Idiot of the Week: Early Nomination

As you'll recall, I predicted immediately after the Pittsburgh shootings that internet lunatics would claim that it was some sort of government-generated incident (a la September 2001 as far as some are concerned) designed to further an anti-gun agenda. Little did I suspect, however, that someone would say the Maersk Alabama incident and its happy resolution were a put on. But I underestimated some people's obsessive fear of President Obama, as illustrated by this posting from the Albany Craig's List site.

The poster is not a Republican, but a conspiracy theorist. He replied to a critical comment on his original post by affirming his belief that Obama is just as much a creature of the New World Order as George W. Bush was. Anyone with power would be, from that perspective, since "power" itself is virtually a conscious entity to such people, the purpose of which is to exclude them from having power of their own. Whoever has power must be part of the conspiracy to deny power to the conspiracy theorists. I'm not saying that conspiracy theorists lust for political power, but that they crave some feeling of mastery (even if it boils down to pure autonomy), the absence of which must be the result of some malignant will. They see manifestations of that evil will everywhere, especially on the news, and any event that seems to benefit that evil will must be its own creation and part of an intricate plot to consolidate the "enslavement" of everybody else. It's probably unfair to label such insanity as idiocy, but when such people make public statements, the public has to assign them some objective value, and idiocy sounds just about right.