B0bot owns up – sorta

Voted “best of” with almost 100 recs in Bobotland there’s a thread entitled

Well, I expected change. Stupid me.

There’s the admission:

Boy was I fucking stupid. I own that – I let my emotions get the best of me. You can go search my post history and find big posts expressing this vision and my hopes for what Obama would be ale to do as far as changing the political landscape of America is concerned. Wrong. Emotion-based not facts based. Wrong despite numerous attempts to explain – with factual information – why I was wrong.

There’s even a mild list of  missed cues that should have got his attention

When Obama lied about NAFTA and got caught talking to the Canadians about how his campaign rhetoric was just for show and that the pro-business pragmatists needn’t worry about any serious reform, my heart told me that I had just seen a window into the reality of how an Obama administration would actually operate….. but I chose to ignore it. Letting the emotion of hope drive me.

Wow! So they were actually perceiving the reality when they pretended not to. Good to know.

Of course, there’s still the cop-out

Cointelpro much? (Infiltrating dissenting groups)

For those of you who are to young to know, Cointelpro was a Nixon operation where anti-war activists were infiltrated by FBI agents – as provocareurs

Now in the age of the internet we have the modern version

Obama staffer wants ‘cognitive infiltration’ of 9/11 conspiracy groups

The  wonderful Cass Sunstein, Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has some ideas

e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.

Of course, referring to “911 conspiracy theorists” it tries to make it palatable to those who are not into that.

But let’s remember the Bush era – everything was a conspiracy until it was demonsrated false – even after:

- Iraq doesn’t have WMD

- there’s no connection between Iraq and 9.11

- Niger doesn’t have uranium – that one was a “conspiracy” that went bad – had to be apologized out of the SOTU as “the 16 words”

To stop the truth from coming to the light, as theragblog correctly concludes

what Sunstein is proposing is government infiltration of groups opposing prevailing policy. Palestinian Liberation? 9/11 Truth? Anti-nuclear power? Stop the wars? End the Fed? Support Nader? Eat the Rich?

Obviously, some of the B0bots are ecstatic

NJmaverick (1000+ posts)

10. OMG!!!!

WHAT A BRILLIANT WAY TO MESS WITH THE TIN FOIL HAT BRIGADE!

Indeed. Brilliant Coming from a poster who seems to be doing just that anyway.

Update

Glen Greenwald writes about it

Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves.  His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise.

and

So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government ”ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.”  I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.”  That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment.  Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.

…

Tabloids – the Earthquake edition

Now that the images from Haiti

reached us

the tragedy of it finally sunk in

and overwhelmed

everything else

.