Monday, September 12, 2016

A Democrat offers a conspiracy theory -- with a basis in history

In light of the fact that Donald Trump's great friend and supporter is Roger Stone, the king of the dirty tricksters...

In light of the fact that Roger Stone, in previous campaigns, has made a habit of planting moles in the opposite camp...

In light of the fact that the Trumpers have given strong hints that they have a secret plan which would compensate for their incompetence at traditional campaigning (such as TV ads and ground game)...

In light of the fact that, until yesterday, the entire "Hillary is sick" propaganda campaign seemed unfathomable and weird...

In light of the fact that every Republican mouthpiece continued to pursue this seemingly absurd meme, almost as if they knew Hillary would develop a real-world health issue...

In light of the fact that pneumonia is a bacterial infection, which means that it should have been unpredictable...

In light of the fact that a bout of pneumonia would not have endangered Hillary's candidacy had the Republicans not prepped the public to view the event in a certain way...

In light of the fact that the Trump team has, in effect, predicted the inherently unpredictable...

In light of all of those facts, I would like to ask one simple question:

How difficult would it be for a Stone/Trump operative to expose Hillary Clinton to pneumonia?

And if you think that question is paranoid, consider this: What if Hillary was exposed to something more serious -- to a pathogen that manifests itself with pneumonia-like symptoms, yet which cannot be easily bested with antibiotics?

In the 1950s, the US Navy exposed mass populations to Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii, which were "markers" intended to simulate the spreading pattern of a serious bacterial warfare agent -- yet even these seemingly harmless bacteria caused a significant increase in pneumonia. That was 60 years ago; one can only guess as to what sort of exotic agents might be available now.

A historical parallel. As you know, Nixon ran against McGovern in 1972. McGovern was the opponent Nixon wanted; the Democrat they feared most was Edmund Muskie. During the primaries, the Muskie candidacy ended after he was hit by a rather silly brouhaha over something called the "Canuck letter" (a long story, well-told here), and after Muskie made a bizarre public appearance in which he became overly emotional in public.

Excellent evidence suggests that Nixon's operatives (many of them "borrowed" from CIA) had slipped a psychoactive agent into something that Muskie ate or drank. See here:
It was long rumored among CIA operatives that the public meltdown of the normally composed Sen. Edmund Muskie--the strongest of the Democratic contenders who doomed his candidacy by bursting into whimpering tears at a New Hampshire podium--was the result of LSD poisoning. Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, writes in "The Real Spy World" that the CIA was asked (presumably by Republican operatives) "for an LSD-type drug that could be slipped into the lemonade of Democratic orators, thus causing them to say sillier things than they would anyhow. To this day, some of my friends at the agency are convinced that Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy [slipped such a drug] into Senator Muskie's lemonade before he played that famous weeping scene."
It is not uncommon for a serving intelligence officer like Copeland to proffer a "hypothetical" which is actually a confession or a boast.

For a more detailed view of that event, let us turn to the December 1977 issue of Mother Jones:
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a former chemical researcher for the CIA's Project MK Ultra, recently told a Senate subcomittee that foreign government agents somehow managed to drug members of President Nixon's traveling party during a Presidential visit abroad six years ago.

According to Gottlieb, the drug cause the American official to whom it was administered to be confused and to cry and inappropriate times.

It's interesting to note that Gottlieb's report is very similar to an allegation made four years ago by another former CIA official, Miles Copeland.

Copeland stated back in 1973 that high CIA officials were privately convinced that Senator Edmund Muski of Maine had been secretly drugged shortly before he broke down and cried during a critical speech in the New Hampshire primary election campaign.

Copeland suggested that Muskie had been the victim of a "dirty trick" by E. Howard Hunt or one of Hunt's White House lieutenants. Copeland revealed that the CIA and the Army had developed an LSD-like chemical that would cause people to act irrationally and to cry.
We can, in fact, draw a direct line between what happened to Muskie and the current Trump campaign.

A line in Stone.

I refer you once again to this all-important series on Roger Stone, whom I consider the true eminence grise and supèrieur inconnu of the Trump effort. (I've added a few paragraph breaks to increase readability.)
Black protesters suddenly showed up in front of the hotel room of democratic candidate Edmund Muskie, calling him racist for having said that a Democratic ticket with a black running mate couldn’t get elected. An ad suddenly appeared in a Miami Beach Jewish newspaper: “Muskie, Why Won’t You Consider a Jew as a Vice President?” Muskie hadn’t excluded the possibility. Flyers appeared in Jewish neighborhoods: “Remember the Warsaw Ghetto…Vote Right on March 14.” Muskie was of Polish descent.

A letter was sent to a New Hampshire paper, filled with outrage at what happened when Muskie had been asked how he could understand the problems of minorities given the lack of minorities in Maine, Muskie’s home state. A Muskie aide had supposedly replied that they did have minorities in Maine, the very same minority that was there in New Hampshire: “Not blacks, but we have Canucks.” Muskie had supposedly laughed.

The next day, Muskie’s wife was indicted in an editorial in the same paper of telling dirty jokes to reporters, and having two cocktails before dinner.

Something in all this broke Muskie, and when the candidate defended his wife in front of television cameras, he began to weep. Muskie’s tears destroyed his candidacy.

Muskie was a target, but all the Democratic candidates were targets. Two hundred dollars was donated to Pete McCloskey by the Young Socialist Alliance, the receipt for the donation helpfully sent to a right-wing news editor. A mole, code named Sedan Chair II, was hired to go inside the Herbert Humphrey campaign and relay strategic information.

It would eventually be established with certainty that the man who’d written the “Canucks” letter, the man who’d hired the black protesters in front of Muskie’s hotel room, was Donald Segretti, who handled a secret, separate black ops campaign team for CREEP. The man who’d actually sent the letter to McCloskey, who’d hired the Sedan Chair II mole, was a nineteen year old operative named Roger Stone. It was because of this that he makes a brief appearance in the Watergate testimony.
Am I proposing a conspiracy theory? Of course.

I make no apology for doing so, even though Hillary's supporters are intent on framing the 2016 race as a contest between Rational Dems and Irrational Fearmongering Republicans. Here's the difference between what I'm saying and the kind of nonsense we associate with Alex Jones: AJ makes millions spewing baseless and outrageous hooey to a growing audience of reactionary fear-junkies -- while I cannot hope to make a single dollar by arguing in favor of this scenario, which is based on unquestioned history.

Watergate was a real conspiracy. No-one disputes this. Whenever historians are pressed to cite an example of a proven conspiracy, the first word they mutter usually begins with the letter W. (The hipper historians may also mention MKULTRA.)

Roger Stone became consummate dirty trickster during Watergate. Even then, Roger Stone knew how to plant moles. Moreover, Stone was demonstrably part of the effort to knock Muskie out of the race. As we've seen, the idea that Muskie was drugged was endorsed by no less a personage than the CIA's Miles Copeland, who was certainly in a position to know such things.

All I am suggesting is this: If such things could happen in 1972, why couldn't they happen today?

What stops a man like Stone from getting up to his old tricks? Is the idea presented here really so very unthinkable?

How candidates stay amped. Roger Stone wrote an autobiography which was never formally published, although a copy was placed on the internet. One passage offers insight into the way moles are used in political campaigns -- and into the ways a candidate can keep himself energized.

As you read about Humphrey in the passage, you may want to ponder the riddle of Donald Trump, a pudge-ball who seemingly lives on fast food. You may also want to think about Trump's doctor, who strikes many people as a very unusual character.

Nota bene: Sedan Chair II was the code-name of another Nixon mole in the Democratic camp.
Sedan Chair II infiltrated first the McGovern campaign until the geniuses around Nixon decided that McGovern wouldn't win the nomination and moved Sedan Chair II over to the Humphrey camp where he was hired as Humphrey's driver.

Little of political interest came back from Sedan Chair II's verbal reports as, of course, Porter had directed me that noting was to be put in writing. Much titillation though. Humphrey was campaigning 18-hour days and traveling with a physician who was injecting him with amphetamines. Hubert liked a roll in the hay with a pair of call girls, usually African Americans, arranged like clockwork by his lead advance man.
(Emphasis added.) The pseudonymous author of the above-linked series on Roger Stone offers this commentary on the above passage:
Sedan Chair II was Michael W. McMinoway, and he would testify before the Watergate Committee that he worked as a campaign spy between February until July 1972 within three Democratic campaigns, Muskie in Wisconsin, Humphrey in Pennsylvania and California, and McGovern at the Democratic National Convention. He would be contacted by a man named Jason Rainier, who said he represented a group of concerned citizens, and he would pay him $1,500 a month for undercover work. Jason Rainier would turn out to be Roger Stone – incidentally, there is a twitter handle Jason Rainier (jrainier88), most of whose tweets are re-tweets of Stone’s.
In another passage from his autobiography, Stone relates how he personally brought a bag of money to Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty (a disgusting individual), whose task was to enter the presidential race in New Hampshire for the sole purpose of siphoning votes from Muskie, thereby boosting McGovern's chances.

That part is interesting. But the part about Humphrey's crooked doctor -- and the amphetamines -- is even more interesting. Stone is not our only source for that allegation, by the by: See here and here. Amphetamine abuse was far more common in that generation than many now realize: Director Victor Fleming popped so many pills while filming Gone With the Wind that he had to do a stint in rehab.

Perhaps happy days are here again?

We've foolishly allowed the Republicans to corner the market on paranoia during the campaign season. I beg my readers to spread word of this post, and to reproduce it elsewhere. As long as we proceed with caution, I believe that -- in this year of fear -- we can benefit from investigating a thoughtful, historically-grounded pro-Democratic conspiracy theory.

17 comments:

joseph said...

In light of the fact that pneumonia is a bacterial infection, which means that it should have been unpredictable...

You might want to do a bit of research. Actually, Pneumonia can be caused by, among a host of other things, by certain chemicals. It might be easier to expose Hlllary to those chemicals. The Russians are quite familiar with poisoning by the use of chemicals. Also, Trump, at least to me, looks like he is amped up something. When he talks he rambles incoherently like someone on stimulants.

D-Jay said...

Perhaps because I'm such an avid reader of your always fascinating blog, the scenario you presented was actually the first thing that crossed my mind when the video of Hillary being helped into the van emerged. Rather than a Stone mole, however, I wondered if T-Rump's buddies in the Kremlin might have offered some really professional help in the matter.
To continue with the speculation, the key tell might be if she recovers in a reasonably quick and easy fashion, as might be expected if it is just plain old pneumonia.
If it lingers too long or get significantly worse, however, foul play of the type you suggest will move to the top of my list of potential causes.
As for the possibility that our Mafia Don might be hitting the uppers a little too hard, one look at any of his standard stump speeches certainly lends credibility to the theory. My own thoughts on what he might be hiding in his medical records involve a rather different type of hard, however...one that might be helped by the regular consumption of little blue pills. :-)

Anonymous said...

You're more willing to believe that a vast conspiracy exists to give HRC pneumonia more than you're willing to believe a vast conspiracy exists to hide a potential HRC debilitating health issue?

Look, when it was just lozenges in her throat and visual freakouts to questions it was easy to just write it off as coincidence, but not this time. We all saw the SS guys literally drag her body across the curb and throw her into a van. We all saw her legs dangling, her shoe falling off.

She has a real problem. Even if it's just pneumonia, and she really did keep that under her hat, we all saw what happened and we've all, at the very least, been exposed to concrete evidence that secrecy and spin the guiding lights of her campaign strategy.

Fortunatly, the DNC has a chance to present someone better as a last minute swap. Bernie, Biden, Warren or whatever, a too-sick Clinton provides a chance to salvage this election to do something good not only for Party elites but also the whole country. Who are we kidding, we'll probably get Tim Geithner.

Sharon Sanders said...

We are reaching the bottom of the barrel as a nation. I was a Bernie delegate; I'm not a Hillary fan based on her policies, but to set the lying-machine in motion by power of suggestion regarding her current illness by one of the all time great liars, Trump, a man without ethics, without policy, without regard for other human beings, a man who makes fun of the disabled, a man who incites hatred, is beyond belief. The Breitbarts, Fox non-news, Limbaugh's and so many others lack any integrity whatsoever and should be disregarded. And, a campaign for president which lasts from the minute a president is elected until the day of the next election is a disgrace. No issues, no congressional decisions to benefit the people--nothing. But back to my point: when you're on the trail for that long, you shake that many hands, give that many speeches, you're bound to get sick at some point and you can easily get pneumonia under those conditions, which can be short-lived or life-threatening. But the build up to that point from day one by your opponent is absolutely outrageous. No discussion of real policy, real issues, real solutions--just dirtying up your opponent, using every tactic in the book to scare her opponents. Again, I'm not a Hillary supporters but I don't think anyone deserves what the Trump people are doing.

Lisa said...

Interesting read.

Trump's buddy Putin knows a lot about poisoning people. Just sayin'

Joseph Cannon said...

Anon 8:57, your English is very good. What do you do for fast food in St. Petersburg? There is absolutely NO evidence that Hillary's doctor is crooked -- while Trump's doctor sure looks like a liar to me, and to a lot of other people. There were no lozenges in her throat or visual freakouts -- all of that was fake video circulating to the low-IQ types who get their news from Breitbart and Alex Jones.

The evidence that this event was engineered comes down to the simple, indisputable fact of a called shot. A case of penumonia is NORMALLY impossible to predict. That's the point I"m trying to make, small-j joseph.

I've been hinting for some time that Trump seems artificially amped up. Now I'm making the idea clear. This theory accounts for a LOT.

Justin Faulkner said...

Check this out Joseph: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2016/09/12/the-man-who-discovered-cte-thinks-hillary-clinton-may-have-been-poisoned/#comments

Amelie D'bunquerre said...

Best practices for older people would have included the original pneumonia vaccine within the last 10 years and the recent pneumococcal vaccine. It's presumptive that Clinton would have received those, but if not, why not?

I wouldn't rule out PTSD or a kindred response since she was there when the site was still smoldering and its air was toxic and deadly. Some things the body never forgets or gets rid of, and neither does the unconscious.

Joseph Cannon said...

Faulkner -- thank you so much for that link. One comment in particular...

"It's not unprecedented. In 2004, Manafort's client, Viktor Yanukovych, had his opponent in the Ukrainian presidential election poisoned with dioxin eight weeks before election day. His opponent, Yushchenko, was disfigured and weakened and lost the vote."

Joseph Cannon said...

Ameilie, your remarks are wise, but one issue is being ignored: How would the Republicans be able to "call the shot"? In the normal course of events, pneumonia is unpredictable. It's as if they knew what was coming by engineering the false impression that Hillary is sick -- an impression generated by fake video, innuendo, continual smears and pseudo-expert "testimony" from anti-vaxxer pseudo-doctors.

How the hell could they have known what was coming?

Justin Faulkner said...

Most of Hillary's staff also got the "nasty bug" according to People.com. Chemical pneumonia is known to be caused by exposure to poisons, particularly inhalation. http://www.people.com/article/hillary-clinton-staff-sick-pneumonia

Justin Faulkner said...

Take Cadmium dust as one possible example. This is sheer speculation, but the characteristics fit. It has no odor except at high levels well above the PEL (permissible exposure limit), symptoms of inhalation include mild irritation of the upper respiratory tract, cough, 10+ hours or more later: shortness of breath, chest pain, and flu-like symptoms with weakness, fever, headache, chills, sweating and muscular pain. Can cause pneumonia (in this case termed chemical pneumonia). Say it was something like Cadmium, it would be possible to determine where and when it occurred based on when the onset of symptoms began and who was there vs who got the "nasty bug"

Justin Faulkner said...

I encourage everyone to watch "Poisoned," a documentary about Russian assassination (and attempts at such) using poison. Joseph, one bright light of the story with Yuschenko is that the election results were contested and he did get into office. I remember seeing this story in 2004 and honestly never thought it would reach our shores...hopefully it hasn't, but the parallels between Ukraine and the US are becoming stronger every day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB0ib5PDrwM

Michael said...

I've got an even better theory. Hillary's own campaign infected her to provide cover for her to withdraw from the race. Hello Joe Biden!

Anonymous said...

But some kind of illness for a candidate in so so health and of a certain age might be considered a 50:50 or better shot. If I was a Trump advisor I would consider that a good bet. Low risk high reward, and it's not like Trump is invested in the campaign. I'm fact the rumor is he is in it primarily for the PR and to set up the new fox type channel. In partnership with Ailes.

For Trump its great business, either way.

Harry

Anonymous said...

The Dems should have nominated Sanders instead of front loading Clinton in via stupid southern primaries and having their finger on the election scale via Wasserman-Schultz et. al.

Joseph Cannon said...

Anon, I should not have let your stupid comment through, because you're an idiot who can't read the clearly-posted rules for comments. But I'm going to take this opportunity to make a point: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz did exactly NOTHING wrong. Those emails which were supposedly evidence of her perfidy actually demonstrate that NONE of the claims made by the crazy Sanders cultists were validated. You are simply lying, you lying fuck.

Sanders, if nominated, would have lost all 50 states, for reasons I outline here:

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2016/05/50-reasons-why-sanders-would-lose-all.html

I had Sanders pegged early on as a typical Roger Stone job. Stone ALWAYS seeks to split the opposition -- it's his number one trick.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2016/08/mirror-imaging-and-election-fraud.html

I came to that conclusion even before we learned that Tad Devine, Bernie's manager, worked with Stone and Manafort in Ukraine. The Devine connection demonstrated my point with the exactitude of a geometrical proof: There is no rational counter-argument.