Letters to the Editor
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The Loony Right
I still believe that Loose Change is loonier, but this is a nice try. Eventually I think the right will be able to involve aliens, Atlanteans and possibly time travellers from the future in their search for the missing WMD's. It's no surprise to see Crazy Curt Weldon's involved in some way.
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I think the aliens from scientology are involved...
See, the evil Islamist empire (who only act like they are more driven by tribal strife than hate of the West) found a way, using Tom Cruise by threatening Katie, to force all the Thetans in the world to use Thetan anti-gravity powers to move the WMD through space and time, invisibly (optically and by radar) of course, to new hidden underground bunkers either in Syria or on the moon. I will have more details when I get the Cheetos (TM) dust cleared from my magic eight-ball.
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Painting the Floor
Well I guess this is the only area to which one can retreat--that everyone is in on the deal because of being an incompetetant or being an apologist.
This information will gain traction--mark my words simply because there is no where else to go besides the last unpainted corner: paranoid thinking.
I'm no psychologist, but doesn't this smack of schizophrenic behavior--contructing realities to support a particular perspective rather than basing a perspective on a measurable reality?
My worry is when you corner something with teeth--what happens then???
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Maxbaer...
great minds... ;^)
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The Bush coalition is disintegrating
If these guys are attacking Bush, it's more evidence that the conservative coalition is disintegrating. Several other more rational conservatives have disengaging themselves from Bushrecently too, and the anti-immigration wackos have been against him for some time.
The Bush coalition included a lot of disparate groups and was held together by the expectation that President Bush would deliver the goods (military victory, an end to abortion, low taxes, and ordinary graft in large quantities.) When people realized that he wasn't going to be able to deliver, they started to go their separate ways, since they don't agree on a lot of issues.
The US will still be 30% wingnut, but if they lose their unity they'll lose their power. The way Congress was run, for most of the last 6 years the US was ruled by the majority of the majority -- moderate and rational Republicans were mostly squashed, and President Bush was more than happy to play along with Delay and Hastert. But they've lost Congress and have no leverage any more.
The media will be the last ones to get the news, of course. They'll be catering to the wingers for a year after the wingers are definitively defeated.
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The WMD scam was stopped by Valerie Plame.
The neocons tried to insert WMD after the fact when the war rationale was being exposed by the facts.
Altanmia Mining was a company that Marvin Bush sat on the board of. They were awarded the KBR gasoline/fuel importation contract for our operations in Iraq.
They never had fuel delivery in their company resume. Their profile did include "WMD delivery."
They had a shipment of banned WMD items and precursors turned back at the border of Iraq, coming in from Kuwait.
"Rayne Today," a Salon blog, once had a lengthy discussion about this fact between the blog host and myself. Several credible NGO and the United Nations, along with other coalition members, took note of the fact Altanmia was stopped at the bored attempting to import banned items that were in fact listed as war justifications.
-Chris Murphy
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decisions, decisions
Hey, I'm convinced. I'm willing to agree that a Saddam had WMD if the Repubs are willing to state that this incompetent bunch of screw-ups managed to lose them, thus increasing our national security risks exponentially.
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The loonier the better apparently
Really, at what point do these paranoids with PC's jump the shark? Is this it? What kind of insanity can we expect when they finally realize that they are cornered by their lies?
The crazier they get, the more the average non-political person will tune them out and vote against them. However, we should never underestimate the ability of these nutjobs to play the fear card, though I am hoping most have caught on to that con as well. My fear is just what these crazies will do when they realize the've irretrievably lost their ability to connect to power.
We've all had that experience of talking to someone who seemed pretty normal and rational, but as the conversation goes on and veers into more conspiratorial territory there is that point where the switch in your brain goes from "normal, likable person" to "whoa, I'm stuck talking to a nutbar". These RW blogs touting this story are well into that territory.
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The Brits who know her well
from her rightward lurch, then her dive into neoconnerie, call Phillips 'Mad Mel'.
She's one of the rarer British examples of a winger who has embraced the whole package of lies, including global warming denialism. And she's been jumping from crank to crank for a while in search of those 'missing' WMDs.
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This is nothing new...
The John Birch Society was convinced Eisenhower was a communist mole. Not FDR, mind you. Not Truman. Eisenhower. Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about them in 1965...
“Pseudoconservativism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission … The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition … [He] sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world … cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.”
–Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 1965.
Now we have Altemeyer's work on Authoritarians but the subjects haven't really changed that much.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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A pattern emerges
Some of these are the same people who express Capt. Renault-style shock - shock! - that anyone could hold the similarly detached-from-reality view that 9/11 was a big conspiracy which benefited from the involvement of the White House. Pot, meet kettle.
For the dead-enders, these are articles of faith. Saddam had WMDs. And returning to what you wrote yesterday about Krauthammer, it is also an article of faith that radical Islamists are everywhere, and that they want to kill us.
I see a great deal of similarity between these people and those who claim to see images of the Virgin Mary everywhere, from slices of pizza to patches of mold of the sides of refrigerators (apologies to Berke Breathed).
You simply can't reason with these people, because their faith that these crackpot notions are true is apparently unshakable. The only thing you can do is point out how delusional they are and hope that the "reputable" publications that continue to publish them realize how much their credibility is being shot by their continuing associations with those who peddle such harebrained stories.