THE LEFT'S CONSPIRACY MADRASSA
One of these days I'll outline something I see happening on the left--an ideological alliance is developing between Islamicists and the Western left, with the latter always acting to downplay any good we do, play up any bad we do and lie lie lie about President Bush so that the weak minded are forever confused about him and his intentions. The left is becoming Sinn Fein to Osama/Saddam/Arafat's IRA.
Exhibit A in all this will be Michael Moore, whose fevered rants give legitimacy to the ravings of lunatic clerics in the madrassas that recruit and train terrorists.
Exhibit B will be the likes of Rep. Jim McDermott. His latest: The capture of Saddam was timed to help Bush. I wish I were making this up, but I'm not:
WASHINGTON -- The Washington congressman who criticized President Bush while visiting Baghdad last year has questioned the timing of the capture of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., told a Seattle radio station Monday the U.S. military could have found Saddam "a long time ago if they wanted." Asked if he thought the weekend capture was timed to help Bush, McDermott chuckled and said: "Yeah. Oh, yeah."
The Democratic congressman went on to say, "There's too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing."
48 hours after catching one of the worst criminals in the past 100 years, and a US elected official does his best to make our own president look as bad or worse. So what's his evidence? He doesn't have any:
When interviewer Dave Ross asked again if he meant to imply the Bush administration timed the capture for political reasons, McDermott said: "I don't know that it was definitely planned on this weekend, but I know they've been in contact with people all along who knew basically where he was. It was just a matter of time till they'd find him."It's funny," McDermott added, "when they're having all this trouble, suddenly they have to roll out something."
You'd think that if Bush were doing something like this, he'd wait until some more critical moment. I mean, if you think he's some sort of evil genius, you should at least assume that Bush would take maximum advantage of the situation--delay the capture until the convention, or until just before the election, right? But that assumes coherence in the conspiracy theory, and such theories seldom allow for consistency or logic. They're just sets of random musings mixed together into one foul stew.
To their credit, some Democrats see McDimwitt for what he is--a nut:
"With all due respect to my colleague, that is a fantasy," Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said of McDermott's comments. "That just is not right. ... It's one thing to criticize this administration for having done this war. I mean, that's a fair question. But to criticize them on the capture of Saddam, when it's such a big thing to our troops, is just ridiculous."
And as always, once the conspiracy is proffered, the theorist disowns it:
McDermott, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, called the timing of Saddam's capture suspicious but said he was not alleging it had been intentionally delayed."Everything was going wrong, and they got a real Christmas gift, if you will, in that the troops did a magnificent job and found" Saddam, he said.
How is this different from Howard Dean's conspiracy theorizing on the Diane Rehm show? Not very, I'd say. In both cases, an outlandish theory is proffered to get it into the public consciousness. Most will reject it, but some will latch on to it while others will simply find it confusing. But over time these theories have a way of taking on a life of their own, and pretty soon there's a cottage industry built to prove them, and responsible thinkers have to spend time researching and refuting them.
The end result of all this is sapped morale. People like me have to spend too much of our time refuting the nonsense, until we get sick of it. After a while it just becomes a waste of time--those that want to believe the theories won't listen to reason anyway. People on the left gradually latch on to them--in the Dean case, his theory once got Rep. Cynthia McKinney booted from office, but now he can talk about it without it denting his run for the presidency.
Some of this conspiracy alliance is intentional--I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find that Michael Moore, whose latest book and upcoming film are teaching a whole generation of Europeans that America is the source of all evil and that we attacked ourselves on 9-11, is in some way directly connected to Islamicist fronts. He's today's version of the nuclear freeze movement, which was a Soviet front in its day, though in his case financial backing probably isn't necessary--his books and films sell well, thus he can use the capitalism he derides to fund his own little virtual madrassa. Some of the alliance is just philosophical--I doubt very much that Dean consciously says things that wouldn't be out of place on the rabid Arab street, though the end result of his words is often to legitimize the world's darkest fears about us. We don't need a president whose first instincts are to float the craziest theories about the war. We need a president who will defend the country, and Dean is evidently not constituted to do that.
As for McDermott, he was one of three Democrat Congressmen who visited Baghdad in the runup to the war, and gave the old dictator a clean bill of health. Is he in someone's pay? I'd be surprised if he wasn't. But whether there is some significant Islamicist financial backing of McDermott or not (as there was with McKinney), he's become an ideological soulmate of Saddam Hussein, and he intended his theory to dent the good that should come from Hussein's arrest.
That's seditious activity, if you ask me.
MORE: I guess we can add former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to the left-wing conspiracy madrassa. I would say that she's just under its sway, but she has actually come up with an original conspiracy theory, so she may also be one of its clerics.
In all seriousness, this country is in trouble when the party out of power has gone so far off into the paranoid weeds.