The Young Turks: We Love Louise Mensch because She Is a Batsh*t Crazy Conspiracy Theorist

Remember Louise Mensch? She was a Tory MP over here, who appeared several times on TV before giving it all up to move to America. She was one of those, who regularly spouted outrageously stupid, uninformed, bigoted drivel. I’ve reblogged a number of articles from other left-wing bloggers taking apart her opinions to show them for the nonsense they are. One of the funniest critiques had a rough diagram of her face with an open mouth with an ‘X’ across in red, surrounded by a red border and captioned ‘Gobsh*te’ as an appropriate warning.

In this clip from TYT Politics, The Young Turks’ Michael Tracey talks about how he loves Mensch, because she has effectively abandoned reasoned political commentary to drone on about her weird conspiracy theories, and so is effectively discrediting the Republicans and the establishment media from within. He states that she had begun her political career as a propagandist for Marco Rubio. I think Rubio’s a Republican politico of the stripe that went into vapours about how Obamacare was a depraved Marxist plot to destroy American healthcare and thought that conditions should be made even worse for the unemployed and those on welfare. Which shows just how unpleasant Mensch’s own Conservative opinions must have been when she was an MP in Britain.

Now she’s given up trying to talk up Rubio, and has instead appeared on various chat shows telling America that just about everything and anyone she doesn’t like is part of a nefarious conspiracy by Putin. According to her, Andrew Breitbart, the head of the news agency that bears his name, was assassinated by Putin because the Russian president wanted his company to be taken over by Steve Bannon. She accused Glenn Greenwald, the respected left-wing journalist, of working for Putin and smeared his paper, the Intercept, as the Ivancept. She even accused Bernie Sanders of working for the Russians. This is nonsense, of course, but somehow she’s being taken seriously by a number of mainstream TV shows. She appeared on Bill Maher’s show the other night, when the comedian and news commenter gave her a very credulous reception.

Taylor loves her, because she is so bonkers that she’s unintentionally discrediting that part of the American political spectrum, just as the warm welcome she’s been given on TV shows by hosts, who really should know better, is also unintentionally discrediting their shows. The lesson here is: the mainstream media just broadcast paranoid bilge, like Louise Mensch. Go to the Internet and The Young Turks and other sites like them for proper, informed news and opinion.

Mensch has clearly taken over the massive Russophobia of the corporate Democrats, and their obsession with blaming the leaks about their own corruption on Russian intelligence. There isn’t much proof of this, and WikiLeaks themselves said they got the information from a disgruntled insider, not from Putin’s minions in Russian intelligence. I’ve put up a piece on here commenting on an article in Counterpunch, which reported how the Corporatist Democrats, the Washington Post and a very unpleasant group of racists and eugenicists accused a series of left-wing reporters and news organisations of being Russian propagandists in receipt of this information, without any proof whatsoever. It seems Mensch has simply taken this lies and expanded them until it seems she thinks that Putin is responsible for everything she thinks is wrong about American politics.

Now that she’s finally joined the ranks of the conspiracy theorists, we can start speculating how long it will be before she ends up like Alex Jones, babbling about how the global elites that control the world a really extradimensional satanic reptoid aliens, and that Hillary Clinton is a demonically possessed cyborg, who is part of a vast paedophile conspiracy. It’s the next step in this kind of madness.

And perhaps we also owe America an apology for exporting her over there, and thus wrecking American politics just that little bit more. Sorry, America.

Vox Political: Snoopers’ Charter Allows State to Lie When Evidence Gather through Spying

I’ve also written several pieces over the past few days talking about the slow death of democracy and freedom in America. Obama has taken over and made permanent all the infringements on Americans’ constitutional freedoms set up by George Dubya Bush, the Democrats and corporate media have taken to smearing leading left-wing journos and website as disseminators of Russian propaganda, and a Conservative student group is compiling a black list of left-wing college professors.

But civil liberties and the rule of law are also under attack here as well. Tony Blair also tried to set up secret courts in Britain when he was prime minister. David Cameron and Nick Clegg also passed legislation establishing them, and expanding the powers of the British surveillance state. Theresa May is determined to do the same with her Investigatory Powers Bill.

Mike today has put up a piece commenting on the way the May’s ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ demands that the prosecution lie in court to avoid revealing that the evidence has been gathered through spying. Section 56 of her wretched Act makes it an offence not only to reveal that the evidence was obtained by lying, but also that spying is, was and/or will be going on. This includes a clause meaning that the legislation also acts retrospectively. In other words, you can be charged and convicted of doing this before this pernicious piece of legislation was ever passed.

This means that the state can lie to secure a conviction. And there seems to be little way to defend against it. Mike has suggested that there is a possible way out, if the defence can show that the evidence could not have obtained it in the normal ways, but crucially does not state that it was obtained through spying. But Mike states that this is no more than a suggestion, and asks his readers for their opinions.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/12/07/if-the-snoopers-charter-allows-the-state-to-lie-in-court-how-can-the-innocent-foil-it/

The whole issue of secret courts is profoundly anti-democratic and a real and present danger to civil liberties. Under the legislation introduced by the Conservatives and their Lib-Dem enablers, Cameron and Clegg, a court case may be held in secret if a public trial is believed to constitute a threat to national security. The accused may not see the evidence against them, nor the identity of their accuser, again, all to safeguard ‘national security’. Now you may not even be told that you have been spied on.

I’ve pointed out before that this is exactly like the judicial system set up by the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and also Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The Iraqi legal system contained a series of secret clauses, whose disclosure to the public was a crime. Thus someone under Saddam’s regime could be charged with a series of offences he was not aware he had committed, and could not legally be made aware.

Franz Kafka, the great Czech writer, described all this in his novels The Trial and The Castle. These are about people hauled through convoluted court proceedings, tried and executed, without being told what crime they have committed or indeed anything much about the supposed offence. These are praised by the connoisseurs of great literature and historians, because they prophesy the gross miscarriages of justice at the heart of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. I think Kafka was probably less serious about his novels’ intentions. If I remember correctly, he had been a clerk for an insurance company, handling sickness claims, and his books are satires on convoluted bureaucracy. I think he even described them as long jokes. But dry, and ironic in style of the Middle European sense of humour.

But there is nothing remotely funny or joking about this piece of legislation. This is the corporate establishment using brutally authoritarian methods to hang on to its power and suppress dissent. All the while telling us that it’s all for our own good, because of the threat of Islamist terrorism. After politicians like Theresa May, Cameron and Clegg have finished, I shall be surprised if we have any freedom left for ISIS or al-Qaeda to destroy.

Corporatist Democrats Smear Progressive Politician as Anti-Semite

I’ve posted up a number of pieces on this blog about the all-too many cases of decent, progressive politicians in Britain and America being smeared by the Israel lobby and the political establishment, because they’ve challenged Israel over its continued occupation of Palestine and its decades-long history of massacring and expelling them from their historic homeland, and/or they pose a threat to the Clintonian and Blairite corporatists in America’s Democrat and Britain’s Labour parties. We’ve had the anti-Semitism smears again Naz Shah, Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone, and indeed, Momentum and the Labour left as anti-Semites in the Labour party. In America, Bernie Sanders’ Jewish Outreach officer was smeared and sacked from her post for alleged anti-Semitism, despite the fact that she was Jewish and active member of her community. Just like very many of those smeared in the British Labour party, such as Jackie Walker – whose father was a Russian Jew, whose partner is Jewish, and whose daughter attends a Jewish school.

Now the corporatist wing of the Democrats are trying to do the same to Keith Ellison, a progressive politico, who supported Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the presidential nomination. In this long piece from The Young Turks, their anchor Cenk Uygur discusses how he’s being smeared as an anti-Semite, because he is trying to become the party’s chair. This post is currently occupied by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who rigged the primaries against Sanders so that Killary would get the nomination. See how well that turned out. But no matter. The corporatist wing of the Democrats, like their counterparts in the Labour party, haven’t woken up to the fact that the majority of people are sick and tired of neoliberal elites, who are only interested in doing favours for their paymasters in big business. And so the Clintonite Dems have started ranting and blaming anyone and everyone except themselves and their candidate.

Ellison has been smeared using a piece he wrote decades ago, defending Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, against the charge of anti-Semitism. The establishment Democrats have also used part of a speech he also gave, in which he criticised Israel for expanding the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. That part of Ellison’s speech also said it was wrong for America to concentrate its Middle Eastern policy on aiding Israel, which only has a population of 7 million, against the 320 million people in the rest of the region. The Anti-Defamation League have also jumped in, stating that this speech shows that Ellison is deeply anti-Semitic.

In fact the opposite is true. Ellison is a Muslim, and the most prominent member of that religion in Congress. The piece defending Farrakhan was written when he was a college student. He recognises that Farrakhan is poisonously anti-Semitic, and years, if not decades ago, very publicly renounced what he’d written about him. I’ve also got a feeling that the information dug up about him and used to portray him as a Jew-hater comes from a militantly anti-Islamic group that has, according to The Turks, been itself identified by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as a hate group.

Cenk Uygur in this video is also very careful in his criticism of the Anti-Defamation League. This is one of the major Jewish organisations campaigning against anti-Semitism in the Land of Free. It is also pro-Israel. Uygur states that they are far to the right of him and The Turks there, and that it is wrong about Ellison’s supposed anti-Semitism. He does, however, recognise and praise the organisation not just for its work tackling anti-Semitism, but also for the way it works against hate crime as a whole. It has done sterling work in defending American Muslims against the rise in Islamophobia, and the attacks of the Alt-Right.

The passage used to claim that Ellison is an anti-Semite is a very carefully selected piece taken out of context. Ellison certainly is not anti-Israel. Far from it. He states that America should continue to defend Israel as its most important ally in the region. As for the illegal settlements, part of his argument against them is that they also harm Israel by provoking resentment around the world. This has been pointed out by another leading Jewish group, J-Street, which has come out to defend Ellison and point out that he has consistently been a friend to the Jewish community.

So once again, we have the corporatist wing of an ostensibly left-wing party – the Democrats – smearing a decent man with the charge of anti-Semitism, just to hang on to power. Like they’ve done to so many other decent women and men. This is disgusting and shameful, and the sooner the people, who make these false allegations are thrown out of positions of power, the better.