Tina Brown, who writes of her own “paranoid theory … that Bush is laying these terrors on the public as retaliation for the taunts about his own inaction during that fateful August of 2001,” begins her article in the Washington Post today on rampant election paranoia as follows:
Among New York Democrats there’s a weird fatalism about John Kerry’s chances in November. The city’s mania to see the president routed does nothing to lift the mood of bullish defeatism. What you hear is that Bush will still win by a hair — not because Kerry fails to rev the electorate’s engine, but because “they” will “pull something.”
What “they” will “pull” ranges from the notion that “they” — sometimes known as “Karl Rove” — will produce Osama bin Laden from some luxury cave on Halloween, to a super-scary election-eve terror attack warning that would have all the authenticity of Orson Welles’s 1938 radio hoax about the Martians, but better production values. On these premises, it is a given that the timing of the recent terror reports was sheer manipulation. Exhibit A, the riff goes, is a photo in the takeout on terrorism in this week’s Newsweek. See that big picture of Fran Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser? In the background is Karl Rove. C’mon what’s he doing at a terrorism meeting? (Actually it was a staffers’ meeting, but nevermind.)
“I’ve heard people saying that the Bush team might blow up something around election day, just like the Nazis burned the Reichstag and then blamed it on the Jews to get elected,” a writer friend e-mailed me this week. “The surprise is that it all comes from your above-average Times-reading academics.”
Are smart people going nuts?
What smart people?
I see that Al Gore isn’t the only Democrat who has lost his mind lately.
From time to time I’ve blogged about the crazies, on the right and on the left. Clinton drove a lot of right-wingers over the edge; to see or hear them, though, you had to scour obscure websites, or subscribe to monthly newsletters, or listen to far-right talk radio. Bush, now, has driven a lot of left-wingers over the edge; to see or hear them, however, you just have to open any big-city daily newspaper. (Anybody who wants evidence of the overwhelming liberal bias of mainstream media must consider my observation here.)
God help us all.
August 2001???
That was shark attack month.
Ok, I get it.
Hmmm… This reminds me of Kerri Dunn at Claremont College staging a fake hate crime. So I guess these scenarios are possible, but it sure does sound crazy.
Given behavior, I wouldn’t be too quick to blame rightwingers if (when, according to al-Q) something blows up close to election day. There is, of course, al-Q and the terror cadres themselves (who have told us they will do something, as they did in Spain).
There is the leftwing tinfoil hat brigade, some of whom might be far enough gone to do something (to try to blame it on BusHitler, or with the idea that such homespun terror tactics will sour us on the WoT as the Weatherman faction thinks it did with Viet Nam).