It sounds like phase 2 of the Democrats' smear and doubt campaign to me. Paint the 'Bush dynasty' as some kind of multigenerational evil empire. As if the BFEE hasn't been one of their foci all along since 2000.
Will this bring about a proportional response from the Republican camp? The more we delve into John Kerry's past, it seems to be a target-rich environment for a conspiracy theory.
Will the 2004 campaign end up in the media as a Skeletor-vs-Darth Vader kind of clash of the evil empires? Or will they eventually get down to business and focus on the real issues, the principal one being who best to lead this country through the next four dangerous years?
> Will this bring about a proportional response from the Republican camp? The more we delve into John Kerry's past, it seems to be a target-rich environment for a conspiracy theory.
Here's my contribution towards a "counter-conspiracy theory":
Kerry's past includes hiring BCCI suspect David Paul (associate of Saudi Ghaith Pharaon) as his Senate campaign treasurer and protecting Democrat Clark Clifford (associate of Jimmy Carter's budget manager Bert Lance) during the BCCI investigation. There's a summary of how one Jack Blum got Kerry involved in BCCI which mentions these individuals here:
http://www.geocities.com/saudhouse_p/roadbloc.htm I'm sure there's a lot there that a little digging will turn up. Kerry's role in the BCCI investigation was evidently not that of a disinterested inquirer.
As for the rest of this hit piece, this is based on the Lyndon LaRouche organization's extrapolation from a conspiracy theory that FDR's trust-busters concocted during WWII. I've yet to see a source which sums up the whole development of this--been piecing it together from various sources with the intent of writing my own analysis--but basically, to be very brief: A number of Communists and fellow travellers in Congress and the Senate had been attacking the oil companies and their financial allies (esp. J.P. Morgan) since the 1890s, with renewed attacks in the 1930s. During WWII Harry Dexter White (recently exposed as a Soviet agent), Henry Morgenthau, and Harold Ickes, with help from the law firm of Thurman Arnold (Arnold and Porter), focused the attack on Standard Oil and any company remotely associated with it, which is how the Dresser-Harriman-Farish-Prescott Bush thing got mixed up with it. The attack on these companies was part and parcel of the Soviets' plan to confiscate German assets and reduce postwar Germany to a pre-industrial state so that the Soviet Army could easily roll in, which was the purpose behind the so-called "Morgenthau Plan" (that Harry Dexter White actually conceived while in contact with Stalin's agents who had the same idea). Ever since then left-wing conspiracy theorists have built on White and Morgenthau's original conspiracy theory by updating it periodically. LaRouche's organization revived the theory and modified it to its current form during the first Bush administration by throwing BCCI into the mix (while downplaying/ignoring the Democrats' role in BCCI mentioned above with respect to Clark Clifford and Bert Lance). The theory is largely constructed of innuendoes based on guilt-by-association, and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you dig into the details. For instance if you'll read a biography of Averell Harriman you'll find that his relation to the Bush family was not particularly close, and nowhere near as close as his relationship to key Democrats in the FDR and LBJ administrations. As mentioned I'm summing up a lot briefly here, but that's a broad outline of how I'd suggest going about constructing a counter to this line of propaganda.