Saturday, September 12, 2009

Conspiracy Theories on the Left Are Always Sane; Those on the Right? Not So Much

Jonah Goldberg makes an important distinction between Birthers and Truthers.

(I)t seems to me the “birther” hypothesis is vastly more plausible than the “truther” hypothesis. Politicians lie to advance their careers. You can look it up. Whole governments rarely orchestrate incredibly complex acts of physics, logistics, and mass murder all the while pinning guilt on others (who boast that they acted alone).

For the record, I don't believe either conspiracy theory, and neither do most Americans. But I've stated before that Barack Obama does have something he doesn't want us to know about his birth certificate and/or educational records. My suspicion is that he was a lackluster student who most likely wrote some radical papers and he doesn't want anyone to use the words he wrote as a 22-year-old against him now (and who can blame him?).

The astonishing part is how many on the Left, rather than blasting the Truthers (and Van Jones) as embarrassing nutjobs of the Democratic Party, has tried to defend Trutherism as a mainstream idea.
In July, the popular left-wing website FiredogLake couldn’t let go of the birther bit. One post — titled “The Republican Party is the Birther Party, and it’s dragging them down” — made much of the fact that 28 percent of Republicans, according to one poll, do not believe that Obama is a natural-born citizen. This week, the site’s founder, Jane Hamsher, was disgusted that Jones was “thrown under the bus,” even though he subscribed to trutherism, a view that “35 (percent) of Democrats believed as of 2007.”

I noted the weirdness of Hamsher's defense here. But worse than the weird defenses from moonbat bloggers is the way the press has decided to ignore Jones's resignation all together.
But mostly, the mainstream press changed the subject to how the Right is paranoid and vaguely unpatriotic for opposing Obama’s speech to schools Tuesday, despite the fact that most conservatives and Republicans didn’t protest the speech once the Department of Education’s controversially politicized lesson plans were withdrawn.

Van Jones's resignation was timed to get the least press and it succeeded, not because there was nothing to report, but because it's just so much easier to move to the next "Republican hysteria." Part of that is because of the car crash mentality of the media, but it's hard not to realize that Jones was an embarrassment to Teh One's administration, and that isn't newsworthy at all.