dgrace wrote:Readers and participants in this thread should read the article in the latest New Yorker magazine by Nicolas Lemann on the paranoid style in American liberal journalism. It is impossible to read without thinking of many of the arguments made on this thread. I will leave it at that except for stating the obvious: it is not only possible, but reasonable to reject all or most of the policies of the Bush administration and the consquences of those policies, without assuming that the consquences have come about as the result of some overarching, carefully-constructed and adhered to Plan. It is not only possible, but likely, that the Bush Administration is, for the most part, making it up as they go along, and that the influence possessed by the "moneyed oligarchs" is far more unwieldy than these interests would like, and that the administration, constrained by day-to-day circumstances, has no idea what they're doing much of the time. This makes the administration and their prejudices no less dangerous, but by acknowledging the chaos and contingency inherent to life, administration critics can insure that they themselves are inhabiting the reality-based community.
This has always been pretty much my perspective on the whole. I don't know if I can fully swallow a full-tilt conspiracy, but it is possible. Unfortunately, whether it is some sort of implausable sounding conspiracy, or rampant opportunism, the outcome for most of us is the same. We are guaranteed to never know the truth, and the politics of the event are where my actual focus is.