It would be laughable…

Earlier this week, voters in the state of Kansas rejected a constitutional amendment that, if passed, would have enabled the state legislature to enact restrictions on abortion. This marked the first real test of the political landscape in the frightening world ushered in by an activist Supreme Court that had no qualms about overturning nearly a half century of precedent for no good reason other than saying “I didn’t like the consequences” and using extremely twisted facts and alleged history to justify it.

So naturally I have been keeping an eye on the websites that might be disappointed by the Kansas vote. And I found a doozy of an opinion piece on a website called “World”. The subheading for the greater site of “Sound journalism, grounded in facts and Biblical (sic) truth” is as much of an indicator of anything I could predict.

They start out by questioning the media’s portrayal of Kansas as “ruby red”. While there is some truth to the fact that the current governor is a democrat, recall that before her, voters had elected Sam Brownback, who was forced to resign over the fact that the platform he actively campaigned on, proved to be absolutely ruinous to the state’s economy. And this is also a state that last sent a democrat to the senate when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

So I guess there are redder states than Kansas (Utah, Oklahoma, and Mississippi come to mind…), but to deny that it’s a conservative state is disingenuous at best.

They do make a truthful statement next. It is true that “[p]olling on abortion is all about how you ask the question.” If you ask the question honestly and with an eye towards the very real consequences of banning the procedure, such as increased poverty, crime, mortality, and government spending, then people will be more supportive of it. If you ask it from a more theological/philosophical perspective (e.g., by arguing that that clump of cells should have its own autonomy and that the mother is nothing more than ab incubator), then people will be less supportive of it.

So it’s not surprising that the author of this article feels that the latter style of phrasing is more honest than the former, despite the exact opposite being the reality.

But it is the penultimate paragraph that demonstrates just how untrustworthy the antiabortion side of the debate really is. He claims that the people who put the amendment on the ballot didn’t know that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe when they proposed the amendment. That claim can’t possibly be taken at face value.

Let’s start with the timing of the original proposal: it was proposed in January of 2021. Which meant that, by this time, Amy Coney Barrett had already been seated on the Supreme Court, and that all three Trump nominees had been thoroughly vetted by their opposition to Roe. At that time, the only real question was when the court might hear a case that could take down the precedent. Dobbs had already been appealed to SCOTUS, at that time and the court granted a writ of certiorari less than four months after the original proposal.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that this proposal was put on a primary ballot. The proponents of this measure surely knew that voters generally don’t turn out in large numbers for off-year primaries. How could they not have been counting on a depressed turnout?

The Kansas vote gives me hope that sanity can prevail. The elected officials in the Republican Party need to embrace sanity not only for their own good, but for the good of the nation. If that means shutting them out of the political process for a few cycles, so be it.

Some people are really idiots…

So for about the past two or three weeks, people have increasingly been pushing back against orders to wear masks because … well, their reasons have been changing so much I won’t even pretend to have a good understanding of it. It’s somehow an imposition or a curtailment of their freedom or whatever.

And that pushback has reached a crescendo in the past day or two, with people claiming that, for health reasons they can’t wear a mask. If they’re that sick, maybe they shouldn’t be out buying cookies, but whatever. In the videos I’ve seen lately, they’re also claiming that they don’t need to reveal what their actual medical condition is because HIPAA or some such. Ya know, unless they had a Medic-Alert bracelet, I don’t think they’re telling the truth.

But I can see three pretty obvious refutations to this argument, one of which is more specific to me than most people can claim.

First, is wearing a mask necessarily any different from a “no shirt, no shoes, no service” sign? If they wouldn’t think to walk into the store barefoot or topless (if not full-on naked), there’s ample reason to disallow people who aren’t wearing masks into the store.

Second, private businesses do have the right to refuse service to some customers. There are protected classes who can’t be refused service under anti discrimination rules, but these same people are defending bakeries who don’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Seems a bit hypocritical if you ask me.

And finally, let me talk about myself personally. I’ve spoken before about how I was born with a harelip. It was superficially corrected when I was two months old and then a related obstruction was partially removed from my nose when I was 14. I still have some pretty bad breathing problems and I do not do well with anything that covers my nose and mouth. About a year ago I was prescribed a CPAP machine to help me breathe at night. My air passage closed up pretty much the moment the mask hit my face. I timed myself: the longest I could keep it on was exactly sixty seconds because I forced myself to wear it for that long.

So if anyone has a medical condition that could preclude them from wearing a mask, it’s me.

And yet, I still wear a mask when I go out. It’s uncomfortable, and I wish I didn’t have to, but I do it. I readily acknowledge that if I go too long with it on, I may get nauseous or worse, but the solution is to find an isolated place, take off the mask for a short time (a minute or two, tops), and then put it back on.

You might ask why I do it. Because I care about my fellow men and women. I don’t want to get sick, and I don’t want to get anyone else sick. I haven’t been tested for the novel coronavirus and, given the testing procedure and the aforementioned nasopharyngeal issues, I’d prefer not to if I don’t think I have it. (But I will if necessary.)

And it’s not a violation of my rights, under either the constitution or under the terms of a law designed to protect people from extortion or blackmail, to put it on.

One more candidate

A couple of weeks before the first democratic debate, I wrote an entry where I went through every candidate seeking the nomination and explained what was wrong with each and every one of them, before finally saying that with that out of the way, we should still vote for the eventual nominee.

Well, since I penned that entry, we’ve had another candidate throw his hat into the ring. And that’s former congressman and Retired Rear Admiral Joe Sestak. So it’s time I said why you shouldn’t vote for him.

A quick word on him before I proceed. If you look at his biography on Wikipedia, you’ll note that he was succeeded in Congress by Patrick Meehan, about whom I wrote an entry on this blog when he resigned as my representative. It should be noted that Sestak never represented me even though I haven’t moved. I was gerrymandered into the PA-07 district after the 2010 census, and Meehan already represented that district by that time.

Now with that out of the way, in my entry about the other candidates, I linked to their campaign websites. I couldn’t do that with Sestak. As best as I can tell, he doesn’t have one. That could be because he hasn’t raised enough money to do it yet, but if so, that makes two strikes against him. It seems as though presidential campaigns are starting earlier and earlier every time (well, actually, they are…), and this time around, it’s not unfair to say he’s starting too late. I’ll be surprised if, when he releases his figures to the FEC for the two or three weeks of the quarter he was actually in the race, he has as much as $1,000 on hand. Compare that with some of the big names in the race, who bring in a million dollars a day.

Then there’s military experience. There has been a trend since Bill Clinton won in 1992, that the candidate with less military experience emerged victorious each time, although the neither candidate had any experience in the military in 2012 or 2016. This may be a historical anomaly or trend that is a function of the unpopularity of Vietnam (and Bill Clinton was of the age to have served in ‘Nam had he served) that could be reversed if either Tulsi Gabbard or Pete Buttigieg gets the nomination, but at least for now, that’s been the trend.

We’ve never had a navy admiral become president. There have been a dozen generals, going back to George Washington, and a handful of navy veterans (LBJ and Nixon both having achieved the rank of commander), but no admirals. When you look over the history of high ranking military officials, though, I question whether that’s what we want in a president as civilian commander in chief. I don’t hide my disdain for Andrew Jackson, and Eisenhower seemed better suited towards military than civilian needs (it’s why he sent the national guard to Little Rock. Effective, but I question whether he should have tried other methods first…).

So, um, yeah. I don’t know how long his campaign will be sustainable, but Joe Sestak probably doesn’t deserve your vote either. Unless he’s running directly against Donald Trump. My guess is that in about six months, he’ll have a new title: MSNBC contributor.

Changing facts to fit your conclusion

There’s a recent article over at the Heritage Foundation that illustrates how incredibly shallow and one dimensional they (and, in fairness, many who decry taxes as being the root of everything wrong with the country) they can be.

Interestingly, they start out right. They’re pointing to people starting to file their first tax returns since the poorly thought-out tax law was passed in late 2017, and finding that their refunds aren’t as nice as previous years. They even point out, accurately, that a refund is little more than the overpayment you’ve made throughout the year. (Or, as some people put it, an interest-free loan made to the government.)

The article goes on to point out — accurately again, I might add — that some of the reason for a smaller refund, is because of adjustments made to withholding from our regular paychecks. It’s just that those adjustments might not have been large enough to hit our radar.

There’s something more psychologically pleasing, though, to getting one big check for $260, rather than getting another $10 added back into your bi-weekly paycheck.

So the Foundation’s (or at least, this author’s) solution to the problem? Eliminate withholding from our paychecks.

Um, sorry. No.

Taxes are a necessary fact of life, and it buys all sorts of things that we need not only to thrive, but to survive. People who always think taxes are too high, have turned a blind eye to the good things our taxes buy, and to the services we have grown accustomed to. Sure, arguments can always be made that some spending habits need to change, but that’s an accounts payable question, not accounts receivable.

The argument made here is that if we paid our taxes all at once, we’d get a better sense of how much we actually pay, and that we’d object to it. There may be a truth to that, but that’s exactly why, for instance, I pay my car/homeowners/life insurance bills monthly instead of annually. It’s why we take out loans for large purchases like cars and houses. It’s easier to spread the cost out over multiple payments than to pay it in one single payment.

And we can flip that argument upside down, too. If you spend $10 per day on coffee at Starbucks — which for them, really isn’t a whole lot by comparison — that means that in a year, you’ll have spent $3,650. I don’t think anyone would give pay that all at once, would they?

What’s really happening with this story is they started at the conclusion — that taxes are still too high — and tried to shift blame away from legitimate consequences of a poorly thought-out tax law change that got rammed through Congress. So their solution to the real problem, is to change generic policies so much, that people will demand more tax cuts.

Maybe if they looked at taxes the same way we pay for other things we like, want, and/or need, it would be a completely different story. But this is the Heritage Foundation we’re talking about. Is any tax rate above zero low enough for them?

Sometimes it’s weird what you remember

When I was a kid, I loved reading MAD Magazine. I remember one article that took some words and phrases, and, by strategic capitalization of certain letters, they pulled some additional concepts out of them. For example, DOW joNes or INDIrA gANDhI (by reading only the capitalized letters, you can see DOWN and INDIA AND I).

Then there was DEmoCrAcY. For a humor magazine to pull the word DECAY out of DEMOCRACY nearly forty years before people with clout started saying the exact same thing, is pretty prescient.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly when it started, but democracy has been on a decline, worldwide, for at least the past 20 years. The hope of democracy that bubbled up in Eastern Europe in 1989 has been steadily crumbling. Poland and Hungary are more autocratic now than they were 30 years ago, and it’s hard to guess what might happen next. And that’s not even getting into the problems in Russia.

You see it across the Middle East, too. It seems as though the Arab Spring of 2011, for the most part, did nothing more than replace one autocratic regime with another. (Tunisia being the exception.) Even countries that are ostensibly democracies, like India or Israel have started to develop cults of personality around their increasingly autocratic leadership. (Indeed, a week before the 2016 election, I wrote that the Israeli leader may be one of the most dangerous people in the world today. He’s still up there but has been usurped of that title by Donald Trump.)

So what happened, why has democracy decayed so much, to use the MAD magazine observation?

This is a complicated question, with no easy answers. An argument can be made that rule by the people was doomed from the start and the only question was how long it would last. Democracy requires an informed populace, but at the same time, those who have the most power, often strive to keep the populace uninformed.

This is nothing new. It’s why the Catholic Church bitterly opposed Johannes Gutenberg and his desire to publish the Bible with his printing press. How dare the people get their information about their religion from a source other than the priests who were telling them what it says?

(In fairness to the church, they were right, in a way. The Gutenberg Bible was published in the 1450s. The Protestant reformation started about sixty years later in 1517 when Martin Luther published his 95 theses, and a hundred years later we had the 30 Years War between the Catholics and the Protestants. The Catholic Church really hasn’t been the same since…)

I hope to expand on this in a future blog entry, (and one that ought to complement my still-unwritten essay on epistemology), but I do think we have to start with the question of the purpose of a government. The preamble to the US constitution puts it beautifully: “in order to form a more perfect union.”

I think we may have lost sight of how revolutionary that was in the late 18th century.

Read up on the history of British colonialism, especially in India. Even the most perfunctory of overviews can be a little bit jarring. It wasn’t a government that sought to exert its influence over the colonies. It was the British East India Company. The monarchy was, at best, a bit player in the grand scheme of things.

And that started before Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations. We don’t — or at least shouldn’t — want any corporation to exert too much influence over our lives. If nothing else, they can’t be relied upon to perform tasks that are necessary but which by definition don’t have a specific, direct, financial reward. (Building roads, cleaning up after a disaster, etc. I’d make an argument that we’re seeing this in the problems created by having private healthcare and private prisons in the US.)

But as long as a government is beholden not to all people but to the people whose primary interests are to protect their own wealth at the expense of everyone else, it can’t really be relied upon to do the right thing.

It’s enough to make you wonder if we need a little anarchy.

A couple of vocabulary lessons

A little bit over a month ago, I wrote a blog entry that casually hints at an as-yet-unwritten post about the fact that we have an epistemological crisis in this country.

This is not that still forthcoming post. But I do need to start with the word epistemology to level-set this entry. According to dictionary.com, Epistemology is “a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.”

Or more simply, it’s the study of how we know what we know.

I mention this because of a recent trend that seems to be catching on around the country: Drag Queen Story Hour, which, according to its website, brings drag queens to libraries, bookstores, and schools to read stories to the children. My kids are too old for these kinds of events but I do wish they’d had these kinds of things when they were younger. But think it’s a great idea.

As you can probably guess, there are two schools of thought regarding DQSH. On one hand, you’ve got the supporters, like me, who approve of the idea and consider it a great way of underscoring the obvious: we’re all unique individuals. This is especially important as we start to come into our own and establish our own identity. Especially when you consider that it’s nearly impossible to come into contact with all of the unique, weird, wonderful ways we can be different. Diversity is a good thing, but not always something easily demonstrated.

On the other hand, you’ve got the detractors, probably best summarized by this article on Breitbart. The article starts off as a reasonably unbiased look at the trend, quoting the website more accurately than I did above. But then it veers off into quotes from people who think this is a horrible idea, peppering the article with words like “child abuse” and “indoctrination”.

You see that word a lot. Indoctrination. Again, according to dictionary.com, it is “the act of indoctrinating, or teaching or inculcating a doctrine, principle, or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view”

That’s the thing, though. Look at the example provided in the dictionary link: “religious indoctrination”. So the religious people, who are indoctrinating their children in their religion, are claiming that teaching children that human kindness is a form of indoctrination.

Yeah, I guess disabusing children of various forms of indoctrination by presenting them with more information can be viewed as a form of indoctrination. But that’s pushing things. It’s a threat to the hegemony of the indoctrinators. We can’t be surprised that they push back against that threat. I believe the Bible has a verse appropriate for this situation.

And so we end up with this situation. Based upon the definition of “indoctrination” above, who’s actually doing it? Those who teach their children that their religious norms and mores are the only correct ones, or those who want children to understand diversity?

I guess the answer to that one is an epistemological one.

Definition of a church

The Johnson Amendment — which does little more than prevent churches from explicitly endorsing or condemning political candidates — has been in the crosshairs (no pun intended but now that I’ve said it, I think it’s appropriate) of some misguided politicians for a while now because they feel it’s an unfair restriction on freedom of speech.

I think it doesn’t go far enough. There was an analysis of available records a few years ago that effectively confirmed George Carlin’s joke about how the Catholic Church alone could wipe out the federal budget deficit if all you did was tax them on their real estate holdings. It’s not surprising, then, that there’s a movement afoot to tax churches.

Couple this with arguments that churchgoers are more charitable than non-churchgoers, which generally fall apart when you factor out donations to the church itself, and how the lack of transparency on how an entity that calls itself a “church” actually spends its money raises some questions about what church donations actually spend their money on.

But there is a truth that many churches do operate legitimate charities, especially when it comes to helping the homeless, the infirm, or the hungry. (And not all of them consider women to be second class citizens whose only purpose is to bear children…)

So I’m thinking there needs to be a provision in the tax law that more explicitly defines what a church is, and any entity that fails to meet this definition simply isn’t a church.

Here’s my first thought on it. We can refine it as necessary but I think this is a good start. A church can only be defined as any entity that is affiliated with a religious organization with more than some number (is 100 a good number?) of adherents. Furthermore, it must spend at least some percentage (50?) of its total income on community services. Community services can be defined as expenses unrelated to any of the following:

• Staff salaries
• Construction, maintenance, or upkeep of facilities, including mortgages or rents on said facilities
• Utilities required to keep facilities operational. This includes, but is not limited to, electricity, plumbing/sewer, telecommunications, and internet connectivity
• Attempts to recruit additional members

When you look at the palace-like buildings owned and maintained by, say, the Mormons, it’s not unfair to question what they actually spend their money on, especially in comparison to secular charities like, say, Habitat for Humanity.

This would have the double affect of getting more transparency in church income and expenses, while also boosting the government’s coffers without raising taxes on the average taxpayer.

Then we can start debating the proper numbers to be filled in to my suggestions above.

We’ve seen this before…

Yesterday, all of the political news media were abuzz with the information posted by The Guardian about a book coming out next week by Michael Wolff, in which the long-anticipated war between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump — which we’d been expecting since the former left the White House to return to Breitbart — finally exploded into open hostility.

I have no real allegiance to either side so I’ll just sit back and watch how things play out, hoping that neither side does too much damage to the country at large. That said, I wouldn’t be a good student of history if I didn’t point out that there have been other individual allegiances between political players that fell apart after their eventual victory. And if history is any guide, things don’t look good for Bannon.

The first that bears mentioning, is Thomas Paine, without whom George Washington would never have had the popular support for his insurrection against the British crown. When Paine was imprisoned in France in 1793, Washington chose not to intervene on his behalf. The rift between them only widened from there and by the time Paine died, he was a pauper and an outcast. While his memory has been revived somewhat in the past 200 years, Washington clearly emerged on top.

Next is Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his complicated relationship with Vladimir Lenin. Like Paine, Trotsky was valuable in helping gain popular support for Lenin’s revolution, although by the time Lenin died, Trotsky knew he’d be safer in exile. Trotsky made too many enemies in Lenin’s inner circle, most notably Josef Stalin’s who would ultimately emerge on top. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Trotsky’s death was a political hit.

Finally, we have Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, two revolutionaries who truly needed each other in their quest to achieve their goals. When Castro got into power, he basically ignored Guevara, who was ultimately assassinated by Bolivian revolutionaries. Castro undoubtedly could have helped.

There’s a fourth that I considered putting in this list. I ultimately decided to mention it here but it’s not quite the same as the other three: Charles Guiteau, who believed himself to be responsible for the election of the 20th president of the United States, James Garfield. When he didn’t get the political position he had applied for, he assassinated the president. He was quickly found guilty and executed for his crime.

It bears mentioning that of the pairings mentioned above, only Castro outlived his one-time ally. Living longer, though, doesn’t mean much in the lens of history. Based upon age alone, I would expect Bannon to live longer than Trump. Washington, Lenin, and Castro all got what they wanted. Paine, Trotsky, and Guevara? Not so much.

Opening the flood-gates

I was born in March of 1972. If you’re a student of American history, then you should know that the first major historical event of my lifetime occurred about three months later, although at the time, hardly anyone would have known or predicted that a “botched, third rate burglary attempt” would have been so consequential.

The location of the break-in has become shorthand for the political scandal that rocked the US government to its core: Watergate. A little more than two years after the initial event, amid talk of impeachment and an almost certain conviction by the US Senate, president Richard Nixon became the first (and to date, the only) president to resign from office.

There are a few points that bear mentioning here. The actual break-in not only failed to gain any usable information on Nixon’s general election opponent, George McGovern, but it was completely unnecessary. Nixon was popular enough within the electorate, that he didn’t need to resort to dirty tricks to secure re-election. I doubt that his lopsided victory would have been much different had the break-in not been attempted.

But Nixon’s crimes and his corruption were far greater than the break-in. There is an old adage about how, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. It’s a political town and everyone is looking out for him- or herself. And if that means taking down people who are powerful, so be it.

One of the key figures who helped to bring Nixon down, was known for more than thirty years under the alias of “Deep Throat” (an homage to a then-popular porno movie) and was only revealed to be Deputy FBI director Mark Felt after his death. He fed information to the Washington Post reporters who did their research and found all of the information that would eventually lead to the resignations not only of Vice President Spiro Agnew but also of Nixon himself.

There is a new movie out about Mark Felt, and I am curious to see it, especially after Movieguide penned an opinion piece that makes Nixon look like the victim of overzealous prosecutors, and how Mark Felt’s personal agenda made him conduct his personal witch hunt. See above about getting a dog. There’s no evidence that his party affiliation made him any more or less dutiful an FBI agent.

The Movieguide article alleges — without even a citation much less evidence — that John Dean ordered The Watergate break-in to cover up his wife’s affiliation with a prostitution ring. If this is true, I couldn’t find a single credible source on this point. Perhaps that’s why they said it once and never returned to this point later in the article, without so much as an attempt to connect the dots from his wife to the break-in. This sounds like, at best, an attempt at deflection from the reality.

Towards the end of the Movieguide article, they make reference to a book by one-time White House staffer Geoff Shepard that I readily concede I haven’t read. All reviews of this book, are on conservative websites that have an interest in furthering their hypothesis that Nixon was an innocent victim. And it may be one of the few published works that offers an alternative view to an extremely complicated moment in American history. I’m not saying that this book likely plays fast and loose with the facts, but Mr Shepard is hardly an unbiased observer here, since his own ambitions were scuttled by the way the scandal played out.

In my lifetime, I have seen a total of nine different presidents. Six republicans and three democrats. I think it’s interesting that the six republicans, in chronological order as they served, also go, in my opinion, from best to worst. I consider Nixon to be the best Republican President in my lifetime (starting the EPA, entente with the Russians and the Chinese, and laying the groundwork for getting out of Vietnam are all positives about his greater legacy…) He was better than Ford, who was light years ahead of Reagan, who was better than Bush, Sr., who was better than his son. And I didn’t think anyone could be worse than Bush, Jr, until Trump came to Washington.

Donald Trump is facing scandals that dwarf the scope of Watergate, and he doesn’t have a dog. He’s damaging the United States domestically and abroad. If he’s doing anything, he’s padding his bank account and those bank accounts of his children. He has made the country and the world a considerably more unsafe place many times over. It’s only a matter of time before he is relieved of his duties, either through impeachment or coup involving the 25th amendment.

I just wonder what kinds of movies and books will be made about this era forty years from now…

A good thing about the Trump presidency

In the movie JFK, Kevin Costner plays Jim Garrison, the real-life lawyer who brought the only criminal case to trial in the assassination of our 35th president (and namesake of the movie).  While the movie’s faults are legion (not the least of which is the credibility it lent to some of the more absurd conspiracy theories about the assassination), there’s an interesting — and valid — point made when Costner gives his closing argument in the trial: the moment you have two or more people involved in something, that is by definition a conspiracy.  

When you look around in today’s media-saturated world, conspiracy theories abound.  By the expansive definition of “conspiracy” used in the movie, conspiracies absolutely do exist.  I’m not trying to make an argument that the official version of any event is necessarily the whole truth, and I readily concede that there are times when skepticism of the official version (or at least portions of the official version) of events is absolutely warranted.  

Modern conspiracy theories generally involve arguing that some group of powerful, wealthy, connected people with a vested interest in covering up the “truth” put out an official story that we shouldn’t believe.   The motivations of the conspirators — depending upon the event — range from maintaining the status quo or upending some rule they don’t like.  The conspiracy theorists argue that mass shootings, for example, are really just false flags planted to get people motivated enough to allow the government to take away guns from law abiding citizens while the anti-vaccination movement maintains that they’re being silenced because too many people (pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, doctors and nurses) make too much money off of the vaccines to look at the supposedly harmful side effects truthfully.  

I’ll grant you that the proponents of the conspiracy theories about mass shootings and vaccinations are quite harmful.  There are no shortage of stories from either survivors or grieving families of the deceased who have found themselves being harassed and threatened by people who believe that their trauma is just an act.   The health risks of vaccines are minimal compared to the overall health benefits of those same vaccines.  (And I’m saying that knowing that I can’t rule out the possibility that my father might be alive today had he not gotten a particular vaccine about 2.5 years before he died.  But that’s the stuff of another entry.  

I’ll even concede that some conspiracy theories can be tempting.  When George W Bush ascended to the presidency in 2001, he definitely wanted to help rehabilitate his father’s legacy as presidency and taking out Saddam Hussein was definitely a part of that agenda.  The September 11 attacks provided more than enough popular support for that goal.   (And, when you consider that there were nineteen hijackers, that definitely meets the definition of “conspiracy” from the Oliver Stone movie.)  That doesn’t mean Bush (or any other member of the US government at any level) was in on it.  

One fatal flaw of modern conspiracy theories, is the size and scope of the hypothesized conspiracy itself.   As more people are “in the know” about the truth, the harder it becomes to conceal it.   There is, for example, an entire industry dedicated to revealing rumors about the next big product releases from Apple despite the company’s best efforts to keep their product plans quiet.  And Apple’s stock price is at least partially dependent upon those rumors.  

Which brings me to the train wreck that is the White House under Donald Trump.  I think there are fewer leaks in the lean-tos built by the contestants on the TV show Survivor than there are in this administration.   And Trump isn’t exactly wrong for not appreciating the fact that the press is getting information not necessarily intended for public consumption.  There’s even a recent story in The Onion that’s poking fun at the leaks.  

The issues Trump is facing in maintaining an efficient, smoothly working operation are identical to any issues that a sufficiently wide-ranging conspiracy would have to deal with.   Keeping people silent, especially when they don’t have some massive motivation to be quiet, is quite difficult if not impossible.   

I’m not seeing much coming out of the White House that I can honestly say is a good thing.  But the more I think about it, maybe the leaks should help us put to rest the notion that these conspiracy theories are anything other than an occasionally amusing distraction.