Ron Paul
Conspiracy Afoot? Did Ron Paul Really Win the Maine Caucus?
My boyfriend Justin’s parents are obsessed with conspiracy theories — so much so that after he returns from an extended visit with them, or even after he gets off a long phone call with his mother (in particular), I need to talk Justin down off all sorts of ledges they egg him onto with wild theories they have of various entities plotting against our country (or them personally).
Living in Arkansas, a lot of their obsessions involve Hillary Clinton, whom they despise (because they swear she’s the equivalent of a magical robot from the future engaged in a long-range, patient plan for global domination); you can just imagine their shared thrill realizing that not only is their only son gay, but he’s living with a guy who worked for Hillary’s presidential campaign (and runs a political site that started its life as a Hillary for President volunteer effort).
Another weird focus of Justin’s father’s is John F. Kennedy’s coffin — THE ORIGINAL ONE (in all-caps because Justin’s father, Doc, shouts this at the top of his lungs) that Robert Kennedy had sunk 9,000 feet underwater before the President was buried at Arlington in a second casket; the original coffin that carried him from Dallas to Washington was destroyed at the Kennedy family’s request because it was saturated with blood, brain matter, and other fluids and the Kennedys didn’t want it ever displayed in public for morbid curiosity seekers. Justin’s father believes state secrets are hidden in it and has devoted an entire room in his house to maps, drawings, and stacks of papers pertaining to “Kennedy’s Missing Original Coffin”.
I’ve never been obsessed with anything (yet), so I don’t know what it’s like to burn from the inside out with the knowledge that I’ve secured one or two pieces of a grand puzzle…which sets me on some epic mission to prove nefarious people in dark rooms will get away with a massive cover-up unless I fill a room of my house with sketches I make of coffins at the bottom of the ocean or crude re-enactments of the murders Hillary Clinton has committed in her free time working as the world’s most deadly assassin.
I do, however, honestly and truly believe that the Fifth Dimensional imp Luap Nor quite possibly won the Iowa Caucus, the Nevada Caucus, and the Maine Caucus — and that the Cocktail Party GOP establishment in those states deliberately “lost” votes that should have gone to Luap Nor to prevent him from winning their caucuses. The operating theory being that if Luap Nor won, then a hue and cry would be raised to eliminate the chaotic and absurd caucuses and force normal, sensible primaries in all states in the next presidential nominating process.
The Cocktail Party establishment LOVES caucuses because they are so cheap to run and so easy to manipulate; the caucuses also require large amounts of time commitment on the part of voters, so the permanent political class in both parties erroneously believes it can recruit dedicated volunteers from those who show enough interest in politics to spend hours of their lives “caucusing” in these absurd little gatherings.
It just doesn’t make sense to me that Luap Nor consistently keeps performing worse in the 2012 caucuses than he did back in 2008, when his supporters are supposedly so much more dedicated and organized this time around. The caucuses are all about getting people out of their houses and determined to spend hours dealing with the nonsense of a caucus — and the most motivated activists in the Republican race this year are Luap Nor voters.
There’s absolutely no passion for Willard “Mittens” Romney…so it’s bizarre to me that Romney won the Maine Caucus this weekend, when that should have gone to Luap Nor because of the enthusiasm gap between the supporters of these two men.
In Iowa, the Cocktail Party GOP establishment was ultimately forced to admit that Romney didn’t actually win there — and the Caucus was given to Rick Santorum weeks after the fact; Santorum, it seems, was a preferable winner to Luap Nor, whom the Iowan permanent political class refused to register a win. Amid loud shouts of “Nothing to see here! Move along!” the establishment also acknowledged that vote records had been mysteriously “lost or destroyed” so the true winner of Iowa’s Caucus in 2012 will never be really known. It’s as if these people just came out and said, “Alright. You got us. Romney didn’t really win. Let’s just say Santorum won, okay? As long as it wasn’t that Fifth Dimensional imp known as Luap Nor”.
I really hope committed Luap Nor supporters raise absolute Hell over Maine’s Caucus though — because officials in the Cocktail Party there are now being forced to admit shenanigans went on that threw the race to Romney.
Maine’s Cocktail Party decided not to count some caucus sites’ results because they appear to have favored Luap Nor, and changed other rules midstream so that conditions better favored a Romney win. I would not be the least surprised if ultimately the Maine GOP had to admit “vote records were either lost or destroyed” just like what happened in Iowa.
Because I have seen the inner workings of the Cocktail Party GOP establishment here in Illinois (and before Justin, I dated a few operatives involved in this sort of stuff here in Chicagoland), I can attest that a conspiracy really does exist to keep someone like Luap Nor from winning any states.
I’m paying close attention to what happens in Virginia, since only Romney and Luap Nor will be on that ballot and I am hoping more than anything for a Romney loss there — to underscore just how weak and unwanted a candidate Mittens really is. Expect the Cocktail Party to use every trick in the book to drag Romney over the finish line in Virginia to spare themselves the embarrassment of a loss to Luap Nor there.
Ultimately, I think the Cocktail Party GOP establishment is doomed — and I think many in the permanent political class know that, too. The big advantage these people have always had is that voter fraud is such a dry topic that’s hard for a lot of people to focus on. It’s boring, hard work to slog through the minutia of what enables the two parties to rig elections. BOTH parties do this, and agreements are often made between the establishment figures on both sides of the aisle as to who’s going to win what, when, and where. It’s all about keeping certain would-be aristocrats in positions of wealth and prestige so that the political world runs smoothly and all the various consulting firms and campaign operatives stay employed…and keep channeling funds back to the right people so the establishment remains secure no matter who the voters really want to send to Washington.
I really wish people like Justin’s dad would stop obsessing over Kennedy’s ORIGINAL COFFIN and would instead get excited about voter fraud and the machinations of the Cocktail Party in the caucuses — because, while dry and difficult to read at times, there honest to goodness is a mystery to solve here with great ramifications for the country.
The trick is making this stuff appealing and interesting to the average person…so that uncovering fraud and election tampering in Caucuses is as interesting as theorizing what’s really inside Kennedy’s ORIGINAL COFFIN at the bottom of the ocean (or what Hillary Clinton really is up to late at night when everyone thinks she’s asleep, but she’s really in her black ninja pantsuit operating as some sort of vigilante).
Any ideas?
Ron Paul Won Nevada Caucus – And Nevada Voters Lost
Ron Paul speaks in Minnesota, H/T The Daily Beast
While you were busy enjoying your bread and circuses yesterday, operatives from the Nevada GOP–aided and abetted by all four cable “news” networks–were busily manipulating the results of the Nevada Caucuses, handing another undeserved victory to Mittens “It’s My Turn, Peasants” Romneycare.
You probably aren’t aware of this, because the TeeVee told you that Mitt Romney won, nothing to see here, move along now, after a mere 5% of the vote had been counted.
But what the TeeVee didn’t tell you–for about an entire day–is that the Nevada GOP refused to release the results from Clark County, Nevada’s most populous county and the home of 60% of Nevada’s registered voters. In fact, as of this writing, more than 30 hours after the last caucus closed, the Nevada Caucuses are still not decided. (Well, not in the “lawfully and transparently counting the votes to see who got the most” sense. They’ve already been decided in the “we count the votes, and we already decided in advance that Mittens was going to win” sense.)
Here’s some coverage of the “special caucus” that Newt’s billionaire casino magnate backer bought for him. It was the last caucus that took place, and is in Clark County, where 60% of all Nevada voters are located. Later that night, CNN also aired the live counting of the votes at that caucus. In the video below, CNN joins the event at the point where the candidates’ supporters were giving stump speeches. Over two dozen caucus voters spoke on Ron Paul’s behalf, in an audience that was expected to be largely Seventh-Day Adventists and Orthodox Jews. Romney, Gingrich and Santorum only inspired two or three supporters to speak on their behalf, according to one witness who voted at the caucus.
Here are the results, counted and announced live on CNN:
Ron Paul: 183
Mittens Romney: 61
Newt Gingrich: 57
Rick Santorum: 16
It’s remarkable that the total is so high, given the fact that the caucus organizers forced those who wanted to vote to sign a “religious declaration” affidavit before giving them a ballot, likely in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Even with religious discrimination the results favored Ron Paul, as the Paul campaign expected, based on their internal polling. (At some point in the past two weeks, I read that the Paul campaign had identified over 20,000 definite Ron Paul voters in advance of the caucuses. I’ll post a source if I can find it.)
Ron Paul’s vote totals have more than doubled in every primary or caucus so far over his 2008 totals, and since he has had a massive organization in Nevada for four years, and Nevada is a libertarian state, he was expected to either win or tie for first place. And in the ONE large Clark County caucus where the votes were counted in public, on live television, Ron Paul won by a landslide, as was expected.
Apparently, that was bad news for those in the Cocktail Party GOP in Nevada.
Miraculously, “irregularities” were quickly found that required the party operatives to sequester themselves in a smoke-filled room and “recount” the votes from Clark County (until they get the totals they had decided upon in advance?)
At 3:10 a.m. Monday, nearly 10% of the votes have still not been reported. At this point, Ron Paul is listed in third place with only 5,901 votes–fewer votes than he received in 2008, when he placed second to Mitt Romney in the Nevada caucuses.
And just as miraculously, the chairwoman of the GOP in Nevada resigned effective 12:01 Sunday morning, in a move she claimed was pre-planned and had nothing whatsoever to do with the voter fraud the Nevada GOP was apparently undertaking.
Here’s a shorter version of events of the caucus voting and counting.
Move along, peasants. Nothing to see here. Turn up the surround sound and pass the hot wings.
Oh My! Newt’s South Carolina Miracle?
I’ve been sitting back quietly watching the campaign trail. After the crumble of Herman Cain’s campaign…I’ve been a little shy about thumping my chest for the man that I think can save this country…Newt Gingrich. I haven’t put up ”Go Newt Go!” posts every day. I wanted to take a wait and see approach. I’m starting to feel a little different as of this morning. It’s beginning to look like Mitt Romney’s carefully built house of cards is starting to sway in the warm South Carolina coastal breeze and Newt has his sail tilted in just the right direction to catch the lift. It’s amazing really… considering seven months ago his entire campaign staff walked out on him (I bet they’re regretting that move). He’s survived several media attacks and polling slumps. Now that he’s back on track with his positive message about what he can do to save this country…the sky’s the limit.
I’m beginning to be cautiously optimistic.
And….it appears that the little interview with his whining ex-wife Marianne seems to have helped him instead of hurt him….that tickles me pink!
Newt is a survivor….he’s one tough son of a gun.
I guess that’s why Chuck Norris is endorsing Newt.
I wouldn’t argue with Chuck.
Former Obama Field Organizer: Ron Paul Can Bring Blacks To Republican Party
This former field organizer for Barack Hussein Obama who has been “working his butt off” for Ron Paul, warns the GOP to stop marginalizing Ron Paul supporters, because only Ron Paul has the potential to fundamentally transform the demographics of the GOP by pulling more black voters away from the Democrat Party.
The video is discussed here, in the Washington DC Examiner:
Could Ron Paul be the best thing to happen to the Republican Party?
“In this video, Mr. Harlan has just met Ron Paul at a campaign event and admits that he was quite star-struck upon meeting Dr. Paul. Chris wanted him to know that he has a lot more support within the Black community than he may think. What is really profound is that he expresses that Ron Paul has the potential to change the demographics of the Republican Party for years to come.
For anyone that has studied the facts and history behind the beginning of the Republican Party, one would find it hard to believe, given today’s demographics of the Democratic Party, that it was actually the “Radical Republicans” as they were once called that led the charge against racism.”
GOP Debate…Where was the Blood?
I didn’t watch the debate last night. I couldn’t stomach it. I think we’ve seen enough debates to know what everyone is going to say to the same old tired questions that idiots like Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulus ask. I did follow what was happening on Twitter. I prefer to read what other’s think. The primary reason for last night’s debate was to see if Newt, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul were going to go after Mittens. The LSM wanted a bloodbath….they wanted a GOP remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (with Newt, of course, playing Freddie Kreuger). They didn’t get it though. Sure there were some zings thrown here and there but they were just little cat scratches compared to the damage that could have been done by Freddie’s knives.
Why?
I truly believe that Newt wanted to do the unexpected. He didn’t want to give the left a “see we told you so” debate. He took all the hot…toxic…foul air out of their balloons. They are absolutely depressed over last night’s debate. Here’s a quote from MSNBC news this morning…
“A Saturday night debate in Manchester yielded few defining moments, and did little to add new scrutiny that had been expected of Mitt Romney, the frontrunner in the Granite State’s primary on Tuesday.”
They are hoping and praying that round 2 (this morning’s debate) will yield at least a pint or two of Romney’s blood. They desperately want the GOP to slaughter each other between now and November so that Obama…the most un-American President in the history of our country…can win re-election and continue his path of destruction.
I love Newt Gingrich. He’s the right man for the job. I do not like Mitt Romney. He is no real friend of conservatives. I do not like the GOP establishment and their blind stupidity….but I hate Barack Obama and all that he and his goons are doing to this magnificent nation. I will fight to keep Mittens off the GOP ballot but if he is the nominee…I will fight for him.
We can not let EVIL win in November.
Is Cocktail Party GOP Establishment Rigging Iowa Caucus Against Ron Paul? Hint: Keeping Iowa First in the Nation Depends on It
I normally don’t give much credence to conspiracy theories, but this time the people who believe the Cocktail Party GOP establishment is plotting against them are right.
Here are a few things you need to know:
1. The Iowa Caucus is incredibly easy to steal through voter fraud and other nefarious means. It is, by design, a chaotic and horribly organized affair with no ID checks for people attempting to vote. Very elderly people run most of the Caucus sites and most of the counting is done by hand, without a system in place to assure any sort of accuracy. Results are then called in verbally via telephone from the Caucus site to the “headquarters” that tallies the results. I have known of elections in junior high schools that were more secure and safe from both fraud and human error.
2. When I attended the Iowa Caucus in 2008, I observed the very elderly people who were running the Caucus and watched as they attempted to phone in our Caucus location’s results to “headquarters”. It was like watching Lily Tomlin performing as her telephone operator character from the 70s…or seeing Andy Griffith struggle with the Mayberry switchboard when trying to place an important call on this TV show. The Caucus location was incredibly loud, with Iowans gossiping and comparing notes on how many times they got to meet each of the candidates in the leadup to the Caucus. The very elderly woman who was trying to call in the results at the Caucus I attended had a very hard time hearing whoever answered the phone. I distinctly heard her shouting into the phone with one of her hands covering her ear, trying her best to hear what the person on the line was saying. And then it came time for her to shout numbers into the phone. “Forty-seven”. “What?”. “Not FORTY-seven, not FOURTEEN”. “FORTY SEVEN, oh, mercy they can’t hear me. I SAID FORTY SEVEN! No, not SEVENTEEN. FORTY SEVEN!”. This went on for some time. I am not exaggerating how foolishly the Caucuses are setup or how much they resemble a junior high student council election where the votes are tabulated in the principal’s office after being collected from each of the home rooms. There are many in the agenda-driven media who think this is all very cute, but let me assure you of this: as someone who witnessed this travesty unfold in person four years ago, there is nothing cute about it. At all. The people phoning these results in could very easily make mistakes (some even doing so on purpose) that will disenfranchise many voters…and the Caucus winner will be declared before anyone can ever raise a complaint about it.
3. The Cocktail Party GOP establishment has a vested interest in guaranteeing that Ron Paul does not win the Iowa Caucus, because the Republican Party does not want to do away with the Caucus. There are too many GOP consultants who have a cottage industry that’s called “the Iowa Caucus”, and too many Iowan lobbyists exist in Washington who threaten to punish any political figure who makes a move towards eliminating Iowa’s “first in the nation” status. Since Mike Huckabee won the Caucus in 2008, Iowa’s GOP elite cannot afford for Ron Paul to win in 2012. That would solidify the Iowa Caucus as a colossal joke and give credence to efforts underway to restructure the nomination process for 2016 and beyond. Too many very wealthy Cocktail Party establishment types make too much money off the Iowa Caucus as it exists for them to allow this to be changed: so you can definitely count on tricks being pulled tonight to ensure the Fifth-Dimensional imp known as “Ron Paul” does not win the Caucus.
4. As much as I love Rush Limbaugh, he’s wrong that Democrats are going to Caucus for Ron Paul in Iowa tonight. There has been absolutely no effort made on the part of Democrats to register as Republicans and enter the Iowa Caucuses to propel Ron Paul to a win. Going to the Caucus is a nightmare: it is as disorganized, loud, and chaotic as I have described. Have you been to the DMV, the emergency room, or any sort of free public event at a library or some other city or county building in recent years? Do you remember how frustrating it is to sit there, amongst members of the public at large, and listen to attention-starved, usually older people seize the opportunity to hold court as you wait and wait and wait for whatever you’re there for to be over? Multiply this by several hundred degrees of frustration and you have a basic idea of what the Iowa Caucuses are really like. Now, considering that, just how many dyed-in-the-wool committed Democrats in Iowa are going to willingly subject themselves to the ordeal of Caucusing JUST SO THEY CAN VOTE FOR RON PAUL? It would be one thing if this was a primary, where people could vote all day long (or even weeks in advance via early voting). In that situation, I’d think that, yes, maybe there would be some Democrats who’d want to engage in mischief and vote for Ron Paul just for kicks and giggles…but even then there is a psychological barrier that would prevent many of these people from registering as Republican, even momentarily, to be able to cast that vote. Here in Chicago, if you ever vote Republican in any election — even in a primary — your name gets put onto a list that is given to your local Alderman (the City Council member representing you). Republican voters are punished in Chicago with slow response times for any sort of complaint made to the city (if you want your trash picked up regularly, you need to always vote Democrat and forever vote for your specific Alderman…because they know if you don’t and will hold it against you). Chicago is not the only city where this happens. Unions, also, somehow get reports on people who vote Republican and also punish union members who are not casting Democrat primary ballots. So the idea of people who’ve been so intimidated into voting straight Democrat for years suddenly deciding to throw caution to the wind (in this economy) and register Republican for the Iowa Caucus just to vote for Ron Paul is ridiculous to me.
5. There is no Republican candidate with supporters on the ground as fiercely committed to him or her as Ron Paul’s voters are to him. Not by a mile. Unless the Caucus results are indeed tampered with, Ron Paul should win. Romneycare’s voters just aren’t nearly as committed as Dr. Paul’s are.
I’ll go a step further and say that Ron Paul will win all of the Caucuses in 2012, in much the same way that Barack Obama won almost all of the Democrat Caucuses in 2008.
A Caucus, by nature, is won not by the candidate who has the highest number of people willing to vote for him or her…but it’s won by the candidate whose supporters are the most aggressive, are the loudest, and are most inclined to commit voter fraud, intimidation, and disruptive practices aimed at gaming the Caucus.
Ron Paul’s supporters may not stuff the ballots and use the thuggery that Obama’s campaign directed back in 2008, but I can easily see the more rabid Ron Paul fans screaming and yelling and using intimidation tactics to bully Caucus wins for Dr. Paul in the majority of Iowa’s precincts. Since a Caucus is won with enthusiasm, there is just no way that anyone supporting Willard Romneycare or the other GOP candidates will be able to drown out or match the verve of the Ron Paul supporters. The Caucuses are their turf and barring Cocktail Party voter fraud, Ron Paul will win as a result.
It’s going to be interesting to see how everything plays out considering all of this.
I’m not a fan of Ron Paul’s — and in fact I find his foreign policy horrifying and his lame attempts to distance himself from his newsletters disturbing — but I will be intensely suspicious if Dr. Paul does not in fact win Caucus after Caucus from Iowa to Colorado to Washington and Maine and beyond. Because of his deep investment in ground game for the Caucuses, Ron Paul should win 13 states in the Republican primary season and will end up being a kingmaker at the Convention. If not, then something funny is definitely going on with the vote counting.
I’ll be even more suspicious if Romneycare wins in Iowa, if Rick Santorum comes in second, and if Dr. Paul is not even third. In this scenario, I could almost guarantee that the “secret and undisclosed location” where the Cocktail Party GOP is counting the votes is the place where the votes are in fact being rigged to the Cocktail Party’s desired outcome.
If the voting is fair and accurately reflects the candidates’ enthusiasm on the ground, here is how I’d expect the Iowa Caucus to shake out tonight:
Winner: Ron Paul
Second Place: Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich
Third Place: Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry
Fourth Place: Rick Santorum
Fifth Place: Willard Mittens Romneycare
Sixth Place: Michele Bachmann
Seventh Place: Jon Huntsman
I’m not even going to include Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, or the other people out there that still have supporters in this race even though these aren’t viable candidates for the nomination any longer.
Going forward to New Hampshire and the other voting states, I’d very much like to see Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Jon Huntsman leave the race so that the “Not-Romney” vote has an opportunity to coalesce around other candidates.
Huntsman is going to run third party anyway, so why not just start that now? Bachmann is only in the race at this point to aid Romneycare in her quest to become a Cabinet member. Santorum is looking for redemption and a return to the national scene after his disastrous loss in the 2006 Pennsylvania Senate race.
Ron Paul has invested immense effort and treasure in what looks to be a very effective Caucus State Ground Game, so don’t expect him to POOF! back to the Fifth Dimension no matter how loudly you shout Luap Nor! at him or how ingeniously you strive to get him to say his own name backwards like that. This is Dr. Paul’s last time at the cosmic rodeo and he knows it. He is having the time of his life soaking up all this attention and saying outrageous things before large crowds, while building his email list so he can sell more of those newsletters of his in the future (and also hand those lists over to his son so in a few years Rand Paul can become a Mr. Mxyzptlk character in his own right and run for president himself on a perpetual basis). I would not be the least surprised if Ron Paul won every single Caucus state in the Republican race…and also won Virginia’s primary, since it’s just Dr. Paul versus Willard Romneycare on that ballot in March.
Immediately following New Hampshire, I’d like to see either Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry leave the race and 100% endorse whichever of the two is riding the highest against Romneycare. My gut tells me it’s going to be Perry who stays in the race and it will be Gingrich who leaves it (but expect to see Gingrich in a Perry administration in some way shape or form, if Perry wins the nomination and the White House). I don’t think Perry has sense enough to get out and endorse Gingrich if things shake out the other way, which will be to Perry’s great detriment as he’ll never have another chance on the national stage again.
The Cocktail Party GOP establishment has done an impressive job of rigging as much of the nominating process for Romneycare as possible. I have to give them that credit, because so far they have effectively kept the “Not-Romney” vote from unifying behind one candidate who can prevent Romneycare from being the nominee.
The big variable to me in all of this is the Tea Party: I just can’t imagine the Tea Party allowing Romneycare to be the nominee. For some time now, the agenda-driven media has been howling that the Tea Party is over. People I respect very much, such as Andrea Shea King from Patriot Radio, have long argued that the Tea Party is stronger than ever and has just been keeping its powder dry.
If Romneycare’s the nominee, then the Tea Party is over; if Romneycare’s defeated, the Tea Party remains a force to be reckoned with and America really does have a chance of undoing everything that Obama and the Left did to this country.
It really does come down to that.
I don’t think the Cocktail Party will get away with their shenanigans in Iowa, especially not if they go so far as to rig the results enough to produce a Romneycare win. Barack Obama was allowed to get away with that sort of voter fraud, but if anyone but Ron Paul wins the Iowa Caucus, I truly believe Dr. Paul’s committed fans will somehow expose the truth about how the Iowa Caucus was rigged.
Which is ironic, because the reason the Cocktail Party in Iowa is so intent on tampering with results to steal the win from Ron Paul is to keep Iowa “first in the nation” in presidential primary voting…but counting these ballots “in a secure and secret location” will only give the Ron Paul supporters the fire in their bellies needed to keep this controversy burning for years…which will fuel larger efforts to take away Iowa’s quadrennial entitlement.
Martial Law in America: NDAA Signed Into Law
Tomorrow, I leave to volunteer at the Iowa Caucuses for Ron Paul, the only GOP candidate who has spoken out against the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act.
As I type this, I’m hearing my neighbors fire their automatic handguns into the air to celebrate the New Year. In the past, this has bothered me a lot. It happens every 4th of July and New Year’s Eve.
Now I’m kind of glad that so many of my neighbors are armed, even though they’re criminals.
Because I’m pretty sure that Barack Hussein Obama made me a criminal tonight as well, along with his accomplices, the traitors in the House and Senate who drafted and voted for this un-American monstrosity.
My two-week supply of food, my hand-crank radio, my gun and the Ron Paul sticker on my car are probably the only things required to label me as a “dangerous radical.”
This is what it has come to in America.
I never thought I’d live to see the day.
Ron Paul & the Build-a-Burgers. Remember, You Need to Trick Him Into Saying “Luap Nor” to Get This Stuff To Stop
[ What is it with some very cool, incredible people being die-hard fans of Ron Paul? It would be smart to figure this out before Jon Huntsman pulls these people into his third party presidential bid. ]
During the 2008 Democrat primaries, I campaigned for Hillary Clinton every day for a full month in Indiana, as the city of Hammond, IN is just twenty minutes from Chicago and an easy hop over the Skyway Bridge.
One Saturday morning on such a canvassing trip, my friends Joaquin, Panda, and I were in a run-down, depressed section of Hammond where we each left the car with a sheet of addresses on the street to canvass for Hillary. When we met back at the car, Panda was missing so Joaquin and I went looking for him. We finally found the guy standing politely on the porch of a ramshackle house with a disheveled, enraged man screaming at him. When the homeowner saw us approaching, he wrapped it up and let Panda go, slamming the door and retreating back inside into what I remember clearly as a makeshift bunker.
I asked my friend what the man was yelling about and Panda said, “Hamburgers. That guy’s really mad about the hamburgers that Hillary makes somewhere. Does she own a restaurant? I didn’t know that about her. How can she be in the Senate and have a make your own hamburger restaurant”.
I had no idea what he was talking about and was convinced Panda heard the man wrong or was just imagining things while being screamed at for no reason. That man on the porch couldn’t have been angry about hamburgers, and Hillary Clinton didn’t own any hamburger stands (though, how fun would it be if she did?).
In the car, driving to the next neighborhood, Joaquin and I didn’t let it go and we kept pressing Panda for more details. Eventually it came out that the man was angry that Hillary Clinton and her hamburgers were part of the secret world government and that all of this was being orchestrated through Build-A-Burger, which Panda assumed was a restaurant franchise where people were allowed to add their own toppings to burgers and that possibly they had many gourmet toppings available, like black truffles or expensive French cheeses. The extravagance of these toppings, he reasoned, might be what upset the man in the falling-down-house so much.
“No, that’s Fudruckers,” I told him. “They have those in malls, but it’s just stuff like bacon or onions or maybe pickles, nothing very expensive that you can put on hamburgers. Build-A-Bear is where you can make your own teddy bears or Easter bunny plushies and things, but there’s no such thing as a Build-A-Burger”.
“Yes there is, and that man is angry that Hillary’s helping them. Maybe he’s afraid they’ll close down McDonald’s with the competition, but that’s stupid because there are so many McDonald’s that it would be hard to drive them out of business. I don’t know why he’s so upset about that. Maybe he should write a letter to someone”.
I asked Panda whom the man said he was voting for and learned the screaming, burger-time guy was supporting Ron Paul.
Nearly every occasion when I or any of my friends encountered a Ron Paul supporter, screaming of some sort was involved, though not always about hamburgers. Conspiracy theories were always involved, though, if only under the surface. The man in the falling-down house was more aggressively vocal about this than most, but if Ron Paul supporters out in the field were not screaming and yelling at people they were wearing those V for Vendetta masks and jumping around on street corners waiving signs decrying the coming One World Government like those crackpots in the comic strips who bemoan “The End is Near!”.
I have only met one sane, articulate, and reasonable Ron Paul supporter, and that’s my very good friend Kathleen Gee who writes often about Dr. Paul on this and other sites. I’ve long encouraged her to speak openly about her support for Dr. Paul because it fascinates me. I truly don’t understand how someone as intelligent and good at heart as she is could be included amongst the Ron Paul supporters I’ve encountered in the four years I’ve been actively covering politics via this site. One of these things is not like the other, and I’ve tried for over a year now to understand Kathleen’s strong and determined support of Ron Paul despite the way I’m absolutely horrified by 90% of what comes out of that man’s mouth (not to mention the things the great majority of his supporters scream and yell about, making themselves and Dr. Paul look incurably crazy).
It’s a situation like the one with another good friend of mine in Boston who is an avowed Trekkie — but Delphine is not a middle-aged guy with bad skin living in his mother’s basement eating hot pockets and spending all day leaving nasty, sniping comments on AintItCoolNews.com. Delphine is gorgeous, smart, and successful…and in her free time enjoys dressing up as Officer Uhura, Katherine Janeway, or something called a Seven of Nine and going to as many Star Trek conventions across the country as possible. She’s even naming her son, who is due any day now, “Jean-Luc” after one of the Enterprise captains. When I’ve engaged her on the topic of Star Trek, her eyes get this funny look in them and she’s transported to a whole other plane, so blissfully excited that she’s been invited to talk about her great passion in life, Star Trek.
I swear, even though he was yelling, that man who screamed at Panda about Build-a-Burger was downright ECSTATIC to be advocating for Ron Paul; I bet it was the happiest he’d been in months, that someone came to his door and gave him an opportunity to rail against Hillary Clinton for possibly giving people the option of adding one of several different flavors of bacon to their grilled sandwich…but more importantly, it was a chance to talk about RON PAUL.
That being 2008, iPhones weren’t around so I had to wait until I got home to look up what “Build-A-Burger” could be and why it’s upset this man so much. You can read about the Bilderberg Group here. I invite you to leave your own thoughts on it in comments below.
Through the years, I’ve known a handful of people who’ve flirted with these One World Government conspiracies and who’ve found these things exciting to rail against, like their own unique versions of a Star Trek Convention. I honestly think the people really into this stuff give the Bilderberg members much too much credit. The world is far too large to ever be controlled by one Empire, with one set of imperialists at the controls. When I was a kid, I wrote a science fiction story about an ancient giant albino spider lurking deep beneath the Vatican that used the strings of its enormous web to ring bells and pull levers to control the entirety of the political world. The nun grading that bit of creative writing hated it so much she sent it to the principal, who forwarded it to the priest in charge of the school, who sent it to my parents demanding I be punished for writing about a giant spider under the Vatican.
The nun, principal, and priest missed the part about it being a science fiction story and thought I really believed this was true; my parents thought it was funny and encouraged me to keep upsetting the nuns because they were too uptight for their own good some of the time.
This is the attitude I’ve always taken with the Ron Paul supporters, actually. I see them as people with a great deal of passion and creativity…and they have powerfully strong imaginations. They love Ron Paul and his fantastical exclamations the way Delphine loves Star Trek author Gene Roddenberry and the magical world he created for TV and the books she loves reading and re-reading over and over again.
I’ve written before that every presidential election since 1992 has had one dominant “Mr. Mxyzptlk” character who captures the imaginations of a very passionate and aggressively vocal subset of the electorate. It was Ross Perot in 1992, followed by Lyndon LaRouche in 1996, then Ralph Nader in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, and Dennis Kucinich in 2008. It’s clearly Ron Paul’s turn to be the Mr. Mxyzptlk of 2012.
By 2016, Dr. Paul will be retired and someone new will play this part. I’m secretly wishing for Cynthia McKinney to rise to the occasion, so that there can finally be a MS. Mxyzptlk for a change…and I bet she can rev the screamers and yellers and conspiracy buffs up as good as any man ever could.
I think it’s highly dangerous to dismiss the people who gravitate towards the Mxyzptlk candidates out of hand or to make fun of their passion. The reason many of them become so obsessed over men like Ron Paul is because they feel alienated and ignored by the mainstream; mocking these people makes them entrench themselves in the most fantastical things the current Mr. Mxyzptlk says. It’s like Delphine and her Star Trek fandom — part of why she goes all out and buys such elaborate costumes to wear to all these conventions is because she’s so maligned by many of her friends for being attracted to this stuff. When she’s in her full regalia, surrounded by people dressed up as Romulans or Klingons or whatever, she claims she can breathe easily for the first time in memory, relax, and be herself without any fear of attack. She finds herself “at home”, in her own words.
That’s a stark contrast to how agitated and unhinged I’ve seen Delphine get when people have even jokingly mocked her Star Trek love to try to get a rise out of her. That never goes well, and has ended on more than one occasion in screaming and yelling.You don’t even want to know what happens when someone suggest Delphine embrace the more mainstream Star WARS instead of her beloved TREK.
It’s just like with that Ron Paul supporter on his porch in Indiana screaming at Panda, and like other Ron Paul supporters I have seen who, once Ron Paul is out of the race, will more likely than not either stay home in 2012 or vote for Barack Obama because they feel so slighted by Republicans for “not giving Ron Paul the respect he deserves!”. There is a real need to understand what about Ron Paul and his professed beliefs these people are attracted to…and why they were drawn to him in the first place.
The greatest hope in the Left is that the Ron Paul zealots will bolt to a third party candidate who will split the Republican vote just enough next year to squeak Barack Obama to victory. Jon Huntsman has been promised the Secretary of State slot in a second Obama administration if he’d run third party and bring as many of Ron Paul’s voters with him as possible. He’s got the money to do this, and the Paul supporters have the passion to mount a vainglorious third party campaign out of sheer spite to pay back everyone in the conservative blogosphere who they feel slighted them and Dr. Paul.
In the years since, I’ve really liked Panda’s response to the screamer on the Indiana porch. He listened to the man and let him have his say and didn’t try to argue with him the slightest (which I would have done, as I forever tend to escalate things). Panda would have let the guy continue until he lost steam, no doubt, if Joaquin and I hadn’t walked up and caused the man to retreat inside. I think more than anything Ron Paul’s supporters want to be listened to by mainstream people, so that they aren’t just going back and forth amongst themselves in endless echo chambers. It’s a lot like the Star Trek conventions with some of the Paul supporters, where they feel at home batting a lot of these conspiracies and theories around with each other…but maybe they wouldn’t be as into this stuff if they had a little more interaction with the mainstream.
Delphine at least gets to wear her Star Trek gear at Halloween or at theme-parties where other people dress up in space clothes too. I’ve noticed she has less of a yearning to go off to a convention if she can talk about Star Trek at least a little amongst people who aren’t obsessed with it like she is.
We all know that Ron Paul will not be the Republican nominee, but we don’t know what Ron Paul’s supporters will do once he’s out of the race. A very smart move would be to start addressing Jon Huntsman’s third party ambitions and prevent him from usurping these Paul supporters and using them to create the controlled chaos that Barack Obama is counting on to squeak to re-election.
Remember: If You Want Ron Paul to POOF! Away, You Must Say His Name Backwards Every 90 Days
[ Click above to embiggen ]
Ron Paul really comes off as a sort of “trickster imp” in a lot of the things he says and does, especially in the Republican debates. He’s just the latest in a long line of these “imps” in recent presidential elections, running back to Ross Perot in 1992, Lyndon LaRouche in 1996, Ralph Nader in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, and Dennis Kucinich in 2008.
In the Superman comics, Mr. Mxyzptlk (pronounced “Mix-ush-pit-lick”) isn’t a bad man, and he actually considers himself to be Superman’s pal.
But his thought processes are rooted in a completely different dimension from our own.
Whenever Ron Paul goes off on a tangent describing his dream of withdrawing all American troops from everywhere in the world and closing down all our bases, so that Islamist theocracies like Iran (and the Islamizing countries that have radicalized under Barack Obama’s watch) will like us and drop all plans to arm themselves with nukes or obliterate Israel from the map, Dr. Paul comes across as a very naive and out-of-touch-with-reality little man who may very well hail from the Land of Zrrf somewhere removed from the visible spectrum.
During the debates, the talking-head moderators always seem to trick Ron Paul into saying something that the majority of Americans interprets as completely insane and horrifying. It’s happened at every single debate so far. Like orange clockwork.
It always reminds me of Superman tricking Mr. Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards (Kltpzyxm) — which sends him POOF! back to the Fifth Dimension.
There was one episode of the late-90s Superman animated series where this happened over and over and over again, with Superman not having to work hard at all to make it happen.
Doesn’t that remind you of Ron Paul’s performance in the debates, where over and over again he falls for the moderators’ tricks and makes an outrageous statement about Iranian nukes or turning this country into an isolationist ostrich?
I hope at the next debate Newt Gingrich gets him to say “Luap noR” aloud so we can see what happens.
He won’t be able to participate in a debate for at least 90 days, if the comic books are right about this sort of thing (as they usually are). It takes that long for him to rematerialize from the Fifth Dimension and get up to his antics again.
Ron Paul’s Newsletters: What Should He Have Known About His Ghostwriters?
[ Ghost writers can be ghost readers too, apparitionally, but only if the ghostwriters are already dead. ]
Because Ron Paul’s leading in polls taken for the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, the Alinsky Methods Death Star’s been fired up and aimed at him by the Left and agenda-driven media. This means everyone and their elf will be talking at Christmas dinner about newsletters that were published under Dr. Paul’s name in the 1990s. Typically, the agenda-driven media’s now claiming this proves Dr. Paul is a RAAACIST.
I’ve never read the newsletters and I don’t intend to because I am already not a Ron Paul supporter – because of his stance toward cutting aid to Israel (the one country in the world I feel we have a moral duty to protect, support, and defend with all our might) and his terrifyingly naive belief that Iran should not be prevented at all costs from gaining a nuclear weapon. Whatever was printed in newsletters years ago pales in comparison to this, in my mind – since anyone who downplays the Islamic theocracy’s clear and present danger to the world has DONE LOST HIS OWN MIND.
I do, however, want you to think about just how often people are called RAAACISTS! by the agenda-driven media and how this always happens whenever these individuals are doing something that either threatens the Left’s plans or provides some sort of obstacle to a narrative the agenda-driven media itself is crafting. Twenty years have passed since those newsletters were written, so you need to ask yourself why — at this exact moment, just days away from the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire primary — are all the talking heads on almost every Leftist-supporting network working overtime to depict Dr. Paul as a foaming-at-the-mouth RAAACIST!.
One of the worst and most stupid mistakes the Republican Party forever makes is not as a giant, cohesive unit hitting the agenda-driven media back HARD whenever any Republican is called a RAAACIST! for any reason. This is the Left’s number one weapon against conservatives: false accusations of racism or threats of branding someone a RAAACIST! if he or she doesn’t shut up and go away like the Left wants them to.
The Left, the agenda-driven media, and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment all want Ron Paul and his supporters to go away, and they are honest-to-goodness terrified at the thought of Dr. Paul winning the Iowa Caucus for two important reasons:
1. These people all want Willard Mittens Romneycare to win the Iowa Caucus, not Ron Paul, and calling Dr. Paul a RAAACIST! and really amping up the attacks on him is designed to make Iowans take another look at “noncontroversial” cucumbers-and-mayonnaise Romneycare and possibly decide the only way to avoid being called RAAACISTS themselves is to vote for the bland candidate the media’s deliberately not taking any smacks at (since they want him to win the nomination before they unleash Hell on him).
2. If Ron Paul wins the Iowa Caucus, then Iowa will no longer be allowed to be the “first in the nation” in the next presidential election…and the permanent political class in both parties doesn’t feel like going through the arduous task of changing the nominating system (as many of these consultants believe they’re experts on manipulating the system in place now, so why would they ever want to change it?).
One of the most thrilling and euphoric days of my life will be the day the Iowa Caucus is tossed onto the trash heap of history. Do not believe all the lies the agenda-driven media will tell you for the next week about how “seriously” Iowans take their “first in the nation” role. I went to Iowa for eight straight weeks in the leadup to the 2008 Caucus and canvassed a dozen cities and small towns, going door to door in the cold campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I never met one of these “serious” Iowans who “followed the candidates and issues closely”.
I did, however, meet a lot of very spoiled, overly indulged, rather petty people who — more or less — seemed to vote for whichever candidate they met the most times, or which candidate actually knocked on their door personally and came in to eat cake with them.
Almost all of the people I met knocking on doors were very nice, and all were thrilled to have people knocking on their doors. Even the twenty-somethings and middle-aged people behaved like they were octogenarians in nursing homes that only got visitors every four years; at some houses, people raced to answer the door, falling over each other to have the honor of being courted by representatives of the campaigns.
I can’t remember a single Iowan having anything interesting or original to say, but I have vivid memories of how greedily they ate up all that attention and how aggressively they bragged about which candidates they met in person and how often they or their relatives had seen them at a local market or coffee shop or whatever.
The whole Iowa Caucus spectacle reminds me of going to Disneyland and seeing little kids racing around with their autograph books to meet, and get photos with, the various actors dressed up as princesses or plushy characters. While it’s not just acceptable but actually expected for small children to be so starstruck, and at times overly demanding of their favorite character’s personal attention, none of this is becoming on people in their 40s and 50s who live in places like Dubuque, Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, or wherever…and behave this way with presidential candidates.
These people LIVE for the orgy of attention they’re lavished with every four years, but it’s a damn lie the agenda-driven media propagates that Iowans take candidate vetting seriously and actually have the slightest clue what they are doing when it’s time to “caucus” (which, on the Democrat side at least, involves wandering into corners of a large room while people in their 80s or 90s attempt to count the individual bodies huddled there). Always remember this simple fact: Barack Obama is president today because his campaign gamed the Iowa Caucus through voter fraud and the general atmosphere of chaos and ineptitude prevalent in a caucus; if Obama had lost Iowa, he would not have been the Democrats’ nominee and none of the terrible things that happened in the last four years would have happened. Obama would be Vice President instead, and he’d be having a ball playing golf and saying stupid things somewhere (Joe Biden style) with absolutely no ability to do any damage whatsoever to the country. It is only because of Iowa that we are in the enormous collective mess we are in during this “The Golden Age of Hope and Change”.
While I would never vote for Ron Paul, and I certainly don’t want him to be the Republican nominee, I must admit a large part of me wants him to win the Iowa Caucus just so this will be the last time in American history that Iowans are indulged so preposterously in a presidential election year or have such opportunity to vault a candidate like Barack Obama into the White House.
If we are ever to end the boondoggle that is ethanol subsidies then we need to take the “first in the nation” rights away from the attention-seeking divas of Iowa, since neither political party will ever make a move against the ethanol scam while Iowa still holds such disproportionate sway over presidential nominations.
If Ron Paul would win the Caucus, expect to witness the full power of the Alinsky Methods Death Star aimed at him because the permanent political class will not want to allow him to make clear and obvious fools of the divas in New Hampshire as well, by winning that primary a few days later too….which, honestly, he could very well win if his fans actually turn out the votes as aggressively as they defend Dr. Paul from all criticism on the Internet.
This is all backdrop for what I really wanted to take a moment to talk about in this post because you’re going to hear a lot of people at your Christmas dinners talking about “Ron Paul’s RAAACIST! newsletters”, since that’s what the agenda-driven media and Cocktail Party GOP establishment WANT you to talk about.
I’ve seen many people commenting on various articles here and there not really understanding what a ghostwriter is or how much Dr. Paul would have known about what was being ghostwritten for him.
Well, I’ve been a professional ghostwriter for eight years now and have ghostwritten for all sorts of clients, including a few here in Chicago political circles. Mostly, I ghostwrite very detailed, time-consuming, and quite boring things like grant proposals, annual reports, and copy for different trade publications. But through the years I’ve also ghostwritten for a few people who are somewhat famous, and are thus extremely careful and conscious of their brands.
I’ve ghostwritten cookbooks for a celebrity chef, public remarks for a Chicago philanthropist, and speeches for a fairly well-known architect and artist. All three of these people watched everything I did under their name LIKE HAWKS and repeatedly sent me back to the computer to rework every draft dozens of times until they were satisfied that every single sentence, down to the period, represented them and their brands they way THEY wanted to be represented.
Even though the grants I ghostwrite are incredibly important (since the nonprofits I write for depend on them to cover the programs they’re specifically written for), in the eight years I’ve been doing this now I’ve never had a single Development Director or foundation executive micromanage me because the grants don’t have a direct and personal connection to any of these individuals. They might be signing the grants as if they wrote them themselves, and they certainly look better the more grants are accepted and the more programs are funded, but the people approving the ghostwritten grants don’t feel their PERSONAL reputations or good names are on the line with anything that’s being dispatched to a grant review board at a foundation somewhere, since these grants will never be made public and will never be published anywhere.
The cookbooks, public remarks, speeches, newsletters, and other things I’ve ghostwritten for public figures were a completely different story, no matter how laid-back or pleasant the famous person was otherwise. One of these clients was a real control freak who micromanaged everyone who worked for him, but the rest of these people were very nice and generally carefree…except when it came to anything that would be printed out and distributed to the public signed with their name. They insisted on reading each and every word, multiple times, and would never in a million years approve anything written in their voice that was not 100% factually accurate to the best of their knowledge.
I’ve told you all of this because you need to understand that I do not believe for a moment that Ron Paul did not know exactly what was in each of the newsletters that were published with his name on them, ghostwritten in his voice, and signed under his name.
The only way for anyone to convince me that Dr. Paul did not know exactly — to the period in every sentence — what was in those newsletters would be to tell me that Ron Paul has multiple personalities and “Paul Ron” approved the letters in a take on “The United States of Tara” when “Ron Paul” was unavailable and this alternate “entity” took over his body.
Granted, a politician might not read every piece of campaign material his staff writes, but I don’t believe for an instant that Ron Paul wouldn’t read everything that was written in his voice and signed with his name because recipients of those newsletters would assume they were written by him (as mot people out there have no idea how prevalent ghostwriting actually is).
I doubt Barack Obama has ever read “Dreams of My Father” (which was ghostwritten by William Ayers) or “The Audacity of Hope” (ghostwritten by the Jon Favreau who isn’t the movie director), but he is a very rare exception to the rule because his own hubris and ego preclude him from ever imagining his ghostwriters would write a single word that would disparage him…in a world where he felt certain the agenda-driven media would trumpet anything with his name on it as “the greatest autobiographical writing the universe has ever seen”.
Ron Paul, through the years, has insisted that various entities and organizations are out to get him, to stop him, or to keep him quiet about all sorts of things that Dr. Paul’s newsletters covered. I just can’t square the circle to ever conclude that a man who lacks Obama’s media protection would ever feel comfortable enough allowing controversial articles to be disseminated under his name when these articles would eventually come back to hurt him.
I once had to re-write a chapter on organically grown mushrooms something like 57 times because the chef I worked for was paranoid he’d be raked over coals for any tinge of cliche in those seven or eight pages; this man was convinced his career would never recover if an amusing anecdote I’d written about chanterelles wasn’t “him” precisely and definitively as he insisted it needed to be.
If Chef was that obsessed with my characterization of mushroom preparation and so convinced I could ruin his life and career with the smallest mistake in that ghostwriting, then I just can’t imagine a non-multiple-personality-disorder scenario where Ron Paul (or “Paul Ron”, whichever one is ultimately dominant) knowingly allowed newsletters to be written in his first person narrative and signed with his name that he didn’t personally approve line by line, sentence by sentence, down to the last period.
I truly don’t believe Ron Paul’s a RAAACIST, for the simple fact that his Congressional district is 40% black and there’s no way Democrats wouldn’t have knocked him off in an election with RAAACIST! accusations if they had anything at all to go on.
But I believe Ron Paul very much indeed read and approved every one of those newsletters, since it’s illogical to believe someone in his position wouldn’t supervise his ghostwriter(s) on a micro level like that.
Dr. Paul does himself and his fervent supporters a major disservice by obfuscating on this and giving the agenda-driven media more material to attack him with in these last few remaining days before the attention-gluttons of Iowa have their “Me! Me! Me!” fest.
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Side Note:
This is something that always makes me laugh when I see it written in reference to Ron Paul’s newsletters, but a “ghostwriter” is someone like me who produces prose for a client that the client will ultimately sign their name to and take credit for.
A “ghost writer” is someone like Agatha Christie, William Shakespeare, or Ulysses S. Grant who is a writer, dead for some length of time, and returned from the spirit world to churn out new books via seance or other paranormal means.
Ghostwriters sign confidentiality agreements with stiff penalties precluding them from ever identifying themselves as authors of the works they were assigned to write. In many cases, it would be a career-ending embarrassment for someone like Barack Obama if ghostwriters like William Ayers or Jon Favreau ever publicly admitted they authored his books (and, in my opinion, embarrasing for Ayers and Favreau since those two book are so trite and terrible).
Ghost writers don’t sign anything because their hands pass right through the pens, coating those Bics with ectoplasm while possibly giving Ray Parker Jr. false hope for a career resurgence. Who you gonna call?
If you ever see a quickie, celebrity autobiography that has “with So-and-So” written under the celebrity’s name that So-and-So writer is not a ghostwriter (or a ghost writer, either, most likely…unless it’s Shirley MacLaine we’re talking about…or, yet again, Ray Parker Jr.) but the actual author of the book who has just been paid to take a backseat on the dust jacket in order to sell more copies. The celebrity probably just had a few meetings with the writer, where the two of them talked about what the celebrity wanted the book to be about and the writer tape recorded everything and used that as an outline.
After that, it was just a matter of filling in the blanks, making the narrative flow reasonably well, and meeting the publisher’s demand for number of chapters and ultimate page count.
My all-time favorite example of ghostwriting was Fantasia Barrino’s “book” — which she claims to have “written” — soon after being a contestant on American Idol…which was a singing competition she appeared on, during which she repeatedly stifled back tears while talking about being illiterate (to gain sympathy from voters).
The book’s still on sale on Amazon (for as low as one cent), but it has no “with So-and-So” credited under Fantasia’s name. This means, quite miraculously, that an illiterate reality show contestant “wrote” a book about being illiterate when, by her own admission, she couldn’t ever read a book because of her illiteracy.
And that book is STILL probably better than “The Audacity of Hope” by “Barack Obama”.
