Who’s afraid of Gordon Duff?
Not me.
But maybe I should be.
Like Otto, Kevin Cline’s G. Gordon Liddy-based character in A Fish Called Wanda, Gordon has a high opinion of his own fighting skills, an even higher opinion of his own intelligence, and is the kind of guy you’d suspect of having killed people for the CIA.
So all you folks impugning him, listen up: Gordon says he knows how to turn people upside down and shake things out of them. Better apologize while you’re still right-side-up.
Also, like Otto, Gordon is a serious “humor menace” – a real threat to make you die laughing.
But unlike Otto, Gordon may actually be as smart as he thinks he is. And unlike Otto, Gordon has a highly developed sense of irony; the hilarity he evokes is purely intentional.
Though he doesn’t strike me as particularly terrifying, Gordon seems to have scared the bejeezus out of somebody – presumably somebody in the Netanyahu-Romney-neocon-ziomafia camp. That somebody is apparently worried that Gordon’s boasts about taking down the Netanyahu-Romney campaign might hold a grain of truth…and that his plans to keep rolling back the neocons during the next four years constitute an actionable threat.
“Mr. Somebody” obviously wants to reduce Gordon’s level of info-war efficacy. So they took their best shot at him, rolling out a sound-bite in which he says that 40% of what he writes isn’t true and blasting it around the internet.
The clip is a perfect example not of mendacity, but of Gordon’s “loose cannon” style of humorous hyperbole.
I should know; I’m an expert at getting my own hyperbole misconstrued – by US Marshals, for example.
If we untie the Gordian-knotty hyperbolese, Mr. Duff is telling us: “Don’t just accept what I say, or what anyone else says. I can’t tell the whole, literal truth about everything I know, because various bad things would happen if I did.”
And: “I say this kind of thing because I need to come across as a loose cannon, otherwise I couldn’t do what I do and stay alive.”
Does this make me mistrust him?
Not really.
The people I really worry about are the ones who claim to be telling “nothing but the truth” but actually lie and distort as they undermine the info-war for truth.
In other words, I’ll take a Cretan liar over a Zionist “truther.”
I have never believed that everything Gordon (or any other political commentator) writes and says is 100% factually correct. Most of Gordon’s stuff is possible, plausible, or likely; and some of it isn’t; but since it’s based on Gordon’s confidential sources, it isn’t subject to verification. And like just about everybody else, Gordon has personal agendas – alongside his refreshing and courageous concern (unusual in a well-connected player) for honor, justice and – believe it or not – truth.
One thing I can tell you, is that when Gordon claims to know big name “players,” he regularly proves (to me at least) that he’s telling the truth, by giving me their private emails and phone numbers. When I call them, they answer. And they know and respect Gordon. So whether or not he’s as well-connected as he says he is – which would mean he has just about everybody except God on speed dial – Gordon clearly knows a whole lot of influential people.
He’s undoubtedly right up there with Bob Bowman as the best-connected out-of-the-closet 9/11 truther.
Does he knowingly put out false information, ever? Probably – though “40%” seems an exaggeration.
Gordon Duff flays Bibi "Wile E. Coyote" Netanyahu on Press TV
As I see it, Gordon is pioneering a new style of gonzo journalism – sort of Wayne Madsen meets Hunter S. Thompson, spiced with a dash of gossipy Herb Caen. Like Madsen, Gordon puts out a lot of incendiary stuff from intelligence community sources. And like Madsen, or Seymour Hersh for that matter, it’s “buyer beware” – this kind of information is only as good as its sources, sometimes not even that. And we, the audience, are rarely in a position to vet sources whose lives would be forfeit if they leaked in a more mainstream-credible way.
Some folks can’t deal with that paradigm. They angrily reject all information that can’t be reliably and transparently sourced.
Unfortunately, in the Orwellian world we live in, most of what can be reliably and transparently sourced is pure, 100% bullshit. The truth is classified – or, worse, protected by extra-governmental, draconian secrecy oaths.
So if Gordon is only putting out 40% BS, that puts him 60% ahead of the New York Times.
And what does “sourced” mean, anyway? It means you put a little footnote next to your “fact.” The footnote leads to an index entry – a book or article or statement by so-and-so. Whether so-and-so was telling the truth, whether his sources were telling the truth, whether anybody knows the real, whole truth and is able to tell it…no “works cited” list, however copious, can guarantee such things, as readers of Borges and the even more fantastic 9/11 Commission Report know only too well.
To get a reasonably accurate picture of the truth, you have to bring together a whole lot of data, evaluate the whole of it with discernment, and connect the dots.
Gordon Duff does this, often brilliantly.
I don’t agree with Gordon on many foundational issues, and on some secondary ones.
Every time I talk to him on the phone, he claims to be eating pork products. He seems to relish pork chops even more enthusiastically than the Hebrew-speaking dude who played “Mohamed Atta” in the 9/11 made-for-TV spectacular.
Not exactly the guy I’d invite over to my mosque to give a khutbah.
I’m not going to suspend judgment and believe everything he tells me.
But I’m going to listen. He’s fun, occasionally hilarious, and more often than not, right on the money.
So the joke is on anyone who takes Gordon’s “40% BS” BS literally and discounts his work.
The punchline, in my humble opinion, is that there is more truth in what Gordon says than even he wants you to to think.
And that is a hilarious – and terrifying – thought.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar