Conspiracy theories are fascinating. Not for the theories themselves, but for the implications they contain. Take the Obama conspiracies, for instance. Many of them have been posted right here on Neighborhood Link over the last few months. If you believe any or all of them, than you would have to agree with all or part of the following statement:
Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, Socialist, Manchurian-like candidate who has palled around with and/or been mentored by and/or been funded by terrorists, domestic and foreign, and black power racists, who has skirted the laws of this nation to run for the highest office in the land despite being ineligible.
That may sound a bit fantastic, but not nearly as fantastic as the implications behind such statements. For statements like this give Barack Obama far more credit than any mere mortal is due.
For if any of this were true, Barack Obama would have to be an evil genius on a level far above that of the fictional Lex Luthor. Because that would mean that millions upon millions of people have either been duped by Senator Obama or have been pulled into his secret circle and are conspiring to help him carry out his nefarious plan.
It would involve his family and friends, which would include his wife and daughters, sisters, brothers, grandmother, in-laws, and neighbors. It would also have to include his professional colleagues including those he worked with as a community organizer, the hundreds of legislators and staffers that he worked with in Springfield, Illinois, and the hundreds of congressional members and staffers that he has worked with in Washington, D.C., of which John McCain is included. Not to mention the faculty and staff at the University of Chicago as well as the employees of the law firm where he worked when he met his wife. And if not duped by the Senator, this would imply that this is possibly the most secret society in the world as none of them have ever leaked the plans, accidentally left behind an incriminating dossier, or inadvertently sent a damning e-mail to the wrong person. This is the type of secrecy we only hear about in Dan Brown and Robert Ludlum novels.
Only an evil genius would be able to get himself, along with his coconspirator William Ayers, appointed to sit on the board of a charitable foundation funded by one of the most prominent Republican philanthropists in the country so that he could hand out grant money to literacy programs and the like in order to hide his true intentions.
Only an evil genius would be able to scrub the documents of his past (with the exception of his birth certificate, of course) to hide his true intentions thereby throwing all news agencies and reporters off his trail.
Only an evil genius would be able to convince the student body and faculty of Harvard Law School that he was benign enough to be elected editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Only an evil genius would be able to convince the thousands of people who voted him into the state government in Illinois, the 70% of Illinois voters who elected him to the United States Senate, the nearly twenty million people who cast votes for him in the primaries and the millions who supported him in the caucuses in his bid to become the Democratic nominee for President, and the fifty-plus percent of Americans polled in the current general election, that he isn’t who he really is.
Only an evil genius would ever think to hide his true Muslim identity by attending a church with a crazy Christian pastor.
And only the evilest of geniuses would be able to dupe the FEC, the DNC, the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security into believing that he was indeed born right here in the United States (as his fake birth certificate implies) even though he wasn’t.
OR
The alternative is that all of these people and organizations are lying and are in fact part of the plan to seat Barack Obama in the highest office in the land to rule the most powerful country in the world. It’s like a Pinky and the Brain episode gone bad.
But those are the implications that go along with the conspiracy theories being floated about Barack Obama. That is what one must believe in order to fully accept any or all of the crazy assertions that have been raised about him.
In 2004, when Michael Moore floated his conspiracy theories about George W. Bush, conservatives and Republicans laughed at his foolishness. What’s truly funny about all of this is that in 2008, those same conservatives and Republicans have become what they reviled those four years ago. They are the new Michael Moore.
In their defense, it must be depressing for Republicans to know that they have become what you once ridiculed - Amateur conspiracy theorists afraid of losing what little power they still have.
