enormously helpful to the Bush Administration as it provided a giant distraction from the colossal crimes they committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If their energies had been directed in a positive way, there’s a good chance Bush would have been impeached and Dick Cheney thrown in jail.
Within minutes of the post, Ben started getting angry emails from truthers. He’s reprinted a couple at his website. Writers question his motives and intelligence:
Dear Sir: Are you really uniformed about the facts or part of a criminal element? …Or maybe you believe in some higher purpose for lying, pesonally (sic) I don’t really care. You are either a fool for talking about something you know nothing about or are a traitor to the human race. (Emphasis mine)
As always, those who speak out against conspiracy theory face accusations of being part of the conspiracy; but the comments on Cohen’s work mostly take umbrage at his mention of the truther-birther nexus.
They learned to do this from arch-tinfoil hatter Alex Jones, who picked up the 9/11 conspiracy thread the day after the attacks and immediately worked it into his narrative about a vast global conspiracy for world domination.
Jones has been spreading this special blend of Crazy™ far and wide ever since. Even when thoroughly and systematically debunked, Jones never loses because he can just lump the debunkers into his insane narrative as “enemies of truth.”
Here’s how Jones introduces himself in a video titled “The Road to Tyranny:”
Hello, I’m Alex Jones, a syndicated radio and television host based in Austin, TX and for many years I have been exposing the criminal activities of the global elite also known as the “New World Order.” And this collection of power-mad megalomaniacs has been using a successive string of terrorist events to usher in their corrupt world government. A world government where populations, their own documents show, will be herded into compact cities; will be issued national ID cards, and yes — even implantable microchips. (Emphasis mine)
Jones offers a detailed fantasy-revision of world history in which every significant event traces to the single ulterior purpose of global domination and mind-control. His “evidence” is conjecture. Occam’s Razor is nowhere to be seen.
Nowadays, Jones is pushing birther nonsense and extolling the “virtues” of legal challanges to the Obama presidency. Phil Berg, filer of the original birther-lawsuit, has been a frequent guest on Jones’s show for many years. Berg is a longtime propagator of 9/11 conspiracy theory.
The connection is irrefutable. Moreover, it’s only the tip of Teh Crazy™ iceberg.
Another Jones guest is David Icke, a British conspiracy nut best-known for his belief that alien reptiles rule the world from ancient, secret underground facilities and hide among us by shape-shifting into human form. Yes, it’s a plot right out of bad 80s television that even includes the British Royal Family.
Like Jones, Icke describes the New World Order as part of this fantasy universe. Jones used to rail against Icke’s reptile theories as harmful to the “cause” of truth — until that magical day when Icke became Jones’ guest:
another example of a scared, confused population unable to rationalize why their jobs are being shipped abroad, their health care costs are spiraling out of control, and the prospect of putting their kids through college is moving rapidly from slim to none.
On Friday, Harry Shearer postulated that birtherism is due to the deterioration of legitimacy in the last two presidencies:
The opposition, in both cases, was fueled, energized, and supercharged to a point of near mania by the whiff of illegitimacy. Both the opposition to Clinton and the opposition to Bush drew power, endurance, and bile from the feeling that the incumbent was a rank usurper.[...]Republicans, dependent on consultants to advise them on the exquisite variety of methods of nay-saying, gaze longingly at the emotional power of a charge of illegitimacy. The birthers are their wind turbines.
Questioning the legitimacy of a president, like questioning the legitimacy of your best friend’s children, is a sure-fire way to get sparks going, to fire up the base, to turn a torpid opposition into a pitchfork brigade. We’ve twice tasted this heady brew, and both enjoyed and recoiled at its bitter high. In this light, it’s easy to understand why some opponents to a still-popular president would be drawn to a cause that once again allows the suggestion of illegitimacy to trump disagreement with policy. (Emphasis mine)
I don’t think Cohen and Shearer are wrong, but Bob Cesca hit closest to the mark last week when he told birther and frequent Glenn Beck doom-bunker guest Michelle Malkin to “just blurt out the n-word already and get it over with.” As I said last week,
Birtherism invites all the ugliness of race and red-baiting into political discussion. Far from being an extreme idea of a rare fringe, birtherism is the stovepipe by which the right seeks to inject that ugliness into the public discussion.
For whatever reasons birtherism exists — economic fear, apocalyptic paranoia, or just plain mental illness — it has become that stovepipe. We cannot excuse it for being born of ignorance. Crhis Matthews’s takedown of G. Gordon Liddy was sweet, but incomplete; the primary sources of birtherism need to be interviewed, examined, and held to account for the totality of their Crazy™.
