Conspiracy Theories, Old and New

With nothing else on the local AM radio except National Football League games and financial advice and The Oak Ridge Boy’s all-time lamest hit on the usually reliable country oldies station, we wound up spending some drive time on Sunday evening listening to Alex Jones’ “Infowars” program. We enjoy a good conspiracy theory the way some people enjoy a good murder mystery, which is to say the more far-fetched the better, and Jones rarely disappoints.

If you’re not familiar with Jones, he’s the lunatic who likes to scream that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was a made-for-TV movie and certain politicians are literal demons from hell who literally smell of smell of brimstone and are putting chemicals in the water that are “turning the friggin’ frogs gay,” in between commercials peddling snake oil cures for the diseases that all those refugees are spreading, but as we tuned he was talking about the assassination of President John Kennedy. That’s rather old news by now, but Jones had we journalism types call a “news hook” because President Donald Trump has announced that he’s going to de-classify a great deal of information about the assassination, and we can hardly blame Jones for his glee. As a candidate for president Trump appeared on Jones show to attest to the hosts “great reputation” and promise that “I won’t let you down,” Jones has since boasted about how the things he says on show have been repeated by the president he helped elect, and even after so many years the Kennedy hit is still grist for the conspiracy theory mill.

Jones was joined during the segment by Roger Stone, a veteran of Richard Nixon’s self-named “Rat Fuckers” dirty tricks unit, a partner of Trump’s former campaign Richard Manafort in a lucrative lobbying business that mostly catered to the world’s worst dictatorships, and a longtime friend and advisor of Trump himself. Both men were quite convinced that President Lyndon Johnson was the mastermind of an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy, citing the supposed deathbed confession of former Central Intelligence Agency operative E. Howard Hunt, who’s better known as one of the burglars who tried to wiretap the Watergate offices of the Democratic party on Nixon’s behalf, and both were giddy at the possibility that Trump had acted to vindicate their theories.

After so many years we can’t imagine any living person’s reason not to declassify almost everything regarding the Kennedy assassination, so we can’t fault Trump for doing so, but we also don’t don’t doubt that Trump was making a dirt cheap payoff to his conspiracy-theorizing fans. Any moment now we also expect the declassification of everything about the alien space craft that landed even many more years ago in Roswell, New Mexico, and although there’s no reason not to do that as well it will probably be for the sake of those Trump fans who still worry about that.

Nothing that can be declassified will at long last vindicate any of the conspiracy theories, all of which have gone stubbornly unproved over so many years, and we’ll bet whatever we’ve got left that they won’t implicate Sen. Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination, as Trump’s good friends at The National Enquirer alleged during a heated presidential primary campaign. Still, none of it will implicate Trump, as it all happened so many so years ago, and whatever doubts it sows that there’s something sinister behind all the otherwise inexplicable news you see these days can only hearten Trump’s conspiracy-theorizing friends.

Jones first came to fame alleging that Republican President George W. Bush had conspired to kill more than 3,000 Americans in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and unknown capital locations, then spent eight long years alleging that Democratic President Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim and godless communist who attained office through some nefarious plot or another, but he know holds forth that Trump is bravely battling the ongoing plot that has been afoot at least since Kennedy was killed. According to some accounts the plot has been ongoing since the illuminati formed at the end of the Holy Roman empire, or as far back as when those demons from hell first rebelled, but by all accounts Trump is the foretold hero who will deliver us from evil.

Meanwhile there’s not yet unclassified yet thoroughly leaked information that suggests that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton arranged a fishy deal with the Russians to sell a fifth of America’s uranium, and that Republican nominee Donald Trump had his own fishy business arrangements with him and that key staff and family enthusiastically members met with Russian officials who were illegally acting to help his campaign. Both sides will assert that no matter what’s proved the other side was worse, neither side will likely prove blameless, and almost everybody will be glad to pin it all on the long dead Lyndon Johnson.

We have our own gripes with LBJ, as does everyone else on both the left and right, but we’ll require some pretty convincing proof to convince us that he masterminded the association of Kennedy. Even if he did that doesn’t mean that Clinton didn’t sell all that uranium in exchange for the donations to her family’s foundation, or that the Trump campaign didn’t love it when the Russians offered their assistance, and the uncertainty about it doesn’t make us feel favorably to anybody or anything. There’s a lot of “fake news” out there, too, but we suspect that The National Enquirer and Alex Jones and the latest presidential “tweets” are any more reliable.

— Bud Norman

Of Teapot Dome, Watergate, and Uranium

Another day, another Clinton scandal, and one has to wonder how many it will take before Hillary Clinton’s presidency stops being inevitable.

The latest blow comes from The New York Times, which is nobody’s idea of a vast right-wing conspirator, and it’s a doozy. This one is about the Clinton family’s already scandal-plagued foundation raking in tens of millions of dollars on a deal with a Canadian company that acquired large holdings of American uranium and wound up selling them to the Russians and allowing Pravda to boast of their corner on the market for  a scarce resource crucial to America’s economic and national security interests, including $500,000 paid by a shady Russian bank for a speech that former President Bill Clinton gave praising the human rights record of Kazakhstan, another unsavory human rights-crushing dictatorship figuring in the sordid story, and the worrisome possibility that Russia might toss in some uranium along with the sophisticated anti-aircraft systems that it’s currently providing Iran, with whom the administration is currently negotiating a deal to accommodate and legitimize its nuclear power ambitions, or that the Russians might deny the uranium to the American nuclear energy industry that provides a fifth of our electricity, and the rather unsettling detail that it was all given official approval by a State Department run by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The New York Times is required by journalistic convention to give the Clintons and their foundation a chance to downplay the matter, most of which has already been disproved, and none of which is the least bit convincing, but at this point even the most polite press no longer feel obliged to pretend that it isn’t a big deal. Any readers old enough to have been sentient during the good old days before Watergate will recall that headline writers used to affix the suffice “Dome” rather than “Gate” to any scandal du jour, which every schoolboy understood was a reference to the shocking “Teapot Dome Scandal” in which some undeniably Republican Warren G. Harding administration officials back in the celluloid collar days enriched themselves by accepting money from an American company that wanted its hands on some American oil resources, but even that gold-standard scandal didn’t entail hostile foreign powers or the possibility of the lights going out in a fifth of the country or Tel Aviv being blown to bit with American resources. There are now 25 years worth of Clinton scandals, which has had a cumulative effect on the family’s reputation no matter how strenuously the press has previously tried to downplay each of them, and all of which is dismissed by the Clinton apologists as “old news,” but even the most polite press now seem to have reached the limits of their patience.

The Clintons are no doubt surprised that anyone should be troubled their multi-million dollar deal-making, given the previous politeness of the press, and they had every reason to expect that the likes of The New York Times would chastise any Hoover Institution-affiliated right-wing nutcase who uncovered such embarrassing facts as a sexist reactionary. We admit to some surprise our right-wing nutcase selves, even if we did always hold out hope that even Democrats would realize sooner rather than later that Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy is a very, very bad idea. Our optimism always winds up dampened, though, and this time it’s that the Democrats seem less upset by Clinton’s outright corruption and incompetence and complete lack of any accomplishments than by her occasional heresies from left-wing lunacy. We can’t think of any Clinton heresies from left-wing lunacy, and we note that the multi-millionaire deal-maker is running as a Chipotle-patronizing regular American populist and that after 25 years of trashing the women her cad husband has victimized is billing herself as the standard-bearer of the feminist movement, but if Democrats are holding out for a faux-Indian millionaire-consultant purist such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren or an unabashed socialist such as Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders or some guitar-playing unknown such who turned his reliably blue Democratic state over to the Republicans such as former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley we won’t mind if they use the corruption and incompetence and lack of accomplishment as an excuse.

Of course, the Republicans could still lose to either Clinton or some slightly-less corrupt yet more purely left-wing lunatic. Eventually the press will discover an unpaid parking ticket or a family vacation with the dog on the car roof in the Republican candidate’s past, or the time he winced at a same-sex kiss scene during an episode of “Glee,” and making tens of millions on a deal that comprised America’s economy and national security will pale in comparison. Still, we’re glad that almost no one outside the Clinton family and their circle of business associates seems very enthused about her inevitability.

— Bud Norman