SpyTalk

You would have had to dug deep to discover that the woman who prompted the instantly famous retort of Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., that "trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table," was a LaRouche follower.

The Washington Post's Aug. 20 Capitol Briefing blog eventually got around to noting in its story on Frank that "LaRouche PAC has been waging an intensifying campaign against the Obama and congressional health reform proposals since the president's nationally televised news conference of July 22, when he called for an 'an independent group of doctors and medical experts who are empowered to eliminate waste and inefficiency in Medicare.'

"The group has interpreted that statement as ordering euthanasia," Garance Franke-Ruta and Sarah Lovenheim wrote on Aug. 20, with no discernable effect on the rest of the paper's coverage.

Another five days passed before The New York Times took serious notice, albeit in a blog as well.

"No one is more put out by the fact that Mr. LaRouche has received no credit for introducing Nazis into the health care debate than Mr. LaRouche himself," Robert Mackey wrote in The Lede.

"In a news release this month, his political action committee wrote,  'Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouchePAC are the source of the campaign to expose the Obama "health care" policy as modeled on that of Hitler in 1939.'"

Mackey also quoted from a recent report on LaRouche from the Antidefamation League.

"Since May 2009," the ADL said, "LaRouche and his network of supporters, many of which are part of the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC), have focused on health care reform, producing signs, banners, pamphlets and other items that employ Nazi imagery, including the Hitler comparisons."

You'd never know this from the likes of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, who are content to blame Republicans for whipping up what looks like mass hysteria from ordinary folks.

While the onetime Marxist may indeed be a wing nut, moreover, LaRouche has a 40-year history of covert operations aimed at keeping leftwing activists and mainstream Democrats alike off balance, traceable with a few clicks of your mouse.

But where is all the energy (read: money) for such an ambitious, if wacky, campaign coming from?

According to the entry on Neo-Nazism in the Encyclopedia Judaica, LaRouche is a "notorious antisemite" whose "international organization" is today a "major source of ... masked antisemitic theories globally."

Chip Berlet, who assembled the Judaica entry and has been following LaRouche & co. for decades,  says the group has a variety of sources, including "liquidating trust funds of members, and soliciting their families."
 
In 1988, LaRouche was sentenced to prison for 15 years on charges related to his handling of funds.

Berlet, senior analyst for the left-wing Political Research Associates in Cambridge, Mass., also cited these sources:

*Payments from companies using Wang computers for programming through Computron, set up by the LaRouchites (but no longer connected).
 
*Conversion of publication sales and other income into federal matching funds during LaRouche's presidential bids.
 
*Solicitation of "loans" for various publishing and political projects that were never paid back (got Lyndon sent to jail)
 
*Income from the printing business run by long-time member Ken Kronberg (subsidized printing of LaRouche literature). Kronberg, vilified by LaRouche, recently committed suicide,
 
*An industrious "Boiler Room" fundraising operation run out of Leesburg. VA.
 
"There are other sources, but based on interviews with ex members, these are probably the most significant," Berlet told me.

I would have called LaRouche for a comment, but in my past attempts at eliciting facts over the years, I usually ended up getting a lecture on the British Crown's role in the drug trade.