Posted on 11/23/2002 8:39:30 PM PST by Doctor Raoul
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?
By Andrew Breitbart
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If you happen to be wavering on Iraq, or the coming election, perhaps Gore Vidal's latest paranoid flight of fancy will be instructive.
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?
If the stakes weren't so high, it would be funny.
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?
And then there's good ol' Sen. Hillary Clinton, who's now busy reviving the greatest hit of '00 to scare the masses two weeks before her diminishing followers are due to take to the polls in '02. Trotting out the "President-Select" trope in, of all places, Bel Air, the freshman New York senator reminds us of the most important lesson of all: When all else fails, go conspiracy.
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.
For the record, it's President Bartlet who authorizes illegal assassinations — not Bush. It has to be true; I read it in the New York Times.
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 Terry McAuliffe is the head of the Democratic National Committee.
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"?
Or worse, paranoia.
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.
I'm rooting for the honest Democrats too.
Whatever. More class warfare strategizing from the party of discontentment, the Democrats. A group of people who hang their political fortunes on how much they can damage America.
With all due respect, I do not view Gore Vidal, nor Hilly and Billy from the Ozarks as particularly high-I.Q. types, ideologues though all three may be.
I have spent my career dealing with similiar left wing ideologues from expensive high tone eastern colleges and have usually found, like these three, than when you scratch the intellectual underpinings of their academic record, you find that the skids have been greased by similar more senior left wing ideologues (like Senator Fulbright etc.) that enabled the junior generation to enhance their academic resume even though their personal intellectual qualifications were mediocre.
Bill Bradley admited that his access to a Rhodes scholarship and to Princeton University was enabled even though he did not have the intellectual credentials to have been awarded or admited on merit in either case.
Simple reason why none of these people will enter into a straightforward debate on significant issues of economic and political politics--none of them are smart enough to frame the issues. Same reason you find these left wing groups on campus exercising picketing and other boycott efforts to keep Ann Coulter and others off campus and out of the political discourse. Reason why Harvard student liberals burn weekly's with written material they don't like. The liberals don't have enough IQ to meet any of these issues head on.
They are not smart at all, they are dumb.
Well, if it was about 'ridding the region' it
was a colossal flop. If not oil, what?
Our innate love of Kuwait?
It doesn't boil down to an emotionally appealing, simplistic idea such as 'oil'............and I think you know that.
"Mr Babylonian King" has grandiose ideas about himself, and it manifests itself time and time again. Yeah, he wants become self appointed tap master of the world's oil supply.
We're really sorry that 3000 people died. It got a little out of hand. Want some more oil?
I think Iraq needs to be invaded. "Poison Gas" boy can be sent to the trashcan of history, and anybody who thinks like him, or foments such nonsense (Hi Saud) can think about the consequences.
Yes.
File "Saddam", cannot be restored if you press delete from here. Are you sure you want to do this?
Click.
It's lame, it's weak, but unfortunately effective. Have's and Have Nots, and too many people are in the Have Not Category.
......although the sharpest sword against this sort of thing is American innovation, and traditional capitalistic values.
Not Enron, and that sort of thing, but the classic American ideal of capitalism tempered by our innate sense of good judgement.
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