Running on Hearsay

In a campaign soon to be measured in weeks, this promises to be a very good week for Democrats. On Sunday, former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke took to the airwaves to accuse the Bush team of ignoring the issue of terrorism for eight months "when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11"—leaving unsaid exactly what the Clinton team, of which Mr. Clarke was also a member, was doing for the previous eight years. Today, too, a parade of former Clinton administration officials will appear before Congress, presumably to make the same case. By the end of the week, John Kerry will surely be echoing their claims, with a conspiratorial twist.

Howard Dean's "interesting theory" that President Bush could have averted the 9/11 attacks has generated a catalogue of equally interesting theories—not merely on the Internet, or from the likes of Tim Robbins and Paul Krugman, but on the 2004 campaign trail. The theorists run the gamut from the obscure and insane—Rep. Jim McDermott (D., Wash.), for instance, who claims Saddam Hussein's capture was deliberately timed for political reasons—to the mainstream and inane, the clearest example being Madeleine Albright, who asked Roll Call's Mort Kondracke, "Do you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?" (The same Ms. Albright will be the star panelist at this week's hearings.)

Al Gore, too, has descended into the swamp, suggesting the Iraq war was devised to "benefit friends and supporters" of the administration, which has engaged itself in "a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology." For his part, Mr. Kerry's chief booster, Sen. Ted Kennedy, wonders whether the administration went to war "to change the subject from its failed economic policy, the corporate scandals and its failed efforts to capture Osama bin Laden?" To buttress his contention that the war was "made up in Texas" and "the whole thing was a fraud," Sen. Kennedy cites the claims of retired Air Force officer Karen Kwiatkowski, who, since leaving the Defense Department, has made a name for herself on the black-helicopter circuit by revealing the "Zionist political cult that has lassoed the [Pentagon's] E-Ring."

In fairness, during the past three presidential election cycles, theories such as these were mostly the property of the far-right. But one never heard candidates for the nation's highest office musing about, say, the airport in Mena, Arkansas. Today, by contrast, the presumptive Democratic nominee has enshrined conspiratorial logic at the heart of his stump speech. Hence, just as John Kerry says he heard from "a friend of mine who was in Paris the other day" that France really does intend to further America's cause in Iraq, and just as he heard that he has a lock on the votes of foreign leaders, the candidate has also "heard" a series of much more bizarre conjectures.

Heard, mind you, not verified. He has "heard stories" that the Bush team engineered the Haitian coup that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, including from "a very close friend in Massachusetts who talked directly to people who have made that allegation." In a similar vein, he has heard "from friends in the British government that the deal [for Libya to abandon its weapons of mass destruction] was in a slow lock," suggesting in an interview with the Daily News that "Bush sat on December's deal to have Gadhafi renounce weapons programs to get a political boost."

As for what Mr. Kerry actually says, he pledges in a television ad that "no child growing up in America today should ever have to go to war for oil," the implication being that America has just done exactly this. Indeed, according to Mr. Kerry, the Bush team's unilateral decision-making in Iraq "says to the world, 'Our occupation of Iraq is about Halliburton and business and the president's friends.'"

Never mind that hearing is not knowing—particularly when it comes to Mr. Kerry's theories about Haiti and Libya, which, to judge by detailed reporting in the press, he has spun out of whole cloth. Never mind, too, that by his own account he voted in favor of a war for oil and the president's friends. Consider, rather, his argument in 2002 that "the record of Saddam Hussein's ruthless, reckless breach of international values and standards of behavior . . . is cause enough for the world community to hold him accountable by use of force," which offered the true and obvious rationale for war.

In all likelihood, then, political expediency, not paranoia, explains the candidate's change of heart. According to polls, after all, Mr. Kerry's Democratic base views the Bush team roughly the way its critics viewed the Illuminati. A worldly Yale-educated senator, moreover, does not typically succumb to conspiracy theories with the same alacrity as someone who believes the Founding Fathers came from Mars. Alas, in sheer political terms, such theories have their uses.

In civic terms, they do not. One could argue, as many do, that the Democratic Party's embrace of the paranoid style in American politics amounts to evidence of vigorous populist dissent—all the more so because the Bush team is a rather secretive bunch whose members rarely concede fault and too often convey something less than candor. But at this particular historical moment, when the U.S. itself has become the object of murderous conspiracy theories, a line of argument that rejects critical thinking, exploits paranoia at the expense of reason and ignores the contingency of events in search of plots the powerful few implement at the expense of the powerless many—this is not simply the everyday pollution of political discourse. It is the nullification of political discourse. If it is true that the sleep of reason breeds monsters, then we may awaken in November to a nasty surprise indeed.