Swimming with the Bush-hating sharks
In preparation for the conspiracy I have been dutifully studying the conspiracy theories on the other side to get an idea of how to live up to their expectations. Classic behavior for conspiracy theorists is to engage in rhetoric and form organizations resembling those which they are intended to oppose, and I'd like ours to fit like a glove.
[Don't bother thinking too hard about that last sentence as the logic may be found wanting and it could be deleted after further review.]
Anyway, the point is I've taken a leave of absence from the echo chamber and I may not return. I have found it about 50 million times more interesting to read stuff by people I totally disagree with.
When I first returned to the Northern Virginia area from Florida about 15 years ago, it was an immense relief to be able to read the Washington Times and the New York Post each day instead of the mainstream stuff which was all I could get down there. Then, getting satellite and Fox News was an additional helping of manna. I no longer had to sit and fume at the bias and shout at the television.
For the past four or five years I've subsisted largely on sources of information that I did not feel were completely full of crap.
But in the process, I guess I lost sight of the big picture: I'm really not interested in finding a group of like-minded individuals and only talking to them for the rest of my life. I'm much more interested in working, in whatever small way, to change the views of the misguided or "undecided."
To do that, you've got to know both sides of an argument. In college, I subscribed to The Nation, The New Republic and National Review for most of my time there, and eventually I realized the ideas expressed in the latter were closest to my own set of beliefs. I became a conservative. But I threw the baby out with the bathwater: With the effusive passion of youth, I got so annoyed with the grandstanding and overwhelming prominence of those on the liberal side that I decided life was too short to even listen to them.
After reading P.J. O'Rourke's excellent little article in The Atlantic last month I realized he hit on exactly why I was becoming tired of spending all my time imbibing viewpoints I agreed with while becoming unbelievably frustrated when polls showed so many are wallowing in the darkness of ignorance.
Another spur for me to get out more was the fact that a couple friends I care deeply about are committed liberals, and conversations with them have become increasingly unproductive. We no longer get to the roots of disagreement on issues, but just end up trying to one-up each other with competing (and contradictory) portfolios of facts.
I decided I needed to understand where they are coming from, so I have gone to the ideological source materials. What an eye-opener: Getting to the bottom of actual differences of opinion is really exhilarating in this age of shouting contest "debates."
This is all going to be spelled out in more detail when the conspiracy is officially launched, which hopefully will be in the next week. But for now, I'll just note that I have been delving back into The Nation, Washington Monthly, along with The American Prospect and The Progressive, and a variety of Web resources, and boy oh boy are there some competing definitions of reality out there.
When my liberal friends have told me how much they HATE Dubya, I've been pretty much perplexed by their explanations. Well, I'm perplexed no longer. Call me naive (seriously, I mean this, say "John Climacus, you are depressingly naive," because I really have dropped the ball on learning both sides), but I've had blinders on. I did not know the extent of the Bush-is-evil theorizing. The following links give a taste:
Bush conspiracy to create riots in FL
Conspiracy to get re-elected through increased layoffs
Bush bin Laden connection conspiracy revealed
U.S. government foreknowledge of 9-11
Michael Moore: Bush, the CIA and the Roots of Terrorism
Full collection of "Bush Knew" articles
Top 10 conspiracy theories of 2003-2004
New research on Bush-Hitler links
24 Ways President Bush is like Adolph Hitler
Gore Vidal: Bush allowed it to happen, for oil
Just like Nazi Germany: They thought they were free
Descendent of Hitler victims compares with Bush
Patriot Saints (ultra-Right Wing?): Bush's Complicit Role in 911 Attack
My appraisal so far: A LOT of the anti-Bush data presented as an indictment of the current president specifically is disingenuous. The frustration is with the U.S. government, and Bush happens to head it up right now. As James Bovard tellingly notes in The Bush Betrayal (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004, pg 7), "The Bush presidency is continuing and accelerating many of the noxious trends of the Clinton era, most of which started long before William Jefferson Clinton became president. Many of the abuses of the last few years would likely have occurred regardless of who was elected president in 2000."
A good portion of the "evidence" against Bush results from a difference of opinion on policy with one side framed as incontrovertible fact. This is by Robert Reich in the August 2004 issue of American Prospect (pg. 72): "...'smoking out,' imprisoning, or killing terrorists, based on information supplied by our intelligence agencies, cannot be the prime means of preventing future terrorist attacks on the United States. More important is dealing with the anger and the hate. This means, among other things, restarting the Middle East peace process...It requires shoring up the economies of the Middle East. And it means strengthening the legitimacy of moderate Muslim leaders, instead of encouraging extremism."
And, of course, the overriding piece of evidence against Bush in most of this literature is the failure to find WMDs in Iraq: The president, knowing there were no such weapons, started a war on the stated rationale that the weapons were there, apparently not having anticipated the fact that the absence of weapons would thus be proven.
Oh yes, this leads to another overriding theme of the Bush conspiracy material, which is that, if he is not an evil genius, he is a complete dunce. But then, so am I, and maybe so are you, because liberals are, by definition, smarter. We'll dissect this argument further at a later date.
