More From the Right Wing Nut Jobs

After the frivolities and whimsies of last week, it's back to the usual business of ranting.  It is with sadness, but little surprise, that I've noticed the conspiracy nuts are all over the Boston Bombings.  According to one whacko web site I've seen, it's all another plot by the Obama White House to, well, do something.  The details of this supposed conspiracy isn't clear, but there are plenty of photographs floating around allegedly showing how the two bombers were set up by the authorities and one of them executed, rather than dying in a gunfight with the police.  There was even an attempt to tie it in with the New England school shootings 'conspiracy', with one photo supposedly showing the head mistress of said school in the crowd at the Boston marathon finish line, despite having been reportedly killed in the shootings.  I must admit that I increasingly find these kinds of conspiracy theories offensive, with their obsessive claims that every horrific incident in the US has actually been staged by the authorities, and that all the people killed or injured in these violent incidents are fakes.

Whilst currently these nuts are predominantly right-wing fruit cakes trying to pin all the ills of the world on the Obama White House, the conspiracy theorists aren't necessarily politically partisan.  Remember how 9/11 was all staged by the Bush White House?  Which is just as offensive as the current conspiracy theories.  Whatever else I think about Dubya, I refuse to believe that he and his cronies would have gone as far as murdering thousands of innocent people for political advantage, (the Iraq war excepted, obviously).  But obviously, I'm the kind of naïve dupe who allows the conspiracy to take place, the theorists would say.  Perhaps.  But apart from the offence they cause me, these theories present another problem for me, in that they simply serve to obscure the real issues.  The incoherent conspiracies being spun around the Boston bombings, for instance, serve only to distract from some of the aspects of the authorities' reaction to the events which I, and may others, found disturbing.  The sight of hordes of paramilitary-types in body armour, brandishing automatic rifles, swarming over the streets of a city under what amounted to martial law, in search of two men, was very troubling.  What ever happened to quiet, measured police work?  I know that the city authorities in Boston would counter that, at that point, they didn't know whether they were dealing with a full-on organised terror campaign, or just a single nut job, but with the conspiracy theorists shouting that the whole bombing was just an excuse for the state to impose a military dictatorship, any debate is effectively stifled.  If you question the authorities' tactics , they can now all too easily dismiss you as a conspiracy nut.  But maybe that's the conspiracy - the government is behind the conspiracists as well, as a way of neutralising debate!