Obama To GOP On Susan Rice: “If They Want To Go After Somebody, They Should Go After Me” (by Adalrich William)
Response to a G+ post wherein I posit that conspiracy theories are a bunch of crazy stupid bullshit.
Behind every nonpartisan institution, the right sees the malevolent hand of a liberal cabal. Just look at the latest outrageous charge by the far right that an improvement in the jobs report must have been manipulated.
None of this should be taken to imply that the situation is good, or to deny that we should be doing better — a shortfall largely due to the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans, who have blocked any and all efforts to accelerate the pace of recovery. (If the American Jobs Act, proposed by the Obama administration last year, had been passed, the unemployment rate would probably be below 7 percent.) The U.S. economy is still far short of where it should be, and the job market has a long way to go before it makes up the ground lost in the Great Recession. But the employment data do suggest an economy that is slowly healing, an economy in which declining consumer debt burdens and a housing revival have finally put us on the road back to full employment.
And that’s the truth that the right can’t handle. The furor over Friday’s report revealed a political movement that is rooting for American failure, so obsessed with taking down Mr. Obama that good news for the nation’s long-suffering workers drives its members into a blind rage. It also revealed a movement that lives in an intellectual bubble, dealing with uncomfortable reality — whether that reality involves polls or economic data — not just by denying the facts, but by spinning wild conspiracy theories.
It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.
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| — | Paul Krugman |
“The Bureau of Labor Statistics released an unexpectedly strong monthly jobs report on Friday, finding a dramatic drop in unemployment to 7.8 percent and revised the number of jobs added in July and August up from initial estimates. While for most Americans, the growing economy is good news, conservatives immediately expressed their skepticism in the jobs report’s credibility.
1) Minutes after the report was released, Jack Welch, who famously cooked General Electric’s accounting books when he was CEO, accused President Obama of manipulating the numbers to distract from his debate performance:”
“A ThinkProgress study of the the Drudge Report reveals the popular internet aggregator has linked 184 times to InfoWars and World Net Daily, two sites that promote the internet’s worst conspiracy theories, since June 2011. By directing millions of visitors to these websites, Drudge is providing critical financial and reputational support to publications that argue 9/11 was an inside job, FEMA is building concentration camps and President Obama was not born in the United States.
Despite his support for paranoid conspiracy theorists, Drudge has received frequent praise from the media and political right. Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time Magazine and MSNBC, has called Drudge “the Walter Cronkite of his era,” advising “you can’t refresh Drudge too often.” Politico co-founder John Harris recently called Drudge Report’s influence on the political debate “a real achievement.” During this year’s campaign, Mitt Romney singled out Drudge as one of his favorite websites, and posted an online video of himself reading the Drudge Report on his iPad.
Drudge can provide 10% or more of total traffic to large media sites like NYPost.com, Boston.com and FoxNews.com, creating a powerful incentive for the mainstream media to overlook the unsavory side of his operation.”
As Lizza notes, things get downright conspiratorial: “In the sixth episode, a mysterious man in a fake mustache drives around in a white van and furtively pours chemicals into a city’s water supply, while Schaeffer speculates about the possibility that the U.S. government is controlling its citizens by means of psychotropic drugs.” That reflects an extreme level of distruct of government—but then, so does suggesting that we are locked in a United Nations plot to end resource extraction entirely, and warning that a moderate Democratic president will launch “re-education camps” for our children.
The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.
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| — | Alan Moore, “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” (2003) |
Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.
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| — | Alan Moore, “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” (2003) |
Who Is Alex Jones? | Media Matters For America
Ads for the DVD show Jones’ eyes above the words, “Death camps Are Real.”
Jones’ Obama Deception film claims that “Obama is continuing the process of transforming America into something that resembles Nazi Germany, with forced National Service, domestic civilian spies, warrantless wiretaps, the destruction of the Second Amendment, FEMA camps and Martial Law.”
An April 17, 1999, Austin American-Statesman article (retrieved from Nexis) reported that, even then, Jones believed that FEMA was “building hundreds of concentration camps on military bases with separate areas for men, women and women with children.”
BP oil spill a deliberate act. Jones has pushed the theory that the BP oil spill was a deliberate attack. Jones co-wrote a June 8 article headlined, “Evidence Points To BP Oil Spill False Flag.” A false flag event is an operation carried out by a powerful entity to deceive the public into thinking it was carried out by someone else. False flag examples cited by conspiracy theorists include the Oklahoma City bombing, and 9-11 attacks. From Jones’ article on Infowars.com:
- Sales of shares and stocks in days and weeks beforehand
- Halliburton link, acquisition of cleanup company days before explosion
- BP report cites undocumented tampering with well sealing equipment
- Government uses disaster to push for Carbon Tax, Nationalization talk
Troubling evidence surrounding the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20th suggests that the incident could have been manufactured.
Jones has discussed “evidence” that the spill was a false flag event on his radio program. A program posted on Jones’ YouTube channel on June 20 states that Jones “reveals why he is now sure it’s a 100% false flag event to usher in the global carbon tax talked about at the G-20 summit.”
Additionally, Jones has pushed numerous other conspiracy theories about weather control, mass sterilization, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, among others.
via mediamatters.org
Jones was pretty good in A Scanner Darkly. That was a work of fiction. He is not so good at nonfiction, unfortunately for all of us American citizens and citizens of the world that want to reduce pollution, normalize immigration, and promote global cooperation and unity … .
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