Conspiracy A-Dough Dough
by digby
Could someone explain to me again how Jonah Goldberg became a valued intellectual in American political life? (Oh that’s right, it’s because his mother was a professional character assassin who befriended a horrible harpy named Linda Tripp. )
Here’s Jonah’s latest:
As I wrote last year, I find it amazing that the “Birthers” are considered more dangerous and evil than the “Truthers.” The Birthers believe that an ambitious man who travelled a lot as a kid has concealed the circumstances of his birth so he could be eligible for the presidency. I don’t think they’ve made their case. And, frankly, I’m not sure I’d want them to at this point. Aside from the horror of a Biden presidency, I for one don’t yearn for a constitutional crisis. And while I am sure there are more elaborate and crazier versions of Birtherism, the basic allegation isn’t that crazy, at least in the abstract.
Ok. I don’t think I need to explain why Jonah is a blithering idiot in that statement. But he’s a big intellectual and I’m just a lowly DFH so you can draw your own conclusions.
But this is really amazing:
Now, Trutherism, on the other hand, is a really insidious and evil claim: that the White House was “in” on 9/11 and that it either passively or actively aided and abetted the murder of 3,000 Americans and the attempted murder of tens of thousands more (surely the hijackers hoped to kill far more people inside the World Trade Towers). Indeed, the upshot of Trutherism is that “the government” sought to kill countless congressmen and effectively incapacitate the legislative branch and our military leadership indefinitely. Depending on which version of Trutherism you buy into, you’d have to believe dozens or even thousands of government agents were in on the whole thing, too. Moreover, if this had been proven true, the only moral, legal, or rational response would have been not just impeachment and criminal prosecution, but literally the formal executions of the president, the vice president, and much of the national-security establishment. They’d all have to hang.And yet, “Birtherism” is dangerous and paranoid and “Trutherism” is quirky and no big deal, according to liberals.
First of all, I don’t know that liberals think “Truthers” are quirky and no big deal, while we consider “Birthers” dangerous and paranoid. I think both groups are nutty as fruitcakes. But what I do find fairly dangerous is the fact that Republican elected politicians and conservative “intellectuals” can entertain such a silly crackpot notion that it would even matter if the president were born outside the US (which he wasn’t.) In order for this to be meaningful in any way you have to believe in some kind of long term Manchurian candidate nonsense that takes this one into the realm of the super kooky, alien abduction style of conspiracy mongering.
On the other hand, “Truthers” are part of American conspiracy lore going way back. For instance, one of Jonah’s intellectual forbears, Robert Welch, made his bones claiming that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor and purposefully did nothing to stop it. In fact, that has been an article of faith among a segment on the right for many decades:
In May 1999, the 10 World War II veterans in the U.S. Senate were arguing about who was to blame for the fateful American unpreparedness of Dec. 7, 1941. Specifically, they were debating an amendment to a military spending bill that would clear the names of the Pacific commanders, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short—both long since dead, demoted, and disgraced for sleeping at the watch at Pearl Harbor. Veterans Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and William Roth favored clemency; veterans John Warner, John Chafee, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan did not. Ultimately, the amendment, introduced at the behest of Kimmel’s son Edward (a constituent of Roth’s), passed, 52-47. Afterward, Sen. Roth announced, a bit defensively, “We’re not rewriting history. We’re just correcting the record.”
Roth was right about this much: No history book will be altered because of the Senate’s gesture. Nor, surely, have we heard the last from those who maintain the innocence of Kimmel and Short. After all, the debate over their culpability—and its more important flip side, the debate over President Franklin Roosevelt’s role—has been swirling for 59 years. Even today, as another Pearl Harbor anniversary passes, military hobbyists and crusty Roosevelt-haters are propounding far-flung theories about presidential treachery while historians wearily rebut them.
Like a pesky kid brother, devotees of the who-lost-Pearl Harbor “controversy” are always hanging around when the big-boy historians want to discuss the Pacific War, demanding attention and making a fuss if they don’t get their away. Some years ago, historian Donald Goldstein was on the circuit promoting Gordon Prange’s much-praised book about Pearl Harbor (At Dawn We Slept), which Goldstein had helped edit for publication after Prange’s death. Goldstein found his audiences so monomaniacally fixated on the blame issue that he returned to Prange’s original overlong manuscript to extract a second book (Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History) to satisfy the enthusiasts.
Indeed, the question of who lost Pearl Harbor is the Kennedy assassination for the GI Generation, a favorite of amateurs, conspiracy theorists, and military buffs. And like the Kennedy assassination, the Pearl Harbor debate is interesting more as historiography than as history—more for what it says about the different camps and their worldviews than about the actual events of Dec. 7, 1941.
Goldberg’s wide-eyed wonder that anyone could possibly think that an American president could commit such a horrible act clearly indicates that he isn’t aware of the rich conspiratorial history of his own conservative ancestors.
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