For those who always suspected that liberals are conspiracy-minded paranoiacs, proof is now available in the New York Times. A recent front-page news story details their fear of conservatives and of the democratic process, and also show-cases the guilt-by-association tactic by which liberals intend to battle their imagined enemies.
This article starts off by bemoaning the defeat of the Conference of the States (COS), a project organized by the Council of State Governments. The idea was to get 50 State legislatures to pass resolutions sending delegates to a conference in Philadelphia this fall.
But only 14 states signed on, and its organizers had to abandon plans for a conference this year. Now the move is on to blame somebody for the embarrassing defeat of a plan espoused by the prestigious National Governors’ Association and National Conference of State Legislatures.
Licking their wounds, the COS organizers have made common cause with the paranoid liberals and invented a bogeyman to blame: a conspiracy of all those who believe in any conspiracy! That’s right! They blame the defeat of COS on a conspiracy of all the disparate groups who believe in any conspiracy about any subject!
The alleged conspirators include those who are concerned about the Federal Government’s concentration of power at the expense of the states, those who are concerned about the loss of U.S. sovereignty to the World Trade Organization and United Nations “peacekeeping” missions, those who question the official reports of Waco, Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma City, alleged right-wing extremists, and citizen militias.
The supposed conspiracy also includes everyone who wonders what George Bush meant when he declared he was taking the United States into a “New World Order,” as well as people who study the writings of the late professor Carroll Quigley, whom Bill Clinton identified as his mentor. Dr. Quigley’s 1338-page book, Tragedy and Hope, expounds the thesis that a small “network” of elite movers and shakers, operating outside the political process, control U.S. government policy in many key areas.
The idea that all those people could join in a conspiracy is so bizarre that it boggles the mind that the New York Times could take it seriously. In a masterpiece of convoluted logic, the Times gives credence to this incredible conspiracy theory, while at the same time ridiculing all others who believe that any conspiracies exist.
Contrary to assertions by COS Chairman and Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, COS was not defeated by people who talk about “global conspiracies” or an “interna tional plot.” It was defeated by COS’s own literature, in which its organizers talked
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about “basic, structural change” in our form of government, about a radically different amendment process, and about transmuting COS into a new Constitutional Conven tion.
The American people don’t want politicians messing around with our Constitu tion. That’s why the movement to reassert the vitality of the Tenth Amendment (which the Times pooh-poohs) is sailing briskly through the same state legislatures where COS ran aground.
The New York Times article also reports that COS supporters are angry be cause their opponents got on the Internet, gave out the names of state legislators, and then cranked up their fax machines. But what’s wrong with that?
Anyone wh. o believes in self government should be cheering the way modem technology makes it easier for constituents to identify their representatives and com municate with them. Isn’t that what democracy is all about?
It looks like some people yearn for the days when ordinary Americans couldn’t find out who their legislators were or how they voted. The Times and the people it quotes so admiringly complain about the current “deep suspicion of the Federal Gov ernment,” but they manifest their own deep suspicion and fear of “the power of com munication through the computer networks.”
Indeed, there is a powerful states-rights movement in America today. At the state level, it is manifesting itself in the success of the Tenth Amendment resolutions and in the astonishing rejection of federal Goals 2000 funds by several state legisla tures.
At the Congressional level, it is manifesting itself in the various proposals to block-grant federal funds back to the states. At the judicial level, we see it in the remarkable opinions written this year by Justice Clarence Thomas in the Lopez and the Term Limits cases.
Large numbers of Americans now believe that the Federal Government must be cut down to size. They believe that coverup is the operative word in regard to Waco, Ruby Ridge, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Task Force, the exporting of U.S. jobs overseas, and the Mexican bailout.
The people who are concerned about these things are not part of a conspiracy.
They are exercising their rights as Americans to participate in the process of self government, and it is fortunate that modern technology makes this participation faster and more efficient.
