Conspiracies are always fun to speculate about so here is a funny memory that was dredged up this week. Harry Reid was in the news for the third time with major injuries that he was attributing to some benign cause. The injuries were weird because according to Reid an exercise band broke, and it not only broke bones in his face, it also broke ribs and gave him a concusion. Rush was circumspect, wondering who had beat him up this time. Breitbart noted the Capitol Police refused to release any report on the incident, and an official resigned.
Way back when the Clinton scandal broke, Senator Robert Byrd was interviewed about it on “This Week.” Sam Donaldson asked Byrd, “Is perjury in a civil case a “High Crime and Misdemeanor“?” Bryd said, “Oh Yes!” Then Donaldson said, “Do you believe Bill Clinton lied under oath in the Paula Jones case?” Byrd said, “Oh, I think it is clear he did.” Donaldson looked shocked as he paused, and then he said, “Well Senator, didn’t you just let the cat out of the bag on how you would vote? If perjury in a civil case is a “High Crime,” and you believe Bill Clinton clearly has done that, isn’t your vote to convict him already all locked up?” Byrd looked shocked as the realization of what he just said hit him. Then he smiled weakly, and said something like, “Sam you’re going to have to give me some space and let me think more about all this, before I cast my vote.” It was a weak answer, but the conclusions were there for all to see. Bryd went on to make a couple more statements to the effect that Bill Clinton was done for, in other interviews on other shows. He was clearly reveling in his role as the esteemed moral bastion of the Senate.
Later that week, ABC was showing some procedural voting in the Senate, I forget what it was for, and Peter Jennings was doing a voice-over as the film rolled from the camera above the floor. At one point, Jennings softly intoned, “You may notice Senator Byrd leaves the Senate chambers every twenty minutes or so. What he is doing is getting a wound on his hand redressed. Just last night he was reading a book while riding in his chauffer-driven sedan, and the reading light in the car suddenly burst into flames. Senator Byrd tried to put the flames out with his hands, and suffered some very sever burns to his one hand while doing it. The wound is so severe that he has to redress it every twenty minutes or so.”
I must confess to having wondered just how a small 12V reading light in a car could erupt in flames to such a degree that it would produce that type of injury, and why if it had, Bryd would have used his hand to put out the flames, rather than having the vehicle stopped so he could exit.
Regardless, Robert Byrd changed his tune 180 degrees after that in subsequent interviews, saying that maybe perjury about sex wasn’t that bad, and the whole Lewinsky matter should be dropped.
It is overwhelmingly likely these incidents are all innocently explained, but I do try to avoid pretending that I understand exactly how things work in areas I have not traversed myself, so I’m not about to swear to that. My general impression is that people who adhere to such false certainties of truth, tend to do so out of a desire to have a feeling of control and to avoid confronting their own lack of understanding and the resultant lack of control.
I suspect if you were to perform a close examination, the conspiracy theorist actually prefers the adventure and excitement of the unknown and dangerous world, to the boredom and the tedium of the well controlled. I can kind of understand the psychology.
Strangely enough, in a crazy world, sometimes they can even be right.
