American Thinker, a conservative blog, started promoting the idea that Obama is employing something called the Cloward-Piven Strategy:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

The idea is now taking off like mad in the rightest-wing conservablogosphere:

Deliberate, crippling immigration policy, systemic fraudulent voter registration (such that eight of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote), multi-generational welfare dependency and the culture of entitlement it both stems from and creates and, of course, using the taxpayer to guarantee home purchasing for people who could not afford to purchase houses and here we are today.

Basically, the idea is that for decades now, Obama and his deputies have destroyed America (the economic collapse, immigration, maybe 9/11, probably even Katrina somehow) in order to get elected and turn the nation into the USSR. And it’s got a crazy name like the Cloward-Piven Strategy, so it sounds totally believable. Can we create a new internet law that whenever your elaborate conspiracy theory involves 9/11, you’re just as bad as those people who bring up Hitler in every argument?

In other news, John McCain has a sign generator on his website for all you Joe the Plumbers out there:

especiallymuslins.jpg

45 replies on “Cloward and Piven and Plumbers, Oh My!”

  1. So it wasn’t 28 years of laissez-faire economics, cheered on by Reagan’s ideological army, that dug American capitalism into the hole it’s now currently in. The truth is, it’s all Obama’s fault. It was all an evil conspiracy he brewed up in 1980, when he was 19 years old.

    I’ll buy that for a dollar!

  2. You know, I’ve long had a nagging suspicion that Bush and co. are actually extremist socialists who are committed to this strategy. But this is more because I just can’t believe they’re actually committed to what they’re committed to.

    I didn’t realize my conspiracy theory had a name, though. Maybe I’ll have to start going to conventions or something.

  3. Always accuse your opponent of what you’re doing. I think I’ll call it Banjo’s Law: When one hears the Neo-cons accusing liberals of something nefarious, one’s suspicions that this describes a current neo-con strategy should rise substantially.

    By the way, it’s generally known as “starving the beast” when conservatives employ the described strategy — management by crisis. For instance, the GOP could never find the political will to simply cancel Social Security and raid the funds in that program, but if an enormous budget crisis, say precipitated by decades of unchecked deficits, were to force their hand, why they may have no other choice….

  4. These people are batshit crazy. I mean, honestly. What the hell are these people even talking about? Does this make sense to anyone? ANYONE? Thank god for Eydie Gorme and Maker’s Mark. They help me get through it all.

  5. American media & education is such an echo chamber. Hello?!?!? Every other single 1st world country has adopted Obama’s “impossible demands” and much, much more and they have not collapsed. They even manage to retain their culture of xenophobia and racism. Southeast Asia even manages to have all this, plus *legal* discrimination! What more could a conservative want?!

  6. Giuliani’s Law: As a presidential election grows near, combined with a Democrat leading, the probability of a conspiracy theory involving 9/11 approaches one.

  11. I’ve long had a nagging suspicion that Bush and co. are actually extremist socialists who are committed to this strategy.

    Maybe they’re like Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate, exactly the opposite of what they claim to be.

  14. I love the idea that most of the people using that stupid McCain thing would probably pay lower taxes under Obama’s plan. ZOMG SOCIALIST WELFARE!

  15. And I’ve heard rumored that O’Bama plans to use his donor database to decide who will lead his new comisariat. Think about it. 3.1 million people is just about right for petty comisar positions over most of the country I guess some folks would have to relocate though.
    Anyways, better donate if you want in, at least that’s what I hear.

  16. Oh man, there was a Tom Tomorrow strip back in 2005 or so about just that: Bush, Cheney, and Rove are all hippies sitting around in the 70s, when they all cook up a conspiracy to go “straight” and infiltrate the system so they can bring it down from the inside. Wish I could find it…

  19. Ooo! Sign generators are fun. Let me play!

    I AM bozo
    THE clown

    I AM Levi
    THE guy that spooged your daughter

    I AM Attila
    THE Hun

    I AM voting for
    THE socialist muslim terrorist

    I AM smoking
    THE pole

    I AM locked in
    THE sweat shop

    I AM Michelle Bachmann
    THE reincarnation of Joe McCarthy

    I AM a Log Cabin Republican
    THE delusional

    You can play too!

  20. I love the august handles these wingnuts give themselves …”American Thinker”, indeed!

    I hope they don’t think too much; it might implode their hateful little pea brains.

  22. @3 5 9

    ditto.

    IT’s creeping socialism. First we have govt. organized sewers; then schools; then an army; then transit; then ynemployment insurance; then social security; then “private” hospitals but we make then serve anyone (thius they are actually govt. run!); then banking; pretty soon we will look like the marxist leninist state of Denmark.

    heh heh heh heh heh heh heh

    PS–we also have secretly taken over the NRA for years. Yes, we will USE THEIR MEMBER LIST TO CONFISCATE ALL GUNS.

    Why do you think we created the NRA anyway, huh?

    heh heh heh heh heh heh heh

    Unity & selam–

  23. overload the government with impossible debts? like the iraq war? Like the trillions in annual defense spending on a cold war relic military?

  24. “Blogosphere” is a damn ugly word. “Conservablogosphere” is so ugly it’s funny and almost awkwardly cute, like those pictures of baby chimpanzees people keep e-mailing me. “Obamaeconomics”, on the other hand, what I can only imagine is what these evil anti-Americans what to overthrow capitalism for (cause communism is deader than Reagen and I can’t imagine even conspiracy nuts thinking that’s what they’re going for), that’s a pretty rockin’ word.

  28. flamingbango @3: Always accuse your opponent of what you’re doing. I think I’ll call it Banjo’s Law: When one hears the Neo-cons accusing liberals of something nefarious, one’s suspicions that this describes a current neo-con strategy should rise substantially.

    flaming, reading this post I kept thinking, “This is exactly what the right has been accused of.” Never mind “starve the beast,” this alleged use of a crisis to further political ends is the whole premise of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

  29. Everything is connected in these turbulent times.
    On the back of the US one dollar bill, it reads: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. That is Latin for NEW WORLD ORDER.

    ‘Nuff said.

  32. #3 got to it first, but still…

    Grover Norquist publicly states again and again his goal to “shrink government to the size where I can drown in a bathtub.”

    Needless to say, Grover’s place is THE networking site for the right wing.

  37. When you are free of cognitive reasoning the way the right wing is.And when you are self deluded the way the right wing is. And when religious superstition and fear are your motivation, it doesn’t matter what the truth is. The truth is irrelevant. What matters is blaming the opposition for anything and everything when you are failing. They never take any responsibility because they are never wrong.

  38. Yeah, those liberals just don’t cotton to government as we see it today… or… if we were to apply occam’s razor to nutty conspiracy theories, wouldn’t it be right wingers and libertarians who would be the ones plotting to erode our infrastructure?

  40. That’s what fiscal conservatives thought Reagan was doing in the 80s- running up the debt so high that the welfare state would implode. The smart ones have learned that the only thing worse than a “tax and spend liberal” is a “spend and spend and then spend a little more right wing nutcase.”

  42. Damn, Paul, you’re really obsessed with 9/11 theorists, huh? You can barely go a post without bringing them up, even when the story you’re referring to isn’t about them. You seem to feel very strongly that people who question the 9/11 commission should the object of ridicule and scorn. Because apparently if you question the administration’s story on only this particular issue it makes you equivalent to the “rightest-wing”. Do I have that right?

  45. I think somebody is manually checking these for earnestness, because my
    I am terrified of
    the brown-skinned people
    sign never came through via e-mail. On the other hand, I’m now on John McCain’s mailing list.

    I thought that taking public funding meant that John McCain couldn’t fundraise, but he was def begging me for money. Is it that he can only fundraise up to a certain dollar amount, or something? If that’s the case, how is it not embarrassing that he hasn’t hit that limit yet? What’s the deal?

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