A few good articles on Roger Stone (personal blog link here), who may or may not be Donald Trump’s shadow Karl Rove.
First, Stone appears to be a guy whose amygdala is triggered by stasis and ennui, producing a sort of amygdala-driven mania.
One of Stone’s friends, who’s known him professionally for a decade, tells me: “What I find interesting about Roger is how committed to the joke he is. He moons the establishment for the sheer pleasure of it, with no thought to whether it helps him. Obviously most of the time it doesn’t and maybe he cares–I’ll bet he has mixed feelings–but he doesn’t stop. Notice how he’s willfully, self-consciously downmarket: Trump, Sharpton, the dyed hair and horseshoe pinky ring. There’s an ironic quality to all of it.
“He could have made a lot more money being Mike Deaver. It’s not like he’s not smart enough to have joined Cassidy and landed Microsoft as a client, like a thousand other semitalented former consultants. Instead, he’s nearing 60 and still wallowing in the small-time sleaziness of New York State politics. And he doesn’t even live there. There’s no master plan with Roger. He just follows the most subversive, amusing course available to him at the time. I sort of respect that.”
He is also devious, deceptive, ultra-clever, and nothing with him is as it seems.
As I earlier stated, Stone is honest about his dishonesty. I figure in this case, it’s partly due to the drinks I ply him with at dinner. (Labash’s Rules: “Without alcohol, people tell you what they want to say. With alcohol, they tell you what you want to hear.”) But Stone comes clean on this, too. Though he appears to knock down each drink I order him, it turns out he has had only one. He greased the waiter in advance, telling him to only bring olives and water in his martini glass after the first one. He didn’t want me to have the edge, in case I was there to whack him like Paul Castellano. It’s a trick he borrowed from Lyndon Johnson, who used to down iced tea in highball glasses to gain the advantage over dim-witted reporters who were slugging back the real thing.
Between his deviousness and the corruption inherent to the system, it is tough to know what to make of this next thing, though I’d lean toward it being true given the nature of the system today.
Stone, who going back to his class elections in high school has been a proponent of recruiting patsy candidates to split the other guy’s support, remembers suggesting to Cohn that if they could figure out a way to make John Anderson the Liberal party nominee in New York, with Jimmy Carter picking up the Democratic nod, Reagan might win the state in a three-way race. “Roy says, ‘Let me look into it.'” Cohn then told him, “‘You need to go visit this lawyer’–a lawyer who shall remain nameless–‘and see what his number is.’ I said, ‘Roy, I don’t understand.’ Roy says, ‘How much cash he wants, dumbf–.'” Stone balked when he found out the guy wanted $125,000 in cash to grease the skids, and Cohn wanted to know what the problem was. Stone told him he didn’t have $125,000, and Cohn said, “That’s not the problem. How does he want it?”
Cohn sent Stone on an errand a few days later. “There’s a suitcase,” Stone says. “I don’t look in the suitcase . . . I don’t even know what was in the suitcase . . . I take the suitcase to the law office. I drop it off. Two days later, they have a convention. Liberals decide they’re endorsing John Anderson for president. It’s a three-way race now in New York State. Reagan wins with 46 percent of the vote. I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don’t know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”
Talk about needing surveillance awareness. In New York City, I’d have assumed that FBI surveillance (and maybe a private sector team or two) was monitoring at least Cohn, and maybe the suitcase-provider, the lawyer, and tracking me. The instant I left Cohn’s office, I’d have assumed I had grown a tail. The instant I reached the lawyer’s I’d have assumed my arrival was noted. In between I’d have doing anything I could to try and get the tail to break off their follow. Today in New York City, I would assume short of diving down a subway tunnel, running the tracks, and popping up a maintenance shaft, that would be near impossible. Maybe it was different back then or maybe it is different if you are in the machine.
A political rival has admitted that he tipped off the FBI about the former New York Governor’s use of prostitutes, effectively ending Elliot Spitzer’s career in public office to score a victory in a bitter feud.
Roger Stone, a controversial Republican operative, alerted authorities four months before the Democratic governor was forced to step down in a sex scandal. Mr Stone told the FBI, through a letter from his lawyer, that Mr Spitzer “used the services of high-priced call girls,” while in Florida.
One version of the origin of the Spitzer scandal (and Stone’s role in it) is in a very long, but very interesting article here, but I suspect it is far from the whole story.
“She was sitting right over there,” Stone told me, pointing to a seat at the bar, as we sipped vodka from plastic cups. (Miami Velvet is B.Y.O.B., to avoid the trouble of securing a liquor license, so Stone had brought along a bottle of the brand p.i.n.k.) “We were just having a casual conversation, and I told her I was a dentist,” Stone said. “She told me she was a call girl, but she wasn’t working that night.” Miami Velvet prohibits prostitution on the premises, a point that is emphasized in the four-page single-spaced legal waiver that everyone must sign to be admitted. (Another house rule, which is reinforced by signs on the wall, is “No means no.”) “She told me she had a very high-end clientele—she kept using the word ‘high-end’—athletes, international businessmen, politicians,” Stone said.
“ ‘Like who?’ I asked her,” Stone went on. “She named a couple of sports guys, some car dealers I’d heard of because of their commercials, and then she said, ‘I almost had a date with Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New Jersey.’ ” Stone laughed. “She didn’t know much about politics. So I asked her, ‘Did this guy have a beard?’ ” (Jon Corzine, the governor of New Jersey, has a beard.) No, the woman said, he was a skinny bald guy—a description that fit Spitzer. According to Stone, the woman told him that Spitzer had reached her through her escort service, which listed her as a brunette, but she had dyed her hair blond. So the agency referred the governor to a dark-haired colleague, the woman said, who met up with Spitzer in Miami.
“I asked her what her friend said about Spitzer,” Stone told me. “She said he was nice enough, but the only odd thing was that he kept his socks on. They were the kind that went to the middle of the calf, and one of them kept falling down.”
Stone said that he decided, after hearing the story, to keep the conversation with the woman to himself for the moment. But there was never any doubt that he would eventually deploy it. As Stone puts it in one of the many rules he lives by, “He who speaks first, loses…”
“Whether it started with Stone, or he contributed to an ongoing investigation, we have no idea,” a member of the Spitzer camp told me. “There is a lot of crazy stuff around the edges of this case. Stone is one part.”
The Velvet story appears likely false in the article. The FBI letter is probably real. So how did Stone happen on it? Clearly he doesn’t want it known.
Adding to the fog, Spitzer pissed off a whole load of top-level Wall Street operators. Wall Street operators hire a lot of ex-spooks, partly because ex-spooks are trained to analyze data and unravel the rules behind complex systems, partly because ex-spooks can run surveillance and uncover secret intelligence which betrays the moves of stock prices. Think Michael Douglas in Wall Street, only with an army of ex-CIA officers under him tracking various CEO’s and Union leaders and recruiting spies in companies, just like they would abroad. More than likely they had a hand in it too.
Never underestimate the power or the prolific nature of intelligence operations and surveillance. From the lowliest criminal to the most well respected biotechnology firm, surveillance and intelligence operators are everywhere, seeking the advantage a little inside information can offer. In major metropolitan areas today you are almost always being recorded, often being watched, and if you are in politics in any way it is probably to a degree you would never believe. Since this story the surveillance state has had a good infusion of fiscal steroids.
These articles are also a good primer on Heartiste‘s “Give-no-fucks Alpha” psychology and the game technique of embellishment to raise SMV. By the end of reading about Stone you almost don’t care if what he was saying was real or not. He is like a funny, witty hurricane who could easily have done all of it, making the reality seem a less important measure of who he is. You can see how Trump’s campaign, with it’s prodigious use of Game, could easily manipulate the vast swaths of idiots that populate this nation. Add in verbal support for real pro-American policies (more than we get from most Cuckservative’s today), and a candidate who makes the media look stupid, and you may easily have the next President of the United States.
Apocalypse cometh™, but Game makes the intervening years look cool.
Your posting rate has been incredible lately. Merely keeping up with all the reading has been tough.
That was sorta meant to be a compliment.