Paul Craig Roberts: Formerly Reputable Conservative Goes Around the Bend

From Frontpage:

Quick – what columnist alleged in an article Thursday that President “Bush intends to attack Iran and that he will use every means to bring war about?” That Bush has used “bribery and coercion” to block “every effort to bring the dispute to a peaceful end”? That “in order to gain a pretext for attacking Iran,” he and a “‘black opts’ [sic] group will orchestrate [an] attack” on U.S. soil?

One would never expect to hear the author is “chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury” under Ronald Reagan. That progressively unhinged man is nationally syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts.

In a delusional column entitled “Iranophobia,” posted yesterday’s on LewRockwell.com, Roberts related “[o]ne of the more extraordinary suggestions” he had heard of how President Bush will develop this “pretext” to nuke Tehran:

a low yield, perhaps tactical, nuclear weapon will be exploded some distance out from a U.S. port. Death and destruction will be minimized, but fear and hysteria will be maximized. Americans will be told that the ship bearing the weapon was discovered and intercepted just in time, thanks to Bush’s illegal spying program, and that Iran is to blame. A more powerful wave of fear and outrage will again bind the American people to Bush, and the U.S. media will not report the rest of the world’s doubts of the explanation.

He concluded:

Reads like a Michael Crichton plot, doesn’t it?

Fantasy? Let’s hope so.

Even on the far-Left, such theories would be unwelcome. Although Kurt Nimmo (a critic of DiscoverTheNetworks.org) and others have claimed for years that Bush secretly plans to pre-emptively decimate Iran, none have publicly claimed he would kill Americans as a pretext. The only detail Roberts omitted was whether Bush was doing the bidding of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the British royal family, or the Vatican.

Not only is this irresponsible slander, it’s not even a new conspiracy theory. Last August, an internet rumor campaign claimed the Bush administration would set off a nuclear device in the port of Charleston, SC, during a military exercise, and use the backlash as to attack Iran. One of its promulgators was Webster Griffin Tarpley, who wrote an “unauthorized biography” of George H.W. Bush with Lyndon LaRouche’s house historian, Anton Chaitkin.

What does one say about somebody like Roberts? Perhaps only that people who once seemed sane enough sometimes turn absolutely wacko.

[Update]

Peter DiGaudio, the Texas Hold ‘Em blogger, has noticed Robert’s slide into Moon Battery also.