John McCain and the Conspiratorial Left's Brain Droppings

I know this is asking for the impossibly rational, but wouldn't it be grand if the right's counterpart of the lunatic fringe took an overdue vacation this election cycle? The forces of progressive reason have a long road ahead in the race against John McCain, and they really aren't helped by leftist versions of Richard Hofstadter's "paranoid style."

In merely the last 48 hours, for example, I've received multiple "news alerts" from left-wing crackpots that ask such representative questions as, "Was John McCain Brainwashed by His North Vietnamese Captors to Destroy This Nation?" There is then a link supplied that answers the question, which, without reading, one knows will be in the shocking affirmative.

But my answer is this: Is the passing on of clinical imbecility like that supposed to help the progressive cause? With so much material to legitimately hammer McCain on, is this the kind of counterproductive, conspiracy-theory crap that the "cyber"-left really wishes to invest in?

Such garbage is not atypical of the Web, of course, but it does require a truly peculiar frame of mind to thrive. The right has always seen bogeymen everywhere, as Hofstadter so brilliantly chronicled; but, sad to say, the left is not exempt. It has its own embarrassment of paranoid and conspiratorial riches. And as it lays them out it does damage to the quite rational arguments made against conservative pols like John McCain, because the right merrily plucks them out as typical, just typical, of what the left is saying.

I myself have never quite fathomed that frame of mind -- the conspiratorial, we-know-the-real-truth frame of mind -- yet there's no doubt about its humiliating but growing relationship to the progressive cause. In recent years, for instance, the right has had a splendid time of it deriding the likes of the immensely conspiratorially minded "9/11 Truth Movement," which, since it is virulently anti-Bush, is easily associated in the minds of many voters with the progressive anti-Bush movement. And, indeed, not a few among the latter are card-carrying members.

The "9/11 Truthers" are every bit as stubborn as Oliver Stone and, almost unbelievably, they're still making headlines and enlisting celebrity support. You may have read that their latest inductee is former Governor Jesse Ventura, who, as one headline blasts, now says "WTC Collapse a Controlled Demolition." This also briefly made the network news, which occasionally picks up on the ravings of the Web and conspiracy-talk radio, which is where Ventura originally snapped.

Sure enough, I was instantly notified of this "breaking news" by a rabidly "progressive" emailer in what can only be described as an unremitting crusade to harm the legitimate case against the Bush administration in all its miserable manifestations. Because this sort of stuff is just plain nuts and it taints the progressive opposition.

Now, the same harm to the legitimate case to be made against John McCain is in the conspiratorial, paranoid works and increasingly on the Web. The Arizona senator, we're told, is the real thing -- the Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed by the North Vietnamese.

Some might take comfort, if not intellectual refuge, in the historical fact that, as Joseph Ellis notes in American Creation, the Democratic Party was, in large part, itself founded on lunatic conspiracy theories. Hence today's Manchurian candidate garbage is nothing new. It seems comical now, but the pre-party organizers of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison actually believed -- really, truly, genuinely believed -- that Alexander Hamilton's formation of the first Bank of the United States was absolute proof "that a Federalist plot was afoot" to restore monarchical rule.

Like the 9/11 Truthers and Manchurian candidate jazzers, the Jeffersonians had not an ounce of evidence to support their claims, but "one advantage that Jefferson and Madison enjoyed ... was their Virginia base, which gave them a safe haven to develop their conspiratorial conversation and a supportive constituency already primed to understand" the skulduggery "without any extended explanations." Just think of what they could have accomplished had they had the Web.

Out of this came the hysterical pushback of the early Democratic Party, which was "rendered even more passionate because, truth be known, the [conspiracy believers] had not the dimmest understanding of what Hamilton was talking about." Sorting out the young nation's fiscal mess was a dreadfully complex business, so it was easier to write off any unwanted attempts at it to a vast, Federalist conspiracy. In the end, "Jefferson ... reached the conclusion that the bank was not just unconstitutional, it was actually treasonable."

Laughable? You bet. But so is today's political currency that will buy you such utter nonsense as John McCain having been "brainwashed" by the North Vietnamese and, for that reason, has now set upon us to "destroy this nation." Is it not enough to properly frame him as a blind imperialist? Or a certifiable economus ignoramus? With all that going for it, does the progressive opposition really need to hustle pure and embarrassing crap that only makes a laughingstock of the left?

Unfortunately, those responsible for hustling said crap likely won't have the dimmest understanding of what I'm talking about, either, so I probably just wasted nearly 900 words.