Will the election cycle conspiracy theories keep getting less plausible, or have we maxed out?
Trig Trutherism was awesome and I thought the shark had been cleared by a comfortable margin, but the idea that Romney allies made a movie in order to destabilize the world and thus influence the election, and that it worked as designed, is more preposterous than anything. It's not that they would not... they would do anything. It is that they could not.
As a conspiracy theory it is far too small. It is nonsensical unless one uses the whole roll of foil because it cannot make sense unless you believe that Al Nas television and al-Qaida both do the Romney campaign's bidding. (Or do the bidding of whatever the responsible entity is in the theory.)
Now that would be a conspiracy theory worthy of admiration. And Mit and the Kochs and a lot of other RW assholes might have enough money to perhaps bride Arab religious leaders and TV programmers, and to hire terrorists.
But unless that is the deal and Mitt directed Al Nas television to have a day of hate on 9/11 centered around this film, and also directed Ansar al-Sharia operating in Benghazi to destroy our consulate and kill a bunch of people under cover of being upset about the film then there is no path from A to B.
One might as well concoct a conspiracy theory wherein some RWer buys a mega-millions ticket in order to funnel the millions won into scurrilous anti-Obama advertising. It is almost airtight. There are RWers who buy lottery tickets and there are RWers who would spend millions on scurrilous anti-Obama ads. But the inconvenient winning the mega-millions part kind of reveals the foolishness.
Some laughable "Islam sucks" video on youtube does not have a reasonable expectation of becoming the biggest thing in the world. You can produce it and post it, but unless you can get Arab leaders, Arab TV and Arab terrorists to all play their parts there's no there there.
And no, this does not happen every time someone, somewhere says "Islam sucks." What extreme Muslim religious leaders seize on to dupe their credulous followers about is not reliably predictable. Simply making something offensive does not get it. For every "Satanic Verses" there are a thousand writings equally disrespectful of Islam that didn't get the first Fatwa. And those Danish cartoons were certainly not the first or only rude drawings of Mohamed.
South park has done as bad or worse, but without anyone being killed.
Show how Romney had some sort of operational control of the people who actually made this specific movie the biggest thing since the last nonsense that was the biggest thing and there's a story.
"Some people made an incoherent film that looks like it was shot in my garage and posted it on You tube because that was certain to cause terrorists to kill a bunch of people and incite mass protests across the Islamic world." That is silly. If that was how this worked it would happen every day.
The film did not cause the outrage so it really doesn't matter who made the film or why.
Stipulate the worst possible intent and that video still doesn't get window one broken 99% of the time. On the other hand, if the Arab players involved decided to have a daily hate about Chicken Mc Nuggets then there's a decent chance a McDonald's in north Africa could get burned down, or have its employees beheaded.
To read history backward and deduce intent and likelihood from happenstance is like watching a spin of a roulette wheel and saying, "The guy who bet on number 38 wanted to win and everyone else wanted to lose or else they also would have picked 38."
Show that the actual outrage makers in Egypt and Libya and Yemen and India are under American RW command and control and you will be my hero. For real.
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To paraphrase Rachel. 