It looks like CPAC needs to find another keynote speaker.
9
I'm so glad this goon is gone. I only hope he's taken his pathetic and delusional street preachers with him. I can't count how many times I had to tell his sad, waist-of-space hustlers that they couldn't violate public safety laws in NYC with their giant, offensive signs and literature tables all over the place, regardless of their free speech right to be on the sidewalk. They had no right to violate public safety laws. What an eyesore and a total waste of time for the fools who spent so much energy and expense thinking this fool had a chance at running for President. The fact that he made it to his 90s proves that only the good die young and the pains-in-the-!@#$%^ live forever. Well, almost forever. So glad his forever is over.
21
My first memory of LaRouchies was in the late 1970s at a forum on the Panama Canal treaty. They were distributing pamphlets accusing Henry Kissinger and Queen Elizabeth of running an international narcotics ring. A teenager at the time, I remembering wondering how anybody could be that nuts. Decades before pizzagate, bizarre people were spreading fact-free conspiracy theories.
31
News this kind and pertinent is rare. Before and around Trump, there was Larouche, who lurched with conspiracies galore, sparing not even the Queen of France, from left to right and into well-deserved obscurity.
9
I almost got him booked on a radio show I worked for once. Would have been wonderful talk radio fun. I do think he has coarsened political debate in the USA by quite a bit. Especially with his whole "Every President past Reagan is Hitler" rhetoric.
His Space Elevator sounded like silly fun though. Also, he pretty much wrote the whole script for people wanting a return to Glass Steagal.
He's an interesting oddity. Should be a fun subject of future documentaries or movie dramas.
7
The obit doesn't mention one of his most notorious efforts, to try twice to enact by initiative in California a law to quarantine all people with AIDS. The actual result was to light a bonfire under the LGBT community to engage effectively in California politics, which led to major advances in state AIDS policies and funding.
20
Wow. Maybe the secret to a long life is running for President as often as possible. Good on him for 96 years!
3
While passing through airports in the 70's and 80's, his animated acolytes did provide a small measure of entertainment to the humdrum travel experience.
10
@Tom x skier
They had a table outside the local subway station here in Brooklyn Heights a few weeks ago. I asked the guy how their campaign against Queen Elizabeth was doing.
11
Another example of someone from the far left who goes over to the far right (or vice versa). There really are no differences between the two extremes.
9
@Louis Well, except that one side wants justice for all and the other wants justice for some. For me that's pretty big.
32
@Justice A perfect nutshell in which you put it: I have heard the similarities oft-noted, but you summarize the key difference. Bobby Kennedy must be smiling, and that concept is the very reason I signed on his campaign, shortly before his 50 years old unsolved murder: "Government is needed wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress."
Or as Jim Hightower's "pappy" put it: "Everyone does better when everyone does better."
Such clear common sense wisdom rarely careens at us from the far right, if ever, but has been steadily plodding toward us from its opposites on the left.
Chesterton "weighed" in on some of this sameness with pith:
"There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses."
"The only difference between a Socialist state and a Capitalist state is whether power is concentrated in a few private or a few bureaucratic hands."
Well yes, but perhaps the most distinct difference between the two was brought out, memorably, by Reinhold Niebuhr: "It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made the servant of an ethic of progressive justice, and not turned into a bastion of conservatism, especially one which defends unjust privileges."
And to my mind, never the twain shall meet.
Therein lies our dilemma. As you say, a "pretty big" divide.
11