realthog: (AZ)
realthog ([personal profile] realthog) wrote2010-05-03 03:28 pm

keep the tinfoil flying


Someone called mike4rest, posting on the history.com community pages, has an urgent question he wants to put to anyone else as batshit crazy as he himself is:

How much you wanna bet Obama blew up that oil righ?

He's been one of the biggest opponents of drilling there ever was in Congress and then he suddenly changed his mind supposedly!

Yet a week or so later a big oil rig just happens to blow up?

We've seen other examples of alleged coincidences from this Administration such as a Militia Group suddenly arrested just as the Democrats are spreading their hate speech for Talk Radio!

So how do we know Obama didn't arrange for a little accident to happen to scare people with?


That's the trouble with Kenyans. Always blowing up oil rigs. When they're not faking global temperatures, setting up death panels, and injecting autism into infants' veins.

[identity profile] zhai.livejournal.com 2010-05-03 08:27 pm (UTC)(link)
I think ultimately you're probably right, but I wish that wasn't the end-point of the analysis, if that makes sense. It shouldn't be good enough. I understand it's possible people's brains are short circuiting because they can't find a rational reason to be pissed off, but why it has to jump into bizarre alternate reality conspiracy theory, and why it's okay to talk about these things in the mainstream (or maybe history.com isn't mainstream, maybe the whole internet isn't mainstream) just baffles me. The argument seems to boil down to "black president does not compute, therefore craziness", and it almost seems like making an excuse for the behavior on some level -- like "oh, they're racist" is an end-point conclusion rather than opening that up and saying hey, this is not socially acceptable (the behavior, with or without racism). But I ramble.

[identity profile] realthog.livejournal.com 2010-05-03 10:15 pm (UTC)(link)

it almost seems like making an excuse for the behavior on some level -- like "oh, they're racist" is an end-point conclusion

I know what you mean. The trouble is that, every time I do try to dig in deeper to find other motives (for research purposes I'm currently subscribed to lots of wingnut journals like WorldNutsDaily and Media Research Center and Accuracy in Media and Bob Livingston's Liberty Alert and NutsMax and the Hitlerian-seeming One Nut Now, so I'm kind of aswill with this stuff and have been mentally wrestling with it a lot), it really does seem to bubble back in to that racist motivation. We need merely consider the fact that during the last election there was exactly zero buzz (well, to about the tenth decimal place, anyway) over the fact that the (white) John McCain actually was born abroad.