Scheer and There, May 30

Bill Herbert, one of the champion fact-check-the-ass-ers on the Internet, finds more than a few factpimples on Scheer's soiled rear end. Example:

And on the question of whether the Pentagon did "nothing" to challenge the erroneous leaked report, here's paragraph four of Vernon Loeb and Susan Schmidt's story [Washington Post, April 4, recounted here]:

Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be assessed. Pentagon officials said they had heard "rumors" of Lynch's heroics but had no confirmation.

Lona Manning e-mails:

Scheer is actually paying the Pentagon a compliment. He believes that the "leaks" about Lynch must have been orchestrated and deliberately planned with the intent to mislead, which argues a higher degree of precision than the alternate explanation -- that the some individual officials blundered and passed along unverified information.

Good old Occam's Razor, destroyer of lunatic conspiracy theories everywhere.

But speaking of silly conspiracy theories. I got a good chuckle out of Roger Simon's satirical suggestion that Scheer is a Republican plant to discredit the Left. But after contemplating it some more, I think Simon might be on to something. Specifically, I speculate that Scheer is a card-carrying CIA cointelpro operative. Let's review the facts:

* Scheer has never been imprisoned, tortured or killed by the government (at least his own biography doesn't brag about any such accomplishments) in spite of his courageous provocations against the fascist American police state. How could this be?

* Scheer has been close to many other dangerous dissidents over the years, from Huey Newton to Barbra Streisand. Wouldn't the CIA want to keep tabs on all of them, and doesn't Scheer have the ideal public persona for insinuating himself with such people?

* He has been writing for the L.A. Times for three decades, yet nobody can figure out how he's gotten away with it. David Horowitz has reported that he was told Scheer was "annointed" or "protected". But Horowitz never found out who was protecting Scheer. Who else could have an interest in doing so?

* The L.A. Times is in Southern California, home to numerous defense and aerospace companies, all of whom have a vested interest in discrediting the leftist opposition to the military industrial complex.

* Scheer's biography brags that he has interviewed every president from Nixon to Clinton. Recall that there were four Republicans during that period, including former CIA director George H.W. Bush.

* Scheer was the interviewer who induced then presidential candidate Jimmy Carter to confess on the pages of Playboy "I've committed adultery in my heart many times". Could Scheer's interview have been a deliberate attempt to discredit Carter?

* Scheer is a senior lecturer at the Annenberg School of Communication. The school was founded with a grant from Walter Annenberg, a one-time member of President Reagan's "kitchen cabinet".

* Scheer owns a yacht and is often seen dining in fancy restaurants. How could a communist afford to live so well?

* Most revealing, Scheer's writing is so bleeding-brained goofy that it can only be persuasive to those who are already beyond help. Why would anybody write such stuff unless it was orchestrated from above, as part of a project to Manufacture Dissent, so to speak, in order to distract the potentially dangerous rebels while still providing an illusion of dissent? At the same time, Scheer's (fabricated) madness would serve to discredit the entire dissenting movement in the eyes of all of those potentially free-thinkers who listen to talk radio and read blogs, thus turning the latter into manageable drones for the service of the ruling class.

Here at the Shark Blog we report, you decide, but I challenge anybody to prove my findings wrong. And if I ever should be killed under mysterious circumstances, you already know why.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 30, 2003 08:03 AM