see below re Jerry Lembcke
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/fromeditor25.html
One member of the audience, a Steamshovel fan of long standing, effectively challenged Jerry Lembcke, a panelist who wrote the book CNN's Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam's Last Great Myth, a well done examination of media distortion. While the book has a lot to recommend it, its author often makes his points by receding into the vagaries of "institutional analysis", the facts-avoiding tactic advocated by Noam Chomsky.
To describe parapolitical research, Lembcke uses terms like "conspiracism", a word that Fletcher Prouty pointed out long agocontains the subtle smear of "racism" within it. Lembcke also labeled Prouty "right wing", as he did people like Michael Ruppert and Jeff Rense. To my great pleasure, the Steamshovel reader had my co-panelist trace this line of reasoning to the absurd point where he actually declared Peter Dale Scott "right wing" as well.
...The search for "credibility" also haunts the opinion industry, left and right. Jerry Lembcke defined respected conspiracy writers as "right wing" - not just people whom he felt had it wrong - because it gave him more credibility as a critic coming from the left. Stauber had little to say about conspiracy as a broadstroke concept, even though his work studies it in detail, because that would tarnish its credibility.
>From: Stephen E Philion <philion at hawaii.edu>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: [lbo-talk] What does Amy Goodman see in Thomas Moorer?
>Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:16:53 -0600
>
>Today's Democracy Now was really wierd, featuring Thomas Moorer, a
>former chief of staffer for Johnson and Nixon, later a John Bircher far
>right wing conspiracy theorist...Today's topic was the USS Liberty,
>with an "independent commission" headed by Moorer calling for an
>investigation by congress into the incident...
>http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/27/1625213
>
>She had him on back when when April Oliver was spinning her Tailwind
>Tale...
>Anyone read Jerry Lembcke's recent book unravelling the rightwing
>conspiracy theorising that went into the Tailwind Tale presented by
>Oliver, Moorer, and Singlaub on CNN in 1998? It's an excellent book
>cautioning against leftists embracing rightwing conspiracy theorists
>and their nativist-militaristic narratives...
>
>
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