example, some neighborhoods in Philadelphia are run by the Dominican mafia. Does this mean that parts of Philadelphia have been surrendered to the Dominican Republic? Do the depredations of the Russian mob in Brighton Beach mean that Brooklyn's "Little Odessa" is now an island of Russian sovereignty?

Keep an eye peeled for an upcoming TNA piece retailing Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's latest bombshell disclosure -- the sudden surge in beheadings committed by illegal immigrants in the Arizona desert!

The Obama Administration Running Legal Interference for New Black Panthers? 

Item:

"The New Black Panther Party has been a controversial subject for a number of reasons," wrote GOP stenographer Raven Clabough a July 10 posting on the TNA website. "On Election Day 2008, Black Panther member King Samir Shabazz and national chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz were caught on video bearing billyclubs outside of a Philadelphia polling center. An investigation was launched and charges of voter intimidation were made, but the Department of Justice, under the leadership of Eric Holder, elected to dismiss the case."

Correction:

The New Black Panther Party -- a less-than-fearsome group that is equal parts comic opera and street theater -- is a pretty loathsome outfit, and neither they nor anybody else should be permitted to intimidate voters for any reason. The Justice Department examined the behavior of NBBP cadres and decided to drop the criminal probe.


That was the Bush-Mukasey Justice Department, not the Obama-Holder Justice Department. 

The decision was made three months before either Obama or Holder had anything to do with the matter. 


J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney-turned-GOP activist, claims that under Obama and Holder the voting rights section of the Justice Department repeatedly showed "hostility" toward prosecuting intimidation cases involving "black defendants and white victims," and said that its dismissal of the NBBP case illustrates this institutionalized bigotry. 




Thomas J. Perrelli, identified by Adams as the one who ordered the dismissal of the case against the NBPP, wasn't confirmed until three months after the Bush administration dropped the criminal complaint.

Deputy Assitant AG Julie Fernandes, who per Adams' version ordered subordinates not to prosecute minority voter intimidation cases, didn't start at her post until six months after the criminal case was dismissed.

Why wasn't Adams outraged when the Bush-Mukasey Justice Department dropped the criminal probe of the NBPP? Why is he trying to give the Obama-Holder Justice Department all of the blame for this, when, at most, they were simply building on the decisions of their predecessors?


The Obama administration won the civil case against the NBBP by default. It didn't pursue an injunction against the entire organization -- which was the department's original approach -- focusing instead on the one individual whose actions, captured on tape, were clearly illegal.

What Adams describes as "reverse discrimination" has been referred to by others involved in the decision as a disagreement over strategy and priorities among "career people" in the department. This seems entirely plausible, pending corroboration from Adams of his alarming accusations of official misconduct that, if true, would be grounds not only for impeachment but criminal prosecution.  

UPDATE --

While the people in charge of TNA are pandering to the Fox-aligned demographic by retailing breathless accounts of Afro-Militarism, an Arizona offshoot of the National Socialist Movement -- led by former JBS member, Hitler fanboy, and likely federal asset J.T. Ready -- are actually taking people hostage at gunpoint.

The New Black Panther Party's alleged "voter intimidation" involved one NBBP goofball -- roughly one-eighth of the group's entire membership -- making faces and saying offensive things. The NSM's "border patrols" are quite likely to get someone killed.



Obama's a foreign-born usurper -- we read it in the check-out line!

Item:

"Globe magazine has jumped into the citizenship controversy with a July 12 cover story that states, `Obama was not born in the U.S.,' writes Raven Clabough, who appears to be TNA's liaison to the Hannitized. "The supermarket tabloid may not have the best track record for accurate reporting among mainstream publications, but it does have a large circulation and its voice and what it has to say will undoubtedly bring the issue of Obama's citizenship to the attention of a lot more people and cause them to consider seriously if there is anything to it."

Correction:

Actually, there's nothing to correct here, because there's no story -- at least none that The New American would have bothered with back when those producing it aspired to provide credible news and thought-provoking commentary. 

To the extent that there is "news" here, the substance of it would appear to be this: Whether or not Obama's an illegitimate president owing to foreign birth, a large-circulation tabloid has lent its support to that theory, and this will have an impact on the opinions of its readers (make that "browsers"). 

This isn't reporting. It's not even blogging. It is pure, undisguised pandering of the worst and most transparent variety. And it is an all-sufficient indictment of the abysmal standards that prevail at what was once an exceptional publication. 

Oh, If Only We Had a Military Dictator....

Item:


In a paean to "Operation Wetback," the paramilitary Border Patrol operation that rounded up and deported millions of Mexican laborers, Dr. Roger McGrath extols the "bold, decisive, and forceful leader" who presided over it: General Dwight Eisenhower (who was president at the time), and Lt. General Joe Swing, Director of the INS. 

"It took a military man, who thought that national borders should mean something" in order to defeat the "unholy alliance of agribusinessmen and other employers," in concert with perfidious Mexicans, to subvert the border and undermine the labor market in the southwest, writes McGrath. 

The problem began during World War II, when, "with so many Americans in the service — and fighting and dying overseas — Mexicans illegally entered the United States to take advantage of employment opportunities, especially as agricultural laborers."

Fortunately, Eisenhower and Swing were willing to employ military means to beat back this invasion, offering an example we would be wise to follow, concludes Dr. McGrath.


Correction:


First of all, it's notable to see Eisenhower -- not Robert Welch's favorite public figure -- being extolled as not only a hero, but as something akin to the savior of the republic, in the pages of The New American. Perhaps the TNA editorial staff decided it was acceptable -- in this one instance -- to traffic in "nuances" that differ from Mr. Welch's views. (Of course, publicly differing in "nuance" from the incumbent JBS management is a firing offense, or at least it was in one specific instance.)


Of greater significance is the omission from Dr. McGrath's essay of any mention of the 1942 "Bracero" treaty between the U.S. and Mexico. 

McGrath depicts Mexican laborers as "taking advantage" of dislocations in the labor market caused by the war socialist economy of WWII. In fact, it was the FDR regime that invited those laborers into the country through the 1942 Bracero Treaty, which didn't expire until 1963. Through that agreement, the U.S. government imported millions of Mexicans to labor as "guest workers" in fields, factories, and other productive roles left vacant because of mobilization for the war. 

Mexico at the time was in the midst of its own depression, which was even deeper and more tragic than ours. So it's not surprising that millions of Mexicans -- in some cases, literally entire villages -- migrated northward in search of the promised wage of 30 cents an hour (which was specified in the treaty). Nor is it surprising that the northward migration didn't flow tidily in government-established channels. 

"Operation Wetback" was not the first time Mexican laborers who had come north to fill jobs left vacant in wartime were rounded up and expelled. During Woodrow Wilson's War, as well, fan informal Bracero-style agreement was reached with Mexico that permitted laborers to come north with their families. Many English-speaking American citizens born in this country pursuant to that agreement were among those eventually rounded up and summarily expelled at gunpoint.

None of this is mentioned or even alluded to in Dr. McGrath's homily regarding the supposed virtues iron-handed military rule.

By omitting "Bracero" from this discussion, McGrath produces a caricature: The villains are insidious Mexicans "stealing" jobs from American draftees, and conniving businessmen bereft of civic virtue. 

The "heroes," by way of contrast, are "decisive, forceful" military leaders in positions of political authority -- guys like Lt. Gen. Swing, whom McGrath describes as "[h]andsome and square-jawed with sparkling blue eyes, white hair, and a bearing that suggested strength and decisiveness...." Yes, someone like that is just the hero to beat back the Brown Peril, isn't he?

Mini-clarification, July 18: In the photo caption on page 37 in the print edition of TNA's July 19 issue, there is a fleeting reference to the "Bracero Agreement" as providing to Mexican laborers "a legal way to enter the United States and work." This truncated, inadequate description is the only mention of Bracero in the entire article.

Observations:

The TNA stories examined above display the superficiality, selective credulity, and opportunism that have come to characterize the publication since -- oh, let's pick a date purely at random; how about October 2006? Dr. McGrath's story, produced by a capable writer and long-established academic figure, represents something worse: Deliberate omission in an effort to promote an ideological agenda.

There was a time, not long ago, when TNA would take the time and invest the effort to examine and report on issues responsibly, rather than simply retailing whatever resonates with the Republican-wedded, Fox "News" and Talk Radio-obsessed sub-population. 

They're too busy riding the wave in Appleton to take the time and care to find out if part of Arizona really is under the rule of throat-slitting Mexican narcotics lords, or if the Holder-era Justice Department really is a festering pit of Afro-racist corruption. 

But this would require actual reporting, and it might complicate the effort to pander to the lowest common denominator -- and in the cases discussed above, that denominator runs right along one of the fault-lines Robert Welch warned about.

 

        "The Cressbeckler Stance": JBS-TV's New Star Attraction?

Why bother watching Art Thompson stumble through the latest installment of "cranky old reactionary reads the newspaper"? Joad Cressbeckler offers pretty much the same content in a much more entertaining way:

A Meeting of the Minds in Mesa? (Updated, June 24)

Neo-Nazi planetoid J.T. Ready rallies his boyfriends...

 While Jack McManus is in Mesa today (June 22), he really should make a courtesy call to local anti-immigration activist J.T. Ready. The two of them see the world in very similar terms, at least in their choice of enemies.

Like McManus, Ready served in the Marines, albeit briefly and without honor or distinction: He somehow managed to be court-martialed twice. 

More recently, Ready -- a conspicuous representative of the National Socialist Movement -- was briefly a member of the JBS, despite the fact that the Birch Society has an ironclad rule against collateral membership in anti-Semitic and other bigoted groups. That rule apparently didn't survive Jack McManus's decades-long involvement with a schismatic Catholic group founded by unabashed anti-Semite Leonard Feeney. 

...Ready following a post-rally beer or two.

Both the NSM and the Feenyites embrace political models under which severe civic restraints would be imposed on Jews and others, albeit for different reasons. 

Ready and his comrades would insist that only those who belong to the volkish nation -- people of supposedly "pure white" extraction -- would be citizens; the Feenyites insist that the state must be controlled by their proprietary brand of Catholicism. Although they disagree about the particulars of government administration, both groups agree that Jews should be disenfranchised and, if necessary, expelled. 

Where the subject of illegal immigration is concerned, however, I doubt there is any daylight between McManus and Ready. Among other things, they've both endorsed the deployment of the military at the border as a means of turning back the Brown Peril from Mexico.

Neither of them seems to have noticed that, both in Arizona and nationwide, immigration  -- both legal and illegal -- is sharply down since the housing bubble collapsed. The same downward trend is apparent regarding violent crime in Arizona.

Jack's Summer Speaking Tour is entitled "Stealing the American Dream: How Illegal Immigration Affects You." In terms of title and marketing, this is pure, undisguised pandering, coupled with opportunistic scapegoating: In a time of severe and deepening economic hardship, Jack and the bankrupt JBS brain-trust are encouraging people to believe that brown people who speak with funny accents are the cause of their misfortune. Needless to say, where Ready and his goose-mincing boyfriends are concerned, Jack's message is coming in five-by-five.

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the JBS went to great lengths to explain how people of Ready's ilk are used to cultivate conflicts that expand government power at the expense of liberty. (In fact, William F. Jasper produced Pulitzer-worthy work on the subject.) Right now, the panderers running the organization are so worried about finding a "wave" to ride they're willing to allow themselves to be co-opted. 

Get a room, guys: Ready and Russell Pearce

The most acute threat to the "American Dream" in Arizona, as elsewhere, is a profligate, incurably corrupt government that has destroyed our economy and is suffocating our liberties. This has nothing at all whatsoever to do with immigration; our enemies are not the people misruling Mexico, or those driven from that country northward; it is the people controlling the regime in Washington, D.C.

The dated, ill-informed presentation Jack will disgorge this evening will have nothing to do with the causes of Arizona's economic afflictions. The current issue of Harper's magazine offers some genuinely terrifying details: 61.5 percent of all Phoenix mortgages are "underwater"; unemployment is probably running at about 18 percent, or higher; the newly created town of Maricopa, forty-five minutes southwest of Phoenix, suffers a "distress index" (percentage of home sales involving bank-owned or pre-foreclosure properties) of 76.8 percent. 

"In a neighborhood called Maricopa Meadows," writes Ken Silverstein, "we rolled past a block of McMansions, all but a handful of which had gone into foreclosure." Silverstein's guide observed: "You've got people doubling up in houses so they can split utilities.... The story is the same from here to Queen Creek to Buckeye, in all these places that people scattered before the crash." 

As the New York Times recently reported, the real estate industry in Arizona -- which, like Nevada, fell prey to a delirious, Fed-financed real estate frenzy earlier this century -- is now essentially a subsidiary of Fannie and Freddie. When the Fed's bubble was expanding, Realtors sold homes to unqualified buyers at grotesquely inflated price. Now that the bubble has burst, Realtors are doing a similarly brisk business in repossessions. 

A threat to the "American Dream"? Murder victim Brisenia Flores.

In all of this, the chief villain is the Federal Reserve. 

To the extent illegal immigration played a significant role, it was in providing  relatively inexpensive labor during the boom. Now that the bust has descended, the jobs are gone and the laborers go elsewhere. 

What this means is that the immigration problem -- yes, "problem," not "crisis" -- is what the JBS used to call a "tangent" -- a distraction from much more important matters. 

Rather than exercising leadership, Art andJack are content to join in the torchlight parade: They extol the supposed merits of Joe Arpaio, the Mussolini of Maricopa County, and promote the "papers, please"  measure promoted by Ready's political paramour, Russell Pearce.

Meanwhile, Ready and his bunkmates -- who consider themselves a self-appointed law enforcement auxiliary -- are bidding fair to become public face of "immigration reform" in Arizona; an Arizona resident murdered his Mexican-American neighbor following an argument over the "papers, please" law (the alleged killer reportedly told the victim -- who had been born and raised in the U.S. -- to "go back to Mexico");  and shirt-tail associates of JBS Speaker's Bureau attraction Chris Simcox (who is in a bit of trouble himself) are accused of murdering an innocent man and his nine-year-old daughter (both of Mexican ancestry) in a deranged robbery plot intended to fund a breakaway Minuteman faction.

No, Jack isn't responsible for any of this, nor is the JBS. But there was a time, once again, when the JBS would use whatever influence it had to defuse manufactured ethnic conflicts, rather than abetting them, either actively or obliquely. (Witness the role the Society played in de-fusing an orchestrated race riot in Americus, Georgia during the 1960s, or Delmar Dennis's speaking tours exposing the Klan.) Even if Jack were inclined to play the role of peacemaker, I don't think he could do so credibly.

For all of these reasons, and many more, it would be entirely appropriate for Jack to break bread with J.T. Ready while he's in Mesa today, even though the spectacle -- like much of what Jack and Art have done to the JBS -- would make Robert Welch weep through gritted teeth.

                                           Update: Appleton's Inexhaustible Hypocrisy

Apparently, there is no limit to what a contributor to The New American can get away with, assuming he or she isn't named William Norman Grigg.

On the TNA website today (June 24) can be found an essay entitled "In Immigration Debate, Politicians are the Problem," by the immensely gifted Becky Akers. Published near the end of Jack's "Stealing the American Dream" immigrant-bashing tour, Akers' essay deftly and effortlessly demolishes the fraudulent foundation of Jack's presentation -- namely, the idea that immigration is an unrelenting "invasion" of alien usurpers who are (as Alan Scholl once put it) "wrecking our economy."

Those blaming immigrants -- legal or illegal -- for the loss of jobs or other economic problems "are scaping the wrong goats," Akers observes. "If they truly want to `fix' unemployment, they should go after politicians and bureaucrats, not immigrants. Government destroys exponentially more jobs than immigrants could ever `steal'...."

Akers observes that "we play right into our rulers; hands when we beseech government to `protect' jobs, whether from immigrants or from foreign competitors via tariffs." Ah, but what about the federal government's constitutional duty to protect each state from "invasion"? Doesn't Washington have a duty to "secure the borders"?

Not exactly.

The Founders, Akers writes, "didn't include `Control movement into and out of the country' among those [limited federal] powers," Akers observes. "In fact, the nearest the Constitution allows government to approach immigration is `establish[ing] a uniform Rule of Naturalization.' But setting the standards whereby people become citizens is far, far removed from walling off our borders or erecting bureaucracies to harass everyone, American or not, with orders of `Papers, please.'"

"When it came to jobs or borders, the Founders knew better than to trust the State," she concludes. "Why don't we?"

Implicit in that question is the following one: Why the hell is Jack McManus abetting misplaced trust in the State in his "Stealing the American Dream" excursion?

Akers' essay is quite comparable to my now-notorious June 22, 2006 "Birch Blog" installment entitled "Phony Immigration Debate vs. Real Police State Threat." We agree that the immigration issue is cynically exploited as a distraction by opportunistic politicians, and it is being used to manipulate the public into accepting police state measures. But Akers actually assails the claim that there is a constitutional case for immigration restriction -- and she does so in an essay published by the JBS while its President is making exactly the opposite case in a national speaking tour.

Art Thompson treated my re-publication of the immigration-related Birch Blog essay as a firing offense, because I was publicly disagreeing with his, ahem, inspired "leadership" in a matter of nuance. There is nothing nuanced about Akers' disagreement, which was published with the imprimatur of TNA editor Gary Benoit -- you know, one of the four former friends who connived to stab me in the back and throw my family to the wolves. 

Nemo me impune lacessit!

The McManus Credo: Dulce et Decorum est Mendacium Decir

He never stops lying, and until the breath permanently departs his lungs he never will. 

For an inveterate liar like John McManus, a speaking tour presents a number of potential pitfalls. One is the possibility of being asked, in public, about the lies you have told and the people you have betrayed. This happened to Jack during an interview on KID-AM in Idaho Falls, and he handled the matter with the unctuous dishonesty that is his most recognizable trait. 


"I'm curious as to why you fired William Norman Grigg," inquired a caller during Jack's appearance, "and also if you would address the accusations of anti-Semitic statements, [such as] saying that Jews and masons are the cause of the conspiracy --"


"Now, wait a minute," interjected an audibly flustered McManus as the host very thoughtfully cut off the caller. "Hold on a second, you're spreading a lot of rumors."


"Mr. Grigg refused to, uh, adopt the positions of the Society regarding decorum in his blog and so forth," Jack lied, inventing yet another version of what happened in October 2006. "We asked him to do so, he said he wouldn't, so we said, okay, well then we can't continue."


This is an extravagant falsehood, as I have discussed elsewhere. "Decorum" had nothing to do with my firing. I was fired for publishing a blog on my own time -- one Appleton used as a fund-raising tool for nearly two weeks after I was terminated. The only specific charge Art Thompson could muster was that I had used my blog to publish material that had been "rejected" by Appleton because I had disagreed with JBS management on matters of "nuance."

I was offered the opportunity, after the fact, to grovel for my job by agreeing that everything I wrote or spoke for public consumption would be subject to prior approval by Appleton. 

One of those who would be given the veto over my writings and utterances was John F. McManus, who had spent decades promiscuously violating the JBS's standards and principles regarding anti-Jewish bigotry.

Jack's second answer is a combo platter of mendacity, one that is even larger, more audacious -- and, quite unintentionally, very revealing.


"He [Grigg] has accused me of being an anti-Semite," Jack continued. "An anti-Semite is somebody who hates. I don't hate anybody, I never have hated anybody, I'm not an anti-Semite -- and I don't want to discuss the matter any further."


Notice that the caller did not connect the two questions: He didn't ask Jack why I had characterized him as an anti-Semite, or even mention that I had made the accusation. Jack's answer was intended to leave the uninformed listener with the impression that I was the source -- apparently, the original and only one -- of the idea that Jack has ever expressed anti-Semitic views.


Jack knows this isn't true, of course -- because, among other things, Jack eagerly used me in October 2005 to defend him against those accusations. 

The source of those accusations is a large and enviably well-documented dossier compiled by Art Thompson, who had become alarmed over Jack's anti-Jewish agitation no later than 2000. Jack's side career as a Jew-baiter made him (and the JBS) vulnerable to blackmail during the 2005 management struggle. 

When an effort was made to blackmail Jack, I resigned my job in disgust and, to an extent, his defense -- not because I sympathized with his bigoted views, but because I couldn't countenance the use of criminal means to settle a leadership dispute. 

At the time I knew nothing about Jack's views beyond the clips I had been shown by his critics in the previous JBS administration, and the fact that he had used the repellent expression "slimy New York Jew" in a conversation. After Art Thompson was appointed CEO, Jack asked me to re-join the staff.

It wasn't until Don Fotheringham used his website to publicize the Art Thompson-created dossier on Jack that I learned that he had spent years propagating anti-Semitic nonsense, while pulling down a pretty decent salary to be the figurehead president of the JBS. He did so in prolonged, conscious defiance of the Birch Society's principles. This is why he was -- at Art Thompson's initiative -- removed from his position as JBS president. As the effort to blackmail him in 2005 demonstrates, Jack's actions directly threatened the very existence of the organization.


So, naturally, Jack was reinstated by Art Thompson as JBS president, and a year after I had risked my job on their behalf, Jack and Art stabbed me in the back. 


Jack's self-serving definition of "anti-Semitism" as "one who hates" is worthy of remark. I can't address Jack's inner life, or his unspoken motives, so I grant that it's entirely possible that he doesn't hate Jews. That isn't the issue, nor is Jack's definition of "anti-Semitism" the proper one for our purposes. 

Jack is committed, as a matter of covenant, to a minuscule and deeply authoritarian schismatic para-Catholic cult founded by unabashed anti-Semite Leonard Feeney. In 1959, Feeney -- a defrocked priest still referred to as "Father" by his followers -- insisted that  "the Jews, as an organized force, are the implacable, declared enemies of Christianity — of its tenets, its traditions, its moral code, its very culture. We think it is vital, too, for American Catholics to realize that the Church has always known this fact about the Jews, and, to the extent of her influence, has counseled and decreed regulations for curbing their malice." (Emphasis added.) 

 Feeney and his followers insist that "the state must declare itself officially Catholic" -- that is, "Catholic" as defined by Feeney, since everybody else in the Roman Catholic Church is controlled by the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. Under a Feeneyite regime, the "curbs" inflicted on Jews by the state would include the denial of citizenship. Historically this has led to some pretty ugly consequences, up to and including the Shoah.

Presumably, Jack would see this as a form of rigorous "Christian" love -- the same kind of tough but necessary correction that Torquemada and other torturers applied in order to purify Jews and other heretics through pain. The day after I was fired, while I was still bleeding from the dorsal knife wounds he helped to inflict, Jack sent me an e-mail professing to be my friend. So there's reason to believe that his views of affection would be suited to the practice of "Christian" kindness of the sort described above.

Despite the fact that the Feeneyite ideology is utterly incompatible with constitutionalism, let alone the professed principles of the JBS, Jack has been peddling this stuff while taking home a Birch paycheck -- and he's been doing so for decades.

Several weeks ago, I received a letter from a veteran in the liberty movement who describes his first meeting with McManus: 

I first met Jack in 1973. I was a high school senior in Boston. My history teacher, [name omitted] ... had given me "The Law" by Bastiat and I discovered I was a libertarian. [The teacher] told me about the JBS bookstore in Belmont and I rode my bicycle over to check it out.

That's when I met Jack. I was at the bookstore perhaps once a month or so buying books. When you entered the front door, the book store was to the right, and Jack's office was to the left. If Jack was there he'd always invite me into his office for a chat. Jack would give me his spiel on the Masonic Pope, the Masonic  UN, and the Masonic Masons. In the summer of 1974, I told Jack I was planning to go to [an Evangelical Christian college] that fall. Jack was horrified! "They hate the Catholic Church!" he said. I was still indifferent to religion. I decided on [that school] because I didn't want to go to a leftist college like Boston University or any of the other schools in Massachusetts.

I'd found out about [the school Jack hated] through their ads on the back cover of American Opinion magazine, and I made the mistake of assuming that since the JBS bookstore sold lots of libertarian books, (Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Bastiat, etc) that anything and anyone connected to the JBS also had to be good. Duh!

Anyway, I only lasted one semester ... and soon after I returned in December, Jack told me about St. Benedict Center, which at that time was in Harvard, MA. He also loaned me a number of books about catholic history, extolling the virtues of the Inquisition, Queen Isabella, Philip II and the like...

It didn't occur to me at the time, but looking back, and reading what you say about Jack on your blog, it is interesting that at no time did Jack seem interested in what I might do in relation to the JBS, but he was extremely interested in getting me involved with SBC. [the Feeneyite cult's religious community].And all of this while sitting in his office in the Birch Society headquarters, collecting his salary from the JBS.

So his religious crusading goes back at least to mid-1974.

Jack is obviously deeply committed to the Feeneyite religion. On the basis of his example it's apparent that honesty is not among its tenets. 

Nemo me impune lacessit!

Heckuva Job, Artie

"If we're attacked by [Morris] Dees [and the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC], many Birchers will rally but some will question leadership. It may be [that] Dees quietly shows McManus material around without a major public outcry....

.... Dees needs something solid with which to fully demoralize the membership. Does the [anti-Jewish] language of McManus do that? Maybe....

More than likely, Dees will hint that some Birchers are less than tolerant, not all, but some, while showing the McManus material to key locals: police, D.A., etc...."

Excerpts from Art Thompson's memo to G. Vance Smith and Tom Gow regarding John McManus's career as an anti-Jewish agitator, October 22, 2000.


"An ultraconservative Roman Catholic, [Jack] McManus has been accused of anti-Semitism, a charge he has denied. In 2005, according to The New York Times, Birch staffers who were ousted amid internal turmoil leaked recordings of McManus saying that Judaism was a dead religion and that militant Jews have influenced the Freemasons, who were `Satan's agents' and part of the Illuminati conspiracy to cause world upheaval."

Excerpt from the SPLC's recent screed attacking "right-wing extremists."


It takes a certain gift to identify a potentially fatal problem and address it in a timely fashion. That gift is one dimension of the combination of traits called "leadership."


It takes a different and much less commendable set of attributes to recognize that problem, prescribe a responsible solution to it, and then permit that problem to grow into a crisis because dealing with it candidly would be contrary to one's self-interest. That's a species of hypocritical opportunism.


When one is the innocent victim of deliberate misrepresentation, he make a legitimate claim of persecution. When that criticism is rooted in truth, the word "persecution" doesn't apply. If one belongs to an organization the "leaders" of which have done disreputable things -- and then covered them up -- that individual may find himself a collateral victim of criticism he didn't earn, but that is quite properly directed at those who claim to lead him.


It is a testimony to Art Thompson's unique collection of gifts that he has managed to put the membership of the John Birch Society into the predicament described above.


Jack McManus, the most prominent spokesman for the JBS, is an incorrigible bigot whose career as an anti-Semitic agitator is being used to damage the reputation of the organization. This was made possible by Art Thompson, who anticipated what is happening now -- and who, for self-serving reasons, set aside his concerns about Jack for the sake of "Survivor"-style coalition politics during the 2005 leadership dispute.


Given the escalating campaign to vilify, marginalize, and -- most likely -- criminalize "right-wing extremism," this is more than merely a matter of social inconvenience for members of the JBS. It may prove to be something akin to a matter of life and death. And while Art will try to portray this as a case of the JBS being persecuted because of its effectiveness, this is actually an indictment of his own cynical dishonesty: He's directly responsible for creating this mess.


Ten years ago, Art Thompson recognized that Jack McManus was a potentially fatal liability to the JBS. He pointed out that as of October 2000 Jack had "for well over 10 years been speaking for and to Catholic organizations as the President of the JBS with most of this info on our nickel. (It has not been uncommon that he arranges these talks while in the area while on JBS business let alone the special trips he has taken[...])."


For at least the previous "3 1/2 years," Art observed, Jack had been haranguing audiences with "anti-Semitic dialog," in presentations during which he "refers to himself as representing the JBS."


At the very least, Thompson wrote, McManus would likely become "an embarrassment to the public at large reflecting on the JBS in conservative circles." At worst, McManus's anti-Semitic evangelism would precipitate an attack on the JBS, most likely involving Morris Dees "convincing local authorities to not interfere in a federal crackdown" against "extremists." Another possibility Jack listed would be that "McManus launches the attack" against the JBS himself.


It was Art's idea to "Put on a video [of] short clips of various speeches by McManus" and use it as part of an attempt "to get McManus to do the right thing" -- that is, to resign.


Five years later, the "right thing" for McManus to do, from Art's perspective, was to support Art's campaign to unseat Smith and Gow. What had changed in the interim? Certainly not the nature of McManus's anti-Jewish diatribes, or the vulnerability of the JBS to the kind of demonization Art described in his 2000 memo.


The only thing that changed was Art's calculation of his own self-interest, which he placed above the good of the organization he now "leads."


And the JBS is now facing exactly the scenario Art outlined in 2000 -- because of Art's own cynical, hypocritical, self-serving actions. This included compiling the very clips now being cited by Dees as ammunition against the JBS.


Jack is currently on a 40-city speaking tour on the subject of illegal immigration. This comes several years after the immigration bubble burst (roughly the same time that the Fed's housing/mortgage re-fi bubble collapsed), so it's hardly a timely subject.


Given Jack's involvement and his unique, self-inflicted vulnerabilities, this tour is a profoundly bad idea. This would have been even if it weren't for the fact that somebody (most likely on the payroll of a three-letter agency) hadn't started pulling COINTELRPO-style stunts designed to defame the JBS as a Klan-style hate group.


Folks, things are just going to get worse from here. False-flag operations, embedded provocateurs, Orwellian hate sessions, indoctrination of law enforcement about the "extremist threat" -- all of this can be found in play right now, and we can expect much more of the same.


In this environment -- one in which the JBS is dealing with blood libels linking the organization to groups like the Klan -- the Society simply cannot afford to be represented by a committed, impenitent anti-Semite like Jack McManus, nor can it continue to be "led" by a CEO who saw this problem with clarity a decade ago and allowed the wound to fester for so long that it may prove fatal.


A couple of additional thoughts....


In the current environment, I'm concerned that people -- well-intentioned, conscientious, patriotic volunteer members of the JBS -- are likely to get hurt because of Art and Jack.

Here in Idaho there's a really decent young man -- father of a large family -- who is running for elected office while working as a volunteer member. He is a principled fellow with very little patience for the petty hypocrisies that typify politics. He has the potential to be a Ron Paul-type statesman.

All it may take to snuff that promising career would be for his political opponent to point out that the patriotic group he belongs to is fronted by a career anti-Semite who was put in that position by a CEO with detailed, guilty knowledge of the problem who chose to cover it up rather than deal with it.

There are volunteer JBS members who suffer socially because of their commitment to the organization. Some of them might suffer professionally and economically as the effort to demonize the "radical right" deepens and accelerates -- and Jack's tainted background and current prominence make this all the more likely.

Anticipating one of Appleton's likely objections, I point out that what I've described regarding Jack's background, and Art's duplicity, is already a matter of public record -- in no small measure, once again, because of Art's eager efforts to compile the damaging dossier on Jack ten years ago. I didn't invent this problem. As someone who stuck his neck out for Jack in October 2005 I'm entitled to resent not being made aware of all the facts Art had at his disposal at the time.


On another subject ....


JBS field coordinator Kip Webster quite sensibly dismissed the execrable Mark Levin as "at best a useful idiot" during an interview with columnist Paul Mulshine.

Levin turned down an invitation to speak at this year's CPAC event because he didn't want to be associated with the Birchers.

Ah, the agony of unrequited love: One of the reasons I got fired was a blog post I published four years ago lampooning Levin's pseudo-tough guy act. Little did I know that Alan Scholl apparently had something of a man-crush on the adenoidal propagandist for the neo-fascist GOP.

In any case, it's no longer a firing offense for JBS staffers to speak ill of that wretched, scrofulous fascist troll. That's an improvement, albeit a very modest one.

Oh, and it's no longer a firing offense for staffers and TNA contributors to have their own blogs and websites, either, given that all of them -- including the JBS's chief on-line editor -- self-publish on the web without supervision or prior approval from JBS management.

It becomes ever clearer that the guys who stabbed me in the back in October '06 were simply trying to find a "problem" to justify the pre-ordained solution -- namely, getting rid of me.



Nemo me impune lacessit