The editors in today’s/Wednesday’s NY Times [see: “Conspiracy World”] rip GOP conspiracy theorists--including former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, Fox News and the rightwing blogosphere—to shreds.
Conspiracy World
Editorial
New York Times
October 10th, 2012
When Republicans began questioning President Obama’s birth certificate four years ago, it seemed at first like a petulant reaction to a lost election, a flush of nativist and racist anger that would diminish over time. But the preposterous charges never went away. As this election cycle shows, many in the Republican Party continue to see the president as the center of a broad and malevolent liberal conspiracy to upend the truth.
To live and seethe in that world of conspiracy theories means rejecting any form of objective reality. When unemployment numbers make the administration look good, they are obviously “cooked.” When poll numbers put Mr. Obama ahead, they are skewed. Birth certificates are forgeries. Safety-net programs are giveaways to supporters. Health insurance reform is socialism. And campaign donation disclosure is antibusiness…
At this point in the editorial, the Times’ editors rehash the events immediately after the release of September’s employment numbers by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this past Friday morning, as I also noted them in my most recent post, very early on Monday: “Stiglitz and Krugman Slam The Door On Jack Welch’s BLS’ Truther Bullsh*t.”
In case you’ve been in a coma for the past four days, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics “…reported that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8 percent, depriving Mitt Romney of his standard talking point that the rate had never been below 8 percent during Mr. Obama’s term. No one expected Republicans to celebrate a positive trend for the country, but almost immediately the anchors on Fox News and the editors of right-wing Web sites saw something more sinister: a conspiracy, led by the Obama campaign, to manipulate the numbers to make the president look good a month before the election.”
Today’s NYT editorial continues…
…To Mr. Welch and his fellow cynics, the facts were inconvenient, so they had to be wrong. And not just wrong, but deliberately so. That’s the same mentality that led ideologues last month to accuse independent pollsters of deliberately skewing polls to show Mr. Obama ahead, though no such charges are emerging now that Mr. Romney is improving in the polls. And this trend is reinforced when people who know better, like Newt Gingrich and Senator John McCain, trash the civil servants at the State Department and the Congressional Budget Office. (Mr. Romney, to his credit, did not question the latest jobless figures.)…
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…Many are far more worried about a conspiracy that is verifiable and serious: the concerted effort by Republicans over the last four years to deprive minorities, poor people and other likely Democratic supporters of their voting rights…
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…When there is real-world evidence of political collusion, the conspiracy theorists are nowhere to be found.