what is with these conspiracy theories?

ok, so it seems some people who are, like me, on the left, have a problem with conspiracy theories. check out this discussion of dick cheney. now, don’t get me wrong... dick cheney is untrustworthy and evil, as evidenced by the fact that he picked himself to be vice president, how he is so obsessed with secrecy, how he likes to have our nation’s enemies tortured despite evidence that torture does not work, how he cooked the books on the intelligence about iraqi weapons of mass destruction through his office of special plans, and how he is corrupt and thinks he is above the law. and the elections of 2000 and 2004 may both have very well been stolen, the first one stolen in florida and the second in ohio. who knows if the elections were really stolen? not me. maybe the perpetrators would know, or maybe there are no perpetrators. but anyway, dick cheney is not behind 9/11, our country is not a fascist dictatorship, we are still a democracy, president bush is actually in charge, and it is not the end of the world. we are having a presidential election in 2008 and bush and cheney are not up for re-election! democrats control both houses of congress after winning them in last year’s elections! it is sooooooooo not the end of the world. and we are probably not going to nuke iran, although politicians continue to say that “all options are on the table”, which presumably includes the option of us doing a preemptive nuclear strike. anyway, yes it is true that neoconservatives like dick cheney are bloodthirsty warmongers who want to kill as many people as possible by fighting as many wars as possible. but i think dick cheney has become somewhat sidelined and less influential as more and more people within the government realize he is a tyrannical madman. our democratic system works, and soon we will be rid of bush and cheney. and i think people really need to stop buying into crazy conspiracy theories with regard to evil tyrants like dick cheney. just because someone is evil, insane, obsessed with secrecy, loves torture, loves war, and hates being held accountable, that does not mean that person is actually involved in any secret conspiracies. the neocons are certainly not a conspiracy. everybody knows about the project for a new american century! and everyone knows about dick cheney’s secret energy policy meetings with the leaders of big oil companies and ken lay from enron, and how dick cheney tried to keep everything secret. and now we are finding out about how dick cheney was behind pressuring john ashcroft to sign off on something evil (torture, or something) when john ashcroft was sick in the hospital; alberto gonzales was the one actually sent to the hospital to do the deed of pressuring a bedridden ashcroft. but that is actually good news! it means ashcroft was not the evil guy everyone thought! and there is more evidence coming out about how colin powell and condoleezza rice have both acted as obstructionists towards cheney’s all-consuming lust for power and domination. but dick cheney is no genius. he is probably not even that much smarter than the president. and the president is not as stupid as some people say, although he is a little stupid. the truth is, dick cheney’s idiocy is plainly apparent because dick cheney is so bad at public relations and his approval rating is so low. if he had half a brain, he would try harder to manage the media and have them cover him positively. but instead, he is an utter failure at preventing the media from publishing stories that damage his reputation. in other words, dick cheney is incompetent, and could never pull off a major conspiracy because he is such an unapologetic bloodthirsty tyrannical dumbass. al qaeda was behind 9/11 and lee harvey oswald acted alone when he killed john f. kennedy. i can see why people would be inclined to believe conspiracy theories about dick cheney, but in reality, if i were starting an evil conspiracy, i would not want to include an idiotic nutball like dick cheney. someone like him would ruin the whole conspiracy with his incompetence and the press would find out. you see, nobody likes dick cheney. now his chief of staff, lewis “scooter” libby, is going to jail for a crime dick cheney committed, and libby was just the fall guy. but that is because libby is a submissive idiot who is dumb enough to obey whatever his tyrannical boss tells him to do. scooter libby deserves to rot in jail. it is his fault he lied under oath, not dick cheney’s. dick cheney was behind the whole campaign to make joseph wilson look bad by revealing that valerie plame was a cia agent, and, predictably, the whole plan backfired and made dick cheney look bad instead, and started a criminal investigation. that incident reveals the stupidity of vice president cheney, and why he could never pull off an actual conspiracy. these people could never turn our country into a totalitarian dictatorship. nobody would support them! if they tried something like that, our own military would rise up and overthrow them, and then we would transition back to democracy again. and the bitter american expatriates overseas who post online about how horrible our country has become are just sad and pathetic human beings who are too closed-minded to see all the good things about the united states of america. just because we have bad “leaders” does not mean the whole country is rotten to the core! but it bothers me that sometimes we leftists allow conspiracy theorists to claim irrational things, and rather than correct these inaccuracies, we just debate the right-wingers. i mean, sure, conspiracy theories may sometimes be beneficial politically, if they make the other side look bad. but they are not a logical and rational way to discuss current events, and we should try not to have opinions that are so strong, they overpower facts and the truth and cloud our judgment. i still believe the threat posed by dick cheney to our nation has been contained and he is being monitored closely by other forces in our government who realize he poses a threat to our democracy. and thus, our great democracy is protected from these fools! the central intelligence agency, for instance, has consistently been an enemy of dick cheney, and they have often fought each other with leaks to the press. if he tries anything funny, i am sure someone will be watching him and will leak it to the media, and it will be all over the newspapers and the television and the news on the radio and on the internet. for dick cheney, there is no escape from bad press! everyone hates him, including most of the government and most of the media. so i do not think he poses any threat to us anymore. people should stop with the hyperbolic paranoia about how our country is turning into a totalitarian nightmare. that is just not true. i watch c-span, and politicians in both political parties are quite similar. i think anybody who gets involved in politics has to act like they do in order to be successful. but that is how democracy works. congress caved in to the president on the funding for the iraq war a while back. there will be another fight over that in september, supposedly. this does not mean our democracy has failed. democracy works slowly, and sometimes it takes years for politicians to catch up to the will of the people, because the system has so many checks and balances to slow things down and obstruct anything controversial. it is hard to end a war, because most people in congress don’t have the balls, guts, or whatever you wish to call it, to just do it and end the war. this does not mean we are an empire and that the imperial presidency can do whatever it wants and that congress is just a rubber stamp regardless of which party is in control. i know some people say that type of rhetoric but it is just untrue. there is a real difference between both parties, but it is in the policies they try to enact, not in the human behavior of individual politicians. people are just too cynical and do not believe politicians actually mean what they say and believe what they are saying to the public. it is quite sad how cynical and jaded we have all become towards our democratic process, and how much distrust we have of politicians, most of whom are dedicated public servants. yes, their human failings and subjective understandings of reality prevent them from enacting real change most of the time. but that does not show corruption. it just shows that they are fallible humans like everyone else, and most of them are not original enough thinkers to come up with great new ideas for how to do things. and as for whether dick cheney is evil... he believes he is a good person, and so do some of those close to him. he believes his actions are justified. but you know who else believed that about himself? adolf hitler. and stalin too. you see, people always try to justify their own actions to themselves, and this clouds their judgment. just because someone believes they are good and tries to do what they believe is good does not mean they are actually good. if that were true, adolf hitler would be considered saintly. we judge people by what we think is good and evil, and what society thinks is good and evil, not by what the people who are doing the things we are judging think about their own actions. so that is why dick cheney is evil. it is because we live in a society where his actions are considered morally reprehensible. in some other society, he might be considered a good person, if they had a different value system and different morals. but here in our democracy, we consider dick cheney evil, because that is a subjective value judgment, not objective reality. in objective reality, there is no such thing as good or evil. morality is all an invention of human society. but it is a good invention, and one we should believe in and use accordingly. dick cheney is pure dagnasty evil. it’s just a fact. what kind of fact, you ask? well, the kind that is actually just an opinion because morality is subjective and not objective, because it is based on arbitrary rules and standards devised by human society, and not universal laws of science. but we would have no society, no civilization, no science or technology, if it were not for morality. it is necessary for humanity to function cohesively as a whole and not have us all divided into egocentric amoral individuals who only care about themselves. if only dick cheney were smart enough to understand all of that, and not so obsessed with power and domination and secrecy. and did i mention halliburton and its no-bid contracts where it rips off the government for billions of dollars? yes, in that last sentence, for the first time. is dick cheney behind halliburton getting these contracts? who knows. the whole bush administration is run by former oil executives. there is probably just a general consensus in the administration in favor of oil companies, one that needs no discussion because everyone already understands it and nobody wants to be caught saying things that could be damaging to the administration and their own careers. i think it might be a good idea for the legislative branch to have more authority over the executive departments, and for the presidential administrations to have less authority over the rest of the executive branch. we should limit presidential power as much as possible without damaging national security. there is too much power in the hands of one person (the president). and why is there too much power in the hands of our current vice president? because the president lets him get away with it. in the end, everything is bush’s fault. even hurricane katrina. president bush controls the weather and caused a hurricane to hit new orleans. okay, now i am joking, and i hope you recognized that was not serious. anyway, conspiracy theorists have no regard for the truth or for being accurate. they just want to make as many unsupported accusations as possible. so please ignore people like the infamous alex jones (a very popular conspiracy theorist nowadays). they do not add to the discussion, they only throw it off track with bullshit. there are only a few conspiracies, and 90% of the conspiracy theories are wrong. i just wish conspiracy theorists could focus on the 10% of conspiracy theories that are true, and when one of their conspiracy theories is proven false, if they could just stop repeating their falsehoods, it would be great. they should just focus on the conspiracy theories that are actually true, but always be open to accepting it when one of their conspiracy theories is debunked. and why do we have to call the vice president names? calling someone “dick cheney” is the biggest insult in the world. dick cheney has already earned such a bad reputation, there is no reason to call him anything but the name that has earned such a horrible reputation. like why do people call him darth cheney and a sith lord? are they star wars fans or something? or why do they call him dr. evil and call dubya mini-me? that is all stupid. let us just call him dick cheney and then insult the hell out of him and call him evil and insane and everything else we can think of that we can make stick and become a part of his reputation. that is the solution.