Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Just Because You’re Part of the Paranoid Tradition in Politics...

As if the zigzagging Dow weren’t making the present seem uncertain enough, liberals must be experiencing at least a little bit of cognitive dissonance when they regard the past, after the claim, noted on Drudge, that Jackie O thought LBJ was behind the JFK assassination (it’s nice that she cared enough to theorize, even after all her and JFK’s extramarital affairs, including his with a nineteen year-old intern, reportedly).  Maybe Oliver Stone’s not so crazy after all – and maybe it’s time to avenge JFK by dismantling all of LBJ’s (not to mention Nixon’s!) Great Society programs.  

Actually, Stone is crazy, but it’s interesting when people who know government best are even more paranoid about it than we libertarians are (or at least we old-school pre-Tea Party libertarians):

•Jesse Ventura became convinced that CIA conspirators run the government because a phalanx of CIA reps confronted him while he was governor of Minnesota, he says, demanding to be apprised of his gubernatorial agenda. 

•Madeleine Albright wondered privately whether Bush might have captured bin Laden and kept it a secret, planning to produce him when it was tactically useful – and Morton Kondracke publicly condemned her for such notions.  But she had been Secretary of State, and you have to suspect she had seen some comparably fishy things under Bill Clinton to make her have such notions. 

She’s the woman who literally did a song and dance number, Weimar-style, at one international conference, celebrating the retirement of the pejorative phrase “rogue states” from diplomatic parlance (even rhyming “rogue” with the contrasting “vogue” while singing about North Korea and the like).  This prompted one friend of mine (a leftist, I should note) to ask with exasperation, “Are we living in Mega City One?!” (that’s the fascist town Judge Dredd lives in, for the 86% of you too sane to get the reference).

I suspect we are – except that Mega City One wasn’t on the verge of financial collapse.

No comments: