Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: CAROLINE KENNEDY

  • Arianna Huffington, Tina Brown and the New Media: Death at an Early Age?

    Readers of this site will recall that in 2008, around this time, I wrote a three part series entitled “An Open Letter to Jane Hamsher and Markos Moulitsas.” In that article I lamented the criticisms of those two bloggers about Caroline Kennedy placing her name in nomination to replace Hillary Clinton as senator from New York. I wrote that their rather shallow, melodramatic and unfounded broadsides actually said more about them than it did her. (Click here to read that piece.) Kennedy eventually withdrew from consideration. Governor David Paterson then appointed the upstate Blue Dog Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand to fill the post. I pointed out that the two bloggers goofy outrage had resulted in the appointment of just the kind of GOP-Lite Democrat they were supposed to be opposed to.

    Later, some sordid revelations surfaced about what the governor had done in the wake of Kennedy’s withdrawal. Paterson told Judy Smith, a political hack on his staff, to start selectively leaking confidential material in order to smear Kennedy. Why? To make it appear that she withdrew because Paterson would not pick her because of ethical problems. When this happened, Hamsher actually used these manufactured smears to attack Kennedy and protect herself against my column! As more objective observers have written, Kennedy dropped out because she felt Paterson was using her to garner media attention for his re-election bid. Smith, a former GOP enforcer, was later forced to resign. Paterson became the subject of an ethics inquiry over the Kennedy smears. Which was later accused of covering up for him. (Click here for that story )

    Paterson’s handling of this episode was so bad that even Republican Mayor Bloomberg questioned why it had happened. In its aftermath a decline in Paterson’s ratings began. It soon became a shocking downward spiral. Less than three months after Kennedy dropped out, Paterson’s rating had dipped from 51% to 19% positive. His negatives soared to 78%. (New York Daily News, 3/23/09) Things have gotten so bad that the White House has tried to talk him out of running again. Not just because they think he will lose, but because they think he will bring Gillibrand down with him. And since the Blue Dog Gillibrand has been scarred, the White house has also tried to talk the more liberal Carolyn Maloney out of running against her in the primary. (ibid, 7/3/09) Which tells us that Rahm Emanuel is in charge.

    Funny how the New Media’s Hamsher and Moulitsas have been hesitant to detail the mess they did so much to cause. They sure flunked that test – all the way down to covering up for Paterson. (For the best article on the Caroline Kennedy affair, click here.)

    During that travesty, Arianna Huffington played both ends of the stick. She originally cross-posted Hamsher’s first salvo against Kennedy, which was clearly meant as a preemptive strike. It was immortally titled, “Caroline Kennedy: Thanks, But no Thanks”. (In light of the above, I would reply with: “Hamsher and Moulitsas: Thanks, But find other jobs.”) Huffington also printed a follow-up post Hamsher penned which tried to link Kennedy with, of all people, Joe Lieberman. But Huffington also printed pieces that defended Kennedy. And she ultimately printed a short essay by Sherman Yellen that roundly criticized Paterson’s pick of Gillibrand as catering to the worst aspects of the Democratic Blue Dog phenomenon. Yellen compared this choice with John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin. This was accurate and a tonic to Moulitsas who once compared Kennedy with Palin – which shows either how dumb or how off the wall the guy was and is.

    This straddling of both sides has been a clear syndrome of Huffington Post, which is the top-rated news/blog for liberals. The key to profitability for that site has been the utilization of free content. And lots of it. This means that the editors there don’t seem to really care what goes on the site. As long as it’s free, and as long as it either has some kind of celebrity attached to it, or it addresses a topic with name recognition. (Which the editors like to play up with either visuals or flashy headings.)

    I

    Edward Epstein has something of a name as a writer, and the JFK assassination certainly is a topic with high recognition quality. Epstein began his career in 1966 with the book Inquest, a study of the make-up and process of the Warren Commission. One of the underlying themes of the book is that although the Commission was not an in-depth, exhaustive investigation, it was not really a conscious cover-up. The Commissioners were misled by not having certain pieces of evidence available, by having to hew to an unrealistic timeline, and not being fully informed by agencies like the FBI and CIA. The book tried to picture the Commission as performing something like a benign political palliative.

    Volumes by Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, which followed Epstein’s, undermined Inquest by indicating that the Commission did understand that it was partaking in a deception. So in retrospect, his first writing performance indicated that there was more to Epstein than met the eye.

    This was confirmed the next year. FBI informant Lawrence Schiller had co-written a book called The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. This book was the first attempt to ridicule and caricature them as odd creatures not deserving to be listened to or heard. It had an accompanying LP record called The Controversy. Epstein can be heard on this album joining in on the lambasting.

    If anyone maintained doubts about where Epstein now was, they dissipated in 1968. He published a long hit piece on Jim Garrison, which would later be issued as a book called Counterplot. According to Garrison’s chief investigator, Epstein had spent all of 48 hours doing research in New Orleans. (Probe Vol. 7 No. 1 p. 15) So where did the author get his information? Documents declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) reveal that Epstein had been in contact with Clay Shaw’s lawyers – Bill and Ed Wegmann – quite often. He was also in contact with the lawyer for both Jack Ruby and Gordon Novel, a man named Elmer Gertz. The work of the ARRB shows just how close Shaw’s lawyers were with the CIA and FBI. (See the essay “The Obstruction of Garrison” in The Assassinations ed. by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.) So it is not at all surprising that within one week of publication, Epstein’s hit piece was being circulated worldwide by the CIA to all station chiefs. (CIA Memo numbered 1127-987)

    In 1971, Epstein showed he was an equal opportunity pimp: he now helped the FBI. He wrote an essay that argued that the Bureau had not really killed 28 Black Panthers as their attorney Charles Garry had argued. He added that, contrary to what observers thought, there really was no scheme by the FBI to liquidate the Panthers. He argued this on television with Garry. (FBI memo of 1/20/76) This phony tenet was exploded when the Church Committee exposed the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO programs, one of which was directly aimed at the Panthers. The declassified record today shows that the FBI – working with state and local authorities – did all they could to destroy the Panthers, including coordinating violent action against their leaders. The most famous instance being the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago. (Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 384)

    If anyone – like the editors at Huffington Post – needed more evidence about who Epstein was, it arrived in 1978 in the form of a book called Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. The sub-title is the giveaway. Because the last thing you will find here is anything about Oswald’s covert life. Nothing about his activities in the Civil Air Patrol with David Ferrie. Little suspicion about how he got out of the Marines so quickly over a phony family injury to is mother. No questions about how he just happened to meet Marina Oswald right after another ersatz defector had. Nothing about Oswald in the Clinton-Jackson area with Ferrie and Clay Shaw etc. etc. etc. You get the idea.

    At the time, many felt the book was another Epstein put up job. They were right. Again, the ARRB was helpful in proving this. In 1976, Kenneth Gilmore, Managing Editor of Reader’s Digest, got in contact with the FBI about their upcoming serialization of the book. The memo reads that “Gilmore said that the book will be a definitive, factual work which will evaluate, and hopefully put to rest, recurring myths surrounding the Kennedy assassination.” (Probe, op cit) Gilmore was requesting that the FBI give Epstein as much aid and documentation as possible to help with the book. Since the Bureau had been covering up the true circumstances of Kennedy’s murder from about the first day, they obliged. (Click here for proof this was the case.) Clarence Kelley, FBI Director at the time, gave the visit his blessing. (FBI Memo of 4/5/76)

    The timing of this contact and the beginning of Epstein’s research is interesting and relevant. The Zapruder film had first been shown on national television in 1975 and created a public furor. Three bills were then drafted in Congress to reopen the JFK case. The HSCA was about to be formed. Knowing Epstein’s history of fronting for the FBI and CIA, it is safe to say he was trying to get the jump on the formation of the committee.

    Years later, in 1992, Epstein revealed in the introduction to a reissue of the book that Reader’ Digest had promised him extraordinary access to Yuri Nosenko. This was the KGB defector who had given the CIA information about Oswald’s non-recruitment by the Soviets while he was in Russia. This probably came about because a senior editor at Reader’s Digest, John Barron, had been a close friend of CIA Mexico City station chief Winston Scott. (Probe, op cit, p. 24)

    Epstein’s chief source for the book was James Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief for over 20 years. (Jerry Policoff called Angleton one evening and he confirmed this was so.) Angleton’s infamous reign included the assassination of President Kennedy and the later imprisonment of Nosenko. Legend was budgeted at two million dollars. Epstein got an advance of half a million. He was also furnished with a research staff. (Probe, ibid)

    Although the book is amorphous to read, it seems to say that the Soviets made a pitch to Oswald when he was with the Marines in Japan. They convinced him to defect to Russia in 1959. Oswald had good information on the U-2. In return, he was given a nice apartment and job. The Russians then directed him to return and they gave him an undisclosed mission in Texas. But the book implies that in 1963, Oswald abandoned his KGB sponsors and moved toward Cuba. This seems to have provoked him to kill Kennedy. In order to detract suspicion from any involvement, the KGB sent Nosenko over to say they had never employed Oswald. The book says that, unfortunately, the Agency ultimately bought into Nosenko. The last part clearly shows the influence of Angleton since he was the one who pushed the Agency to imprison and torture Nosenko. CIA Director Bill Colby disagreed. He, and many others, thought Nosenko was genuine. For as Director Bill Colby asked: If Nosenko was sent over by the KGB to trick the CIA about Oswald, why had he tried to defect before the assassination.

    How bad was Epstein’s approach to the book? When Jim Marrs interviewed a woman who was involved in the making of the volume, he asked her why Epstein never went into Oswald’s ties to the CIA. Which, he correctly added, were at least as obvious as his ties to the KGB. She replied that they were advised to avoid that area. Billy Lord was a traveler on board the ship Marion Lykes, the boat that he and Oswald took to Europe in 1959. After a preliminary meeting with Epstein, and one with his staff, Lord refused any more contacts. He said that Epstein is “a critic of anyone who criticizes the Warren Commission.” Because of this Lord was reluctant to deal with him further and suspected “he may be an agent for, or otherwise connected, with the CIA.” (Probe, ibid, p. 26)

    The releases of the ARRB tell us why Angleton wanted to use Epstein as a mouthpiece. As John Newman notes in Oswald and the CIA, when Oswald defected to Russia, the State Department properly notified the authorities in the USA. That notification was quickly filed in the right place at the offices of the FBI and the Navy. But it was not posted at the CIA for 31 days. And when it was finally filed, it was filed in the wrong place. Instead of going to the Soviet Russia division, it was filed in Angleton’s CI/SIG unit. (See pgs. 25-27) This was a special shop that protected the CIA from penetration agents. Newman’s book demonstrates that it was Angleton who was likely running Oswald as a counter-intelligence agent. And in the 2008 reissue of the book, Newman named Angleton as the designer of the plot. (p. 637) In other words, through Epstein, Angleton was concealing who Oswald was, and who manipulated him.

    Perhaps the most intriguing fact about this deception was Epstein’s association with George DeMohrenschildt. DeMohrenschildt, nicknamed the Baron, takes up a lot of space in Legend. Because of his Russian roots, Epstein tries to insinuate that somehow he was the Russian agent guiding Oswald in his Mission from Moscow. Today, most researchers look at the Baron the other way: He was assigned by Dallas CIA station chief J. Walton Moore to approach Oswald upon his return from Russia. As he put it, “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.” (JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglass, p. 47) The Baron then introduced Oswald to the White Russian community in the Dallas area. More importantly, he connected Marina and Lee with Ruth and Michael Paine. Once that was accomplished, he slinked off-stage. But the Paines stayed closely involved with Oswald up until and after the assassination.

    On March 29, 1977, the Baron was found dead from a shotgun blast in Palm Beach. He had been staying with his daughter Alexandra at a Florida estate owned by Alexandra’s aunt. Two things happened before he died.. Gaeton Fonzi of the HSCA had been to the home to serve notice that the Committee wanted to talk to him. Second, DeMohrenschildt had just returned from an interview with Epstein at his hotel, about 12 miles away.

    At the time of his death, there were few surviving witnesses more important than George DeMohrenschildt. For one, he could have told the HSCA about the reports that he was filing about Oswald with military intelligence. All of it was of a prejudicial nature. Why? (The Man Who Knew Too Much, by Dick Russell, p. 456, 2003 edition) He could have answered questions about his 1963 relationship with Dorothe Matlack. She was the military intelligence officer who the Baron met with after Oswald left for New Orleans in April. Did she and the CIA help arrange a $285,000 oil exploration contract with the Haitian government for him and his partner Clemard Charles? (Douglass, p. 48) In May, the Baron departed for Haiti. Was the money a payoff for his Oswald assignment? Did DeMohrenschildt also arrange for Oswald’s job at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall after Lee returned from Russia? It seems odd that a Marxist defector would be working at a shop doing Defense Department assignments. One of which was reportedly map-making the U-2 overflights during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (ibid) These are all intriguing queries that the Baron never got to answer.

    Although DeMohrenschildt’s death was ruled a suicide, the evidence presented at the inquest does not make that verdict altogether convincing. Those who have seen the autopsy photos say that, although DeMohrenschildt was supposed to have stuck a rifle in his mouth, there is no blasted out back of the skull. As Jerry Rose pointed out in The Third Decade (Vol. 1 No. 1), although the maid and cook were in the kitchen directly below DeMohrenschildt’s room, neither of them heard the shotgun blast explosion. Rose also points out that the position of the rifle post-mortem, is weird. It was trigger side up, the barrel resting at his feet, the butt to his left, and the general direction was parallel to the chair he sat in. As Rose writes, “to the layman’s eye it will appear … that the rifle was placed in that position by a living person.” These and other oddities brought out by Rose, suggest foul play.

    One other point needs to be made in this regard. In November of 1977, Mark Lane wrote an article for Gallery. It was based on his attendance at the inquest. He wrote that Alexandra’s aunt told the maid to tape record her favorite soap opera while she was gone. The tape carried the sound of the program and the shotgun blast. The servants had testified that there was an alarm system installed which caused a bell to ring when someone entered. It rang whenever an outside door or window was opened. When the tape played, just after a commercial, a gentle bell was heard, and then the shotgun blast. Did someone enter the house right before the shooting? Was this person involved in the death? The HSCA should have explored that matter thoroughly. It did not.

    Despite all these oddities in the evidence, Epstein, who the Baron had just seen, did not testify at the inquest. He had been staying at the five-star Breakers Hotel. He was paying DeMohrenschildt three thousand dollars for four days of interviews. Lane interviewed David Bludworth, the US attorney on the case. Bludworth said that although Epstein was paying George handsomely for the interview, he let the Baron go after a very short period of time. He commented to Lane: “Why do you think that was?” Bludworth said he knew the long distance calls made from the area and he knew whom Epstein had called. He had also questioned Epstein on the matter. Epstein said he had taken no notes or tape recordings of the DeMohrenschildt interview. Bludworth told Lane he thought this was a lie. Why pay him all that money then? Bludworth continued by adding that DeMohrenschildt left in a car rented by Epstein. But only after Epstein showed him a document indicating that he may be taken back to Parkland Hospital and given electroshock treatments. Bludworth closed with, “You know, DeMohrenschildt was deathly afraid of those treatments. They can wreck your mind. DeMohrenschildt was terrified of being sent back there. One hour later, he was dead.”

    II

    The above is necessary background for the following sad disclosure: On the 2009 anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, Epstein did a relatively long article about Oswald for the New Media’s Huffington Post. The editors provided no background to the reader about who Epstein was i.e. his long association with the FBI or the notorious Angleton.

    Apparently, they weren’t even aware that the CIA did an internal study that discounted Epstein’s credibility. Cleveland Cram worked for the Agency from 1949-1975. He was asked to return to do two internal histories. One was a multi-volume study of the counterintelligence unit under Angleton. The other was a smaller study called “Of Moles and Molehunters: A Review of Counterintelligence Literature.” In the latter, Cram reviewed several books about the CIA which were leaked to writers from former employees. Cram appraised books by David Martin, David Wise and Tom Mangold as valuable and accurate. (p. 66) In fact, he thought the Agency was lucky that Martin’s book about Bill Harvey and Angleton was not popular, because it was quite unattractively accurate. He was critical of the work of Thomas Powers, biographer of Richard Helms. But he was even more critical of Epstein. In fact, he makes it clear that Epstein was part of a disinformation campaign constructed by Angleton. Cram knew what he was talking about. What started out as a one-year study of Angleton ended up taking six years. As Cram was allowed access to all that was left of Angleton’s work product.

    Two other points should be made about the Cram study. Like many documents declassified by the ARRB, Cram didn’t think his work would see the light of day. (The Angleton volumes are still classified.) Second, after his painstaking review, he came to the conclusion that Angleton did not fool Epstein. He believed Epstein was a willing and witting accomplice in Angleton’s plan to deceive the American public through the then wildly popular Reader’s Digest. In fact, Cram also concluded that former Angleton staffers Scotty Miler and John Bagley aided Epstein. (Miler figures in Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial as trying to give E. Howard Hunt an alibi he doesn’t have for November 22, 1963) Cram ended referring to Legend as “propaganda for Angleton and essentially dishonest.” (p. 60)

    The title of Epstein’s Huffpo piece was “Annals of Unsolved Crime: The Oswald Mystery”. Which is deceptive right off the bat. Because at the start, through some slick card dealing, Epstein solves the crime. Oswald is the murderer of both President Kennedy and patrolman J. D. Tippit. Epstein begins by asking the reader to ignore the “questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy”. In other words, the evidence is not important. What, pray tell, is? Well, the guy who’s true identity Epstein has been hard at work trying to conceal for a good part of his life: Lee Oswald. After the set-up comes this: “His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper’s nest at the Texas Book Depository.” Actually there are three deceptions in that one sentence. First, we don’t know if that rifle belonged to Oswald. I reviewed all the questions about the ordering of the rifle in the first part of my review of Reclaiming History. Also, with the new work on Buell Frazier, it is an open question if Oswald ever carried either the paper package or the rifle into the Depository. (See Part 6 of that review, Sections 2 and 3) That is also a funny “fatal bullet” Epstein says Oswald fired. As it entered JFK’s head, it split into three parts. The head and tail hurtled through Kennedy’s skull. But the middle part somehow stopped dead at the rear of the skull. Did the tail of the bullet magically elevate to jump over the middle and end up in the front seat? (See review of Reclaiming History, Part 4, Sections 5 and 6.) Finally, was this the first rifle found in the so-called sniper’s lair? Because at least three witnesses reported finding a Mauser there first.

    From here, Epstein goes on to write that Oswald’s palm print was found on the rifle: without saying when it was found. It was not found after the rifle was dusted in Dallas, or sent to Washington to be examined by the FBI. It was found after it was finally returned to Dallas-after being examined twice. This palmprint card was returned to the FBI on November 29th. A week after the murder. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 123)

    Another lie quickly follows. Angleton’s acolyte writes that Oswald bought the ammunition. The FBI did an investigation of all the gun shops in Dallas. No one recalled selling Oswald the ammo. (Meagher, p. 114) And no such ammo boxes were found in his possessions. (Meagher, ibid) Epstein goes on to write that Oswald’s cartridge cases were found near the body of slain policeman J. D. Tippit. He doesn’t say that the cases did not have the initials of Officer J. M. Poe on them. And they should have since he marked them. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pgs. 153-54) He also does not tell the reader that the cases do not match the bullets. Two of the cases are Winchesters and two are Remingtons. Three of the bullets were Winchesters while one was a Remington. (Hurt, p. 152) Further, Epstein does not reveal that the cases did not show up on the first day evidence report made at the scene of the crime. It took six days for them to appear in the evidence summary. (ibid, p. 155) Maybe because the cases originally reported at the scene were from an automatic, but the handgun attributed to Oswald was a revolver? (ibid)

    If my case rested on evidence like this, I wouldn’t’ want to argue about it either. Because I would lose. Yet the people at Huffington Post had no problem printing this piece of slime penned by a slime artist and designed to confuse matters on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. The New Media sure looks like the Old Media doesn’t it?

    III

    But that wasn’t enough for the liberal Huffpo. They also printed an article about one Hany Farid. Farid runs the Image Science Laboratory at Dartmouth. He claims to have solved a great mystery about the famous backyard photos of Lee Harvey Oswald. He says that it is possible to duplicate the weird shadow pattern in the photos and make them originate from just one light source. Even though some have said there had to be two. How did he solve this puzzling problem? The same way that Dale Myers and Gerald Posner explained away the Single Bullet Theory. Farid used the ever-helpful computer simulation. Did anyone tell the professor that, in 1963, people did not have personal computers or photographic software? That a real duplicating experiment would have had to been done using the technology that was extant in 1963? Further, according to the article in Science Daily (11/6/09), Farid is an authority on digital imaging. This is a different technology than the old style chemical process used in sixties cameras.

    But that did not stop Huffpo from running their news summary of this story in advance of the 2009 anniversary. Or from Farid declaring, “Those who believe that there was a broader conspiracy can no longer point to this photo as possible evidence.” (ibid)

    Farid’s great discovery lasted about a week. It turns out that apparently the Dartmouth bigwig conducted his experiment using just one of the photos. This is startling since there could be no comparison and contrast sets done with the others. Which scientifically, leaves a large hole in his methodology. Because today there are four of the photos: the two printed in the Warren Commission, the Roscoe White version, and the one surfaced by George DeMohrenschildt. It’s hard to believe Farid did not know this. Also, if the original light source was the sun, how could one possibly duplicate that natural effect with a computer? Further, in a critique done by Jim Marrs and Jim Fetzer at OPEd News (11/18/09), it appears that the Farid study was also limited by the fact he did not do a full figure duplication. He only modeled the head and shoulder areas of Oswald. And by only using the one photo he eliminated a problem in comparison that the authors point out: Oswald’s face is tilted in different directions in the photos. But the V-shaped shadow under the nose does not vary.

    To show just how eager he was to make his above dubious declaration, Farid apparently does not know that besides not doing a comparison study, the shadows are only one of many problems with the photos. To mention just three others, there is the problem of comparing the relative heights and lengths of Oswald versus the rifle and the two papers he has in his hands; plus the problem of the line across the top of his chin; and the fact that the square chin in the photo is not like Oswald’s rather pointed chin. (For two interesting studies of the photos click here and here.)

    As should have been expected, it turns out that besides specializing in digital imaging, Farid has done work for the FBI. He defends them in court when they are accused of doctoring images. (NY Times, 10/2/07) But there is something even worse underneath it all.

    Informed observers understand that Robert Blakey had an agenda when he took over as Chief Counsel of the HSCA. If he found a conspiracy, he wanted to make it small and limit it to the Cosa Nostra. But second, he wanted to do all he could to discredit the critics who had helped reopen the case and who he had little use for. According to Jerry Policoff, Blakey actually assigned a staffer to find errors in the critical studies of the Warren Commission. Then, when the Final Report was being written, almost everyone was dismissed except Blakey, Dick Billings (who also favored a Mob-did-it scenario) and two other trusted aides. After the report and the 12 volumes on the JFK case were released, Blakey filed away in the National Archives much more material than the Warren Commission did.

    If one reads the section in HSCA Volume VI dealing with the backyard photos, one will see that whoever wrote it was out to debunk the critics and support the Commission. For instance, the author writes that the rifle and revolver in the pictures of Oswald were mailed to him on March 20th. There are no questions raised about those assertions, which today are highly questionable. (See Harvey and Lee, by John Armstrong, pgs 437-484) To explain the horizontal line at the top of the chin, the report tries to say that the line was a water spot. It then says that Oswald quite clearly had a natural line running across his chin. (Para 408) Oh really? I won’t even quote the ludicrous explanation they used to explain away the different chins. (Those interested can read para 410) The report does not even try to explain the strange provenance of the Imperial Reflex camera, allegedly used to take the photos. Why did the police or the FBI not find it until weeks after the assassination? Ruth Paine had the Imperial Reflex camera and gave it, not to the FBI or the police, but to Robert Oswald. No details on how the Imperial Reflex then replaced the Stereo Realist as the American camera in evidence, yet Marina still insisted that the Stereo Realist was the American camera Lee owned. (WC Exhibit 1155) Or how Marina eventually changed her story about the Stereo Realist camera being Oswald’s, and finally Ruth Paine claiming that that camera was hers all along. (WC Vol. 1, p. 118) All very interesting. Yet none of it is in the HSCA report.

    Something else one will not find in the HSCA volumes is a study called “Report on Fake Photography Project” by a man named David Eisendrath. Eisendrath was a consultant to the HSCA. His report was submitted to the committee in November of 1978, right before Blakey and Billings released everyone and started on the final report. Eisendrath was a photographer and lecturer “known for his understanding of photographic principles and techniques.” (NY Times, 5/5/88) He worked in the field for over 50 years. His columns appeared in several photographic magazines and he was “admired for conveying often abstruse subject matter understandably.” (ibid) He was a member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, the Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers, and he was a fellow of the Photographic Society of America.

    In 1978, Eisendrath wrote a letter to Mickey Goldsmith, counsel for the HSCA. Referring to his report, he said: “I have already written to you about the photogrammetry of the backyard pictures and after several re-readings still feel that this should be re-edited, re-calculated or destroyed. It’s a bombshell and should not be published in its present form.” It was not destroyed. But why was Eisendrath so worried about the report being published? Because according to John Hunt, Eisendrath’s job was to prepare fake versions of the backyard photos using three different methods. Knowing they were fakes, the panel issued detailed reports on how they were forged. Guess what? They gave the wrong reasons for detecting forgery. Eisendrath’s report spelled out how they were fooled.

    If not for the ARRB, this report would be unknown today. Because Blakey knew it rendered futile and pretentious the whole methodology of how the HSCA proclaimed the backyard photos of Oswald as genuine. This internal exercise proved that the HSCA panel could not properly detect photographic forgery. Eisendrath understood that. He also understood the culture of the HSCA-that the American public had to be protected from the truth – and he was playing the good patriot. Blakey did his best to bury the report for fifty years. If not for the ARRB, it would have worked.

    This declassified report reveals a cover-up inside a cover-up. That’s a real story for Huffpo. Hold your breath until they run it.

    IV

    The Daily Beast is another combination news/blog. It is backed by former movie executive Barry Diller and run by none other than Tina Brown. Brown was born in England and rose to youthful prominence as a tabloid editor there. She was a social climber who understood you had to know powerful people to get ahead. She cultivated what she called “contacts”, not friends. She associated with people like actor Dudley Moore and writer Martin Amis. She eventually wed Harold Evans of the Sunday Times. They were married at the home of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. Which, of course, tells you a lot.

    In 1984, after Si Newhouse decided to revive the magazine, she became editor of Vanity Fair. She began that magazine’s present obeisance to Hollywood, and its habit of putting movie stars on the cover. Because of his Hollywood connections-he had been a movie producer – she also hired the reprehensible Dominick Dunne. Whatever relationship to and training in the canons of journalism Dunne had were extremely well hidden. But, as one commentator has written, Brown was not really about journalism. As previously noted, she was a social climber who knew about power: “Brown had an instinct and an unrestrained affection for power, and she set about glamorizing it, whether in politics, Hollywood, business, or crime.” Her idea was that a magazine could borrow celebrity power to increase its own. (New York Magazine, 5/31/09)

    In 1992, Brown went to another Newhouse magazine, The New Yorker. She did there roughly what she had at Vanity Fair. She brought in Richard Avedon as the first staff photographer. The magazine now had more color photography and less type per page. She also increased the coverage of celebrities and rich fat cats. Eventually Brown let go of 79 writers while hiring 50 new ones. Many contributors, like Renata Adler, came to believe that Brown had turned a distinguished literary weekly journal-which at one time published the likes of Nabokov, Hersey, Cheever, Salinger, O’Hara, and Roth – into something a bit more literary and high-faluting than People Weekly.

    In 1998, Brown left The New Yorker and started Talk magazine. This time, her employer actually was from Hollywood: Harvey Weinstein of Miramax studios. This was Brown’s first failure. It was so bad it ended up resembling a Mad magazine parody of what Brown would produce left on her own, without guidelines or supervision. It was essentially a grab bag of celebrity glitz, gas and frill – lacking substance, meaning or reason d’Ítre. Talk had the weight and gravitas of a helium balloon. Due to huge losses, Weinstein pulled the plug in 2002.

    After writing a book on Princess Diana, and hosting a talk show for CNBC, she teamed with Diller to launch The Daily Beast. She proclaimed about her latest venture, “I want this to be a speedy read that captures the zeitgeist. We’ll be smart and opinionated, looking to help cut through the volume with a keen sensibility. We’re aiming for a curious, upscale and global audience who love politics, news, and the media world.” (USA Today, 10/6/08) Nothing in there about an alternative web media to counter the failure of the MSM to deal with the sorry state that America has fallen into. If that’s what you want, you came to the wrong person.

    The value of Brown and Daily Beast is epitomized by the hiring of a rather curious figure as their Chief Investigative Reporter: Gerald Posner. This partly indicates Brown’s belief in “contacts”. In 1993, after he was approached by Bob Loomis of Random House, Posner wrote his execrable Case Closed. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 369) But it was Brown’s husband, Harold Evans, who was then president and publisher of Random House. So it would appear that Brown took a tip from her hubby and hired an investigative reporter who specialized in covering up the murders of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. For Posner also did a whitewash on the King case with his god-awful Killing the Dream (1998). Also published by Random House, very likely at the request of the CIA friendly Bob Loomis.

    Like Epstein, Posner was up to his old tricks at the anniversary. For Daily Beast he did a review of the TV special called The Lost JFK Tapes. He wrote that watching the immediate reactions of people involved reminded him of the work he had done reviewing film footage for Case Closed. He wrote, “They made it clear how the seeds for conspiracy mongering was laid that very day. Ear witnesses heard shots from different directions at Dealey Plaza. Eyewitnesses had accounts that varied about when the president seemed to be struck by bullets.” He called these first impressions “flashbulb memories” that are subject to change, especially during famous events. For as we watch the event and talk to others the new information melds together “with our own memory and changes the way we recall the event.” In other words, the eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza somehow got it wrong by running up the grassy knoll when they heard the shots from there. Yawn.

    As I noted in my previous series on Hamsher and Moulitsas, at the start – around 2003 – everyone had high hopes for the blogosphere. We believed that without the pervading pressure of corporate sponsorship, without the inevitable ties to government officials at higher levels, this was a great opportunity to return American journalism to the days that the late Angus McKenzie recalled in his book Secrets. The days of sixties and seventies alternative journalism, hallmarked by Ramparts and the LA Free Press. So far, it hasn’t happened. If one cannot feel free to deal with the bÍte noire of modern American history – the assassinations of the sixties which altered the face of America – what can you be trusted with? And how are you fundamentally different than the MSM? To me, the difference would be at the margins. I mean, Huffpo and Talking Points Memo now want to send correspondents to the White House press room. Why? If there is one thing we have learned from the MSM its that the story is not in the press room. That place is a time and space filler that is meant to indoctrinate reporters into the “conventional wisdom” of the Beltway. Which, more often than not, isn’t what is actually happening.

    The other syndrome being handed over from the MSM to the blogosphere is the fear of the “C” word: Conspiracy. Posner’s presence epitomizes this. In fact, people like Moulitsas and Huffington have sent down orders to discourage visitor postings on things like voter fraud and 9-11. This is ridiculous. Vote fraud in not a marginal issue. Nor is it up for debate. It pervades our present political reality. In the year 2000, a conspiracy took place in broad daylight. Right under the nose of the MSM, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris stole an election in Florida. They took it from Al Gore and gave it to Jeb’s brother, the overgrown frat boy. This turned into one of the true catastrophes of the post-war era. For Jeb’s brother turned out to be one of the worst, if not the worst, president in history. Not one newspaper, TV station, or radio network launched any kind of field investigation into what really happened down there. Yet, within 24 hours, I knew what had happened. When the networks called the Florida election for Gore, then switched to Bush, then declared a toss-up, I knew something was up. If I knew it, then hundreds of thousands did also. Yet, to name one example, the late Tim Russert didn’t?

    But then how did Greg Palast know? Palast is a British journalist who immediately smelled a rat. He spent months investigating how the plot worked and he exposed it in the pages of his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (See pgs. 11-81 of that book for a true piece of investigative reporting). Reading the results of that inquiry, several people should have been indicted. Nobody was. Harris did not go to trial. With the help of the MSM, she went to Congress.

    We all know what happened to the rest of us: the phony war in Iraq, with hundreds of billions dumped there, along with hundreds of thousands dead Iraqis; the cover-up of Plamegate; the Wall Street collapse, and the disappearing two trillion dollars that went with it; the punctured real estate bubble and the billions lost there; and the stealing of another election in Ohio in 2004. That heist was also covered up by the MSM. And it took Robert Kennedy Jr. two years to expose what actually happened in 2006 in the Rolling Stone. In other words, rather than expose a conspiracy, the MSM would rather see the country go to hell. To them, that’s better than being called a Conspiracy Theorist. Even if there was a conspiracy. This is what the USA and the MSM have become: A lawless state, in which criminal conspiracies run rampant while the Powers That Be cry, “You silly conspiracy theorist, you probably believe in alien abductions too!”

    It’s all a diversion, orchestrated with the help of those who commit the crimes. Many hoped that the blogosphere would call a halt to it and end the carnival of decline. With these most recent indications, that won’t be the case. Huffington, Hamsher, Moulitsas, and Brown like being on TV and part of the Media Establishment. They don’t have the guts or instincts to build their own independent alternative. They don’t believe in investigating crimes of state. That could lead to uncovering a conspiracy. So like their predecessors, they provide safe haven for cover-up artists like Epstein and Posner. The more things change …

    Katherine Harris, you can rest easy. With these people in charge, you will never be held accountable for the awful crime you visited on your nation.

  • Hamsher, Moulitsas, Marshall: State of Denial

    Evidently, Jane Hamsher did not like my Open Letter to her and Markos Moulitsas. Especially after Lisa Pease wrote about it on the blog Booman Tribune, thereby publicizing it throughout the Internet. That blog was one of the very few to stand up to Hamsher, Moulitsas, and Joshua Micah Marshall and both their idiotic attacks on Caroline Kennedy and their cover up for Gov. Paterson and his shameful choice of Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary Clinton’s seat. For right around when Lisa did this, Hamsher responded to my essay on her site.

    As the reader can see, she did so in the same over the top, shrieking style that she used in her off-the-wall attack on Caroline Kennedy. Incredibly, she never once refers to Chris Smith’s extraordinary essay on the subject, which I noted in my previous article The Caroline Aftermath. Even though Smith’s piece is, by far, the best reporting on the subject yet to appear. And the only report that is truly investigatory in its nature. In other words, it is not just commenting on events from the outside—it is actually digging into them to find out what really happened from the inside. This is the essence of investigative journalism. And it is the way you really enlighten your readers and actually empower them. As I noted in part two, this has been a serious failing of the blogosphere so far. It was typified by former Time Magazine correspondent Matt Cooper in his summing up piece at Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo (posted on 1/22). Which can only be called so agenda driven and fact averse that it could have been written for the New York Times. But this is what happens when, like Marshall, you hire former MSM reporters who don’t want to, or even know how to investigate. When you work for a publication like Time, you get paid not to find the truth. Let alone print it. After all, in the whole Valerie Plame scandal—which should have been an impeachable offense—Cooper took his leads from Karl Rove. And if you analyze that shameful episode, Cooper was maybe one bar above Judy Miller in his journalistic lineage. (Josh, don’t get any ideas from this. And Matt, please don’t give him Miller’s phone number!)

    By not referencing the Smith piece, Hamsher can keep her readers misinformed and thereby attack Kennedy on false pretenses. She leads it off by again repeating the falsity that it was Kennedy’s idea to go upstate to Syracuse. From there she’s off to the races. And she even misinforms her readers on the end game. As I noted, the clear implication of Smith’s piece is that Kennedy withdrew because she was tired of being exploited for media exposure by Gov. Paterson. She could not say that of course. So her camp said it was personal reasons and offered up Ted Kennedy’s condition. Incredibly, Hamsher scores her for this! Jane, Joshua, Markos! Pay attention now: You should have been doing what Smith was doing. Then you could have found out that Paterson’s media blitz at her expense was a bit much for her.

    But alas, Hamsher, Marshall and Markos can’t do that. Why? Because the second villain in a play, usually does not expose the first. Smith’s piece exposes just how clownishly Paterson handled this whole affair. I, for one, have been around a long time. Longer than Josh, Jane, or Markos. I do not recall ever witnessing such a circus over an interim appointment to a senate seat in my life. Actually, nothing even comes close. And as Smith reveals, the underlying reason seems to be that Paterson needs to run for office next year. And this is something that is obvious from what proceeded. Usually New York politicians do not run strongly in the more rural upstate region. So what did Paterson do? He sends Kennedy up there first to meet the mayor of Syracuse and he tells her not to talk much with the press. Then when she drops out, he appoints Gillibrand, another upstate politician to the seat. Duh! Yet the Three (and a half) Amigos—Hamsher, Marshall/Cooper, and Moulitsas—couldn’t discern that for their readers. Because if they did, it would point out that the main reason this all happened is that Paterson’s follies helped create the whole mess. Obviously, the way it should have been handled was that Paterson should have accepted calls from each interested politician in New York. He then should have made his choice in a matter of a couple of weeks. He didn’t have to look at polls, but the ability to hold the seat plus one’s Democratic credentials in a blue state should have been important. The two most logical choices should have been either Kennedy or Andrew Cuomo. But I’m talking logic here. The last word I would apply to the approach these three took in this sorry episode is logical.

    Let me point out some examples in addition to the fallacies I mentioned above. Hamsher does not mention my name in her post/rant. And she links to my Open Letter by burying it under a hyper-link named “overwrought paeans to Kennedy’s superlative abilities.” That’s being fair, isn’t it? Who would want to read such an essay with that rubric applied to it? My original essay centered on Moulitsas’ nutty charge that implied that all political families are equal in quality and achievement. So I gave a short history lesson in how it was wildly wrong to say that somehow the Kennedy family was even remotely like the Bushes or Rockefellers. Moulitsas was relying on the reader’s ignorance of history to inflame them. Which is exactly what alternative journalism is not supposed to do.

    This leads to another illogical argument Hamsher uses. This one was borrowed from another blogger, this time from Americablog. This guy said that the blogosphere should not be blamed for the eventual appointment of the Blue Dog Gillibrand. The concept was: “if a politician is leaning towards a bad decision, he shouldn’t be questioned about that decision lest he make an even worse decision.” This blogger is a lawyer and he termed this doctrine “post hoc ergo propter hoc”. Jane, it’s not smart to use lawyers in a situation like this. All they care about is winning. Therefore he begins with a false assumption. Namely that Kennedy was a poor choice. Why is that false? Because no one is ever going to know what kind of senator she would have made. But, and this is a huge but: It is possible to make a very good guess. This is what I wrote about in part one: She comes from, as Paul Wellstone used to say, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. For it was only after the murder of RFK that the party lost its compass and it began to get southernized by the likes of Carter and Clinton. Which culminated in the creation of the DLC. But in RFK’s 1968 race, he was actively endorsed by both Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King. (King actually said RFK would make a great president.) Unless, you’re talking Frederick Douglass, it does not get better than that. Unlike Gillibrand, there are no Republicans in her immediate family.

    Second, as I mentioned in part two, she rejected the Clintonization of her party by endorsing Obama at a very strategic time. Third, she then helped in the search to get Joe Biden on as the Vice-President. So in a real sense, she helped forge a winning ticket of two non-DLC Democrats. Fourth, she would have certainly looked for advice from her uncle Ted Kennedy, and you don’t get much more blue than that. So in actuality, we have a very good idea on where she would have stood in the senate. Hamsher, Moulitsas, and Marshall can’t tell you that since it tells you how unfounded and false the whole basis of their campaign was.

    The capper of course, is that we do have a good idea of who Kirsten Gillibrand is. And as I showed in part two, it’s no comparison. Could anyone imagine Al D’Amato being at Kennedy’s appointment conference?

    Hamsher is also disingenuous about who she supported in the 2008 primary. It is true that her site, Firedoglake, did not formally endorse anyone. But it didn’t’ take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who Hamsher supported, and supported early. In a story in the Washington Post of 4/25/2007, it was revealed that Hillary Clinton was going to make her first guest blogging appearance at Hamsher’s site. Hamsher understood that Clinton was not perceived as being friendly with the Netroots, so she was there to help her out. At Huffington Post, 1/5/08, she was clearly giving Clinton advice on how to overcome Obama’s surprise victory in Iowa. Then she was appalled at how Clinton was letting Obama beat her in all those caucus states. She was also quick to blame any attacks on her as resulting from anti-feminism. She even had her picture taken with Bill Clinton, something I would never do. (And if I did, I would try to burn all the photos.) Who the heck would want another president who likes having someone like Dickie Morris—or Mark Penn—around the White House?? (By the way, Marshall thinks Clinton was high five material also. This is what I mean about the ignorance of youth.)

    Finally, I have to comment on the techniques used by Hamsher-and the others-in this whole affair. After Hamsher started the charge, Marshall and Moulitsas jumped on board the three wheeled Conestoga. None of them noticed one of the wheels was missing, and they were therefore headed for a crash. Therefore, the drive was marked by misinformation, ignorance, illogic, and finally-as one can see from the link to her site—it devolved into what is called on the web, a “flame war”. That is, the trading of cheap insults and baseless accusations. Which, of course, is the way Hamsher and Moulitsas started the whole thing. Like I said, in their newfound limelight, like mobsters, they take no prisoners. And in that winner take all contest, no comparison is out of bounds, no charge is too extreme. Therefore, people can write that those who think Caroline Kennedy’s bona fides are beyond reproach are like those who way Fred Hiatt is a liberal. This is the Washington Post’s editorial page editor. Again, this shows how ahistorical and anti-intellectual these people really are. Fred Hiatt, Ben Bradlee, and Kay Graham all had nothing but disdain for President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. (I analyzed the Bradlee angle in depth in my article “Ben and Jack, not a Love Story”, Probe Vol. 4 #6, p. 30)) But these people don’t understand what self-parody is. This is illustrated by the title of Hamsher’s post in which she implies that anyone who thinks the whole process was a sideshow is somehow a victim of “groupthink”. This is the woman who started the whole misguided rampage and now calls those who think she was wrong Stalinists! (I’m not kidding, check the comments.)

    This, of course, is the opposite of what alternative, progressive journalism used to be. The kind I mentioned in part two, as practiced by Gilbert Seldes, Warren Hinckle and Art Kunkin. In those days, these kinds of cheap slurs were not accepted. Because they were not needed. The idea was that our side had both the facts and morality behind them. And the gradual accumulation of the former would forge the latter. Here it’s the opposite. As I noted in part two, the unearthed facts expose the falsity and emptiness of the Three Amigos in this affair. And this is why they have to resort to name-calling. As it usually does, it completes the cover up of their role in this fiasco. And its one of the phases in the process of denial.

  • The Caroline Aftermath: The Blogosphere Defines Itself, and it’s Not a Pretty Picture

    The aftermath of the Caroline Kennedy affair is almost as fascinating as the follies that preceded it. The two things that are interesting are 1.) Who Gov. David Paterson actually appointed, and 2.) The post-mortems that are taking place within the blogosphere to explain and justify what happened.

    As everyone knows by now, on January 23rd, after Caroline Kennedy e-mailed Paterson and told him she wished to be dropped from consideration, he selected Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to take Hillary Clinton’s seat in the senate.

    I found this choice to be jarring. The so-called liberal blogosphere—led by Jane Hamsher and Markos Moulitsas—had gone after Kennedy relentlessly and savagely for six weeks. Hamsher opened the salvo by saying if Paterson selected Kennedy it would be a “truly terrible idea”. To me, a truly terrible idea would be selecting a Republican for the empty seat. So after all this over the top hysteria, which should be reserved for Republicans, what do we get? A Republican-Lite! Yep. Gillibrand is a member of the Blue Dog caucus within the Democratic Party. Most real Democrats look at the Blue Dogs with scorn since a large part of that caucus is made up of southern conservatives chosen by Rahm Emanuel when he was trying to take back the House. Hamsher railed against Emanuel’s strategy of choosing conservative Democrats. He was hedging his bets by not losing the mythical “center” on social issues like gun control and gay marriage.

    Guess what? Gillibrand had an incredibly perfect 100 rating with the NRA. This is in New York state of all places! Not the south. Her record on this is so extraordinary that even the Republican Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, spoke out against it. (AP wire story of 1/23) Gillibrand even co-sponsored legislation to deny information that cities and police need to track the use of illegal guns. (Ibid) Got that: she did not just vote for it, she co-sponsored it. Further, her father was a powerful Republican lobbyist in the state capital of Albany. (Wikipedia bio) Yep, a Republican. As a lawyer in two high-powered law firms, she represented Philip Morris up until 1999. This is startling. Because at that time, due to years of discovery motions, it had become clear that the tobacco companies knew they were addicting customers to cigarettes and tried to cover up their criminal conspiracy to do so. This is what led to the huge verdicts and settlements that were meted out. It got so bad for them, that in 2003 Philip Morris changed their name to Altria.

    Need more? She twice voted against the TARP bailout bill. She was the only New York representative to vote for the May 2007 funding bill for the Iraq War. (Time Magazine, 1/23) She was against gay marriage before she was for it. (Ibid) She also co-sponsored a balanced budget amendment for the federal government. Which, I hate to tell you Markos and Jane, is not a good idea right now. (Huffington Post 1/23) John Maynard Keynes, FDR’s favorite economist, is throwing up in his grave on that one.

    The capper for me was this. When Paterson introduced her as his appointment, there was a very strange person on the platform next to her. It was former Republican Senator Al D’Amato. I’m not kidding. I later found out that Dirty Al is a friend and investment partner of her family. D’Amato is the hack who held senatorial hearings on every wild charge leveled by the wingnut right against Bill Clinton. This eventually paved the way for that ugly and prolonged impeachment fiasco.

    As Sherman Yellen wrote in the Huffington Post, for Paterson this was his John McCain moment—as in picking Sarah Palin. It was an attempt to gain traction upstate with the conservative wing of his party and with moderate Republicans. Yellen continued, “This is a woman who represents the far right of the Democratic Party. Her political roots are deep in the Republican Party and its platform; her instincts are Republican contrarianism.” (I/25) In other words, she is synoptic of everything the liberal blogosphere is supposed to be against. Jane and Markos, take a bow.

    But for me it’s even worse than that. Gillibrand is a close ally of Hillary Clinton. She has raised money for her, and Clinton supported her appointment. To me that makes perfect sense. Because, led by the disastrous Mark Penn, this was essentially Clinton’s approach pre-primary, and in the early days of the primary season. (And Hamsher supported her all the way.) The idea was for Clinton to appear presidential by taking the centrist route. To the point of her even voting for a resolution which could have paved the way for a war with Iran. And it was this approach and rhetoric which finally repelled Ted and Caroline Kennedy. To the point that they organized their powerful pubic endorsement of Obama at American University. They didn’t want any more of this stuff. Especially since the country didn’t want it either.

    So instead of having a person who is a true Democrat, one who fought for a real Democratic ticket, who comes from impeccable Democratic lineage, the blogosphere helps us get a Blue Dog Republican-Lite. And now they are trying to cover up this strategic embarrassment. Markos says that Gillibrand will now track left. Markos, with Kennedy there would have been no need to “track left.” She’s not the kind of person who supports the NRA a hundred percent. Do I have to tell you why? (Hint: Dallas, 1963.) Moulitsas has also said that people who were supporting Caroline were being “romantic”. If Gillibrand and the Blue Dogs are his idea of realism, I’ll take a little romance any day.

    The second interesting point about this disheartening sideshow is what it says about the vaunted blogosphere. I would like to note two symptomatic episodes that appeared on Daily Kos. The first argument Markos made against Kennedy was that, if Paterson appointed her, she was not then the choice of the people. The whole “fiat” charge. (Markos missed the point that anyone appointed by Paterson to fill the post would be in office by “fiat”.) This argument was smashed by the first polls appearing on Dec. 15th. Each of them had Kennedy with a substantial lead over second place Andrew Cuomo in a Democratic primary—by 21 and 10 points. Clearly, she would win the nomination in a primary. And she would also beat the suspected GOP nominee, Peter King. (Probably foreseeing this, King jumped on the Hamsher/Moulitsas bandwagon and started criticizing Kennedy on her inexperience. Nice to see the blogosphere helping out the Republicans.)

    Realizing this gutted the whole “choice of the people” argument he was broadcasting, Moulitsas then did something that we would expect of a GOP “oppo research” hack. And it reveals his almost pathological behavior in this whole circus. On December 18th, he did a trick with the numbers to mitigate the harpoon he had sustained. Realizing Kennedy’s numbers looked too good in a primary—and that she actually was the Democratic choice—he added the “Democratic only” numbers to an “all voters” sample. He then averaged out the two differing sets of numbers to decrease her lead. Markos, you win the primary first and then you run in the general election. When presidential candidates are running in primary elections, pollsters don’t add their primary and general election numbers together to reach an average. They are two different races. But even with that disgraceful stunt she still had a lead over Cuomo and was 25 points ahead of Gillibrand.

    But clearly, the nutty campaign by Hamsher and Moulitsas fired up the unthinking extremists in the Netroots (they are called Kossacks at Daily Kos.) They now decided to pull something that is, again, usually reserved for the general election. That is, against your Republican opponent. They faked a letter to the New York Times. This is utterly fascinating of course because the Times has always been negative on the Kennedys. So they would be willing and eager to print a letter from the Mayor of Paris criticizing the tentative appointment of Kennedy. How do we know it was probably from a Kossack? Because it called the appointment “appalling” and “not very democratic”. The incriminating clincher in the letter was this: “What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling.” Only a reader of the blogosphere under the influence of Hamsher/Moulitsas hysteria could write such tripe. Well, the Times was so eager to add to the sideshow that they never even called the French mayor before they printed it. The hoax was not exposed by an ombudsman from the Times. It was exposed by a French web site. The Times apologized to the mayor and its readers. But revealingly, not to Kennedy.

    This sorry incident marked a milestone in the saga. The Times began to cooperate with the blogosphere in this bizarre and unhinged campaign against Kennedy. When Kennedy went upstate to introduce herself to some local politicians, Hamsher called this “meeting with elites”. (How the mayor of Syracuse is a member of the “elite” escapes me.) And Markos compared it—unbelievably—to the Sarah Palin rollout by McCain. Well, the Times followed this cue! On December 17th the Times web site compared this visit to the “carefully controlled strategy reminiscent of vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.” Thus the so-called alternative media was perfectly matched to the MSM. In opposition to a strong and real Democratic candidate who, by all indications, who would have steamrolled the Democratic field. Talk about topsy-turvy.

    But the circus was even worse than that. And it took some real reporting—not cheap blogging— by New York Magazine to expose it. Hamsher and Markos were criticizing that Syracuse trip as if it was based on Kennedy’s instincts. You know, she’s the type who meets politicians, not the real people. Writer Chris Smith reveals that this excursion was Gov. Paterson’s idea. And he also told her not to talk to the press while she was up there. Further, Smith reveals why Kennedy hired media strategist Josh Isay. Paterson had made it clear Kennedy was his favorite, but behind the scenes he actually suggested to other interested parties—e. g. Randi Weingarten and Liz Holtzmann—that they were in it also. So when they, quite naturally, started attacking the front-runner, Kennedy turned to Isay, who she knew from her public school fund drive, for help. (Hamsher left out that last fact and billed him solely as “Joe Lieberman’s fixer”. Wow. )

    Smith also reveals something else that is disturbing. Paterson enjoyed keeping Kennedy jumping because it kept him in the limelight. For instance, instead of doing an Albany cable channel show he was scheduled for, he begged off because of -get this-stomach problems. The stomach problems cleared up enough for him to discuss the upcoming appointment with, on Monday January 19th with Larry King, on Tuesday the 20th CNN News, and Wednesday the 21st, Katie Couric. As long as the spot was kept open, Paterson was in the public eye. And the accidental governor needs to run for office next year. The clear implication of Smith’s fine piece is that Kennedy grew sick of the media spectacle that Paterson had created in both the MSM and the blogosphere at her expense. She was being exploited. For instance, King’s lead for his interview with him was “Can you hold out against all these Kennedy forces?” That was it for her. She called him to say she was withdrawing. Then Paterson did something that was nakedly self-serving. Yet it supports what Kennedy suspected. He asked her to “release a statement saying she’d changed her mind and was staying in the contest.” He pleaded with her, “You can’t withdraw, you gotta stay in this thing, and I’ll just not pick you.” Kennedy would not go along and sent him an e-mail certifying her withdrawal.

    Now, Paterson was left without his first choice. This is when he turned to the Blue Dog, tobacco lawyering, NRA supporting upstate congresswoman Gillibrand.

    But actually it’s even worse than that. Because Smith reveals that Paterson now got angry with Kennedy for dropping out of his self-created sideshow. And this is where the phony personal smears began to circulate in the press: about back taxes, marital problems, nanny problems etc. He had been shirked and now he had to reverse that image.

    Smith’s article, a real piece of investigative journalism, makes both the MSM and especially the blogosphere look sick in comparison. Besides exposing the false attributions of Hamsher and Markos, it focuses on the real villain of the sorry affair, namely Paterson. (That enlightening essay can be read by clicking here.) And I should add, it also humiliates Joshua Micah Marshall and his Talking Points Memo site. Marshall actually wrote that the reversal of Kennedy’s decision to withdraw was by Kennedy. He completely missed on Paterson’s pleading with her not to drop out. Probably because he did no investigation. And then Marshall actually had his new hire Matt Cooper do a summing up story on the whole affair. With absolutely no shoe leather—or brainpower— expended, Cooper blamed the affair, in order on: Ted Kennedy (Huh!), Caroline Kennedy, and, ridiculously, Mayor Michael Bloomberg! And the former Time reporter, and Patrick Fitzgerald target, made the same error about the genesis of Kennedy’s upstate trip. He says it was her idea, when it was actually Paterson’s. Cooper’s brief piece is almost a parody of the MSM. It’s a disgrace that 1.) It’s on TPM, 2.) Marshall hired this Karl Rove confidante, and 3.) the blogosphere still won’t print the truth.

    Which brings me to a point that refers back to the title of this essay. Everyone interested in alternative journalism, that is anyone who craved for a real outlet besides the compromised and canned MSM, had high hopes for the blogosphere. Especially when it began to rise in the wake of Bush’s inexplicable invasion of Iraq. We thought: Once this thing matures, it will become a real and genuine journalistic apparatus. One that—like Gilbert Seldes— will be unblinded and unbent by compromise, politics, ignorance, sloth, or personal predilections. It might actually begin to mimic the last great icons of alternative journalism from the last great rush of a progressive movement. Anybody who understands where I am coming from knows of what I speak: Warren Hinckle’s Ramparts and Art Kunkin’s LA Free Press. To say the least, it hasn’t happened yet. Not even close. Either in the quality and depth of reporting, or the desire to go where the MSM will not venture. In fact, I can detect no real investigative field reporting anywhere in the blogosphere. And as far as what will be reported on and what will not, Daily Kos actually discouraged some comments on the voter fraud issues in their diaries. This is an issue which was addressed at length in mainstream publications like Harper’s and Rolling Stone. It is quite a negative testament when the alleged “alternative media” will not go as far as those two well-established mainstays. Or commission their own serious and sustained inquiry into something as fundamental as the right to vote. Its almost as if the ambition of the blogosphere is to become a more moderate version of the MSM.

    And now this. A family that was good enough for the likes of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King isn’t good enough for Jane Hamsher and Markos Moulitsas. And, in lockstep, their unthinking followers write fake letters to the New York Times.

    For me, I’ll take the endorsements of two great men like King and Chavez any day. They would have laughed at the NRA endorsed Blue Dog Hamsher and Moulitsas brought upon us. But alas, those were the days of real alternative journalism.

    Go to Part Three

  • An Open Letter to Jane Hamsher and Markos Moulitsas re: Caroline Kennedy and “Dynasties”

    Dear Jane and Markos:

    Being an avid reader of the blogosphere I could not help but note the recent round of columns that was started by Jane and taken up by Markos. I am referring to Jane’s December 7, 2008 post about Caroline Kennedy’s interest in the open Democratic Senate seat of Hillary Clinton. (First entered at Jane’s Firedoglake and then cross-posted at Huffington Post.) Jane’s post was entitled: “Caroline Kennedy: Thanks but no thanks”. It essentially had two beefs about Kennedy’s interest in a possible appointment by Governor Paterson: 1.) That she was not around for the last eight years or so while you and Markos were fighting the good fight, and 2.) She has never run for public office before. Therefore we do not know what kind of candidate she would be when she has to maintain the office in a primary and general election. (Hmm you didn’t hold this against Ned Lamont did you?)

    Your post was picked up with relish and gusto by Markos at Daily Kos on December 8th. His post was self-righteously entitled “This country isn’t a monarchy.” He quoted some of your original entry and then added, “I hate political dynasties. Hate them.” He added that if Paterson would appoint her it would be an act of “fiat”. The main concept that that you and he were touting was you were “saviors of the common man”. And somehow Caroline Kennedy would be an insult to all the wonderful work you and Markos had done. Markos has now gone off almost every other day on the issue. Even once comparing Caroline Kennedy with, of all people, Sarah Palin. (Whew)

    As I said, I read the blogs daily. I don’t comment on them or write any “Diaries”. I guess you could say I am a lurker. One of the reasons I only lurk is that I find many of the posters to be very young. Therefore most seem to lack any sense of history and perspective. This includes both of you. Jane was about one year old when Caroline’s father, President Kennedy was elected. Markos was yet to be born when her uncle, Senator Robert Kennedy, was murdered at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. And apparently, none of that matters to you, since you never mention any of what happened in between or afterward. Markos just says indiscriminately : I hate political dynasties! Sort of like saying: I hate three-piece suits!

    The problem is that some of us were around back then. And further, some us have studied what happened in those intervening years–and afterwards. So lumping the Kennedys with say, families like the Rockefellers or Bushes in the dynasty category is, at best, indiscriminate. At worst, it is ignorant, insulting and irresponsible. (For all that it means, why not throw in the Colbys?) Yes, there are some political families that should be avoided. Since it has been proven that they have little interest in providing for the common good. But to lump the Kennedys in with them is utterly preposterous.

    Let me briefly explain to you two why that is so. When Congressman John Kennedy was first running for the Senate, he took a trip to Vietnam. He quickly dumped his official French escorts to seek out the best information he could on the war then raging between the French and the forces of Ho Chi Minh. (For your information, Ho was the leader of the north Vietnamese and the rebel group in the south called the Viet Minh.) After educating himself on this, he then returned to America, and won his Senate seat. He then began making speeches in the Senate about how the USA needed to stop backing French colonialism in north Africa, i.e. Algeria. He warned that if we did back it, we would lose the allegiance of the rebel groups there. This would be unfortunate because, according to Kennedy, they eventually would triumph. One reason for this was their cause was not what Richard Nixon and John Foster Dulles (then Eisenhower’s Secretary for State) said it was: communism. It was really nationalism. He actually said these words on the floor of the senate in 1957. And he was roundly criticized for it. Especially by Vice-President Nixon.

    When Patrice Lumumba, nationalist leader of the Congo against the colonialist Belgians, was attempting to keep his country independent, then President Eisenhower sided with the Europeans. And Allen Dulles OK’d a CIA plot to help in his murder. The CIA hurried this plot in the interval between Kennedy’s election and his inauguration since they knew JFK would not back it . His sympathies were on Lumumba’s side. The plot succeeded. (Remember Markos, the CIA is the agency you wanted to join before you took up blogging. Maybe you missed this episode.) But Kennedy still supported the cause of independence for the Congo all the way until his assassination. Against Belgian advocates like William Buckley and Thomas Dodd. (This is Sen. Chris Dodd’s disgraced father. You two should read up on him)

    Let’s switch to the domestic side briefly. One of JFK’s first acts as President was to increase the minimum wage. Although he wanted balanced budgets, he was a Keynesian in economic theory. And in just three years, he doubled the rate of economic growth and increased GNP by about 20%. I could write pages about his civil rights program, but just let me note the following. In 1963, A. Philip Randolph was organizing the legendary 1963 March on Washington. (You two probably thought it was Martin Luther King.) The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King’s group, signed on. But they could not get a white politician to endorse the demonstration. In July, about six weeks before it began, President Kennedy did so at a press conference. He then called in his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He essentially told him that he was entrusting the project to him and it had to come off very well, in fact, perfectly. If not, their enemies would use it to their detriment. It did come off perfectly.

    Which leads us to Caroline’s uncle, Bobby Kennedy. A man who, as Attorney General, led what was probably the most unrelenting campaign against organized crime in American history. A campaign that once started, eventually brought the Mafia to its knees. And at this time, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would barely recognize that there even was such a thing. RFK also forced Hoover into recognizing the fact that the Klan operated a murderous terrorist group that killed civil rights workers. As Attorney General he sued the steel companies when they tried to conspiratorially rig prices to gouge the American consumer. He also actually placed the executives ofelectric companies in jail when they tried to cheat the government.

    Now, do I really have to educate you about Ted Kennedy? The liberal lion of the senate? The man who is always there for unions, education, the mentally afflicted, the poor? The one member of a disgraceful panel who actually spoke up for Anita Hill? Surely you remember that episode?

    One last mention: Caroline’s cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr. He is probably one of the leading environmental attorneys in America. A man who is not afraid to take on corporate polluters no matter how big they are. Or to go on the radio to denounce the horrible things they have done. A guy who was probably too radical and militant in that regard for Obama to appoint as EPA administrator.

    So my question to you two is this: Did you know any of the above? If so, did it matter to you? Markos: This is the kind of political family you hate? Hmm. Did you also hate Al Gore and his dad then? How about the Gracchus brothers? (You can look them up on Wikipedia.)

    To even put Caroline Kennedy in the same sentence with Sarah Palin is ridiculous. This is a woman who helped to raise 350 million dollars for New York public schools. Who graduated from Harvard and then got a law degree from Columbia. She has co-written two books concerning serious questions about the Constitution. Do you think she would know more than one famous Supreme Court case?

    While Jane was backing Hillary Clinton, Caroline Kennedy decided to back Barack Obama. One reason for that is probably something you two aren’t aware of. Because of President Kennedy’s interest in the struggle of African nations to be free from European colonialism, he became a hero in large parts of the continent. Many young men tried to get into contact with his office in order to study in America. Barack Obama’s father wanted to do so. He got into contact with more than one agency. They turned him down. He finally contacted John Kennedy. JFK helped arrange the financing for his voyage to America.

    So when Caroline bucked the Clinton Machine in January of 2008 — a machine which Jane backed — she understood the dynamics in play. And when she and her uncle set up the announcement of their support for Obama at American University, they conveyed to millions — except maybe you two — that they understood the symbolism of the moment. For it is there, in June of 1963, that President Kennedy made his famous, “We are all mortal ” speech. The speech that mapped out his official quest for dÈtente with the Soviets and an end to the Cold War. This is why thousands of young people slept on the grass there that night to see the rally. They instinctively understood what was happening. And there is little doubt that this gave Obama a rocket boost. Just ask the Clintons. Question: Does this count for “fighting the good fight”?

    I think there is little doubt that one reason Caroline supported Obama was because he opposed the Iraq War from the start. Which Hillary Clinton did not. She understood that this was something her father and uncle would never have supported. In fact, there is a poignant story in Robert McNamara’s book, In Retrospect, where Caroline’s mother, Jackie Kennedy, had McNamara over for dinner one night. The widow understood that what President Johnson had done was a reversal of what President Kennedy had planned for at the time of his murder. That is, a withdrawal from Vietnam. As the dinner progressed, Jackie brought his issue up because she objected to what McNamara had done under President Johnson. To quote McNamara “…she became so tense that she could hardly speak. She suddenly exploded. She turned and began, literally to beat on my chest, demanding that I “do something to stop the slaughter.” I can see how you two could hate people like that.

    Let me also tryand answer the query as to why people choose to do the things they do in life. It’s true that Caroline and her late brother, John Jr., did not enter the public square as far as political office went. But I think you overlook a rather important detail. If I was a young child who stood by and had to watch my father’s brains being blown out — and had to relive that moment every time someone showed the Zapruder film–I think I would have qualms about entering the public arena. But, as many know, after John Kennedy’s murder, Bobby Kennedy then became a surrogate father to John and Caroline. And he ran for the presidency five years later. Something that Jackie Kennedy was not all that excited about. To then have your surrogate father have his brains also blown out in public … Well, that might swear me off from political life also.

    You two like taking credit forgrappling with the forces of conservatism after the new millennium began. Yet you ignore the fact that the rise of the New Right really began in this country after that murderous night in Los Angeles which I just described. That is, when the death of RFK allowed the election of Richard Nixon and the extension of the Vietnam War. A war which RFK had pledged to halt at all costs. Many questions remain about what happened in both Dallas and Los Angeles. Questions, which you two do not debate or entertain on your sites. Because they necessitate the use of the “C” word: Conspiracy. And you want to become part of the dialogue inside the Establishment. But suffice it to say, one of the unspoken reasons as to why the New Right took over was because they shot their way into power over the bodies of that “dynastic” family. If you two don’t, those forces sure understood who the Kennedys were and what they represented. And they decided to play hardball. There was a lot at stake.

    The Kennedys know this of course. They can’t talk about it. Because they have to play the game. Just like you two do. But as David Talbot’s book Brothers reveals, RFK understood what happened to his brother immediately. He even told the Russians. And this is why I think Caroline knows also. Which is one reason I like her. See, I like people who have suffered, who have felt desolation and abandonment. To have lost first, your father, to unknown regressive forces, and then your foster father to probably the same, that to me is to understand pain. Those are the kinds of shocks that no amount of money can cushion. They are the kind of experiences that build character and empathy. It’s the kind of thing that no amount of political campaigning can instill. Maybe you two have never felt that. Few have.

    But that’s no excuse for not understanding them. It’s strange, I think, that a member of the family that fought what turned out to be a fatal battle against the forces of conservatism and regression is now being persecuted by the new Liberal Establishment. It almost makes me think that you don’t really wish to replace the MSM. But just to tweak it a bit.

    It’s an irony you are both too young to appreciate. And maybe too arrogant. You actually wanted someone who had endured all that to come to you for approval first.

    Wow. We need another RFK. There’s a new Mafia in town.

    Go to Part Two