As humans, it is generally our tendency to blame other people when we make mistakes.
If we get a bad grade on a test, we blame the friend that called us at 11 p.m. and talked until 2 in the morning to keep us from studying. If a relationship goes sour, we blame the other person for being too clingy. And the list goes on.
However, it seems that in politics, the blame game is played far too often, with increasingly ridiculous results. Conspiracy theories, once limited to "there was more than one gunman on November 22, 1963" have grown as prevalent in Washington as congressmen missing votes.
The latest example can be seen in the Dan Rather fake memos case. Of course, we all know that someone (it is unknown who exactly) gave these memos to CBS, and we all know that CBS was told before they ran the story that it was probably a hoax. Now however, we have Democratic congressman Maurice Hinchey claiming that President Bush's "brain," Karl Rove, set up CBS with these memos to gain an edge in the 2004 election. Rather than admit that someone in the Democratic Party got a little carried away with trying to win the election, Hinchey would rather blame Karl Rove. After all, Rove takes the blame for just about everything that goes wrong in this country anyway. Anything, that is, that is not blamed on President Bush himself.
But wait, that's not all. Web columnist Carol Rawle recently wrote that John Kerry may have thrown the 2004 election in exchange to get a "real shot" to be president in 2008. This makes no sense at all, considering how passionately many Democrats despise the president. Why would they permit him another four years in office on purpose? It may seem tempting to say Kerry threw the election, considering how pitiful a campaign he ran, but I'm more inclined to believe that the senator just completely screwed up every time he had a chance to gain leverage in the campaign.
Democrats, however, have nothing close to a monopoly on wacky conspiracy theories. The Vince Foster theory has always been one that the right has pointed to. During the Clinton administration, Foster, who was deputy White House counsel early in Clinton's first term, killed himself in a Washington, D.C. park, apparently due to a scandal that was referred to as "Travelgate." However, many on the right still claim that Foster was killed and his body was planted there, with evidence that is very unlikely to be defensible.
And of course, there's always the "it's Hillary's fault" group that blames Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee for president in 2008, for everything from the Foster death to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, with little or no evidence to support such an outlandish theory. These people are gleefully referred to as "nut cases" by members of the opposite party.
Be you a Democrat, a Republican or even some other affiliation, don't look for a wacky theory blaming another party for your problems. Sometimes, we all need to accept the fact that our parties are not perfect and will make stupid mistakes from time to time. Members of the party simply need to keep supporting their groups and hope that things will get better.
Otherwise, it's someone else's fault!
Write to Andy at ndistops@hotmail.com
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