NY Times Reporter Explains Crazy Foreigners Believe Crazy Conspiracy Theories Published in the New York Times

Mark Mazzetti, a national security reporter for the New York Times, was just on Fresh Air to explain the mysterious ways of the orient:

GROSS: So anti-American sentiment seems if anything to be growing a bit in Pakistan. Why is that?

MAZZETTI: The number one conspiracy theory in Pakistan is that ultimately the Americans' goal is to take the nukes, that we have designs to ultimately take the nuclear weapons out of the hands of Pakistan's government because of concerns about, that they might fall into the hands of militants. So—so many of the conspiracies on the street in Pakistan sort of go back to that...

And so that is what's fueled so much of this anti-American sentiment in Pakistan...So as long as the U.S. is maintaining a presence in Pakistan, an intelligence presence and also with the drone strikes, I think you'll continue to see these conspiracy theories...

And here's a 2007 op-ed by two of the most prominent national security think tankers in the U.S., Frederick Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon, published in the New York Times:

...the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss...we would have to act before a complete government collapse, and we would need the cooperation of moderate Pakistani forces.

Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place...For the United States, the safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico.

Why are the filthy wogs so given to mass delusion? Is there something wrong with them genetically, or is it their culture? I suppose it could be both, of course.

(To be fair, Kagan and O'Hanlon do say it would be probably be impossible to get even "moderate" Pakistanis to let us literally steal their nuclear weapons, so we would "have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops.")

—Jonathan Schwarz

EPISODE II: ATTACK OF AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM

There's an op-ed in the Washington Post today by Sally Kohn called "President Obama shouldn’t be afraid of a little class warfare." Here's some of what it says:

The class war began in 1971. That year, soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a confidential memorandum to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about the "Attack of the American Free Enterprise System."

Oh man that makes me so happy. Of course, the title of the memo was actually "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," as you can see in this, which I believe is the original:

However, at some point it got reprinted somewhere—with both the correct title at the top, AND the greatest typo in world history in the subhead: "Attack OF American Free Enterprise System":

This must be the version that has circulated the most widely, because both PBS and Reclaim Democracy have the incorrect title in their transcribed versions. So that's fantastic already. But now with the wrong title in a Washington Post article, it may really go down in history (ie, Google) that way.

Also, this is interesting: just last month, the version of the Powell memo with the typo was hosted here on grassroots.com—the astroturf arm of Edelman, the largest private PR company on earth. Their clients include the Chamber of Commerce. So they're carrying out exactly the kind of Attack of American Free Enterprise that Lewis Powell wanted. I guess they still used it as a playbook.

However, as you can see by going to that link, it's now vanished from the Grassroots website. I wonder why?

—Jonathan Schwarz

Sonny Bono's Brother, Cui

By: John Caruso

When it comes to global warming denial, this has always been my favorite accusation:

Did you ever think that many of the scientists could be in error? I guess not. The falsifying of data probably didn't enter your little minds. Perhaps the data was changed to get more grants? Follow the money.

This is what it means to be a conservative*: you think it's obvious that 98% of climate scientists are falsifying data and/or supporting transparently bogus theories because they want to get their greedy little hands on some of that sweet, sweet grant money, while at the same time recognizing no financial incentive whatsoever on the part of oil company-funded "skeptics"—much less the oil companies themselves.

No really, work with me here: someone decides to spend ten years and tens of thousands of dollars earning a PhD, subjecting themselves to upper-level math/physics/statistics and classes with names like "Fluvial Geomorphology" and "Stochastic Hydrology", and finally manages to land a faculty position with a middling salary at some university somewhere.  But you don't really think they care about any of that stuff, do you?  Ha!  No, it's just so they can risk their entire career and academic reputation by making shit up, in order to get their hands on some grant money they can then use to make even more shit up and get even more grant money, in a neverending cycle of dishonesty and megaprofit.  Science, schmience; it's all about the stipends, baby!  I mean sure, I suppose these same people could have just taken a community college course and gotten their real estate license, or maybe started a porn site or become an investment banker, but everyone knows the real money is in climate "science".  Right?

(Just like everyone knows the best way to parlay your junk science into a massive payday is to set yourself in effective opposition to some of the most powerful and ruthless corporations on the planet, whose products also happen to be the foundation of modern society.  Right?  I mean, how else could you possibly profit from the calculated misuse of academic credentials?)

Head, meet ass; I think you two are going to be inseparable!

--

* (Or Alexander Cockburn)

— John Caruso

Back Complaining

I've been helping out on the launch of this, and that combined with some personal troubles has kept me so busy I haven't been able to use this space to complain about human existence. Fortunately things are less frantic, so I hope to be back complaining every day.

The personal troubles have had a happy ending, but I urge every single person in the U.S. to read The Life You Save by Patrick Malone about how to avoid preventable medical error when dealing with America's healthcare system. There is great care available if you push for it, but hospitals and the medical system generally are far more chaotic and dangerous than you would like to believe.

—Jonathan Schwarz

The Obama They Elected

By: John Caruso

As Israel was blanketing the Gaza Strip with high-powered explosives and white phosphorous in January of 2009, I wrote:

I have little doubt that Israel notified the Bush administration of their attack plans, but I'm equally confident they informed Obama's team.  The Israelis want to have a good relationship with the incoming administration, and I can't believe they'd have blindsided them. 

And sure enough:

One FBI post passed by Leibowitz to Silverstein indicated that the Israeli Embassy in the United States provided "regular written briefings" on Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza intended for "President Obama in the weeks between his election and inauguration."

In the same posting I predicted the Israelis would provide Obama with a "January surprise" by terminating their attack before his inauguration day, which of course they did—and though it was apparent at the time that that was coordinated, the fact that we now know Obama was getting regular updates from the Israeli government puts it beyond a reasonable doubt.  To put it another way: one of Obama's first acts as president—before he'd even been inaugurated—was to give the Israelis both approval and political cover to turn Gaza into a free-fire zone as long as they agreed to pull back from Guernica levels of mayhem to a less obtrusive Jack the Ripper style before his inauguration, thus sparing him the embarrassment of openly backing mass murder on his first day in office.

Figuring that out didn't require ESP any more than it does to guess what's going to happen when you throw an egg at the ground—just a willingness to ignore Obama's totally exciting yeswecanitudes and instead pay attention to tedious minutiae like his speeches to AIPAC, his articles in foreign policy journals, his pledges of undying loyalty to Israel on his campaign website, his Likudnik cabinet appointments, decades of lockstep US policy by both Democrats and Republicans, etc etc ad nauseum.  Yawn.  Nonetheless, Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time that "reliably predicting" whether or not Obama was going to continue the standard US policy of blind support for Israel "requires a clairvoyance which I believe people lack"—just one example of the misguided but depressingly universal wait-and-see attitude among Democratic-voting progressives after the election.

Why couldn't so many informed, intelligent and otherwise skeptical people "predict" something so obvious?  Because they didn't want to, of course.  Because seeing what was already so clear—among many other things, that Obama was a willing accomplice in Israel's orgy of killing and destruction in Gaza, with all that implied—would have harshed their pre-inaugural buzz by forcing them to accept the fact that they hadn't elected a champion of liberal values and human rights, but just another standard-issue imperial manager and corporate errand boy.  The number of Obama voters who were even open to hearing the facts (much less accepting them) may have exceeded the world's unicorn population, but not by much.

They did Obama a real favor by giving him the benefit of the doubt in spite of the ample evidence that he didn't deserve it, since it made it just that much easier for him to do all the wonderful things he's done.  And as much as I'd love to believe otherwise, I'm sure many of them will keep waiting to see the real Barack Obama—"the Obama we elected", as they often call him, as though their illusions still carry more weight than the unwelcome reality—right to the bitter end.

— John Caruso