Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times asks, “Why do one-in-five American voters now believe Osama bin Laden is still alive?”
Additionally, Obama aides’ eager and hurried attempts to tell the raid story to their boss’ best advantage lead to countless conflicting details and confusing inaccuracies.
The botched recounting turned a PR homerun into a merely impressive triple, needlessly eroding Obama’s credibility even among those wishing Bin Laden ill.
AdvertisementTo assuage criticism among some influential Washington pols — the people who really matter in Obama’s non-fundraising day-to-day world — he offered to show the not-so-nice photos to select members of Congress.
However, although global audiences have been treated to countless photos of atrocities and gruesome scenes in recent years — severed heads online, bound Abu Ghraib prisoners, Saddam Hussein hanged and burned, mutilated American bodies hanging from a Falluja bridge come vividly to mind — Obama clearly was more concerned about possible foreign reaction than domestic disbelief, which he doesn’t place much stock in.
A strange reaction from someone who tried for four years stonewalling skeptics of something as simple as documenting his birthplace, only to finally give in and release his sealed long-form certificate just this spring — and then see virtually all the wind immediately disappear from the sails of the so-called birther movement.
Operating in a longtime one-party city like Chicago, Democratic politicians do not often feel beholden to explaining themselves to the obedient public. So, the lesson this president from there obviously drew from his unnecessary birth certificate-sealing confrontation was to do it again with the Bin Laden photos.
But isn’t it a statistical given these days that 20 to 25 percent of Americans believe some sort of conspiracy? Just look at the conspiracies that have been floated by the news media and Hollywood during the past few decades:
- LBJ and the Joint Chiefs of Staff assassinated JFK. (Thanks Oliver.)
- The Moon landings were faked. (Thanks Whoopi.)
- George W. Bush deliberately caused 9/11. (Believed in 2007 by an estimated 35 percent of Democrats, according to leftwing blogger Jane Hamsher. Thanks Rosie.)
- George W. Bush deliberately caused Katrina. (Thanks Spike.)
- George W. Bush was holding Bin Laden in Area 51 for the ultimate October Surprise. (Thanks Walter.)
- Global Warming is the greatest threat mankind has ever faced, but it’s not enough to get anyone who believes in it to sell his mansion and stop flying in private jets. (Thanks Al.)
- Sarah Palin would usher in “the coming American police state.” (Thanks Naomi.)
- Sarah Palin’s uterus. (Thanks Andrew.)
- Clip art kills. (Thanks Paul.)
- Democrats who voted for Hillary instead of Obama in the primaries were racists. (Thanks Nora.)
- The Tea Party is racist. (Thanks Keith.)
- Every Republican candidate is racist, except for Herman Cain, and if you’re a Republican you’re only supporting him because you’re a racist. (Thanks Bill.)
Richard Hofstadter wrote his “Paranoid Style in American Politics” essay in 1964 in an effort to assert the superiority of his worldview, and to attack anyone who disagreed with it. But since then, there seems to be plenty of paranoia to go around on the left as well, with the media blasting it like a megaphone to the rest of the American public. If these past efforts have caused 25 percent of the American public not to take the word of the president when he says that OBL is DOA, America’s leftwing elites have only themselves to blame.
It’s a de facto admission that Americans don’t go killing muslims or black folks after seeing awful videos that are by no means rare.
This is a thing everyone in the frickin’ universe already knows except Soledad O’Brien the “Racist Hunter” and her cadre comprising the NAACP, CAIR, the HuffPo, her bosses at CNN and any number of Left Wing hate groups who advertise their compassion with sign language at the bottom of your TV screen and concern for wheel chair access and so are forever absolved of racism or bigotry.
Hell, there ain’t even a kettle to be called black.
Paranoia and conspiracy theories exist because our elites, our media, our legal system, our political system, our universities, all spew out a set of lies we know are lies and can see are lies: PC, Multiculturalism, and feminism.
We know, waify 90 pound women don’t kick around massive guys. We know Black guys are not computer experts, and Black people are not possessors of magical wisdom and spiritual goodness. We know that people of different races, creeds, colors, and religions do not all get along in a giant festival of kumbayah but all hate each other with appalling predictability. We know that when no race is mentioned or picture shown, of criminal suspects on the news, it is very likely that they are Black or Hispanic. We know Blacks are 12% of the population and declining (0.9% over the last decade) slightly, and not about 75% of the population based on commercials. We know Blacks are split between 40% Middle Class and 60% Urban Core Ghetto, and do not form the massive middle class we see on TV but do not see in our own daily lives.
Our elites, our TV, our Movies, our newspapers and magazines, our political people (of both parties), our legal system, our universities, keep cramming down Platonic “noble lies” after “noble lies” and we know, directly, from our own experience they are all FALSE! We are lied to all the time, every day, in every way, to support stuff that is demonstrably false: PC, Multiculturalism, feminism, Global Warming, and all the rest.
No wonder no one trusts anything, from anyone, unless absolute proof is given, when we are lied to on average about 100 times a day by our culture and power structure. Add to that Robert Putnam’s findings on diversity (people do not trust authorities and “hunker down” into “fortress like” isolation, with conspiracy theories abounding) and it all makes sense.
You don’t find conspiracy theories much in Japan, or Finland, or other places less afflicted with PC and other cultural “noble lie” idiocy, and coherent in its population. People only trust when nearly all people around them look like very distant cousins, and their culture/elites tell them things that are consistent with what they see with their own eyes.
Maybe the LA Times is failing to see the forrest because of the trees… the credibility of the media itself is at Marianna-Trench-like levels. ANYTHING they report, especially with regards of their favorite naked emperor, Obama, is likely to be viewed skeptically. If the media were to report how Obama is absolutely certain the earth is round, I wouldn’t be surprised to read how one in five are suddenly worried about falling off the edge.
Whiskey has nailed a lot, but there is one fundamental element that is not touched upon -
Namely, keep in mind that there is a huge psychological payoff for these conspiricist doofuses. Namely, in one immediate swoop, by espousing this nonsense, they establish themselves as both smarter than everyone else (you and I, the dumb sheeple who are too ignorant to see the truth through the government lies, blah blah blah…), and more moral than the evil powers who are doing such awful things (“I, as calling them on it, would de facto never do such terrible immoral things backed by such evil lies, blah blah blah…”)
Ain’t that convenient? Just espouse the nonsense, and you are immediately on a hallowed plane far above the unwashed masses. Is it any wonder how many of our academic and cultural elites are willing to play along?
Of course, in an earlier and more ignorant era, people trying to pull this nonsense would get called on it, and laughed at over such minor details as the facts that the conspiracies they propose are logically phantasmogorical and just plain lunatic, believable only by a child. Fortunatey, we are all SO much smarter these days….
I know we are smarter. We have to be. Just ask these people, they’ll be glad to tell you that, in detail.