I posted yesterday on the Grey Poupon scandal. It is one of a class of conspiracy theories which share a common thread; another member is the Government conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Center. These postulate a Vast Conspiracy, which has two properties.

• It is engineered by some Mighty Organization (usually, the Gummint, but in this case, a network), and would deceive Everybody
• except that Anybody with a keyboard can see through it, if they are not the dupes or agents of the conspiracy.

There may conceivably be a conspiracy with these qualifications, but it's most unlikely.

Set aside the problem that it (like all Vast Conspiracies) violates Machiavelli's observation on conspiracies: unless a conspiracy has a small number of members, and acts   without delay, somebody will rat it out to the target/the authorities before it goes off. 

But the conditions themselves are incompatible: if the conspiracy wouldn't deceive Anybody, it has no hope of deceiving Everybody, and so has no real motive. There is no profit, even to the Evil Overlord, of a plot of this kind that doesn't work. 


There are several possible accounts why this sort of  nonsense spreads; one is that the Anybodies who see the plot are thereby demonstrating their superiority to Everybody. This is conventional, but it doesn't fit: they expect the rest of us to believe them, and they argue - interminably. Thus, like the children of Lake Wobegon, all of us Anybodies must be above average.
 

It may just be an inability to believe in innocent coincidence; in this case, that a network used two different takes of the same incident, for no particular reason. I am  reminded of Avram Davidson's observations on Aleister Crowley.

I was tracing this absurd post (by a Cornell law professor; it's a real shame the Ivy League has taken to hiring the self-declared oppressed minority of White Male Conservatives) about the Great Grey Poupon Scandal. No, I'm not making this up - but he is.

I observe, however, that he proudly links to something even worse, and less logical. This piece of neoconservative apology for torture declares that Andrew Sullivan, because (apparently) he is a journalist, is a leftist loony partisan, and Obama is sensibly acting with the approval of such wise men as Boot, Kristol, and Goldfarb.

In the next post on the same blog, on the same day, Obama is a radical leftist, loved by the press.

Obama's behavior is a different, and far more serious, question; but it's clear that the Palinists are indeed a White Party - they even believe six impossible things before breakfast.