Think About This For A Moment

One more Gulen post today, then I'll change the topic. That crazy conspiracy rag The Economist just put up a story on the situation in Turkey. It covers familiar ground: the hated, finger-pointing authoritarian prime minister, the feud with Gulen, the collapsing Turkish lira, etc. But there's also this:

By contrast, in interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the BBC, Mr Gulen has shunned inflammatory language, portraying himself as a selfless democrat concerned by Mr Erdogan’s lurch towards authoritarianism. The damage inflicted by a televised sermon in which Mr Gulen rained curses on the government, and by a leaked conversation with a businessman in which he discusses a tender for an oil refinery in Uganda with bizarre references to pineapples, have been offset by Mr Erdogan’s unabated diatribes against his flock. In a bid to regain the moral high ground, the Gulenists are reported to have stopped leaking secretly filmed videos exposing the bedroom antics of their foes.

One hates to point out the obvious, but sometimes there's no way around it. If you spend any time studying the waves of Turkish prosecutions-- and seriously, they put basically everyone on trial sooner or later-- you can't help but notice how commonplace it is for wiretaps and secret videos to be introduced.  The surveillance takes place on both sides of the current feud, evidently, but the Gulenists in the justice apparatus seem to be the real masters of the craft.  Apparently they're going to leak fewer hidden camera clips in the future.

As for the refinery in Uganda and the pineapples, I have no idea, nor do I care. It's what I would expect from a mogul. Oil and mystery. I'm sure he was speaking in parables.

But it does makes me nervous when I think about all those Illinois Democrats staying in hotels run by people in the Movement.  Then when you expand that phenomenon to all of the other states where these junkets are happening...

Good lord.