Man Of La Manchuria

A person I know writes to me and says,

What drives me nuts with you, honestly, is that you cannot see that BO is here by design, from his handlers in Islamic nations who financed his election, who paid for his campaign, to cut us down and destroy us as a nation. He is a Muslim or at least a black Marxist fundamentalist extremist...with a smooth delivery and a good looking face which bought your dollars and those of Soros and others.

I'm quite certain he's serious.

So let's consider how this works: clearly the indoctrination would have had to start when he was in Indonesia, when he lived amongst them; probably at that non-denominational school. Maybe, even, they selected his father in Kenya; probably would have had to, really. So then they must have also picked his mom, back here in the USA, and somehow got her to comply. For the sake of brevity, I'll not detail how either of those must have been pulled off.

So, lessee, then what? Well, for starters they had to be so sure they had the right baby, they planted news of his birth in Hawaii, and put the fix in, forty years later, with the Republican governor of that state to lie about seeing a piece of paper. They selected a black kid because back then it was clear that, while the US was still hosing blacks and siccing dogs on them, by the time he grew up we'd be ready to elect one. They did this, I suppose, because it was a surer thing than picking a white Muslim.

Somewhere along the line they convinced him, against his fervent Muslim beliefs, that it was worth it, for the deception, that he and his whole family would be going to hell in order to get him to eat pork and drink alcohol, marry outside his religion, get his kids baptized. Strong stuff, but, hey, who needs virgins: unless they re-grow their hymenoptera, he'd be done with them in a couple of months. Black guy: maybe a couple of days.

Then, the same guys who were so prescient and powerful had to get their Manchurian candidate into Columbia, Harvard, get him on the law review, then elected president of it. (Would it have been the same guys, or, by then, their progeny?) Turn down a million dollar job to head back to Chicago. Not a problem; I know I'd have. Hooking him up with a minister who'd later be reviled was a brilliant move; somehow they just knew it wouldn't affect his electoral chances. After all, they also picked the shoe bomber and the underpants guy.

Which is where the true brilliance comes in: first, they have him run against a really big name in Chicago politics, and get trounced. That, they figure, should naturally get him to the US Senate within a couple of years. In order to do that, they engineered the marital infidelity of his main opponent, and then -- the most brilliant stroke of all -- got Alan Keyes to carpetbag his way into the race and run the most ridiculous campaign of all time. Smooth. (Come to think of it, there'd have been no way they could have been certain of this nefarious plan unless they'd chosen what's-his-name [Ryan] long since, too, and cultivated in him his penchant for infidelity. On the other hand, it can't have been hard to convince Keyes of anything crazy, so they knew they had that in the bag years earlier.)

And here's the best part: in order throw us off the track so he could "cut us down and destroy us as a nation," they hypnotized him into saving the US auto industry, making us the last western country finally to provide health care for its citizens (I admit I'm a little suspicious here, because he did it by enriching Republican health care CEOs, including ones who've paid billions in fines to the government for their frauds), and, for the first time since our recent wars, providing somewhat adequate help to our vets. And, just to really nail it down, improve our electrical grid, set aside money for high speed rail and alternative fuels and research on electric cars; and give money to states to save the jobs of teachers, cops, and firefighters. Dastardly, that. It sure as hell fooled me.

Which brings me to my response to my emailer:

In fact, there's more evidence that GW Bush is an al Queda plant, given that everything he did in his presidency served their purposes and weakened America while handing AQ more recruits than they could handle. What wreckage there was left, smoking and dying, at the end of his eight years of reign: economy in shambles, military exhausted (and its wounded uncared for), while his oil buddies (and their Arab cohorts) made out like Ted Haggard with a pretty boy. Coincidence? And the historical coziness of the Bush family to the bin Laden family does nothing to diminish the theory. So, you pick your conspiracy, and I'll pick mine. Except mine has facts to support it (and even so, I don't believe it.)

So, who's right? Teabaggers notwithstanding, certain facts are pretty clear: the state of the union at the end of Bush's presidency was immeasurably worse than when he started, by any standard you can name; and, by nearly all measures, the state of America now is better than when Obama began. Not all that great, but better than the disaster that was his baseline. Auto companies, stock market, military care, health care, banks, Wall Street regulations... all to the gooder. The one thing that's clearly worse is deficit/debt. But Obama's portion thereof is small compared to that of GWB: and GWB's deficits didn't need to happen. They were all about greed and voodoo economics, as his dad once so accurately argued. Virtually all economists agree Obama's had to -- and of his critics, many are saying he didn't go far enough, rescue-wise. And let's not forget: Obama has consistently said that when the time is right, deficits will be addressed. He even appointed this guy to get working on it. Bush, on the other hand, through the guy who pullled his strings, repeatedly told us "deficits don't matter." (A chestnut carried forward even now, by those most loudly railing against them: turns out it's deficits created by tax cuts for the wealthy that don't matter.)

There are lots of bad things I believe about Obama: he caved too easily to Congressional Rs on the stimulus, over and over; his health care plan gives away too much of our money to insurance companies; he should have stood up to the Gitmo nimbys; he shouldn't have continued GWB's rendition policies; he should get the heck out of Afghanistan or do a much better job of explaining why we need to stay (especially since the CIA just announced the biggest AQ threat now resides in Yemen); he should have forcefully defended the location of the non-ground zero non-mosque and explained why.... there's more, too.

But the idea that he's a Muslim or any sort of extremist, bent on destroying the country, is laughable on its face (how can you be an extremist when you have both political extremes in this country pissed off at you?) and dishonors anyone who claims it.

But maybe the emailer was kidding.

(He wasn't.)