Answer To The Paranoid Answer

Steven Den Beste took a walk on the grave I'm not yet in this fine morning.  Or he unwittingly made my ears burn.  Take your pick.  Either way, I resemble his remark on the tinfoil hat side, and I thought I needed to dive into his pool.

I've gone round and round on the foolish/naive/incompetent vs. deliberate/evil/diabolical for the thirty years I've been actively following politics. The temptation is to lean to the latter because sometimes it just doesn't appear possible that anybody could be capable of that much stupidity.  Lib embrace of nonsense like "detente" and "arms control" and all manners and dimensions of appeasement in the bald face of the clear and repeated lessons of history (Neville Chamberlain and Munich 1938, Dean Acheson's "Korea is outside the American defense perimeter", etc.) made it particulary difficult to avoid the conclusion that American leftists had been at least "Stockholmized" if not turned entirely.  Continuing to temporize on questioning motivations starts sounding and feeling like a weak excuse after a while.

To which the inevitable counter arises, in Lazarus Long's immortal words: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."  Ascribing the Left's malevolent bumbling to low cranial wattage - or, more accurately, quasi-religious blind-guidism - isn't as satisfying because it reminds us of our own less than fully developed omniscience, and also because, let's face it, moral crusades are a lot more fun.  The historical example of "It's the stupidity, stupid" being, of course, the lamentable fact that sixty-eight million American voters got bamboozled into chugging the Hopenchange backwash in the first place.  As Borgian as The One is, he didn't force ALL of those nitwits to cast their ballots so grievously against their own personal economic interests.  Though we could get into a discussion of the long-term conspiratorial aspects of over a century of socialized education in this country and how historically and civicly ignorant it's made Us, The People, leading to such easy manipulation by authoritarian demogogues.

But I digress.

So I have been content for years to leave witting villainy out of the equation.  Besides, if stupid is as stupid does, it went a long way in explaining how meager the electoral pickings became for Democrats over the preceding decade and a half.

Then along came 2006 and especially 2008.  The triumph not just of the Democrat Party, or of liberalism, but of leftism.  EXTREME leftism.  Maybe it was naivete on my part to think that the American people would not reward with power a parrty and movement that had gotten alarmingly and dangerously out of the mainstream. Maybe it was complacency to underestimate just how binary the American polity really is.  The Republicans admittedly didn't cover themselves in glory over their last years in the majority, but I simply could not imagine a Donk restoration under their existing unconcionably irresponsible leadership.

I sure won't make THAT mistake again.

Unfortunately, an ignorant electorate is a key prerequisite of tyrranical "transformation."  And with each passing day, and while not diminishing Barack Obama's roaring incompetence in the slightest, the evidentiary baseline of this man's deliberate and calculated ideological malevolence continues to grow logarithmically  And Armus is the Exhibit #1.

Let's put it this way: The tinfoil hat answer is Red Barry sent Navy SEALS to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in one of Dick Cheney's supersecret USOs reverse-engineered from Reticulan technology to blow the Deepwater Horizon well and create his cap & trade "crisis" opportunity; the sane answer is he had not the foggiest notion DWH was about to collapse nor how to plug the damn hole, but recognizes a crisis exploitation opportunity when he sees one, to which cleaning up the spill would, shall we say, not be conducive.

You know what they say: It isn't raving paranoia if they really are out to get you.