Conspiratorial America

If you want to bring your blood pressure to a boil today, take a look at Frank Rich's column linked above. Otherwise, skip it.

Of all the columnists writing for the Times, Rich is probably the most canny polemicist on the left-a good foil for William Kristol. He's also a media critic, constantly evaluating and reevaluating the current election narratives. I have to admit that he, and Mickey Kaus, are good at poking the MSM.

As I've said before, I don't have a lot of time for those who take what I consider extreme positions on either side-they start to sound tedious after a while. But even when I factored in his liberal bias, I was taken aback to find these paragraphs tacked on to the end of Rich's current commentary on McCain.

"McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”

Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”

As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told. "

C'mon Frank. Stick your head out of the sewer.

I don't actually think Rich gives the Corsi charges much credence. He's using them to make the point that we really don't know as much about John McCain as we'd like to think we do-a fair point.

But why bother to give another one of our conspiracy theorists more publicity than he deserves?

Whether it's stirred up by the crazy right or the self-righteous left, this stuff is absolute garbage. Rich does no one any favors by using it against McCain. Even if this stuff about the Republican is true, which I highly doubt, does it really matter?

Vince Foster- was he murdered? Two or more gunmen in the Kennedy assassination-the CIA? Obama-the Antichrist? Martians-tapping into your cell phone? Some of this stuff fulfills the definition of indecency-offensive and sick-making. It's pornography for those who wouldn't dream of watching online sex.

Some of it is just dumb. But it shouldn't have any room in a paper that claims to be serious about covering the news, not making it up.