Conspiracy,

I suspect that every human enjoys a good conspiracy theory now and again. The left has a number of goodies:

• Bush knew about 9-11 going to happen from “his friends the Saudis”, and did nothing on purpose because he knew it would be good for him politically.
• The whole Afghanistan war was to make way for a pipeline from Azerbaijan so that some of Bush or Cheney buddies could get rich(er). Sometimes it fits with the whole 9-11 plot in some elaborate way, sometimes it doesn’t.
• The whole Iraq war was “cooked up” to variously make Halliburton stock go up, provide oil money for some other set of cronies, cure some GW fixation with getting back at Saddam for trying to assassinate his daddy, or some other idea or all of that above.

While a good conspiracy theory needs very little evidence to get going in the minds of people that think it would be “shocking” if it were true, there are usually some set of news stories, memos, “heard on the street” kinds of things to give it some level of credence, at least if you are pre-disposed to believe it.

The interesting thing to me about the ones above is what kinds of people buy into them … Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, 90% of Hollywood … oh, maybe that really isn’t THAT amazing, and of course there is the excess of booze in the Kennedy case, age and booze can be a bit hard on the brain cells. I digress, the point is they do movies like Fahrenheit 911 on such things, millions of lefties go and cheer, and they have the director sit next to an ex-Prez at their last convention (the rabbit killer that only lusted in his heart and spared the Oval Office carpets).

Even though Hillary has pointed out to there being a “vast right-wing conspiracy” on National TV, we on the right just don’t seem to get many of our leading lights out there peddling conspiracy theories. It certainly isn’t for lack of “potential”, there is ALWAYS potential. Here are a few dots that the conspiracy minded could connect if they wanted:

• I read an article in US News last summer that Jim Wallis, author of “God’s Politics: How the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t get it” has been meeting with Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and other Democrats to work on a strategy for “winning back values”. The bottom line of the article was that they needed to focus on “care of the widows and orphans”, and what they really needed was an EVENT to crystallize their superior position on that issue.
• It took repeated calls from the Bush administration to get ANY evacuation called from New Orleans, and even with the calls, the evacuation was grossly inadequate and offers of using a train, busses, and other items were explicitly turned down by either the Mayor or Governor. Hundreds of school and city busses sat in their lots and were flooded out rather than being used to evacuate people.
• People were explicitly told by city officials to go to the Convention Center and Superdome, and these buildings were explicitly NOT supplied with water, portable toilets, emergency lighting, medical supplies or security personnel.
• The Louisiana STATE office of emergency management DENIED access to these facilities by the Red Cross on Tuesday, the day after the Hurricane when they wanted to provide water and medical supplies to the people there.
• No information was provided up the ladder via usual channels that assistance was specifically needed by people at those facilities, however reporters were encouraged to go there and begin to interview people.

So, do I think that the Mayor of New Orleans, the Governor of Louisiana, the DNC and CNN cooked up this scheme to get the ball rolling as a kickoff to a “Democrat Values Initiative”? Nope, I don’t … I certainly don’t give them credit for being that smart or organized for starters. I think they could have done such a thing with a “reasonable expectation” that nobody would be “seriously hurt” and not be aware that things would go as bad as they did, but in no way do I think they even WOULD try to do such a thing if they thought there was a reasonable chance people would be killed (and they would have to be even bigger idiots than I give them credit for to not see that).

All of which goes to show you that my opinion of liberals and Democrats is WAY higher than their opinion of George Bush, Dick Cheney, the US Military, American Business and a whole lot of their standard demons. They explicitly DO think that all of the above are REGULARLY doing “conspiracy things” to “make money”, “gain power” or other such reasons that will certainly take both American and other lives. Democrats at high levels and the media REGULARLY assert conspiracies very much like my fantasy stated above as “facts”, with much less “supporting data” than I have presented. They do whole books on such things (Al Franken, “Lies …” for example) only in place of CNN they use Fox news and Conservative Radio … but it is a conspiracy just the same.

Anything that happens can always be “explained” by some “conspiracy” or even “space aliens” if one is so inclined, all that is really required is ignoring the simple maxim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Do I REALLY think that conservatives should play such games? No, it would make us just as daffy as the left, but I think that an occasional observation of how easy it would be to “spot something” is healthy. Besides, just because I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “vast left-wing conspiracy” really doesn’t mean that there ISN’T one. If Hillary thinks that such a thing exists on the right, maybe she has a good reason because she knows of what she speaks due to her knowledge of the left? ;-)