(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 8/20/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

Alphabet Soup

I was a political appointee of the President, but before and after that I spent time in the regular career civil service.

So when I was appointed by Reagan to the Office of Personnel Management(OPM), another Big Presidential Appointee pulled out the organization chart and showed me how they had come in and reorganized OPM.

I have a reputation for laughing in all the wrong places, but in this case I managed to keep a perfectly straight face.

You see, every time a new administration comes in the professional civil service wants to keep them from rocking the boat. The standard way of keeping them occupied was something we called “playing alphabet soup.”

Every new cabinet secretary is going to Clean Up the Mess in Washington by making everything logical and orderly. So he takes the Office of Career Development (OCD) out of the Directorate of Training (DOT) and moves it to the Human Resources Development Unit (HRU).

Every administration appointee works on shuffling this alphabet soup around far into the night. By the time he has reorganized everything, the dangerous period when the new administration might actually do something has passed, and everybody is settled into Business As Usual (BAU).

It makes not the slightest difference who is in what letters of the organizational alphabet soup. The same high-level career people will be doing the same thing they have been doing for the past twenty years.

This is all well and good, except that people get hung up in trying to follow all the movements of the letters, and respectable conservatives debate the merits of this arrangement vs. that arrangement and argue with liberals over the most minute details of having this agency under that agency and so on, and forget the main point – that the same people are doing the same thing they have always done, and wrecking the country. This last detail seems to escape the notice of almost everyone who is allowed to appear in the media to tell us what is going on.

Getting caught up in following the shuffling is about as useful as playing the “shell game” with one of those con-men on a city bus. And a whole lot more disastrous for the country as a whole.

The reason we are expending the effort to bring you WOL, a radio program, and my book, is that someone needs to call attention to that forgotten detail, the one that everyone seems to have overlooked while following the shuffling.

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Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 8/13/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

The Emperor’s Clothing Store

Does anybody remember how that old story, The Emperor’s New Clothes ended?

A little boy said, “But he doesn’t have any clothes on.”

At that point, everybody was shamed. They had been told that if they did not see the New Clothes, it just showed they were not Worthy. When a little boy said what they could all see, they were shamed to realize they had been made fools of.

But the Professional Market Analysts and the Modern Artists are ALWAYS being exposed. As I keep pointing out on my radio show the Wall Street Journal regularly reports scientific studies that demonstrate that monkeys throwing darts do just as well as professional market analysts.

The Andy Warhol who cracks a commode and sells it for a million dollars is a fraud everybody knows about, but he is not the only person who gets the million. The Professional Art Critics and Art Professors live like kings, too.

And nobody notices.

Nothing professors require us to believe in ever works. But nobody minds. The next time they raise tuition everybody will complain, again, that tuition is being raised too much.

Our professor-priesthood, they say, is asking for too much more pay.

Nobody ever points out that there is no reason to pay them at all.

The end of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” ought to be different.

The kid said, “He doesn’t have any clothes on.”

“The people said, ‘We can all see that. When is the Emperor going to raise our taxes and order an even BETTER set of clothes that don’t exist?'”

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Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 8/6/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

The title of my program this week on Internet Radio is “What is Truth?” linked at:

Townhall Webcast of The Untrained Eye

The title “What is Truth” sounds abstract, but it is intensely practical. The program is not about what the truth is, but how to tell that something is NOT the truth.

If you want to know what the truth IS, you go to a scientist or a prophet.

But if you want an expert on how to tell what is NOT true, you go to a professional in politics.

And here I am.

No one would last a day on Capitol Hill or in any other responsible position if he did not keep firmly in mind what is NOT truth. If a person has a REASON to say something, he is almost certainly deviating from the facts.

In other words, if you are on Capitol Hill and you assume a lobbyist is telling the strict truth, you had better find another line of work.

Fast.

But this is not just true in politics. If someone is trying to sell you something you do not assume he is being 100% straight with you. The minute you know what he is after is the minute you stop treating him as an objective observer and a reference.

But in some areas of life, we forget this.

If someone says you should not believe something because it makes you a Nazi, he is not saying it is the truth. In fact, the minute someone says you should not say something because of its IMPLICATIONS, he is telling you he is perfectly willing to lie about it.

For the public good, of course.

For your own good, of course.

But the bottom line is that he is justifying a lie.

When someone says that questioning the Holocaust is evil because it offends people or because it has bad implications he is saying the present version of the Holocaust must be believed whether it is true or not.

When someone says you must not believe that white gentiles have a right to survive as a group because believing that makes you a Nazi and offends people, he is also saying that you must believe it whether it is true or not.

He is saying you should lie about it.

You have to use he same logic in politics that you use when you buy a house or a car. Remember that taxes cost you a lot more than your house and your car put together. When someone says you should believe in government programs because they MEAN well, not because they WORK, he is selling you a bill of goods that makes your new car look cheap.

Always remember this:

When someone has a reason for saying something, he is not saying it because it is true.

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Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 7/30/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

Benjamin Franklin
c/o Time Warp Mail Service

Dear Mr. Franklin,

You are facing extremely serious legal problems.

1) Your invention of bifocal lens.

You have no qualifications whatsoever in the fields of optometry or ophthalmology. You are ordered to cease and desist from the use or discussion of this product.

Lawsuits have been lodged against you by people whose bifocals have broken and gashed their skins. Others say that they confuse the eyes and cause double vision.

2) Your invention of the stove

Your Franklin Stove has caused serious injury to a very large number of people. Children playing have bumped into it and been burned by it. You have no Federally-approve set of directions for its use, so you are personally responsible for every accident that occurs in using your product.

3) Your discovery of the Gulf Stream

As with optometry in the case of your invention of bifocals, you are practicing meteorology with no degree or other qualifications in the subject.

While no one has yet been able to formulate an actual lawsuit against you on this subject, you have made a laughing-stock of yourself by going outside the field of printing, where you do have some actual credentials.

You are in deep trouble in other areas.

Your comments about Quakers, Indians and other minority groups were definitely Hate Speech.

You are charged with manslaughter and armed robbery in aiding and abetting in the robbery of America from the Native Americans.

Other charges are pending.

Yours Indignantly,

The Association of Experts, Lawyers, Professors and Other Authorities in the Year 2005

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Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 7/23/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

In the last Insider Letter I explained what real power was and how one plays the game.

It is a very private game.

As I said, one who uses the real thing is not that interested in credit. In fact, it is a straight tradeoff. The more power people know you have the less effective you are.

The president of the United States has very little real power. To get elected and reelected he must keep his options very limited. What the people you read about fight for is the title.

When I first went to Capitol Hill, my boss told me, “Bob, I spend all my time talking to people and taking care of problems and meeting deadlines and reading. I have no time to THINK.”

Then he said, “I want you to THINK for me.”

You may say he was handing power over to me, but that’s not true. If John Ashbrook had said, “You just do the thinking and I’ll do whatever you want done,” that would have given ME a lot of power over him.

But he did not tell me to do my own thinking for me any more than he asked someone he was dictating a letter to write his letter for him. I was hired to do HIS thinking for him. That is a matter of loyalty, which a senior staffer has to have in large amounts.

Many times what I wanted was not what John Ashbrook wanted. I was paid to think of exactly what John Ashbrook would like to say if he had the time to think of it and I was paid to get what John Ashbrook wanted.

Since what John Ashbrook wanted and what I wanted were almost always the same thing, this gave me a lot of power to do what I wanted to do. But I never even shaded anything I did for him my way.

A couple of times I put my job on the line by saying I simply could not go along with something. He would have another staffer do it. In one case I think my refusal was what decided him on an issue.

But it was all in the open.

More than once he had to take my word for something and go for it without knowing exactly why, as when we saved the Hubble Telescope. But it was always something he would have wanted if he had had the time to think it over and which he was later grateful to me.

Real power is, as I said, a very private business. Often when I tell someone something I am not interested in their agreeing with me. What I am telling them is a means by which I can judge them.

The best example is what I tell them about John Ashbrook’s death. John died in April of 1982. For fourteen years the entire civil rights establishment had been fighting to get Martin Luther King’s birthday declared a national holiday. John had stood in the way.

Two months after John died they got their national holiday.

There are two Houses of Congress. John was one of 435 members of one of them.

A minority member.

Yet he stopped the whole civil rights establishment from getting its way and they got it two months after he died.

I mention this and watch the reaction of the person I am talking to.

They NEVER get it.

They want to talk about presidential primaries and third parties, where they think the real power is. No one has ever even asked me HOW a lone congressman was able to stop the whole civil rights establishment cold.

I have said that if you want exciting financial advice, you just need to go to a local bar, find a guy who can’t afford to buy his own drink, and he will give you lecture on how money should be invested and a sure-fire way to make real money. The guy who has never had money knows all about it.

The guy who has never exercised any power can give you endless advice on it. In fact, he is even more clueless about power than the one you buy the drink for is about money.

At least the moocher in the bar knows where real money IS.

People who lecture you about real power don’t even know where power is.

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Bob

Reprinted to Blog from email list of 7/16/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin said that one way he got things done was by giving credit to others for things he had come up with, even if he had done the work.

I exercised real power by dong the same thing. I would 1) come up with an idea, 2) find someone who could benefit by pushing it through.

In my case this was not as self-sacrificing as Franklin was because I did very little of the work. Richard Viguerie said in my anthology, The New Right Papers, that the New Right, which had so much to do with electing Reagan, began with a piece of legislation I got started.

But he had no idea that I got it started. The Internal Revenue Service had declared that any private school that wanted to keep its tax exempt status would have to meet racial quotas. Conservatives in general were afraid of being accused of racism, so they let it go ahead.

I contacted the long list of associations I had contact with from my activism and got some solid support. I then went to the Judiciary Committee, where my boss had staff, and talked to one of the newer staff members there who wanted to make a name for himself. I explained how it could be stopped and the benefits in it for him.

We beat it four to one on the House Floor, and after I handed it over to him, I did very little work on it. He and my boss got credit, I got it what I wanted.

I exercised power.

The problem with this method is that I often regretted what I started. Once it gets out of your hands it gets out of your control.

For example, I started what led to the Paperwork Reduction Act. I wrote an amendment to the bill establishing the Department of Education that every regulation had to declare how much extra paperwork it involved.

It didn’t pass, but Senator Hatch put three of the amendments I had come up with as excellent additions to the law, and this was one of them.

This became the Paperwork Reduction Act, but I have a feeling that in the end it just added to the paperwork.

Real power means real regrets.

The greatest power I exercise is the one I will still be exercising in my grave. It is the power I have through my radio program and whitakeronline and my blog. I work out EXACTLY what is wrong with what the other side is doing, and what should be done. The fact that present racial policy is simple, straight genocide is obvious now, but it took me years to get it across.

It is hard for anyone else to understand how I take credit for these things. Every idea I come up with can be found MENTIONED in something from many years ago. But you have to look for it.

It was mentioned and it was missed. I boil it down, I put it front and center, and I make it potentially useful in real political debate. Then I plant it, over and over. Then I make it become so obvious that everybody thinks they’ve always been saying it. That is exactly what I am working for.

If you do that work, someone is going to find it useful. I sit and watch these points become commonplace and very, very effective.

Just as Viguerie did not know that the idea he was talking about first came from me, the others things I do are not seen as coming from me. I make it good enough for people to run with it. I have exercised a staggering amount of power this way, and that is what I am after.

I was a bit surprised when William Rusher actually gave me credit in one of his books for the concept that Federal courts are the bulwark of each out-of-date establishment. It felt odd for someone to know that I had come up with it.

I appreciate his seeing it, but I get more satisfaction out of the power I exercise that no one but me knows that I have. By now I’m used to that and have learned to like the secrecy of it.

But getting credit is very different from exercising power.

And I like power.

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Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 7/9/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

In 1871 France was crushed and humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War. Germany took the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which were German-speaking areas France had conquered centuries earlier.

In Paris there was a government museum with a statue representing each of the provinces of France. The French did not take out the statues representing Alsace and Lorraine in 1871 when they ceded them to Germany. They just covered them over with sheets.

France had not forgotten.

In 1919 when France was part of the coalition that had defeated Germany in World War I, it took back Alsace and Lorraine. Amidst wild celebrations, the sheets were taken off of the statues of Alsace and Lorraine.

No one blamed France for keeping those sheets on and never forgetting it felt that those provinces were part of France. Everybody thought it was great and showed patriotism and determination.

If France had not gotten those provinces back, the statues would still be there today almost a century and a half later.

When America is dealing with the Arabs, we always want them to worry about terrorism and so forth. We want them to forget that we helped take Palestine from Arabs who had lived there for at least two millennia and given Palestine to outsiders who had no connection to that land at all except our version of the Bible.

When Germany took Alsace they did not drive the Alsatians out. We helped drive the Arabs off their own land.

Arab spokesmen are always bringing that up and our reply is, “Forget it. That’s all in the past.”

It is not in the past and it will never be in the past for a patriotic Arab.

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Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 7/2/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

This week’s WOL is about the arrest of British National Party leaders in Britain. They could not have been arrested in America.

I know the men that were arrested. All this is explained in this week’s WOL.

Right now, every European leader feels it is his duty to attack the United States because we have a death penalty. They refuse to send even people who have committed cold-blooded murder back to the United States for punishment.

But there is one gigantic difference. We may complain about their refusing to extradite criminals, but we never criticize their own abuses of the most basic rights.

One reason the political left has been so successful is because it recognizes no borders. When the local governments moved against Communists in Argentina or in Nicaragua, the entire American left began making movies about it, defending their fellow leftists.

So when Nick Griffin and John Tyndall are arrested for “inciting to violence” under Britain’s draconian anti-hate laws — though no one can name any violence they incited — the American right stays totally silent.

I look at far right-wing sites in America, and all I see is that they are still trying to sell the same old books by dead men they have been trying to sell for fifty years. On the respectable right, they do what respectable conservatives get paid for doing, ignoring the whole thing.

And the rest? They are bitching about Iraq and sending each other e-mails about how Bush is not a nice man.

You can’t push a string. The whole right is limp and lives in the past or is obsessed with the latest news.

Everything important goes on right under their noses and they don’t notice it at all.

I am getting frantic e-mails about how France and the Netherlands rejected the new European Constitution. But it never occurs to any of them that we might harness the power of Europeans who are challenging the powers that be.

If the rejection of the European Constitution is important, why aren’t we in on it?

Because we are busy pushing books by dead men and bitching about Bush.

If Europe is worth telling me about, it is worth thinking about.

If Europe’s rejection of the European Constitution is worth frantic e-mails, then it is worth our getting in on this international rebellion against our common enemies.

But if you want to get in on it, you have to START somewhere. A great way to start would be to show a little interest in the tyranny of the European Thought Police.

Let’s take a little time off from spreading the astonishing word that Bush is not a nice man and trying to sell old books by dead people. Let’s spend a little time encouraging the BNP leaders who are under assault. Let’s take a few minutes out from telling each other how bad Bush is to send some outraged letters to the British Embassy and some letters of support to the BNP.

What I am describing is happening right now. You will have another Media Event to get obsessed with next week.

And the dead guys who wrote all those books can wait.

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Bob