Posted on 08/04/2004 1:46:36 AM PDT by kattracks
There was a time long ago, an era before Feng Shui and dog psychiatry, that you had half a chance of engaging in rational arguments with a lefty. Big picture stuff like free markets versus controlled economies or whether colonialism was better for developing countries than self-determination. There was always at least some common ground, a framework for debate that made some sense, even if the argument wandered into purely abstract areas like how many Black Panthers can dance on the head of Leonard Bernstein.
Since that time, there’s been a decline in the level of discourse. The Left’s arguments have been distilled down to bumper sticker dialectics. “Bush Lied, People Died.” “Peace is Patriotic.” “War Is Not The Answer,” and my favorite, “Vote For Kerry, Before You Vote Against Kerry.” Actually, I didn’t see the last one. I made that one up.
Some attribute the Left’s inability to argue coherently to laziness. Others blame the NEA. Whatever the cause, Lefties don’t bother to read anymore because reading is hard. It’s a lot easier and more fun to fire up a blunt and listen to Rage Against the Machine and Bono for all your political insights. Plus there’s all these “facts” that get in the way of a strongly held emotional reaction to things like poverty, crime, terrorism and why conservatives think they have a right to keep at least half their income.
The old reliable common ground between opposing viewpoints is gone. It’s been replaced by uncommon ground, or maybe the common ground the Unabomber shared with people who thought he was spot on about the rights of bunnies and crabgrass and the evil of email. For whatever reason, the truly activist Post Modern Lefty has vacated the traditional tent sites of Marxism, wealth redistribution and “global standards of justice” to take up housekeeping in the Crab Nebula of the political landscape.
A near perfect example of leftist reasoning was the arguments in the run-up to our invasion of Afghanistan. There was the hand wringing about another
Vietnam. And there was the Steppe Horde argument about how the Afghans hadn’t been conquered since the days of Genghis Khan. And they reminded us how the British were humiliated there, how the Russians got mired for ten years, and, the best excuse ever to not invade a country – “What about the brutal Afghan winter?” Those arguments sound Lincolnesque by comparison to the issues the anti-American crowd is currently addressing seriously.
A case in point is a new book on the Required Reading list of Deaniacs, Moore-ophiles and the anyone but Bush crowd, The New Pearl Harbor. Authored by a philosopher at the Claremont School of Theology in California named David Ray Griffin, the book claims to have discovered the truth about the 9/11 attacks. Griffin postulates that Flight 77 never crashed into the Pentagon. What might have hit the Pentagon, he claims, was a US missile. No word from Griffin, of course, on what happened to Barbara Olson and the rest of passengers. They were probably conspirators. Her husband, after all, was on the Bush team so therefore it follows that he was part of the plot.
The book is full of other vile theories. The Twin Towers, according to Griffin, came down not as a result of the two airliners that hit it. Someone planted massive thermite explosives at the base of the towers and set them off after the planes hit. That someone, of course, is the man who would stand to gain the most from the incident -- George W. Bush and his SMERSH cabal of oil pirates that include Dick Cheney, Daddy Warbucks, Doctor Evil, Snidely Whiplash, Montgomery Burns, Ernst Blofeld, that guy who looks like Colonel Sanders in Monopoly, Thurston Howell III and no doubt, the ultimate puppet masters, Halliburton.
In case you haven’t guessed, the reason President Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks was to have an excuse to invade Iraq and grab the oil. But for that to be believable, you have to explain Osama Bin Laden taking credit for the attacks. There’s an answer. Bin Laden is a stooge of the CIA and the Mossad. The poor dupe only “thinks” he’s fighting a Jihad. He’s actually doing the bidding of the man that Whoopi Goldberg claims is the dumbest guy ever to hold public office. Bush is so devilishly clever, he’s convinced his enemies that he’s dumb.
Griffin is not an isolated crank. Radical lawyer Phil Berg has jumped on this conspiracy parade float and is going forward with a RICO case against President Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of the cabalists. Berg is representing Ellen Mariani, the widow of Neil Mariani who was on Flight 175 that crashed into the North Tower. The suit claims that “Bush knew” and did nothing to stop it. For supporting evidence, Berg brings up a lot of the same “questions” that Griffin poses in The New Pearl Harbor.
When jug-headed conspiracies are floated (we never landed on the moon, the Holocaust never happened, the white race is the result of a lab experiment gone horribly wrong) they’re met with serious nods of approval from the same people that want to see John Kerry in the White House. The “alternate” media, also known as the Democrat Party’s Commissariat of Information, has given Griffin’s book a lot of space and air time. They’re interviewing Griffin with the highly serious and deeply concerned tones a sane person uses when discussing troubling lab results with his doctor.
Griffin’s book has drawn applause from the usual activists. It got a big pat on the back from Mumia defender Ed Asner. Howard Zinn and Gerry Spence both think it’s just neat. And while there’s no proof Hillary read The New Pearl Harbor, she clearly has the same doubts as Griffin about the President’s fingerprints all over the 9/11 attacks. She asked the same question as Griffin -- what did Bush know and when did he know it?
While Griffin’s charges may furrow the brows of the average Democrat (at least we hope so), his 911 theory is just a biscuit toss from the ravings of Michael Moore, the guy who practically sat in Jimmy Carter’s lap at the Democrat convention. This has to tell you something about the mental state of the DNC. And even more about the rank and file Demos who didn’t demand that Moore be kept in the protest cages. Or at the very least, made to sit in the Fleet Center basement with the balloon blowers. Moore himself said, “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories except the ones that are true.” And let’s not forget that Carter swears he spotted an extra-terrestrial craft flying over his farm. Coincidence? We think not.
The wonderful fallout of all conspiracies is that they create counter conspiracies. And then counter counter-conspiracies. Once you fall for one big fish story, the rest come easy. For instance, a group of anti-Semites is claiming that activist Phil Berg is in fact a CIA plant, or at the very least, a right wing stooge of the original Bush 911 conspiracy. The reasoning goes like this. Berg is deliberately presenting a weak case in his RICO lawsuit. So weak, in fact, that the case will get thrown out and thus make any future cases against Bush et al impossible to prosecute. Advantage, Bush.
Since Berg is a Jew, they claim, he’s a Mossad agent. If Berg were for real, he should be charging the Jewish Supremacy cabal in Washington, they say, not the Zionist puppets like Bush and Cheney. Except for maybe the Silurians who live inside Mt. Shasta and kidnap hikers, almost every conspiracy theory always manages to depressingly find Jews as the root of all evil on the planet. The lunatics can’t even get creative about it. How about the Swiss for a change? Don’t they have a lot of secret money? And has anyone noticed that the Pope is protected by the Swiss Guard? Popish cabal? You be the judge.
Interestingly, the only activist to deviate from the Evil Jew play book is Dick Gregory, the hunger striker for all seasons. Among his core beliefs, he claims that the Hubble telescope isn’t really broken. The reason it’s shut down is because “they” found alien life in outer space and this needs to be kept from the public for fear of mass hysteria. Or the aliens are brain sucking reptiles. Gregory also believes that there’s a secret underground tunnel between LA and New York that can whisk you from coast to coast in 39 minutes. There’s another one from New York to England. Can we guess whom he’s voting for in the presidential elections?
Apparently, the old problems of civil rights and the creation of a “new man” has gotten boring for the Left. Aging rockers Graham Nash and David Crosby have joined the Party Party whose agenda is to rip the veil of secrecy from Area 51 and finally get to the bottom of the pressing captive alien issue. Apparently, after they left Max Yasgur’s farm Crosby and Nash took a thirty year personal quest of self-discovery through the peyote and Wild Turkey fields and landed face-first on the moons of Metaluna.
The problem for those of us who aren’t IQ challenged is that you can’t argue with the likes of Moore and Griffin. Rational discourse is the throwing of pearls before cosmic disintegrator rays. Talking to them as if they had something important to say is worse than trying to talk to a drunk. In the morning a drunk will at least be sober.
I have my own theory about The New Pearl Harbor, developed after a few days in my bunker shielded from CIA brain probes by wet sand and Dixie Chick CDs arrayed in the form of a pentangle. Griffin is a CIA plant with a Manchurian electron chip in his brain. He’s been directed to write the book in order to attract the likes of Hillary, Michael Moore, Ed Asner, Howard Zinn and the entire Pacifica Radio network in an effort to discredit them and make them objects of ridicule. This clearly underscores how stupid the CIA is because these people don’t need to ally themselves with Griffin to look dumb. They do a superb job of attracting ridicule all on their own.
LOL! Mr. Rafael should copyright that and sell them as bumper stickers.
If the Left weren't so deadly serious about amassing power, they'd be great comic relief.
Could the font have been any smaller?
My own view is that the liberal mind is naturally constructed to believe wild and/or totally insane theories. They operate under sort of a reverse Occam's Razor Law: the more absurd and completely devoid of proof and logic the theory, the more likely they are to believe it. I mean these are people, like The Great Crackpot (Michael Moore), who think your Republican neighbor next door, while he or she is planting flowers in the garden, in conspiring to do some evil to minorities or figure out ways to invade peaceful third-world countries and kill all their citizens just for the hell of it. So why should they not believe another crackpot like Griffin who offers yet another weird, crack-induced theory that only libs will swallow. I'm telling you Hannity is looking more and more correct these days: modern liberalism is turning into some kind of mental illness.
What a hilarious article!!!
LOL!!!
Welcome to the wonderful world of Yearghsville, where being right doesn't matter, only being the loudest. The more these whackos are exposed and debunked, the loonier they become.
The latest wave of conspiracy stories against Republicans started in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Canada and other countries before they surfaced here. They started when fears that Republicans might be elected were first considered in those other countries, about midway through the Clinton Administration. Many of those stories were exported to the USA.
Simply hilarious.
For those unfamiliar with Canadian coins, or waterfowl, I'll point out that the bird on that coin is a loon.
Also for what it's worth, the slang name in Canada for those dollar coins is "loonies".
"Vast right-wing conspiracy! Neocons! No blood for oil! We need to ask ourselves, why do they hate us? TerAYza! TERAYYYYYYYYZAAAAAAA -- !" :)
I can relate to that! I had an encounter the other day with a, from all outward appearances rational, co-worker. She had swallowed the Deaniac line about the latest threat warnings being only political. When asked if she thought the government should not have let people know, her response was something like "it's all made up anyway". I asked her want she meant by that and got an earful of "Bush lied about 9/11 so that Haliburton could build an oil pipeline in Afghanistan and steal Iraq's oil". Rather than waste anymore time with this, I backed away slowly. I realized I'd had a close encounter with the Great North American Moonbat.
I was thinking exactly that!
My brother, sad to say, also gave me that "we're in Iraq for the oil" nonsense. My response was to ask him why, if all we're interested in is the oil, we don't have all of our troops guarding the oil fields, pipelines, etc. so that we can get the oil we're there to steal? Somehow, he couldn't come up with an answer.
I we wanted to have a war for oil, why not just invade Alberta?
Kindly read my tagline- I am dead serious, despite the tongue-in-cheek...
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