a conspiracy to put loony violent conspiracy theorists in control of the most powerful country on earth, etc....,
2011-01-12 23:38:59
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this may call for some skepticism...,
2011-01-15 18:29:36
in the spirit of the times we watch the spirit of the times:
I turned El Rushbo on for five minutes yesterday and got this:
This guy's preferred viewing list is liberal documentaries like Zeitgeist (which said 9/11 was planned by George W. Bush) and a whole bunch of other wacko leftist beliefs. This guy was a "truther." He was a nutcase left and right. His influences were all deranged leftist.
Rush Limbaugh, two days earlier, denouncing the Rush Limbaugh of two days later:
What I see is the Democrat Party, its representatives and its supporters on the American left attempting to take a genuine human tragedy, and their first instinct is to politicize it, and that desire, their political desire is to silence, to quiet people who they consider their opposition: me, people who do what I do, and Fox News. If that is not attempting to profit off murder, I don't know what it is. "But Mr. Limbaugh, that was very vicious to say it that way."
See, this is the problem. The truth is the great casualty.
It's sort of funny that he doesn't consider the actual casualties to be the great casualty.
Anyway, Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is a mashup of every stupid conspiracy you could read about on the internet. Let's take just the bit about the Federal Reserve: it makes the same false claim as other manifestations of gold buggery that "most of the Senate" were at home for the holidays when they passed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and from that invention lays one fat one after another, all the while, without question, denouncing fiat currency in favor of the gold standard. The argument is 24 karat gold buggery, and I'm not sure where Jessie Walker found the Greenback Party position, but its not here.
From there Zeitgeist states that the federal income tax is unconstitutional (and takes "an average" of 35% all income, an absurd nonsense claim to make when 35% is the top marginal rate) with a string of resigned IRS workers who apparently never heard of the 16th amendment, all stating that after years of research they've been unable to discover the 16th amendment.
The international financiers who rigged up the federal reserve system love starting wars, the movie explains, and then complains that the US loans offered to nationalist China and Britain in the early stages of World War II were somehow against "international war rules" and, after condemning the US for taking sides against Japan, complains that American business took both sides in the war in Europe, seeming to endorse the distinctly isolationist policy in which the US would do no business of any kind with any nation in a state of war. It backs this theory up by not even attempting to explain how Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the first Gulf War were all engineered by international financial interests.
Then there's this stupefying statement, "the education system in America continues its stupefying downward slide since the US government decided to take over and subsidize the public school system". The factoid presented are international comparisons that may indicate just as well that other countries have improved their educational systems, and the argument otherwise is the federal government is getting what it wanted and increasingly paid for "since": the kind of idiotic public that would waste an afternoon watching this shit.
From here it leaps to the North American Union and Amero nonsense, inserts a lengthy diatribe by Lou Dobbs, unequivocally denounces the idea without considering its merits and then, somehow, we leap from a supposed NAU to a One World Government. Then we get RFID chips implanted into our skulls, and then the movie finally strikes a liberal tone by telling us we are all one, before floating off into some sort of bizarre pastiche of new age nonsense and liberally plagiarizing Bill Hicks without credit.
The positions laid out in Zeitgeist, then: gold buggery, wars are engineered by international finance; the income tax is unconstitutional; isolationism; abolishing of the Department of Education; an extremely nationalist opposition to open borders of any kind for any purpose; and, finally, that the only decision we have to make, per Bill Hicks, is between fear and love.
These are all bugaboos from quarters of the old right, unless one mistakenly thinks of the Tea Party movement as "new", which is where you can also find right-wing 9/11 trutherism, with Bush's first secretary of labor Morgan Reynolds trumpeting trutherism from Lew Rockwell's website and so on. How one gets from this to the film maker's endorsement of Jacque Fresco's program for a technocratic global rationing system with "No Money, Barter, Trade or Property", a magical system somehow "free of political intervention" - a proposal that seems to have a strange currency in the David Icke/reptilian humanoid crowd - must be seriously bizarre. It also doesn't seem to tell us anything at all about why this kid went on a rampage. He's still alive though, sooner or later somebody will get around to asking him.
