Obama Conspiracies - Right Wingnut Style

Go read Jon Swift's Great Moments In Election-year Blogging (h/t), which is a round-up of the coverage of the most "significant" and "impressive" (wingnut) conservative Barack Obama smears and conspiracies brought forth during these current U.S. elections. Not surprisingly, such (insane) "citizen reporting" has been published/propagated through popular/high traffic right-wing blogs and magazines.

Once you are done laughing your asses off, as I have, be warned of an immediately induced cold, sobering reminder that yes - there are a lot of people like this out there.

Scary what intellectual sloth-driven incompetence can do, no?

George Packer offers an interesting angle (emphasis added):

Wading for a few minutes through the sewage of these Web sites reminds me uncannily of the time I’ve spent having political discussions in certain living rooms and coffee shops in Baghdad. The mental atmosphere is exactly the same—the wild fantasies presented as obvious truth, the patterns seen by those few with the courage and wisdom to see, the amused pity for anyone weak-minded enough to be skeptical, the logic that turns counter-evidence into evidence and every random piece of information into a worldwide conspiracy. Above all, the seething resentment, the mix of arrogance and impotent rage that burns at the heart of the paranoid style in politics.

The problem isn’t lack of education—it’s that of a self-isolating political subculture gone rancid. I heard an Iraqi engineer claim that American soldiers allowed Kuwaitis to steal hundreds of Iraqi cars as revenge for the first Gulf War. I heard a Shiite cleric argue that the Kerry campaign was behind suicide bombings. Bloggers like Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who peddled the Ayers theory, and Ann Althouse, a law professor who pushed the plastic-device story, hold diametrically opposed views to those of Islamists and Arab nationalists. But their habits of mind are just the same.

It will only get worse if Obama wins.

Glenn Greenwald adds a very à propos caveat to Packer's observations (emphasis added):

The New Yorker's George Packer reviewed the above-linked Jon Swift piece on the deranged, year-long election ramblings of leading right-wing blogs, including National Review -- what Packer calls "the sewage of these Web sites" -- and compares it to the most paranoid and reality-detached fever swamps of radical Islam. The difference, though, is that the mentality of the former has been guiding the world's sole superpower for the last eight years, while the mentality of the latter has not.

Speaking of that mentality, here is Sarah Palin yesterday -- in the very same speech where she urged more federal spending for research into the causes of autism -- railing against earmarks for supposedly frivolous, wasteful projects such as "fruit fly research in Paris, France," an example, she claimed, of "political pet projects" which "have little or nothing to do with the public good".

Which, in turn, brings me back to this previous post of mine about primitive-mind thinking ...