ELIZABETH SUPERFLY THE SECOND:

LaRouche sets frightening example in campaign (Boris Volodarsky, January 15, 2004, Yale Daily News)

As Jeff Pearlman writing for Newsday put it Lyndon LaRouche is to presidential elections "what fungus is to the damp side of a rock." LaRouche ran in every single presidential election since 1976. He even ran from jail in 1992 where he was held on fraud charges. Those charges were, incidentally, the reason for Dean's comment during the Black Caucus Debate. After initially running as a third party candidate he became a Democrat and contested Democratic primaries since 1980. Although always unsuccessful, LaRouche was never entirely irrelevant and maintained his pockets of support. In 2000 for example he garnered 22 percent in the Democratic primary in Arkansas. Still, despite this sizable support, the Democratic Party and the establishment in general treats his candidacy as that of a ghost. He is never invited to debates, the media generally ignores him, the polling agencies refuse to include his name, and the Democratic Party fights to the tooth to keep him off the ballot.

Once you learn about LaRouche's views it becomes obvious why the Democratic Party has isolated LaRouche. Political Research Associates compiled a collection of LaRouche's past quotes and here is the picture that emerges: According to this self-described leading economist of the twentieth century, British monarchy secretly runs the world. Even the Nazi Germany was designed and shaped from London. London not only runs drug cartels but also imposes various methods of psychological control like Jazz and the Beatles. It also successfully uses such agents as Jews and the Episcopal Church to run its operations. Once he comes to power LaRouche promises to eliminate the principal London's agency in the United States: "the Nazi Jewish lobby." Jews in general and Zionism in particular have a special place in LaRouche's ideology. He refers to the latter as "the state of collective psychosis." [...]

According to the Center for Responsible Politics in his current bid for the White House alone LaRouche raised over $5.5 million in small donations. According to the Federal Election Commission as late as last April his fundraising figures surpassed those of Lieberman, Dean and Graham. According to the last report from three months ago he still has more money than Kucinich, Mosley-Braun and Sharpton combined, all three of them politicians with nationwide standing.

He's run a very effective campaign here, far better than most of his rivals. But these people are truly nuts. In the NJ Democratic gubernatorial primaries in 1985 there was a LaRouche candidate. The candidate I was working for and the president of the State Senate kept laughing at his answers and it looked ungovernorlike, so they were under strict orders from their respective campaigns to knock it off. They took to just passing notes to each other and smirking.

Finally, in the last debate before the primary, closing statements, last chance to reach the voters, the guy takes out a poem by Schiller and reads it aloud for two minutes. The moderator, dumbfounded, had to interrupt and apologetically tell him he'd run out of time. He folded up the poem and said: "That's okay....I think everyone got the message."

Well, they did if the message was that LaRouchies are lunatics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2004 6:50 PM