5.08.2006
Who's Crazy Now? (NYTimes.com)
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 8, 2006
Some people say that bizarre conspiracy theories play a disturbingly large role in current American political discourse. And they're right.
For example, many conservative politicians and pundits seem to agree with James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who has declared that "man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
Of more immediate political relevance is the claim that the reason we hear mainly bad news from Iraq is that the media, for political reasons, are conspiring to suppress the good news. As Bill O'Reilly put it a few months ago, "a good part of the American media wants to undermine the Bush administration."
But these examples, of course, aren't what people are usually referring to when they denounce crazy conspiracy theories. For the last few years, the term "conspiracy theory" has been used primarily to belittle critics of the Bush administration — in particular, anyone suggesting that the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to fight an unrelated war in Iraq.
Now here's the thing: suppose that we didn't have abundant evidence that senior officials in the Bush administration wanted a war, cherry-picked intelligence to make a case for that war, and in some cases suppressed inconvenient evidence contradicting that case. Even so, it would be an abuse of the English language to call the claim that the administration misled us into war a conspiracy theory.
(More ... Who's Crazy Now? - New York Times) ¶ 20:59
Published: May 8, 2006
Some people say that bizarre conspiracy theories play a disturbingly large role in current American political discourse. And they're right.
For example, many conservative politicians and pundits seem to agree with James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who has declared that "man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
Of more immediate political relevance is the claim that the reason we hear mainly bad news from Iraq is that the media, for political reasons, are conspiring to suppress the good news. As Bill O'Reilly put it a few months ago, "a good part of the American media wants to undermine the Bush administration."
But these examples, of course, aren't what people are usually referring to when they denounce crazy conspiracy theories. For the last few years, the term "conspiracy theory" has been used primarily to belittle critics of the Bush administration — in particular, anyone suggesting that the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to fight an unrelated war in Iraq.
Now here's the thing: suppose that we didn't have abundant evidence that senior officials in the Bush administration wanted a war, cherry-picked intelligence to make a case for that war, and in some cases suppressed inconvenient evidence contradicting that case. Even so, it would be an abuse of the English language to call the claim that the administration misled us into war a conspiracy theory.
(More ... Who's Crazy Now? - New York Times) ¶ 20:59
