The Crazy Conspiracy To Crush An Obama Nominee

[babylonsister]

How Rumors Rule Washington

by Amanda Ripley


UPI Photo / Landov


Nominated to a White House job, legal scholar Cass Sunstein has become a victim of the very thing he writes books about: conspiracy theories and paranoid rumors.

This summer has felt at times like an accidental romp through the mind of a mad man, with a new conspiracy theory surfacing every day: the birthers, the Democrats-will-euthanize-granny crowd, and so on. And now, in perhaps the greatest irony of the season, a respected legal scholar who has written extensively about these sorts of paranoid rumors has fallen victim to them himself.

This spring, Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor and friend of Obama’s from their days teaching at the University of Chicago, was nominated to run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a little-known but powerful White House department in charge of reviewing federal regulations. The Wall Street Journal quickly seconded the nomination, calling Sunstein a “savvy choice” and praising his restrained approach to financial regulation. On the left wing, environmentalists and others fretted that he would be too conservative.

But no one disputed his academic achievements. Sunstein has written some 350 articles and 34 books, including the recent title Going to Extremes, about the spread of fringe politics and conspiracy theories. His latest book on this topic, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, will be published in September. It could easily have included Sunstein’s own stalled nomination as a case study.

The rumors that have thwarted Sunstein’s appointment for seven months, prompting Republican senators to put a hold on it not once but three times, allege that he will curtail gun rights and allow pets (pets!) to sue their owners. Like many conspiracy theories, these have grown from small seeds of fact—Sunstein has in the past said and written some provocative things about animal rights and hunting. Most notably, he suggested in a 2004 book, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, that humans should be allowed to sue, on behalf of animals, other people who violate existing animal-protection laws.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-08/how-rumors-rule-washington/full/

[Thrill]

1. Still waiting on limp dick Harry Reid to get Dawn Johnson confirmed

Good luck with Cass. Who is thought to be one of the people Obama would look at for the Supreme Court too