Issues & Opinions

A conspiracy of dunces, that is, spreading conspiracy theories.

Shockingly, to me as I’m sure it is to you, this one comes from a guy who’s a buddy of Ron Paul, (“R”, TX).

Via Dan Primack’s PE Week Wire:

The candidate is Murray Sabrin, a university professor who once ran on the Libertarian ticket for governor of New Jersey. He’s now running for U.S. Senate as a Republican, and last week received an endorsement from political soul-mate Ron Paul. More specifically, Paul sent out a so-called “Money Bomb” for Sabrin, which is basically an email asking supporters to immediately make an online donation. The idea is to raise lots of money in a single day, and then use the windfall as evidence of growing grass-roots support.

He got his money bomb, because the Paul-\bots are nothing if not slavish in their devotion to the directives of their jingoistic hero, Dr. Ron Paul. And it blew up Sabrin’s site, but good.

Soon after Paul lit the fuse, however, the Sabrin website crashed. It and some associated email accounts were down for approximately 16 hours, before being put back online. The campaign was furious. It had discussed the expected traffic surge with Network Solutions beforehand, and that it had been assured the site would be fine.

Or not, as it turned out – Network Solutions isn’t responsible for design and coding errors in its clients’ sites, and Sabrin’s site was buggy.

This is where it gets just bizarre. The Sabrin campaign seemed to have two choices at this point: Either accept that the crash was caused by its own coding mistake, or blame Network Solutions for having faulty technology. But it went for an unexpected third avenue: Accuse Network Solutions of taking down the website for partisan political purposes.

Which of course Sabrin’s campaign did. Utterly implausibly, but there you have it. For details, click the link to Dan’s story – it’s a good read.

As a larger issue, no wonder people are falling serially in love with Barack Obama – he promises, in some feathery and highly general way, to deliver us from this sort of functional retardation.

It’s all crap, of course – not specifically because it’s Mr. Obama (a fascinating & intelligent gentleman, good with a turn of a phrase, though married to an apparently divisive and demogogic wife and devoid of either the experience or anything that passes for coherent strategy to, you know, actually run the country). It’s crap because he’s a politician, and they’re all full of crap, as they pretty much have to be in order to aspire to the position they seek.

If Mr. Obama’s, or anyone else’s, putative “war on cynicism” had a ghost of a chance of succeeding (and it does not), one of the first things they would propose would be that, every time someone trots out a ludicrous conspiracy theory designed solely to motivate the lowest quartiles of the IQ spectrum, the government could declare a moment of silence, followed by a moment of pointing at that person and laughing.

Hey, a boy can dream.