Gonna be a great year/decade/century for conspiracy theorists
I’ve read and blogged a bit on conspiracy theories, and the basic conclusion I’ve come to is that they are like weeds in a garden. Without careful tending and ample sunlight in the public sphere, they are all too easy to sprout up — and next to impossible to eliminate once rooted in the soil. They’re really ...
I've read and blogged a bit on conspiracy theories, and the basic conclusion I've come to is that they are like weeds in a garden. Without careful tending and ample sunlight in the public sphere, they are all too easy to sprout up -- and next to impossible to eliminate once rooted in the soil.
I’ve read and blogged a bit on conspiracy theories, and the basic conclusion I’ve come to is that they are like weeds in a garden. Without careful tending and ample sunlight in the public sphere, they are all too easy to sprout up — and next to impossible to eliminate once rooted in the soil.
They’re really hard to eliminate if they turn out to contain a nugget of truth, however:
For more on how this particular scandal is not limited to an Internal Revenue Service field office, click here.
As the tail end of Jon Stewart’s rant observes, this doesn’t even get into the rather disturbing Department of Justice seizure of the Associated Press’s phone records.
Nor does it address the fact that the same IRS office that inquired into Tea Party organizations also apparently investigated groups with ties to Israel:
The same Internal Revenue Service office that singled out Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny also challenged Israel-related organizations, at least one of which filed suit over the agency’s handling of its application for tax-exempt status.
The trouble for the Israel-focused groups seems to have had different origins than that experienced by conservative groups, but at times the effort seems to have been equally ham-handed.
Look, there’s no easy way to say this: The U.S. government has just given intellectual cover for every paranoid group in the country to articulate why their conspiracy theory has been validated. The thing is, now everyone else must give some patina of plausibility to those beliefs, no matter how bats**t crazy they sound at first glance.
As Politico reports, the Obama administration’s political levers at the IRS are near infinitesimal. That really doesn’t matter, however. This is now a political problem. Unless the White House finds a way to indicate that it’s taking these scandals seriously and fixing the problems, this will be the defining meme for Barack Obama’s second term.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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