Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
[ kerry spot home | archives | email ]

Hugh Hewitt made fun of the conspiracy-minded among the Democratic grassroots this morning:

My favorite comment from the thread at TalkLeft:

"If I were paranoid, I'd say that this 'scandal' was floated now, a year after the fact, just to give apparatchik Hewitt a news hook for his book tour. And if I were really paranoid, I'd say the whole sequence — Armstrong Williams followed by Kos/MyDD — was a trick shot to (a) get the Williams story out there and then neutralize it with Kos/DD plus (b) give Hewitt an interview hook."

What I guess the "paranoid" folk will never understand is that book interviews are scheduled weeks in advance, in the case of the O'Reilly interview well before the Kos payola story broke. But Michael Moore has turned a generation of lefties into conspiracy theorists, and so speculations of the sort above are routine on the threads of the lefty sites. This presents a huge problem for the political future of the Democrats at the national level, as even center-left voters will have to worry about the make-up of any future Democratic administration and how it will prevent the fever swamp dwellers from entering into the halls of authority.

Oh, come on, I thought, it's just one guy on a chat board. Every group of politically-active grassroots Internet chat board users is going to have a conspiracy theorist or two.

So I'm looking around the left-of-center blogs for reaction to Tim Roemer's latest comments, and I notice the guys at Pandagon are dismissing Roemer as "done" as a DNC candidate, because "touting the Republicans way of doing things is beyond the pale."

And the first commenter on their site says, "Do you think it's possible that the guy is a mole? No, I'm serious. Just think about it: he's employed by Republicans to run for the Democratic chairmanship. Either he gets elected, in which case he goes around glorifying the Republican party, or he doesn't, in which case they will also say that the angry liberals picked Dean (or whomever) over the pro-life moderate."

Well, maybe Hugh's not so far out there. Maybe the Internet makes people more willing to offer theories of sinister plots and extensive manipulations by the all-powerful Karl Rove, but it's becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon. And when someone like Terry McAuliffe suggests that there's a Rove conspiracy behind the CBS memos, he looks silly.

[Posted 01/18 06:02 PM]