The Real Manchurians

It's puzzling, really: the crazies on the right spout all sorts of conspiracies about President Obama and his plans to destroy America, while their party sets out actually to do it. In what the president has done -- saving the capitalist auto industry, basing a health care program on capitalist insurance companies, overseen the recovery of capitalist Wall Street, killed more al Queda leaders than his predecessor could have imagined, including their leader the search for whom President Dead-or-alive abandoned, increased aid for our troops, ended a war as he promised -- in all of that they somehow see stone-carved evidence of their darkest conspiracies. The more a person does one thing, the greater the proof he intends to do the opposite. Who doesn't know that?

Meanwhile, the congresspeople the crazies support are proposing budgets that will in fact wreck America, in real life, no goblins under the bed required. And until they're in a position to do that, they seem to be trying their level worst to sabotage the economy to screw Obama. Heck, even Bill O'Reilly is finally starting to notice.

It becomes clear: feeding conspiracy theories to the most needful and gullible among us, whose worldview is coming apart at their ear-holes over the thought of that black guy in that white house, keeps enough people bamboozled that they'd vote for someone who axe-murdered their grandma if it meant Obama would lose.

Amazingly, it seems to be working. Gotta hand it to the Rovobeckians: they knew the crazies were out there in numbers enough to make a difference, and they're stroking it like a teenage boy alone with his thoughts in a bathroom. They'll take the money and run before the kid has time to reach for a Kleenex and figure out what happened.