Originally published in the Middletown Press, Bristol Press and New Britain Herald, November 16, 2008
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The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they funnel so much attention onto individual trees, they completely miss the reality of the forest.
Consider the 9/11 Truth movement. Bush and Cheney have spent nearly eight years arguing that the American government should be allowed to do things such as torture people, spy on citizens without warrants, lock them away without trial and other frighteningly unconstitutional acts. Worth complaining about, perhaps.
Meanwhile, the Truthers have focused on the best ways to uncover a complex conspiracy involving radical America-hating Muslims who committed a mass-suicide fake terrorist attack as a favor to America’s president, thus giving the Great Satan an excuse to consolidate power over his own people and invade a Middle Eastern country with rich oil fields.
The idea, admittedly, has a certain appeal. It would have been comforting, during the gloomiest days of the Bush administration, to think “At least the country’s being led by brilliant Machiavellian geniuses who know exactly what they’re doing.”
Or maybe “stupid Machiavellian geniuses” is more accurate. At some point, the conspirators still said to each other: “When we bring down the World Trade Center, it’ll give us an excuse to invade Iraq. We’ll blame it on a bunch of suicidal fanatic hijackers. But we’ll have to say they were Saudi hijackers, because there’s no way we could get hold of any fake Iraqi passports for a conspiracy of this magnitude.”
Too bad Cheney never thought to hire a copy editor. Someone with a sharp eye, who could’ve pointed out irregularities that the American public might find suspicious. (This writer was qualified and available at the time.)
But that’s a digression. Point is, the 9/11 movement will likely shift its attention away from the White House once Bush leaves it. Fortunately, President-elect Obama won’t suffer any deprivation, since he’s busy with conspiracies of his own.
The right-wing parts of the Internet claim Obama isn’t merely America’s first nonwhite president, but our first illegal immigrant radical Muslim Marxist terrorist president as well. To summarize the arguments for his preemptive impeachment:
OBAMA blah blah MARXIST wah wah TERRORIST robble robble NOT AN AMERICAN CITIZEN mumble mumble THAT’S NOT HIS REAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE yabba yabba TAKE AWAY OUR GUNS blithery blithery HUSSEIN OBAMA yappity yappity DANGEROUS HIPPIE RADICALS giggity giggity OSAMA BIN LADEN IN THE LINCOLN BEDROOM.
And that’s without even playing the race card.
Are any of these allegations true? America can only hope so. Obama’s probably not capable of demolishing the World Trade Center and fooling the world about who did — that requires the genius of a George W. Bush, possibly with an Illuminati/Mossad connection — but if we’re lucky, he is at least smart enough to have spent several years serving as a U.S. senator without anyone realizing he’s secretly been an Indonesian citizen all along.
He was a precocious little chap, too, bribing some obscure Hawaiian court clerk to alter his birth certificate while still just an infant. That bodes well for us. America’s in bad shape these days. We need a leader with wisdom, foresight and maturity beyond his years, and if half these anti-Obama conspiracy theories are true, he’ll do fine.
