LaRouche! LaRouche! LaRouche is on Fire!

When did followers of Lyndon LaRouche decide to reanimate the rotting corpse of their so-called movement and decide to inject themselves so vocally in the Health Care debate?

In some ways it was just a matter of time, I suppose. LaRouche and his devotees are the closest thing in America to an politico-ideological cult and are, therefore, kinda interesting. It's also one of the most odious and repellent. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before more traditional media outlets start to give them a little more attention (even though they deserve none) which could have to effect of legitimizing them in the eyes of the some.

That would be bad.

One of the strangest -- and more frightening -- things I can recall reading is this April Witt piece in the Washington Post on the LaRouche organization. It's long, but a great read. In the same vein (both pieces revolve around the mysterious deaths of LaRoushe followers) is this article by Avi Klein in the Washington Monthly on the LaRoushite's obsession with printed material:

What was really killing LaRouche's enterprise (in addition, of course, to its peculiar philosophies and inability to keep a simple balance sheet) was that its leader was clinging to a dying medium. Enamored by print, he had failed to exploit the Internet. The Web could have solved many of his problems. Compared to printed material, online propaganda is virtually free to produce, and the Internet offers limitless space for disquisitions on esoteric subjects. (If anyone was made for blogging, it was surely Lyndon LaRouche.)

I sincerely hope that the new found attention that LaRoushe et al. is getting -- which is probably the first wide-spread attention the gang has received in decades -- will encourage them to move their operation online where their message has a natural following among disenfranchised conspiracy theorists.

A few years back I was on the East Coast for business and needed to hail a cab. After a block or so the cabbie started giving me, his captive audience, the LaRouche sales pitch. This is the only time I have ever asked a cab driver to pull over so that I could hail another cab. While I did pay the guy what I owed him for the few short blocks of the trip, it's also the only time I've never tipped a cab driver.