The New York Times
May 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Who's Crazy Now?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Some people say that bizarre conspiracy theories play a disturbingly
large role in current American political discourse. And they're right.
For example, many conservative politicians and pundits seem to agree
with James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment
and Public Works, who has declared that "man-made global warming is
the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
Of more immediate political relevance is the claim that the reason we
hear mainly bad news from Iraq is that the media, for political
reasons, are conspiring to suppress the good news. As Bill O'Reilly
put it a few months ago, "a good part of the American media wants to
undermine the Bush administration."
But these examples, of course, aren't what people are usually
referring to when they denounce crazy conspiracy theories. For the
last few years, the term "conspiracy theory" has been used primarily
to belittle critics of the Bush administration in particular, anyone
suggesting that the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to
fight an unrelated war in Iraq.
Now here's the thing: suppose that we didn't have abundant evidence
that senior officials in the Bush administration wanted a war,
cherry-picked intelligence to make a case for that war, and in some
cases suppressed inconvenient evidence contradicting that case. Even
so, it would be an abuse of the English language to call the claim
that the administration misled us into war a conspiracy theory.
A conspiracy theory, says Wikipedia, "attempts to explain the cause of
an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance."
Claims that global warming is a hoax and that the liberal media are
suppressing the good news from Iraq meet that definition. In each
case, to accept the claim you have to believe that people working for
many different organizations scientists at universities and research
facilities around the world, reporters for dozens of different news
organizations are secretly coordinating their actions.
But the administration officials who told us that Saddam had an active
nuclear program and insinuated that he was responsible for 9/11
weren't part of a covert alliance; they all worked for President Bush.
The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn't a
conspiracy theory; it's simply an assertion that people in a position
of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly
implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around
him wouldn't do such a thing.
The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like
"loopy conspiracy theories" are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put
it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, want to
"confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they
disagree." Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest
that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.
Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of
Bush critics; "It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again,"
said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr.
Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates
have tended to dismiss the administration's harsh critics as victims
of irrational Bush hatred.
But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out
that many of the administration supporters can't handle the truth.
They won't admit that they built a personality cult around a man who
has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit
that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning
that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have
taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in
the media is hiding the good news from the public.
Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left which do exist, but
are supported only by a tiny fringe the crazy conspiracy theories of
the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians,
television personalities with large audiences. And we can safely
predict that these people will never concede that they were wrong.
When the Iraq venture comes to a bad end, they won't blame those who
led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of
the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back.