The Case Is Closed
By Mitch Berg
Those of you who remember back to the early days of the Clinton administration remember the death of Vince Foster (the Clinton staffer who died of suicide after shooting himself in the back of the head eight times with a high-powered sniper rifle that he managed to get rid of before he died), which sort of kicked off the nineties’ great cottage industry – Clinton Conspiracy Theories. These theories – on both sides, really, from Joe Farah’s “Bill Clinton started an AIDS epidemic in Canadian prisons to enrich his Arkansas friends” to Hillary’s own “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” that’s smeared her and her husband all the way to the brink of the White House yet again – are pretty universally comical in retrospect – and few were more ghoulish than the Foster theories.
MLP from “Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry” – a blog you should be reading more of, no matter what your excuse – puts the whole matter to rest:
I am convinced that Hill is completely innocent of knowing or having anything to do with Foster’s unfortunate demise. Here’s my proof;
No, I’m not going to copy and paste it for you; go over there and read it.
February 5th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Once again you find it impossible to admit, quite rationally of course, a fault on the right without pretending it exists in precisely equal measure on the left. Kinda thought the nutty right-wing anti-Clinton conspiracy theories, fueled with millions from far-right fatcat Richard Mellon Scaife, were slightly more significant than those generated on the left.
Afraid you’ll lose the Mitchketeers if you post something that’s rational from start to finish?
February 5th, 2008 at 10:15 am
So assuming two sides of a distribution aren’t balanced is somehow “rational?”
The college kids who won’t get F’s because of your new philosophy thank you, AC.
February 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am
I would suggest that the Jews. vs. Nazi distribution was skewed. Time to Godwin’s Law = 12 seconds! I win!
February 5th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Steve G., that statement is so dumb, some of your fellow Mitchketeers are even smart enough to mock it.
Not saying I’m particularly hopeful that will happen, but come on.
February 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
“Once again you find it impossible to admit, quite rationally of course, a fault on the right without pretending it exists in precisely equal measure on the left. Kinda thought the nutty right-wing anti-Clinton conspiracy theories, fueled with millions from far-right fatcat Richard Mellon Scaife, were slightly more significant than those generated on the left.”
Haliburton. The House of Saud. Diebold. Mobile voter suppression teams. 9/11 an inside job. Giuliani stealing gold from the ruins of the WTC. Valerie Plame ‘outed’ by Bush & Co.
February 5th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
OK, well Terry has proved he can’t read. Mitch and Angryclown were talking about *anti-Clinton* conspiracy theories from the left. Steve G. thinks they’re distributed equally, bell-curve fashion, between left and right. Cause of some natural law that, apparently, leads to the conclusion that spilled coffee falls up as often as down.
Angryclown tends to think most of the wacky anti-Clinton conspiracy theories came from the right. He is more than willing to stipulate that the majority of wacky anti-Bush conspiracy theories come from the left.
February 5th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
“Kinda thought the nutty right-wing anti-Clinton conspiracy theories, fueled with millions from far-right fatcat Richard Mellon Scaife, were slightly more significant than those generated on the left.”
Your subject is ambiguous. Good reading can’t make up for all the problems in bad writing.
February 5th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
It’s not bad writing to assume you are paying attention to the argument.
Sounds like you agree with Angryclown that Steve G.’s only valid point is the one on his head.
February 5th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Whoops, mea culpa AC. Reading fast sometimes means I miss the gist of something, and I locked into the idea that “a fault on the right” in your comment was referring to conspiracy-theory-proneness in general, not Clinton-conspiracies specifically.
And any sentence that you write that mentions Scaife gets caught by the internal filters and discarded as junk, so I wasn’t disabused of that idea by the rest of the comment.
So to clarify: I didn’t mean to suggest that Clinton conspiracies in the 90s were evenly distributed between left and right, just conspiracy theorists in general.
February 7th, 2008 at 3:39 am
Once again you find it impossible to admit, quite rationally of course, a fault on the right without pretending it exists in precisely equal measure on the left.
Peev? What have you done with Angryclown?
Nothing precisely equal about it; the left is much worse.
Afraid you’ll lose the Mitchketeers if you post something that’s rational from start to finish?
No, I’m afraid I’ll lose my Tic readers if I don’t present a verbal Rohrshach blob that lets them find as many personal versions of history as they need to justify their world view. Or whatever that is.