"O, Heinous, Strong, and Bold Conspiracy!”

October 30, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
“O, Heinous, Strong, and Bold Conspiracy!”
It’s election time. Do you know where your favorite conspiracy theory is?

So let's get this Vidal notion straight: George W. Bush — a.k.a., Shrub, a.k.a., the President-Select, a.k.a., boy and various other demeaning appellations coined by the self-anointed compassionate side of the debate — is somehow the point man in a complicated global scheme of mass killing, hatched in the secrecy of the bought-and-paid-for corridors of Washington power so that a few Texas oilmen can lay claim to the Iraqi pumps?

Vidal, of course, is the intellectual patron saint of the Democratic party, a gourmand of loopy progressivism who, like Noam Chomsky, always has a spot at the table amid the world's anti-American elite. He is a classic high-I.Q. ideologue whose passion for "the cause" is the means by which he has earned his literary and cultural bona fides.

When Vidal puts something into play, it trickles mantra-like from the salons down to the streets. That is why he wrote this piece for the British (read: European) press. In no time we'll find his message being parroted by EU fellow-travelers throughout the antiwar movement. He is pleading for backup and rearmaments in his ongoing war against his own country.

If the Iraq regime change is to be stopped in its tracks, Vidal hopes it will be brought about by a world-class effort — via the Left's (and, if you heard the dissent on the war resolution, the Democratic party's) favorite governing body: the United Nations.

Vidal & co.'s message: The American Fifth Column is alive and well, and so the U.N. must maintain its doggedness in taking on the illegitimate American War Machine.

Of course, the honor of riling up the masses stateside goes to show folk like Susan Sarandon and Barbra Streisand — for whom, apparently, America's unique freedoms are not worth defending. Under any circumstances.

Here is but an incomplete list of the Oliver Stone-isms peddled as truth in mainstream Democratic circles in the modern political era, especially recyclable at election time:

The October Surprise — The Iranian hostages are freed by prearrangement between Reagan and the Ayatollah — just in time for the Gipper to heroically take the oath of office of the presidency.

Iran Contra — The U.S. government sold drugs to arm Central American "death squads." An offshoot is Rep. Maxine Waters's (D., Calif.) greatest hit: The CIA infested the inner cities with crack in a bid to keep the black man down.

Gulf War — Take your pick: A) Daddy Bush goaded Saddam into invading Kuwait by having his ambassador tell him in a dispatch that America would not get itself involved in Saddam's internal affairs; B) the war was not about the liberation of Kuwait, nor about ridding the region of a menace predisposed to taking on further regional conquests — it was about oil, pure and simple.

And then there was the memorable "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy:" We brilliantly forced Clinton to do all those nasty things with his subordinates — and then we forced him to cover his tracks, by both committing and suborning perjury in a suit whose underlying sexual-harassment law had been brought to the fore by his own political machinery (NOW & co.) — and then the case was okayed by an Arkansas Democratic judge, Susan Weber Wright, who had been taught in law school by none other than... Bill Clinton himself.

And who can forget the Florida electoral debacle of '00: nothing like Jeb and Katherine Harris having the foresight to know the whole dang election was gonna come down to a few black votes in Florida... So they brilliantly schemed with Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane and a pack of wild dogs to keep blacks away from the polls. Thank God Reverend Jesse went down there on day one and astutely reported this felonious behavior to a shocked nation. And those three statewide machine-count vote tallies in Bush's favor? Even machines now contribute to grandiose schemes. Don't you read Asimov?

When Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D., Ga.) — the first one out of the gates to suggest that President Bush was behind 9/11 — lost a recent congressional primary to a fellow black liberal Democrat, she blamed her bad fortune on pro-Israel forces. Her father, Georgia state representative Billy McKinney, even went so far as to spell it out: "J-E-W-S." Texas Democrat Bernice Johnson chipped in that African-American voters think "Jewish people are attempting to pick our leaders."

Wasn't Rep. Dan Burton (R., Ind.) universally marginalized for his attempts to bring the details of Vince Foster's death to the forefront? So why is there no similar push by the press to do the same for Democrats who bring up even wilder allegations?

The instinct to go wacky is so reflexive in current progressive ranks that even before Paul Wellstone's body has been buried, his death has become the subject of a purported Republican plot. Yes: Bush and the evil cabal so feared the mighty Minnesota populist that they rigged his plane engine and knocked off seven innocents in the process. What more proof do you need that "compassionate conservatism" is a fraud? According to two separate dinner-party reports from Hollywood, the pacifist branch of the "industry" was abuzz with such theories this weekend. Predictably, the Internet teems with like chatter. Author/cartoonist Ted Rall on Tuesday had the courtesy to put the background buzz into the written word for all to see.

Funny — or maybe not — how the Left doesn't contribute a well-orchestrated propagandistic effort to argue against the likes of Saddam. Or Arafat. Or Mugabe and Mobuto. Or, well... supply your own out-of-control murderous world leader. For that matter, they don't much like looking back at such like-minded monsters of the past as Stalin or Pol Pot, whose paths to utopia demanded the extermination of those who dissented.

The Left's collective indifference to a certain political brand of conspiracy indeed sounds like a... conspiracy.

Indifferent to history's harsh judgment, self-proclaimed progressives continue to navigate the political map without a moral compass. The modern Left explains its political losses — both electoral and strategic — not by turning to self-reflection but by resorting to raw conspiracy-theorizing, emptied of reason.

So preposterous is the average conspiracy allegation that it can only too clearly be seen to be motivated by cynicism — to say nothing of the scary possibility that the Democratic party believes their supporters are too gullible to challenge them.

And notice that none of these plots are ever brought to a verifiable conclusion. Nor is there even an attempt at verifying or disproving them: After all, if they were to be proved wrong, the conspiracies couldn't hover above as a permanent fog with which to distract the electorate — over and over and over again.

And meanwhile, there is no body of evidence, no thorough-enough set of facts, no possible way to align the pesky details of Saddam Hussein's evil, that could ever bring these leftists to rethink their recalcitrance on a genuinely life-and-death matter. The same could be said of the Cold War, and of the Right's obvious role in ending it. Nothing can convince the true believer that what happened happened.

Sadly, there would seem to be no behavior — besides apostasy — for which one can be held to task by the organized Left. It's why Clinton is still standing after his multiple felonious debacles. Hell, it's why Clinton rose to power in the first place!

It's why in New Jersey, when the Torricelli cards went against them, the Dems rigged the game in plain sight.

It's why Jesse Jackson still stands at the pulpit of black America, an unelected embarrassment to humanity.

It's why Hillary and Al Gore are willing to dignify a race huckster like Al Sharpton, a convicted perjurer who falsely accused a cop of raping and smearing crap on a black teen woman — and who later admitted to having made the whole thing up. (As of this writing, no apologies have been issued by the good Reverend in the 15 years since he orchestrated one innocent man's personal nightmare.)

It's why Sidney "Grassy Knoll" Blumenthal lurks behind the scenes... somewhere, hidden.

It's why I can't keep my mouth shut at L.A. cocktail parties. And it's why I'm rarely invited back.

And it's why on Election Day I punch out (R) chads only. Even if the last name of the knucklehead on the ballot is Swaggart.

The Democratic party knows no higher faith than raw political power. If the Dems lose power, after all, it's highly likely that the dastardly conservatives will turn back the hands of time and create a racist, homophobic environment practically inviting James Byrd- and Matthew Shepherd-esqe "hate crimes."

Not convinced yet the vaunted party of FDR and Truman and JFK has taken a U-turn somewhere back on the bridge to the 21st Century?

Then why is it that the only thing the party can offer — 40 years after its low-tax, anti-Communist iconic figure was assassinated (by a pro-Communist, no less) — is "fear itself"?

Disagreement can't just be an honest philosophical breach. It almost always has to be a deeper, murkier plot, like abortion, where even mainstream liberals insist a cabal of all-powerful white men are conspiring to keep women down.

If you want my opinion on the Democratic party — if I've been too subtle up to this point — here it is in a nutshell: What we're dealing with is a vast left-wing conspiracy. And the lie that it's the other way around is projection.

Perhaps Kennedy was the starting-off point for this era of Democratic conspiracy discourse. The mother of all conspiracy theories, of course, surrounds his assassination. And, like Vidal, Stone doesn't have finite answers — but he sure does rouse cynicism about the motives of America's anti-tyranny leaders.

Republicans and conservatives may not be perfect. But at least they're honest about being motivated — give or take a Chaffee, a Morella, or a Snowe — to limit government's scope, mainly by lessening the individual tax burden and by not encumbering corporations, those horrible entities that create the lion's share of the nation's jobs.

But since Democrats don't want to butt heads in philosophical argumentation, they hatch whimsical excuses as to why things don't always work out the way they planned.

Call the Right wrongheaded. Work against us with all your might, if you disagree. But at least make the debate an honest one. And the only way to do that is to vote out of office the current crop of Democrat conspiracy theorists and their apparatchik enablers.

— Andrew Breitbart, with journalist Mark Ebner, is the author of the upcoming Hollywood, Interrupted, currently under contract with John Wiley & Sons.

) the war was not about the liberation of Kuwait, nor about ridding the region of a menace predisposed to taking on further regional conquests — it was about oil, pure and simple.

If this war was about oil, we would be allied with Saddam.

What most people have forgotten is that we were invited into Iraq's oil industry just prior to the invasion of Kuwait. When Saddam rolled into Kuwait we had a decision to make; back Saddam and we have entry to both Iraq and Kuwait; fight Saddam and possibly lose access to the Iraqi oil industry.

We chose, and have been locked out of Iraq's oil industry since. Mind you, we could probably have negotiated an end to the sanctions, in return for our investment dollars, at any time. If it was just about oil.

On the other hand, isolating Iraq from the market has helped the Saudis, keeping the price of oil a little more firm. Returning Iraq to full production will be bad for the Saudis. Also bad for major new US investments in Central Asia and West Africa. If it were just about oil, it might be better to keep Iraq bottled up, depending on your specific interest.

Well, I think if there was any miscalculation it involved Saddam's megalomania, which wasn't apparent before the height of the Gulf War. About your one point, lemme say that those who claim such events are some Manichaean conflict between the "Big Oil Barons" and the commonfolk just strike me as distinctly ignorant about macroeconomics & global affairs in general. The key, in my view, to properly evaluating the period leading up to and following the Gulf War, is to not think in hindsight but in foresight.

Before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. sphere of influence was actually rather tenuous at best in the Persian Gulf region. The Iranian intentions to exert influence over the oil shiekdoms and their ability to close down the oil lanes were no big secret - I even remember a lengthy discussion in a National Geographic issue that came out that year (I think the U.A.E. was the actual topic). The Iranians had a border dispute with the U.A.E. (over some islands) which were feared to become a rationale for a sudden cross-Gulf attack.

Moreover, had Iran made a sudden move to capture any part or all of the Saudi peninsula, the U.S. allies would've been in quite a bind - with their closest major installations under NATO command (recall, also, that there was no question at that time of NATO acting as anything more than a defensive pact against the Soviet Union). The Cold War standoff had left both superpowers of the time with only peripheral military access to the Mideast region. Once U.S. forces moved into the area during Gulf War I, Iran has remained tightly contained with the magnitude of its previous military threat long eclipsed.

As for Saddam himself, it's hardly far-fetched to think that he would've withdrawn in the face of invasion (indeed, that's reportedly what the Bush administration expected). Moreover, without the Desert Storm attacks & the following sanctions, he would not have been able to consolidate his power to quite the extent he has - making internal overthrow, whether by natural development or external 'assistance', a much more viable outcome. In short, I'm just saying that people should consider how the situation looked at the time, not just how it looks now, from a vantage point of 12 years hence.

It's also possible, of course, that #41 didn't expect Saddam to go so far as occupation & annexation of Kuwait. They may've expected the military buildup & standoff to get resolved by some means short of full-scale war (not that this amounted to much, considering the vast power differential between Iraq & Kuwait). My problem with that idea is: why didn't the State Dept. then take some more aggressive approach to resolving that dispute? The reason I remember all this so well is because I kept expecting some major development (I've always been fascinated with brainstorming where the next war's gonna happen - call me eccentric, or whatever) and I didn't see anything much in the mainstream media or on the diplomatic front.

In short, I just can't see how the State Department couldn't see events unfolding in that direction when it seemed fairly obvious from my insignificant vantage point. I was actually quite surprised when the Bush administration reacted with such vehemence thinking that they would've not signalled their earlier indifference (as I interpreted at least) had they found such a development of any great concern. At first, I just figured it'd be another random 3rd World conflict which would amount to little more significant than some minor atlas changes. Much to my surprise, it became a far more pivotal and enduring event within global affairs, to say the very least. Regardless of all this, it can't be discounted that it ultimately just came down to misreading the situation on the part of the U.S. government.

I respect your post, you raise great points, I would ask you to consider things 12 years from now.

Heh! Well, that's not the topic of this thread, but I'm frequently off in my own little world pondering how the future's gonna turn out - I guess it's the scifi devotee in me. If you're suggesting that I'm implying we don't need to deal with Saddam in the here & now, I'm not saying that in the slightest. What's past is done; Saddam clearly represents a very different sort of threat now than he did in 1990. His developing a nuclear capability would prove disastrous and he cannot be allowed to do that. It's unfortunate that much of the world is fighting tooth & nail against his necessary overthrow in lieu of disarmament - I'm honestly quite perplexed by the resistance.

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