Max Blumenthal at the 9-12 rally in DC

Just thought I’d pass this amazing video along.

Some of the interviews are unfair “gotcha” material, but it’s great to see people get confused when he asked them why they’re so opposed to health care reform and what exactly will happen when the “Obama revolution” goes down. These people really should stop and ask themselves what they’re getting so paranoid about.

16 thoughts on “Max Blumenthal at the 9-12 rally in DC”

  1. People have been right to point out that the dramatically higher life expectancy in Japan shouldn’t be attributed to health services as diet, etc. is so different but I was quite surprised to read today that the Canadian life expectancy is nearly 3 years longer than American and infant mortality around 15% lower. Canadians are just as porky as Americans, the percentage of foreign born citizens is higher, etc. I think that America needs a home grown consensus but it is time for the crazies to let the adults get together and have that debate.

  2. Max Blumenthal was on Fresh Air the other day speaking about his new book, and how the right wing side of the Republican Party is back in the saddle again.

    Very interesting talk, especially the part when he tells how he infiltrated the church in Wasilla that Sarah Palin used to attend. He stumbled in when everyone was speaking in tongues, and so he played along by rattling off the names of the Jackson children.

  3. I would imagine the “Dipers” guy was a gotcha, but good. I wouldn’t have ended it then though. Overall I was not impressed however – it could have been far funnier. There was not enough subtle probing into what people really thought. Like the woman who wanted the government right out of her life- I would ask her if she wanted the army either disbanded or not to protect her – perhaps private armies? And those damn roads, most annoying. Or the woman who figured if she got sick her rellies would take care of her – lots to get into there too. But what I never get about the “9-11 conspiracy” people is, if it really was engineered by Bush to take out Saddam, why were so many of the hijackers Saudis? Why not make the whole thing Saddam from the start?

  4. So goes the dialectic. What a waste when one of the best J-blogs wastes pixels on partisan US politics, as if there weren’t a gazillion other blogs already doing the same.

    But okay, as long as the 9-11 conspiracy theory has been brought up, I’d say that the “strong” version, that the US gov’t orchestrated the whole thing, is waaaay outside the realm of possibility. The “soft” version, that the US gov’t allowed the attacks to happen as a raison d’etre for vastly expanding its military operations while simultaneously vastly circumscribing individual freedoms – well, it’s not impossible. Certainly the Bush administration didn’t “let a good crisis go to waste,” and that Bush, a religious rightist, may well have been sympathetic to the Saudis, the Muslim world’s quintessential religious rightists, as noted in Michael Moore’s film.

  5. Don’t forget the cardinal rule of government: Never ascribe to intelligence what can be ascribed to incompetance.

    MF isn’t really a J-Blog per se, mind you. It does cover other topics.

  6. I thought the dipers guy was kind of a cheap shot. I mean, maybe he just thinks immigrants should be know English at least as well as he does. And in general if those people weren’t at a political rally I’d think it was bad form to pick on them. I feel like Max is berating my elderly relatives for saying racist stuff.

    One interesting comment from one of the protesters was “before FDR people saved up.” Yeah, and their lives sucked. It’s just so obvious that programs like social security, unemployment insurance and Medicare have vastly improved standards of living. It is as if they are railing against clean running water.

    As someone mentioned, I do occasionally bring up other topics because I am just that much of a broad-minded Renaissance Man. Just about every Japan-related post is tagged “Japan” so you could try following that link. If we ever actually redesign the site maybe we’ll even have a “Japan posts only” RSS feed.

  7. Adamu,

    Keep in mind that the Dipers guy was holding a sign protesting the actions of the government, so he’s in a forum for discussion. Max nevers ‘ranks’ on the man explicitly, but rather decides to point out the contradictions in his statement by revealing to the viewer the man’s sign *after* we hear his earful on how immigrants should “learn English” before they become citizens. I thought it was clever.

    I think pointing out the contradictions is the point of almost all the encounters on that video. I’ll admit that there is an agreed level of smugness between Max and the intended viewers of the video (and expected consumers of his new book), but he is in the end doing nothing more insidious than crafty editing to expose the most ignorant behavior in the batch of folks he talked to.

  8. You know if you think about it, Bush and Obama are only marginally different. To not acknowledge this is to be pretty naive, I think. That is there are certain parameters and paradigms of thinking that just aren’t going to get transcended in mainstream politics because their taboo.

    So I mean, where were these people when George Bush was president? Where were these people when George Bush was conducting overseas wars and bailing out big banks?

    They were watching Glen Beck and thinking it was all patriotic and okay, I suppose.

    That’s the sad thing here. In some way or another, I think these people are just tools of a sort. They *justify* the idea that we should dismiss the opposition as nuts and just follow the mainstream.

    Putting on my blinkers and ear plugs and taping my mouth shut. Thank you Max Blumenthal.

  9. Adamu: “One interesting comment from one of the protesters was “before FDR people saved up.” Yeah, and their lives sucked. It’s just so obvious that programs like social security, unemployment insurance and Medicare have vastly improved standards of living. It is as if they are railing against clean running water.”

    One has to wonder what specifically it is you think has improved, and then specifically how it can be attributed to these programs. Then, one has to wonder why it is you propose to juxtapose your views against people like those in the video as opposed to people who actually have reasonable arguments against such programs.

    If I might be so bold one place you might want to choose to reflect on your views might be here:
    http://www.auburn.edu/~garriro/macro.htm

    By the way, I generally drink bottled water. You don’t?

  10. Well the fact of the matter is that the official conspiracy theory has too many holes.

    The actual physical phenomena of that tragic day, and particularly the collapse of the third skyscraper, WTC7, clearly suggest explosive demolitions:

    – The two towers didn’t simply collapse, they were pulverized into dust
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nc5_5IJek8

    – The two towers, and also WTC7, came down at near free-fall speed even though they were descending into the path of maximum resistance (conservation of momentum?)

    – Explosives were found in the WTC dust
    http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM

    (Note that this is a statement of fact as per peer-reviewed published scientific paper in a reputable scientific journal; peer-reviewed science has been the highest level of argumentation since Newton’s days)

    – NIST’s models haven’t been peer-reviewed by anyone.
    Their physical models simply failed to provide the explanation they were after, as they simply wouldn’t collapse.
    So they put everything in their computer models, assumed zero thermal conductivity, and reached whatever conclusions they needed to reach in the first place.
    But this is not science.

    – Combine all the above with essential bits of historical knowledge, for example Operation Northwoods, and a very strong hypothesis starts to form

    In general, note in this debate which side is trying to have informed, fact-based discussions, and which side is either dismissive or subversive.

  11. The petulant, duplicitous behavior of the the likes of Max Blumenthal, Arianna Huffington, DailyKos, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and numerous other “gatekeepers of the so-called left” is a truly bizarre position, way beyond the extraordinary, reaching into the realms of the “Outer Limits”, or the “Twilight Zone”. By their cowardly (and anti-American) position of blanket censorship of expression and analysis regarding the elements of 9/11 that fail to conform to their heads-in-the-sand opinions, they have placed themselves in a logically untenable place. On the one hand, they keep bleating about the serial lies, abuses, the multitude of illegal/unconstitutional acts other appallingnesses carried out by the Bush Administration (which is fair enough, they happened)… but whenever 9/11 rears its ugly head, first they close ranks and pigeonhole the NeoCons in the “paragons of honesty” checkbox, and then attack people asking questions as “conspircay theorists”. This is not only 6th grade level of “thinking”, but borders on the insane. The “left gatekeeper” crew are arguably the NeoCons’ greatest frends, in that they form an impenetrable wall between the likely perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and a bunch of prison cells on Death Row.

    Perhaps, in the absence of rationality on the part of these”gatekeepers”, one is tempted to manufacture excuses in order to explain why they are doing this; one prime motivation of this kind of ostrich behavior is arguably to maintain an artificial and arbitrary comfort zone. For example, a racist possibilty crops up: we here in the mainstream US, view our white western squeaky-clean Judaeo-Christian culture as morally and ethically superior to those of “brown-skinned Arab/Muslim” sorts, and “we” are fundamentally incapable of committing such a dastardly act, whereas “they” could, (regarding the killing of 3000 people). To doubt this viewpoint obviously causes some to blow fuses, despite the long track record by Western governments (in particular the US and UK) for plannng and/or conducting false flag type events, to further “difficult to sell” agendas, especially including warfare.

    Furthermore, to conduct a proper, no-holds barred investigation of the 9/11 attacks, with full subpoena power, would undoubtedly dilute (or perhaps even eliminate) Arab/Muslim involvement, by the inclusion of others.To the cowardly gatekeepers and the corporate media whores and weasels, that is the absolute no-no area, to the extent that people will stand there with their fingers in their ears (like 4 year olds) screaming SHUT UP!!! I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT… or they will censor and ban others for bringing up the subject.

    It is quite the eye-opener to quote Chomsky himself on this very issue: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

    A lie can get half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on.

  12. ”they close ranks and pigeonhole the NeoCons in the “paragons of honesty” checkbox”

    I prefer the “too dumb to have pulled it off” checkbox.

Comments are closed.