CONSPIRACIES SO VAST

Well, I thoroughly enjoyed the column Gail Collins wrote in response to the big kerfuffle of the week, "General McChrystal's Twitters." Brilliant opening:

DAY 1

In Paris with my Kabul posse -- Bluto, Otter, Boon, Pinto, Flounder. Plus some newbie. Guys call him Scribbles.

And it gets better from there. But do you know what's even funnier than the Collins column? No, not the harrumphy response by Jammie Wearing Fool, who essentially says the column is stupid because, well, it just is. No, what's even funnier is the response by JWF commenter Meredith:

For those who are just passerby news/opinion consumers it looks like he actually tweeted those. She has no disclaimer. It is extremely misleading - and that's her point and the NYT's point.

Yes, that's right -- the whole point of the column by Gail Collins, which is headlined "Opinion" and "Op-Ed Columnist" and is written by someone with a reputation for snark, is to persuade you that McChrystal actually wrote these tweets. What nefarious subterfuge with The New York Crimes think of next!

Oh, but there's more: if you click on Meredith's name, you find you can visit her on Twitter. One of her nineteen tweets today (so far) is this forward:

RT @LJZumpano: RT @PatriciaSmiley: Was McChrystal set-up to be smeared? http://bit.ly/bp5mW1

Which takes us to the blog of the D-list wingnut site the American Thinker, and ultimately into the diseased mind of Mr. Whitey Tape himself:

...This leads us to conjecture about the hidden agenda of the mainstream press and Rolling Stone Magazine. The way the mainstream media spun the remarks of McChrystal's team has some in the blogosphere speculating that the Left set out to smear the general and cause him to lose his job.

Details are scant about who said what to whom, and how the magazine got access to the highest command unit in Afghanistan. Here's a post from Larry Johnson's blog, No Quarter:

This was a set up of General McChrystal. While I'm not a personal friend, I worked under his command for several years and know that he frowned on sharing anything with the media. In fact, I'm certain he did not invite the Rolling Stone reporter into his lair.

[snip]

Here's what I think happened. Rolling Stone asked someone at the White House or DOD for permission to do a piece on the counter insurgency progress in Afghanistan. McChrystal was told to let the reporter accompany them. He thought that the piece being done was on the counter insurgency. Boy, was he wrong.

Yup, and he and his entourage were forced to make disparaging remarks about everyone they work with in the U.S. government! B. Hussein Osama ordered them to do that so McChrystal could be fired for it! There's no end to his sinister wickedness!

(No, actually Larry J says about counterinsurgency guys: "They talk alot of shit when they are among friends. Some of it is rude. Much of it is blue.... More importantly, they make jokes about political figures and leaders. But it is supposed to be kept in-house." So the Kenyan usurper apparently ordered McChrystal to allow all that trash talk to be put on the record. Because he hates America, that's why.)

And while we're on this subject, can we please stop asking ourselves why on earth McChrystal would allow in a reporter from -- gasp! -- Rolling Stone? That hippie peacenik rag? Um, didn't that hippie peacenik rag employ P.J. O'Rourke for many, many years? And doesn't the military regularly run recruitment ads in RS and other rock magazines? Which makes sense, because when the troops in our recent wars have wanted to get pumped up for battle, what were they listening to? Some mixtape downloaded from a Brooklyn-based MP3 blog? No -- they've listened to precisely the kind of corporate rock Rolling Stone champions. You know -- "Bodies" by the Drowning Pool, for instance, which practically became the anthem of the Iraq War.

And in what world is it bizarre that generals do press? In anticipation of his September 2007 appearance before Congress, General Petraeus gave interviews to Fox News, CBS, ABC (twice), NPR, CNN, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, the BBC, The Times of London, Hugh Hewitt, Alan Colmes, and WBZ in Boston (links here) If Rolling Stone had asked him, he probably would have said yes to that interview, too. And he probably would have known better than to say anything stupid.