Holy cow, yet another conspiracy theory!

This has been a year of some wonderfully crazy new conspiracies. Birtherism is actually looking pretty banal next to the "Obama is gay-married to a Pakistani" conspiracy, the "Obama is a Jihadist sleeper agent conspiracy, the Aurora conspiracies, job numbers conspiracies, polling conspiracy theories from America’s least-accurate pollster Dick Morris, and, my former favorite, the Obama is buying bullets for the Social Security Administration to kill all Americans conspiracy theory.

Now the American Spectator is publishing a new crackpot conspiracy theory that I think rivals my former favorite. It's "the media has a secret backchannel where they discuss their plans to get Obama re-elected conspiracy". And who is the proof this conspiracy theory is at work? Candy Crowley!

Shortly after Obamacare was passed and signed by the President, Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute noted a sudden plethora of articles that had begun to appear in a wide variety of MSM outlets about the probable ill-effects of "reform." This prompted him to ask, "Where were these reporters before the passage of the health care bill?" The answer to this question is now pretty obvious. They were colluding, via JournoList and other such forums that we don't know about, to make sure that no one screwed up and told the truth before that morass of taxes and regulations became the law of the land. To the nation's cost, their self-censorship succeeded.

Today, we face a similar but much more dangerous situation. The "reporters" of the establishment news media are engaged in a concerted campaign of misinformation to get Barack Obama re-elected. This has been evident for some time, but the breathtaking mendacity of this effort was writ large by Candy Crowley during last Tuesday's presidential debate. Everyone has by now seen the video clip: the President made the preposterous claim that he had identified the attack on our Benghazi consulate as an act of terrorism as early as September 12. Then, when Romney called him on this egregious whopper, Crowley repeated the lie.

Wowzers. It's hard to continue to debate with a conspiracy theory that is dependent on questioning such an easily verifiable fact. For the record, the transcript from Obama's speech on the 12 reads:

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.

or you can watch the video:

To believe that Obama was talking about some other act of terror other than Benghazi is highly disingenuous as the very next sentence refers to "four more Americans" that died as a result of this "terrible act". But I suppose it's possible, if you are reading at a fifth grade level or something, you could think he was still referring to 9/11. That might make sense, and Romney then might have a valid claim about "14 days" until the relatively meaningless distinction is made, except the very next day Obama says it's an act of terror again.

Let me say at the outset that obviously our hearts are heavy this week -- we had a tough day a couple of days ago, for four Americans were killed in an attack on our diplomatic post in Libya. Yesterday I had a chance to go over to the State Department to talk to friends and colleagues of those who were killed. And these were Americans who, like so many others, both in uniform and civilians, who serve in difficult and dangerous places all around the world to advance the interests and the values that we hold dear as Americans.

And a lot of times their work goes unheralded, doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it is vitally important. We enjoy our security and our liberty because of the sacrifices that they make. And they do an outstanding job every single day without a lot of fanfare. (Applause.)

So what I want all of you to know is that we are going to bring those who killed our fellow Americans to justice. (Applause.) I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished. It will not dim the light of the values that we proudly present to the rest of the world. No act of violence shakes the resolve of the United States of America.

Talking about these deaths he again describes it as an act of terror, unless of course, you think he just threw that in there as a red herring. He just randomly inserts "act of terror" into speeches about healthcare I'm sure. But why this is my favorite new conspiracy theory is because there actually are people who think a defunct online Google forum is evidence of left wing journalists' attempts to rule the world.

For those that are interested, the reference to "journolist" is this now defunct chat group of which many prominent left-leaning journalists shared often impolitic statements about people in the news. Ezra Klein even tried to bring in Tucker Carlson just to allay the crank conspiracy fears about journalists *gasp* socializing online. We even used to have one here at scienceblogs where we would, yes, even coordinate posts, but mostly it was a forum for invective, like most online forums. Snore. Anyway, for the conspiratorial mind the existence of such a group combined with a few cherry-picked offensive statements is proof enough for an illuminati-style conspiracy of the MSM to rule the world. At worst, it seemed to include what I thought were appropriate reactions to the Jeremiah Wright story, which could be summed up by, "this is crap, we shouldn't even cover it, it makes us all stupider." The most obvious question raised by such a non-parsimonious conspiracy theory is do you really think that if journalists were engaged in a conspiracy to control the MSM, would the gateway to this super-secret and all powerful Google group be a mouse-click by Ezra Klein? And would Ezra Klein, being the mastermind of this great conspiracy, be exercising good judgment by inviting Tucker Carlson to join and telling him all about it?

I have something for people who think this is proof of a conspiracy:

The tinfoil hat!