Just because you're paranoid......

Tom McGurk has been sitting in for Pat Kenny since the start of July. He finds it hard to refrain from leaping to blame George Bush for any of the world’s ills.

On Monday last he interviewed Greg Palast about his new book “Armed Madhouse” which might just refer to the White House.

Palast explained that he had previously promoted the claim that the war on Iraq was conducted by George Bush at the behest of “Big Oil” so that they could get control of the very substantial oil reserves in that country. Now he’s come up with a new theory - that the invasion was indeed at the behest of “Big Oil” but that the objective was to turn off the supply of oil from Iraq. And the conclusive proof - just look at how high the price of oil has become, making existing reserves in other countries significantly more valuable than they were prior to the war.

As “the sage of Illinois” Donald Rumsfeld has famously explained “there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” - but not in the mind of your average conspiracy theorist. When one theory becomes a busted flush, they simply come up with a new conspiracy theory to fit the new circumstances. They rarely, if ever, acknowledge their abandoned conspiracy as they steam ahead with the new, improved version.

For a conspiracy theorist “unknowns” simply do not exist. They can tell you the objectives and thought processes of those they oppose, for whom no action or objective is too base to merit attribution with confidence. Their enemies are either fools or crooks but probably both.

Naturally, McGurk was in his element as he agreed with every anti-Bush assessment offered by the author.

A couple of days later Niall O’Dowd, editor of the Irish Voice and an influential intermediary for the Irish lobby with Capitol Hill, was on the programme discussing the status of the conflicting legislation for illegals that are being proposed by the Senate and Congress. McGurk immediately dived in with the comment “and of course, under the Bush administration everything has changed for the Irish lobby”. O’Dowd pointed out to him that Bush was actually on the side of the illegals and praised his liberal approach on this topic when he was Governor of Texas.

Which exchange prompted the following email from me to Tom (at tom@rte.ie if you want to communicate with him):

Tom,
I laughed when Niall O'Dowd rebutted your automatic assumption that George Bush is the problem for the Irish illegals.
You really will have to change that "great satan" record - the needle is stuck and you're becoming a bore.
Regards etc.