Comment Central, the offensive into the “Blogosphere” launched by The Times, is currently on a quest to find the “Greatest Mistake in British History”.

 How about letting a reactionary media mogul get his corruptive, rightist, corporate imperialist hands on our Paper of Record?

It really is over.

Quite a surprise, really. Not so much the endorsement itself as the fact that the Republicans now seem to have quite neatly stitched up their divisions and are, as always, unified behind a lone candidate who can simply stroll to receive the nomination. Only, it’s a RINO.

Not what I anticipated, but then nothing has been. Perhaps this campaign should be less a chance to predict the future and more a demonstration of the imcapacity of the human mind to foresee anything at all.

As my history with protests go this was certainly a first.

But then, the same went for just about everyone there.

The first and most vital stage was to mask up. Scientology, especially for a group that ostentatiously promotes free speech, has a shoddy track-record when it comes to its treatment of critics and as Vamp said the most cunning and sly tactic of Anonymous is their concealment of identities. Unfortunately I had no scarf to hand, or rather there was one which would not wrap properly owing to consisting of an inappropriate fabric. Instead I improvised and used a pair of brown boxer shorts to conceal up to my nose, with the scarf covering my hair and the back of my head assisted by a hefty hood.

I arrived after quite a delay owing to the District line being dead for much of its run. I ended up arriving nearly an hour late but it was hardly as if anyone besides me was going to complain. When I finally got there another masked anonymous was to be found at the exit, who made a quick phone call so that he could find the way. I followed.

(more…)

Suddenly, I find myself warming to Gervais.  I’m not a fan of his comedy.  But really, it’s so refreshing to hear someone with more money than me advocating taxes for the rich…

Interesting to see that he dropped out, I should not have been surprised but I still rather was. He had, after all, ploughed nothing short of $5 million into this race already, but I suppose that it was at least partially a matter of him wanting to have something for his copious numbers of children to inherit.

That and the fact that he wasn’t going to win, of course.

Buit despite a thorough thrashing on Tuesday I still had him penned as in with a shot. As I’ve said before this race seems like it can go anywhere, or at least it used to. Perhaps I should feel glad at this latest twist: any man who says that he wishes to “Double Guantanomo” has no place in office anywhere. Although McCain is the stauncher neo-con I feel delighted that such a firm repudiation of the American “Conservative” movement’s eagerness to torture has been staged and that the blood-thirsty establishment has found itself without any candidate whatsoever. I hear that when he announced it at the CPAC the rabid wing-nuts cried “No! No!”, like an impotent version of the action hero who returned home to find that the Mob/gooks/terrorists/hoodlums have gunned down his wife. Cries of “Fight on!” also rang out, but he demurred. They have no candidate now. Their disconnection with reality may well become clear. As unkind as this may seem the thought of Hugh Hewitt crumpling into despair is quite blissful to me. I expect to see Coulter on the campaign trail shortly.

There was a time when it seemed like callous advocacy of torture was a requisite for involvement in the American right. Giuliani and Romney both blew with the wind but McCain has experienced it himself and held strong, the ultimate rebuttal to their ignorant viciousness. It has now passed. There are no longer any candidates at all that are apologists.

But the downside is that now the race has become strikingly predictable: the Huckaboom is unlikely to expand widely enough to allow him to take on McCain, who never stood much chance of winning over the evangelicals irrespective of whether or not there is a Baptist minister running against him, and doesen’t really need to. The Ron Paul rEVOLution has stalled since it turned out that, at best, he associates very close with a noxious bigot and homophobes who he let write bigoted, reactionary diatribes under his name.

So of the three it seems effectively inevitable that the triumph will belong to the war hero in his 70s who spent much of last year tottering around in an increasingly disjointed and aimless fashion before running out of money and looking likely to drop out before it even began for a good few months, finding it seemingly impossible to crack 10%. The man whom the base seem to possess a loathing for which borders Clintonesque levels {at least she isn’t a traitor} for and the man who was capable of driving them so far towards flip-flopping, formerly pro-choice, pro-gay equality governor who had done his best to run to the left of Ted Kennedy. Mr. Mormon man Mitt.

The race that seemed beyond resolve mere weeks ago has a path laid clearly, while the Democrats are occupying themselves with a thorough schism, tearing neatly into halves. At least officially the Republicans are nearing unity rather than ravenously tearing themselves apart, while the Democrats are precisely bi-sected. Expectations confounded once again.

I have, perhaps prematurely, written off the possibility of any more surprises in this race, for the Republicans that is, but I should probably content myself with the fact that the largest and most unlikely turn-around short of Paul or Keyes winning has happened right before my very eyes. The RINO reigns.

About time that the nationals caught up on this one.

Page three of the Guardian, that article, and although I am hardly going to declare myself a member of a group called ‘Anonymous’ I must say that I have nothing but support for their efforts. It is true that there efforts to take Scientology from the web through crashing their website via the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” do cause them to descend to Scientology’s level a concentrated effort to damage this cult as much as possible within the confines of the law is well overdue.

Indeed there was one before, when they drew the ire of the Cult of the Dead Cow over their efforts to crush free speech on the early web. But it is clear that this was a less than total success given the recent, seemingly inexorable, growth of the Church.

I am not exactly sure what a protest against them will achieve besides perhaps a chance to identify us if masks/scarves slip but I remain interested in the proposition. I may well be too busy that weekend to attend but I understand that Fenby is already filled with anticipation and is readying appropriate concealment even as I type. I suspect that a report may well be forthcoming.

The truly impressive part of the entire affair is the downright cunningthat characterises it. Take the comment made by the Scientologist in that article: “We don’t get into responding to such threats on the internet, particularly anonymous ones,” There is a simple reason: the entire principle of Scientology’s approach to any and all criticism is a responsive offensive. That is to say that rather than justify or defend themselves they simply unload everythingthey can upon the person making the claims. They are perfectly happy to lie, distory, pillage personal history, rake up filth and toss it around like confetti and generally do all that they possibly can in order to defame their critic.

This has been done plenty of times before and will happen again to anybody who wants to challenge them. They use a putrid mixture of ad hominem, non sequiter and strawman ad nauseum and simply replace their rationality with belligerence.

If you want a prime example then watch this. 

That is, shockingly, standard practice. The movement’s fonuder, L Ron Hubbard termed this “Fair game”. Think a mixture of character assassination and total war.

This is where the genius of Anonymous becomes most prominent: as an organisation without any identity there is literally nothing Scientology can do in response. Their entire strategy is one of a vicious reaction, of a snarling hailstorm of attacks without relent. If there is no target then they are nuclear warheads being shot into empty sky.

They have tried, of course, dubbing the group “Pathetic” and “Computer geeks” {strangely enough being dependent upon computer geeks to protect your website is just fine…} but that just seems weak and can not compare to calling a specific critic a child-molesting, long time delinquent psychopath with an out of date tax-disk.

The only course left to them is attacking ideas and since what Anonymous is saying is entirely true they can only say that they are mistaken. But apparently this is a form of mistaken which involves looking at all the facts, reading official documents and consider case histories of a schizophrenic woman left alone in locked room without any medication to die of exposure and be partially eaten by cockroaches.

It is the kind of mistaken based upon empirical evidence.

So none of the slander, libel or slurs will stick, before there is no surface. Nobody actually knows who the people behind this effort are, so there standard filth-mining tactics are entirely impotent. This entire affair is permeated with brilliance, because they can expect what’s coming but can’t come up with any lies because although they know what and they know when they have no idea about who, which leaves their tactics aimless.

If you are in the area then come along. Co-ordination can be found at Chanology’s site here.

Turn up, bring a mask, have lulz.

So, Romney won the Michigan primary.  Whether he should be thanking Republicans or Democrats for this, I don’t know.  But, the fact is that he took the primary, and by a substantial margin.

Unfortunately, there’s not much I can really say now.  Romney is back in the Republican race, we now know - and that’s about it.  This has blown it back open as far as it was after New Hampshire…and Iowa…and…actually, it’s always been pretty open. Any further prediction at present would probably lead to a humiliatingly different final result.  So we’ll have to wait.

Fun, eh?

Well, it’s one approach…

Reasoning here, along with some historical context.

Believe it or not R.E. Vamp had difficulties sleeping last night.

I decided to put my insomnia to some good use and so fired up C-Span to try and cover this deranged contest despite being across an ocean. Their coverage is perhaps best described as “Uninspired” but it certainly seemed to do the job. Idiot callers served as time fillers, perhaps the stupidest saying that we ought to “Draft Al Gore into the race, a suggestion that made me lose what residual faith in human reason that remained.

The results for the Democrats Douglas has already dealt with. I shall add no more but to say that I am horrified and sickened and the prospect of her triumphing looms yet greater. It remains a tight contest and I hope deeply that she gets thrashed but, stronger than at any point since Iowa, I find that unlikely.

In short it was the least pleasant surprise of the year thus far, joint with me opening up my laptop to find the screen thoroughly fucked a few hours ago. Yeah, it’s been quite a crap day.

I, thankfully, got to sleep before the votes could be completely counted {a process which took far longer than I imagined it would} and before any of the Democratic speeches, besides one of them who’s name I forget. He was bloated and boring and as delusional as any outside the big three {and Edwards is lucky not to be included} who reckons that he is still in with a shot. I listened to his bluster absently while scouring polls with increasing desperation.

Edwards was not on for a while longer but instead that guy from Desperate Housewives, you know, the one who fucks the neurotic weird one with more surgery than face {who used to fuck Superman, which I imagine might not have been as fun} and has that wonderful down-to-earth attitude. Well, it turns out that he is pretty similar in real life and loves Edwards. I enjoyed hearing him, actually, so it was a pity that C-Span randomly cut him off half-way through to “Take a look at the locations” or whatever the fuck they were up to.

The Republicans, meanwhile, were far more fun.

First up was Giuliani, everyone’s favourite fascist. This neo-con intoxicated pleb knew that he had lost and lost hard and effectively told his crowd as much, saying that they should help him “In New York, help me in Florida…Help me in California!” with this last one receiving a massive cheer. Presumably they wanted to get out of the cold, or perhaps meet a Hispanic person.

He made repeated reference to the fact that he was about to “Get on a plane”, perhaps making some subtle subliminal reference to Top Gun that would whip up his idiot fan-base. Thankfully he left quickly so that I didn’t have to bear too much of his rhetoric. Like many that night he made himself sound reasonable until he suddenly went far too far and revealed himself.

Second was Romney, who is a loathsome little pustule that I truly despise. Oddly though, it was hard to muster up much hatred for him here. He was on stage surrounded by his family and started by thanking roughly two thousand people {I started to think that he was giving gratitude to everyone who had voted for him, by name} and then proceeded to heartily congratulate McCain and attempt, with very limited success, to cajole the crowd into clapping their foe.

It was never going to work, ever, with the Republican Party in its present state {or perhaps ever} but it was nice that he tried.

Watching Romney for an extended amount of time makes you realise two things:
1) He has a strangely hollow voice, which is befitting of his views.
2) He has an immense amount of charisma and charm, at times. So much that you can actually get fooled, until a phrase or two {his claim that all Americans were “Of faith” was at least, on this occasion, moderated with the proviso “Or something greater than themselves” but still stuck in my craw something dreadful} snap you out of it.

It is very hard indeed to hold onto his record, his rank opportunism and his clear disregard for the actual worth of rights and liberties. His desire to “Double Guantanamo” and simply revolting apologism for the Bush regime’s policy of torture were far from my mind when hearing him speak.

So, he’s scum, but skilled at hiding it.

After this it was time for Huckabee, who seemed astoundingly pleased for coming 3rd place. But then, this is a big-government theocrat running in a state holding the motto of “Live Free or Die” and at that one who had said that he would be perfectly happy for 4th place.

He gave a roaring, populist speech and comparing him to Romney was fascinating. They seem the closest in this race but yet the furthest away. Romney lacked substance while Huckabee seems to be dusted with merely a light dusting of bright charisma.

For some reason McCain did not go last, but penultimate. His speech was wonderful and hearing his voice made me realise that not just regions but generations have accents. His tone is one that will never return, I suspect, but one that harks decades back. You can almost hear the history dripping from it, it evokes Kennedy and the 1960s and all of that. It seems the last chance that those years can reach out and touch the present directly, perhaps at all.

McCain is widely considered a RINO, Republican In Name Only, but his backing of the Iraq War has underwhelmed this substantially. He mentioned it lightly in this speech, instead relishing the triumph. Well, not exactly relishing, his hands seemed unused to such force and enthusiasm behind his speeches, seeming to be an instance of futureshock. The baying of the crowd were not something that he bathed in, indeed if anything he seemed vaguely wary of the joy filling the room.

Then on to Paul.

Poor Ron Paul managed to make barely any impact upon the race, managing to get less than autocrat Giuliani and basically reaping the reward of someone who featured adverts attacking immigrants instead of talking about things he cares about instead of what he thinks the voters wish to hear.

His speech was the same as usual, using buzzphrases that get violent reactions to enthuse the room. He stated at the start that he was surprised to have gotten this far and to be able to receive massive cheers when attacking the Fed. The room responded violently and chanting “[Something] the Fed”.

I can not say for certain but I doubt it was “Hug”.

Ron Paul has a truly vigorous fanbase and seems just as surprised at this fact as are any of the establishment. He seemed delighted at their jubilation, at one stage waving his arms in the air to up their chants {a curious activity for a pack of libertarians to engage in, yet utterly thrilling} and at others just beaming eagerly. It seemed easy to forget that this was a gentleman who had come fifth, with 8% of the vote.

Also easy to slip from the mind were the accusations in the New Republic concerning articles in his paper which almost certainly did not write but could possibly have authorised or encouraged, that expressed striking and barely covert racism and out-right homophobia.

He could have addressed this, but instead stuck to what he is best at: lambasting big government, proclaiming a Heyekian message that there was no division between economic and social freedom and that he would protect both, attacking the relevance of the IRS, declaring the Income Tax only required due to the Iraq War and American troops being stationed abroad and something that he would eliminate along with the Central Bank. His loathing was reserved not for any minority, but for money printed as paper alone instead of being tied to to gold.

As unpromising material as this may sound, from his lips it was truly thrilling, causing the whole room to erupt riotously on a regular basis, leaving him grinning and cheering their cheers.

He dropped the ball here, he truly did. The message was taken to those that did not require a new candidate and the approach inefficient. But this is not over. Far from it.

I doubt that even the death of this old man could halt it now.

Here is a handy little image showing the relative wealth of the candidates. Unfortunately a few are so poor as to be invisible but perhaps that makes the point even more clear.

Romney is rich, filth. Just to put things into some sense of proportion: the estimated wealth of all three Democratic front-runners piled into one is $90.6 million, while Romney’s alone is $294.6 million.

So why isn’t he winning? The obvious suggestion is that that is his personal wealth, rather than the money accumulated for a run. But this is not good enough: in addition to being partially self-financed he has accumulated a vast amount of donations from the typical sources. He seems suitably…Flexible for the billionaires that generally finance such endeavours and while most see his shift of ideology to exactly what votes want him to be as base opportunism and a worrying lack of actual earnestness the backers consider a suitable reverence towards power.

So of all the campaigns only Giulini’s even verges on being as financially lubricated and the others are minuscule by comparison, record breaking web-based fundraiser extravaganza or no record breaking web-based fundraiser extravaganza. McCain’s managed to almost bankrupt itself in the middle of last year and Huckabee has been using what Romney probably used to earn in an hour or so to fund his entire campaign.

And yet, and yet…

Romney seems to have become this elections equivilant of the Liberal/SDP coalition back in the ’80s: coming second just about everywhere and thus getting fucked over merciless by the FPTP system. The only difference being that Romney deserves it.

So what does this tell us? That the vast amount of money at his disposal is not enough, I suspect. That slickness and vast funds do not a winning campaign make and no matter how many adverts you bombard hapless viewers with if you are a reneging two-faced flip-flopper who distorts and reforms to fit the mould desired of him by whoever he is performing to then you may make a damn fine used car salesman {a common comparison} but will struggle to get popular enough to be voted in.

Much the same is true of everyone’s least-favourite ex-feminist Hillary Clinton, who had much more money than Obama after a few wealthy backers and a Hollywood entourage puffed up her coffers with maximum-donations and used a tactic of filling every television screen available as regularly as advertisement breaks would allow in Iowa, yet still received a pumelling.

It is possible that this could not hold true: perhaps Hillary or Mitt will resurge in the fashion that McCain remarkably did. But if New Hampshire’s outcome is a victory for Obama and a second triumph over the state for McCain then, especially given Huckabee’s savaging of Rich Romney in Iowa, we will be forced to the conclusion that the purchase of votes is not possible, scotching a long-standing legend that has bolstered cynics the globe over for many decades. It would seem that extreme wealth can give you economic power, control over the media if you are dedicated enough, but falters when in terms of political.

Which could have some very pleasing implications closer to home…