CSotD: Playing to the crazies
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Wiley Miller plays with fire in today's Non Sequitur. They'll get him for suggesting that everyone who claims to be the victim of a conspiracy is cracked or some kind of egghead. (heh heh)
Did he jump? Did he fall? Or was he pushed???
Uninquiring minds want to know. (Inquiring minds might wonder, but then they'd look into the matter and find out.)
Timing is everything in comedy and today's Non Sequitur, by happenstance, comes a day after I got into an online conversation with someone who still believes that Obama may have been born in Kenya.
I was pretty stunned, because, while it was a screwy idea to begin with, I assumed that things like the birth announcements in the Honolulu papers and the release of the actual for-real birth certificate vouched for by the Hawaiian authorities would convince anyone with any sense at all …
Okay, I still believe that.
Which led me to ponder some sort of ranking of delusional conspiracy theories.
That is, I can understand why someone would doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I'm convinced he did and I'm convinced that the purveyors of the JFK assassination conspiracy theories are either in it for the money or are paranoid, but I can understand how some in the public would believe there must have been more people involved.
On the other hand, Elvis is most assuredly dead, and he died, as it happens, 35 years ago today. I haven't heard anyone propose the "Elvis Lives" conspiracy in several years, but I remember being taken into someone's confidence 25 years ago and informed of all the facts that proved he was still alive. And I remember smiling and backing out of the room.
But I would put that way down the list of lunatic delusions, and I think it has faded from vision for two reasons:
1. It began before the Internet was a factor in daily life, and crazy people actually had to find each other in person in order to keep the delusion going, and
2. There was no particular advantage in having people believe it.
The "Kenyan Konspiracy" has not only been kept alive by the ease with which screwballs can gather in cyberspace, but by the fact that it feeds a niche voting bloc of people crazy enough to still believe it but sane enough to find their ways to the polling places in November.
With their photo IDs, of course, because there is a Democratic conspiracy to have an army of phony voters show up and steal the election.
I heard the architect of Pennsylvania's photo ID law on NPR yesterday, explaining that the reason there haven't been more than a handful of unqualified voters turned away while trying to cast a ballot is because the Democrats haven't been caught. But now, thanks to his new law, they will!
And he noted that one vote can swing an election, which neatly cuts out the uncomfortable thought that, if you really did assemble the hundreds of thousands of people who would need to go to the polls, declare themselves to be named Fred Flintstone or Mickey Mouse (having previously conspired to register those fictional voters), and cast enough ballots to sway a national election, the conspiracy could only survive if not one of that horde ever changed parties and decided to spill the beans.
Or got drunk and told someone on the outside.
Or ran into a poll sitter who knew Fred Flintstone, had worked with Fred Flintstone and counted Fred Flintstone among his friends and said, "You, sir, are no Fred Flintstone."
But it is comforting to think that — since we know that all Americans really support the GOP — the only way Democrats could have won the election was with the aid of Fred and Mickey and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.
So, despite the fact that there is absolutely no credible evidence of even marginally statistically significant voter fraud at the polls, there are a lot of True Believers who support adding a new layer of expensive bureaucracy in order to preserve the rights of people who want to cut bureaucracy and spending.
The Pennsylvania legislator explained that they're going to provide free voter ID cards to people who need them. Which touches off my own conspiracy theory: When did Republicans start saying that entitlements like that are "free"? Won't taxpayers foot the bill for those "free" cards?
So where does "Voter Fraud" fit on the scale between the Grassy Knoll and Elvis Lives?
I'd say fairly close to the Grassy Knoll, mostly because it's being pushed by some powerful politicians, as opposed to the Kenyan Konspiracy, which, these days, is mostly the pet of genuine screwballs and a few fame vampires like the Donald or Michele Bachman, who will say anything to get on television.
Now, where would you place "Alien Abductions" on that scale?
"Faking the Moon Landing"?
"Bush the Deserter"?
"FEMA Concentration Camps"?
"The Strange Breakage of Humpty Dumpty"?
Harry Bliss, in his eponymous daily panel, seems to have captured the zeitgeist:
But I was able to obtain some rare government video of a pair of government conspirators at work. This is the video they don't want you to see, because it proves everything!
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