Conspiration terrory

A reasonable response to the Bush administration's cascade of lies is to become suspicious of every official utterance. Unfortunately, this has turned moderates into conspiracy theorists (or, as a friend's window-washer colleague from Hungary once put it, "conspiration terrorists"). Yet another reason to resent the regime.

Take, for example, the recent airline bomb plot scare. Huge scary plot disrupted just in time, or a whole lotta nothing inflated for political purposes? Who can truly say, given the information at our disposal & the admin's track record? Kevin Drum on a USA Today poll showing Bush with his highest approval rating in some time: "...it's a sad commentary on the continuing ability of the Republican Party to scare their way to victory. There's very little evidence that the airline bombers were even remotely capable of pulling off their plot, and likewise little justification for the massive fear-mongering and hysterical anti-liquid regulations hastily put in place for air travelers. The risk of terrorists manufacturing binary explosives in the air could almost certainly have been handled in other, more effective ways, and it's increasingly obvious that the government's scare campaign was far out of proportion to the actual immediate danger. The likelihood that it was hyped more for political reasons than for genuine reasons of air safety continues to grow, and someday, when there's a real emergency, this attitude may come back to haunt us."