I finally got around to reading Michael Kinsley's feeble attempt to dismiss the Downing Street Memo as a conspiracy theory pushed by the loony left -- i.e. by liberals who aren't domesticated enough to be proper corporate lap dogs. Not a charge anyone is likely to make against Kinsley.
At this late date I won't bother repeating or deflating Kinsley's points, except to note the complete contradiction between this passage:
Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence.
And this one:
You don't need a secret memo to know [the intelligence was being fixed.] Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before.
As I mentioned earlier, the latter argument is one the rest of the media poodles have been barking for weeks: "It was old news." "Everybody knew about it at the time." "We were having trouble with our flea collars."
Or, if you're the Associated Press: "We just never got around to it."
However, according to Kinsley, what everybody knew three years ago is a paranoid theory now, albeit one promoted to "the very edge of national respectability."
You have to admit: He's got us coming and going. By insisting that the media cover the story of Bush's illegal rush to aggressive war, we've demonstrated we're just a bunch of unreasonable extremists peddling a paranoid conspiracy theory -- one that "everybody" already knows is true.
How can you argue with logic like that?