Conspiracy Season: 2012 Election

Well, overlord Obama has won re-election despite a mountain of conservative conspiracy theories.

I have to give Fox News credit for ignoring the desperate lunacy of political evil genius Karl Rove, and ultimately acquiescing to reality Tuesday night.

Rove, of course, served as George W. Bush’s top political advisor, helping to destroy John Kerry in 2004 by somehow turning his Vietnam service into a negative, despite the fact that Republicans loathe draft-dodging types and Bush never made it anywhere near Vietnam.

On election night Tuesday, Rove had to juggle the weirdness of being a Fox News commentator who was also running an anti-Obama SuperPAC, the goal of which was to get Mitt Romney elected the 45th president of the United States.

The New York Times’ David Carr described the tension in an article yesterday:

Just after 11 p.m. on Tuesday, Fox News called Ohio for Mr. Obama. But Mr. Rove, who had helped finance over $300 million in attack ads, was getting phone calls from Romney officials protesting that forecast. He went on live television to challenge it, citing data he was receiving from the Ohio secretary of state.

“That’s awkward,” said Megyn Kelly, the co-anchor, speaking for many of us.

If Fox News had backed up under pressure from the Romney campaign and Mr. Rove, it could have fomented temporary but damaging unrest among its many fervent viewers.

Instead, Ms. Kelly walked down the hall and confronted the decision desk with Mr. Rove’s protest. She asked the head of Fox News’s decision team, Arnon Mishkin, “You tell me whether you stand by your call in Ohio given the doubts Karl Rove just raised?” Ms. Kelly may as well have been asking, “Are we a news organization or an instrument of the conservative agenda?”

Reality won. Undeniable, hard facts won. It was a refreshing change of pace for a network that’s known for spewing anti-Obama, anti-government freak-out ideology 24/7.

Leading up to the election, Fox News spent two straight months calling President Obama a liar regarding the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya. What’s ironic is that, of the dozens of conservative conspiracy theories, this was the only one where there might actually be some there there.

But it’s hard to take conservative media seriously after trying so desperately to sniff out so many other, lamer conspiracies while inciting fear, paranoia and hatred in the misinformation process.

For instance, GOP ringleader and hypocrite former opiate addict Rush Limbaugh said he thinks the shitstorm caused by an American-made anti-Islam movie was a conspiracy “set off” by the U.S. government.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Oct. 5 jobs report came as good news to President Obama. The national unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent for the first time since taking office in January 2009. One year ago, unemployment was at 8.9 percent.

The continuously high unemployment rate has been an albatross around Obama’s neck, indicating economic stagnation, but the new lower rate spelled progress, albeit slowly, which could only mean one thing to conservatives: Conspiracy.

Just 48 hours after the deadly Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, I was doing some channel surfing when something that NBC’s Richard Engel said about repressed Muslims on the other side of the world struck me as familiar.

Speaking from Cairo, Engel said that widespread sentiment among Muslims there, and all over the Middle East, is that the U.S. government is responsible for secretly circulating the anti-Islam video that led to widespread protests and violence throughout the region, citing as evidence of the conspiracy, along with the recent American-made video, instances of U.S. troops peeing on Qurans and Taliban corpses, and crazy Florida “pastor” Terry Jones, who threatened to burn Qurans in front of media cameras last year, and apparently helped circulate this video, The Innocence of Muslims.

“They think the United States is secretly paying for not only this movie, but lots of activities like this,” Engel said. “They think it is part of a hidden agenda, a secret plot where the U.S. condemns this kind of thing, but secretly funds organizations like this.”

“And they believe (the video) is evidence that the U.S secretly wants this in order to undermine Islam,” Engel explained.

And as Engel pointed out, anti-West conspiracy theories aren’t only popular in the Mid-East.

“It’s the same kind of mentality you have in North Korea, by the way,” Engel said. “It’s not just in the Middle East. It’s something that’s indicative when you have a totalitarian regime.”

North Korea is a great example. Look how paranoid the people are. It’s like a prison where the inmates are so neglected, yet brainwashed, that they worship the warden who starves them, and wail in the streets when he dies. They live in their own surreality. It’s Bizarro World.

It’s not at all unlike the millions of Americans who saturate themselves with conservative media that tells them the president’s goal is to pervert and subvert America.

“I was in North Korea and I spoke to the miners we worked with and they were convinced that American school children, everyday, wake up plotting how to bring down North Korea,” Engel explained. “And when I told them that is really not the case ... they just didn’t believe me.”

But Engel also said that Egyptian authorities reinforce the conspiracy theory by cracking down on protesters when protesting is supposed to be something the U.S. encourages. It makes it seem like the U.S. has something to hide and only convinces “those who have a conspiratorial mind that they are correct,” Engel said.

Engel went on to explain the popular local sentiment.

“Why else would the Egyptian authorities be fighting back, using American tear gas—because once again, they are firing American tear gas on these people here—if they didn’t have something to hide, if they weren’t defending some sort of hidden, secret conspiracy?”

Sort of like how the “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theory seemed proven, some would say, by President Bush’s convenient use of it as an excuse to finish a war his father started with Iraq. In other words, if you already believe a grand conspiracy, it’s not such a long leap to find a supposed motive because your mind wants to believe in and find evidence that might support the theory.

The reason conservatives are so freaked out about Obama is twofold: America has a rich history of racism, and conservative media exploits and harvests that latent racism for fucktons of money. They invent and perpetuate Armageddon themes like Chuck Norris’ Thousand Years of Darkness ad until the folks who get all their information from these sources are convinced that our president sympathizes with terrorists who kill Americans.

In an ominous fear-mercial, Norris indirectly calls the Obama administration “evil,” warning that “our great country and freedom are under attack,” and that, of course, “it may be lost forever” if Romney can’t find enough old white people to vote for him.

“We know you love your family and your freedom as much as Gena and I do,” Norris deadpans while creepily clutching his wife's hand in a garage somewhere. “And it is because of that we can no longer sit quietly, or stand on the sidelines, and watch our country go the way of socialism, or something much worse.”

Something much worse? What could that be? Let’s consult the major conservative conspiracy theories. The answer could be any of the following, or any combination of the following:

• Obama is a Muslim

• Obama is not an American.
• Obama is a terrorist-sympathizer.
• Obama is helping the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrate the U.S. government, via Hillary Clinton’s Muslim aide, to impose sharia law.
• U.S. public schools and colleges are liberal mind-control factories that fail to teach the truth about our 6,000-year-old planet.
• The media is controlled by liberals who hate conservatives and not only doesn’t treat them fairly, but conspires against them at every turn.

• Obama’s father was some other guy and his mom was a fat slut, etc. (Dinesh D'Souza: Obama’s America 2016 documentary)
• The Obama administration controls weather forecasts and climate scientists. Global warming is a liberal hoax.
• Obama spread the video that pissed off Muslims to sow Mid-East turmoil and make green energy viable.
• The Obama administration influences the Bureau of Labor Statistics to lie about the unemployment rate—but just this once. Where were they during the September 2010 election when unemployment was 9.5 percent?

“This inherent distrust seems to permeate every corner of the Obama record,” writes Dashiell Bennett of the Atlantic Wire. “Rather than argue that the President is out of touch with most Americans, some must go further and insist that he is not an American at all. Increased Democratic turnout sways the election? Voter fraud. Miscounting the size of crowds at public events? The media is bending over backwards for their favorite liberal. Convention events canceled due to the weather? The National Weather Service does what they're told. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court decides a tough case in the President's favor? He was blackmailed.”

There are dozens of major GOP conspiracy theories. So many that they overlap each other. Fox News and others have so regularly carpet bombed their audience with conspiracy theories that they're left pissed off, paranoid, vulnerable and gullible. At this point, they'll believe anything.

It reminds me of the hit HBO show “The Wire,” specifically, when Det. Bunk Moreland tricked a naïve young suspect into confessing by telling him a Xerox machine is a lie-detector. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” he explains with a smirk.

Well, it’s true with modern day conservatives: The crazier the conspiracy theory, the more popular it is.

Exhibit A:

“Now my question is,” Limbaugh asked his self-described ditto-head radio listeners on Sept. 20, “Could it be—feeding this false narrative—that Obama is setting off these protests in the Middle East? Had this film lie never been told, had the regime behaved in a more adult and responsible manner, would there be all this chaos around our embassies in the Middle East?”

Limbaugh agreed with rioting Middle East Muslims, saying on his show that Obama incited them with the video, insinuating that the “administration” had something “to do with it,” comparing the president to mischievous cartoon child, Bart Simpson (“Nobody saw me do it; you can’t prove anything; I didn’t do it”).

Of course, bad Bart impression aside, Limbaugh gave an idiotized fantasy version of events that didn’t make any sense at any point. He implied that rioting Muslims were doing so because of lingering resentment over Obama killing bin Laden (despite the fact that there was never any backlash from the Muslim world about bin Laden’s death), and then exposing them to a video (that they already knew about), which led to anti-American violence and helped Obama in a way that was unclear.

Of course, Limbaugh didn’t mention the late abu Yahya al Libi, al Qaeda’s No. 2 man who was vaporized in an American drone blast this past June in Pakistan and, according to leaflets left at the scene of the attack in Benghazi, is the real reason for a planned, coordinated strike on our personnel there. Mr. Libi was from Libya. (The attack in Libya is alleged to have been orchestrated by Ansar al-Sharia, a group supported by al Qaeda. The movie protests were most likely used as cover for the attack.)

“So you got Obama, spiking the football, bragging about killing bin Laden, and then inciting these people with this video, telling them there’s this video that some American loony tune made,” Limbaugh said before adding a sarcastic Obama impression, saying, “Yeah, ‘We didn’t have anything to do with it. My administration had nothing to do with it. We didn’t do it.’”

So Obama’s covert agents spread an amateur film to Middle East media outlets? Usually these conspiracy theories have some round-about way of making sense to their believers, but I couldn’t figure out how Obama benefitted from “feeding this false narrative,” by throwing “gasoline on a simmering fire,” as Limbaugh put it.

“And so this is the price that a desperate regime trying to hang on to power—and sadly for the world, the more desperate Obama gets, the more damage he inflicts on the rest of the world!” Limbaugh huffed and puffed. “By blaming this video, that makes them mad.”

By blaming the video, that makes them mad? I’m sure the video itself was plenty to make them mad. It supposedly portrays the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a bit of a dickhead. And Muslims have traditionally been a little sensitive when it comes to satirical renderings of their prophet, to say the least.

We’ve seen how similar situations have gone over in the past, but I’ll give Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt and assume the Salman Rushdie and Danish cartoon debacles slipped his delusional mind. There’s nothing new or shocking about this. Half the world is free to express ourselves and have poor taste, while the other half— tortured and shackled—can’t even grasp the notion.

What’s really happening is that by blaming the video, it makes conservatives mad—not Muslims.

A sane conservative could easily argue that the Obama administration used the video protests as cover for several days to avoid calling the Libyan attack a coordinated terrorist strike because it was election season here. A sane conservative could ask why security wasn’t beefed up more at our Mid-East posts on Sept. 11. There are plenty of critical questions to ask this administration about the attack in Benghazi, yet conspiracy theories are what dominate the conservative airwaves.

As always, no angry Muslims waited to figure out who was to blame. The offensive material was released online in the free world by the video’s creators, who wanted to incite the Muslim world. They sent it to Egyptian media, which, like ours, has goofy characters with crooked interests, some of whom exploited it and attributed it to the U.S. government, and the shitshow began. Violence would have resulted regardless of who’s to blame for the production and dissemination of the silly video.

Limbaugh blaming the U.S. government for the video’s release and/or circulation is the exact same conspiracy theory that Middle East dictators are using to get their people riled up and united against the United States to distract attention away from their own brutal regimes.

As Richard Engel explained from Cairo, “The region’s dictators are in part responsible for imposing this mentality that is a closed circuit. It is a way of looking at the world that sees it through a conspiratorial paradigm. And that was convenient for the dictators because it got people hating the West, hating Israel, hating America, and not hating their own leaders who presented themselves as the only thing that could protect the people of this region from this onslaught that was coming in from the outside, and those mentalities don’t die easily.”

Limbaugh is now arguing the same thing that propagandized people in the Mid-East are! The video was an inside job. Muslims who think the U.S. government is behind the video believe the goal is to undermine Islam. But Limbaugh is preaching to conservatives who think Obama is in alignment with the Muslim Brotherhood, who believe he “pals around with” and “sympathizes” with the jihadists who kill Americans.

But why would Obama want to piss off his Muslim buddies? It didn’t add up. How do dead ambassadors and terrorist attacks on American interests help Obama?

The answer finally came on Oct. 9 when Limbaugh told his listeners that Obama “privately” wants turmoil in the Middle East, so that American oil supplies will be disrupted, thereby causing an American green energy revolution. Aha! Of course.

“We have a president who is very content … and an energy secretary, Steven Chu, who want the price of gasoline to get up and go higher,” because “they’re big believers in this green energy hoax,” Limbaugh said.

“Privately, that’s exactly what (Obama) wants,” Limbaugh said, referring to a hypothetical situation where “tumult in the Middle East” during Obama’s presidency “interrupts oil supplies to this country.”

Limbaugh said that “in a free market, nobody would turn to” green energy because it’s “so expensive.” But “if you get fossil fuel prices up to ten bucks a gallon, eight bucks, whatever,” Limbaugh reasoned, “then green becomes more attractive, and with government subsidies, they could get the price of green energy to lower than gasoline if gasoline prices skyrocket.”

Great Scott!

“These guys are getting exactly what they want,” Limbaugh said about Obama, Chu, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “This is who they are. They gonna bring this country down.”

So just to be clear: According to Limbaugh—and, therefore, millions of like-minded Americans—President Obama’s terrorist-friendly regime circulated the anti-Islam movie because although it undermines Islam, which is the president’s very own secret faith, it also helps his American green energy conspiracy prosper, which is apparently more important than aiding his secret terrorist allies.

Gotcha.

The way Limbaugh chooses his words would be admirable if his interests weren’t purely malignant. He takes extreme care in crafting his rhetorical weaponry. It’s designed manipulation with a purpose.

Limbaugh refers to the Obama administration as a regime. It automatically makes one think of a Middle Eastern, Muslim dictator. After eight straight years of George W. Bush referring to Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, we’re very familiar with the term, but having it applied to the U.S. government is new.

By using a word that’s usually reserved to describe America’s enemies to describe our own government, Limbaugh is trying to create a distortion. It’s meant to help people subconsciously draw the same conclusion as Chuck Norris’ ad: Obama is evil. He’s a foreign enemy trying to destroy our beloved Christian nation under God.

As you’ll see by the following definitions, Bush used the word regime appropriately:

1. a mode or system of rule or government: a dictatorial regime.
-Dictionay.com
1. a government, especially an authoritarian one: ideological opponents of the regime -Oxford

Calling the Obama administration a regime is all a part of the right’s campaign to discredit the president as unAmerican. They question everything from his birth certificate to his faith. I don’t think it’s insignificant that he’s the first black president in a country where half the people fought passionately to defend the enslavement of black people just 150 years ago.

Words matter. It’s the reason conservative media referred to the president as candidate Obama during the campaign. It’s the reason health care reform is a “government takeover” that’s been “rammed down our throats.” It’s propaganda. It plays on our emotions and biggest fears.

In America’s case, we fear Muslim terrorists. We’re so easily manipulated post-9/11. Media outlets understand this and they ride it all the way to ratings and financial glory to the detriment of the truth, our political discourse, and our democracy.

And it certainly doesn’t help that the president's strange African name frames a middle name that he shares with a famous, now-deposed despot. It’s too valuable to many conservative figures not to use regularly. Despite the custom of ignoring middle names, he’s Barack Hussein Obama!

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was no stranger to GOP conspiracy theories about President Obama. Despite zero evidence, Romney repeated the false Fox News meme that Obama goes around the world “apologizing for America” and sympathizing with our enemies, despite the killing of bin Laden and an unprecedented uptick in drone strikes that have wiped out more al Qaeda members than President Bush ever dreamed.

Then, despite a 9/11 anniversary truce that both presidential campaigns agreed to honor until midnight, Camp Romney preempted the deadline and released a statement based on a backwards timeline just hours after the Benghazi attack, which wasted no time politically capitalizing on the deaths of American personnel, saying that the Obama administration was responsible for independent statements from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo earlier in the day, before the attack.

“It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” Romney’s gun-jumping statement said, referring to a preventative message put out by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo earlier that day as crowds began to gather outside in protest of the American-made, inflammatory movie.

In response to Egyptian media accounts of the movie, a statement titled “U.S. Embassy Condemns Religious Incitement” was posted on the website of the Embassy of the United States Cairo, Egypt, along with some similarly themed tweets. The website message read:

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions … Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

Although the message wasn't cleared by the White House and was put out before the Benghazi attack, according to Romney's campaign, it was a clear cut case of Obama sympathizing with terrorists who kill Americans, despite the fact that nobody had been killed yet when the message was posted.

But, really, why so many conspiracy theories among the right?

Well, consider that most Americans get their information from the television. And despite conservatives whining about the unfair “mainstream media,” their “fair and balanced” network is consistently the most watched cable news network in the country, by far. (I’m convinced it’s a big reason Americans will end up just as we’re depicted in Mike Judge’s prophetic Idiocracy.)

The television. That's how so many people come to believe in the same crazy crap. People really believe they’re getting news from Fox News. And therein lies the problem. It’s not news; it’s a political propaganda and entertainment machine. But that’s confusing, no?

It reminds me of that Dave Chappelle comedy bit about women who dress like whores, but then act surprised and offended when a guy hollers at them like a piece of meat.

“’Just because I’m dressed this way does not make me a whore,’” Chappelle says in the bit, imitating an upset lady. “Which is true. Gentlemen, that is true. Just because they dress a certain way doesn’t mean they are a certain way, but ladies, you must understand that that is fuckin’ confusing.”

People who don’t know it’s not news, or refuse to believe it, go on subjecting themselves to conspiracy theories galore. Propaganda. It’s why Richard Engel can’t convince people on the streets of Pyongyang that Americans aren’t plotting to destroy them any more than he can convince Muslims on the streets of Cairo that the U.S. government isn’t responsible for an amateur video.

But how to thwart all the misinformation and paranoia that repressed people with no rights and American conservatives love to consume? Richard Engel offered his opinion for a solution.

“They need education, they need more free thinking,” Engel said, “and they need to break out of that conspiracy theory.”

President Obama commented on the anti-Islam movie fallout at the UN on Sept. 25, drawing a distinction between the West’s free speech and the shackled minds of the Muslim world, saying, “As president of our country, and commander-in-chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so.”

At the root of all the conspiracy theories, I think, is hate. Where did it all come from? Some of it is innate, but much of it is continuously harvested by the media. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi tried to take some of the blame on behalf of his colleagues.

“Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone,” Taibbi recently wrote. “In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote.”

Conservative columnist and former George W. Bush speech writer David Frum agrees. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show Friday, Frum said that Fox News viewers who were caught off guard by Romney’s election night loss were essentially propaganda victims who had been “fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.”

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly appears to be aware of conservatives’ and their media’s rift with reality. During Fox News’ election night coverage, when Rove was dragging his heels to admit defeat, Kelly turned to him and in a very Karl, cut the crap already kind of way, asked, "Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?"

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough echoed what Frum said, essentially that the main conservative media outlets have obviously prioritized making huge shitpiles of money above telling their audience the truth.

“Conservatives have been lied to,” Scarborough said unequivocally on his “Morning Joe” show Friday. “They’ve been lied to by people who engage in niche marketing and make tens of millions of dollars engaging in niche marketing—and I’m a capitalist; God bless ‘em, they can do whatever they want to do—but that’s not an electoral strategy, that’s a business strategy..”

That was Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus had resigned, citing an extramarital affair. The timing (less than three days after Obama was re-elected), and the fact that Petraeus was the top spy in the world, has raised questions and birthed brand new conspiracy theories.

Not surprisingly, today, Fox News introduced the official Petraeus conspiracy theory despite investigative journalist Bob Woodward saying on “Meet The Press” yesterday that Petraeus’ Benghazi testimony would have likely supported what the White House has already said.

“It turns out that Petraeus, a week and a half ago, went to Tripoli, Libya, and conducted his own personal inquiry into Benghazi, interviewed the station chief, actually got the base chief from Benghazi down, interviewed him, interviewed the head—I think, twice—of the Quick Reaction Force that was involved in this episode, so he knows the full story,” Woodward said.

David Gregory asked, “What was going to be the takeaway from what Petraeus would have presented had he testified?”

“I think it would, essentially, back up the White House,” Woodward said, eliminating the administration’s motive to get rid of Petraeus before he could deliver any damning, contrary testimony.

But, of course, Fox News is skeptical.

“As an old intelligence analyst, the way I read this is: The administration was unhappy with Petraeus not playing ball 100 percent on their party line story,” said Fox News military analyst Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. “I think (Petraeus) was getting cold feet about testifying under oath on their party line story. And I suspect these tough Chicago guys knew about this affair for a while, held it in their back pocket until they needed to play the card..”

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson points out that certain stories are just too ripe, too juicy, not to become conservative conspiracy theories. Like George W. Bush to the 9/11 “truthers,” sometimes it’s just too easy not to go for the conspiracy. Like a great sale on crappy, unnecessary knickknacks that you just can’t afford to pass up.

“What we have here—(Petraeus is) the head of the C.I.A., so this immediately becomes a spy novel,” Robinson said today on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “And you’re never going to convince people that there are coincidences in a spy novel, so the fact that the Director of National Intelligence hears about (the Petraeus situation) on Election Day is always going to give rise to conspiracy theories.”

Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren kicked off her show tonight asking, “Is it coincidence, or is it cover-up?”

Here we go again. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.