Nuts and Dolts

(NYTBR) Paranoia is a bipartisan temptation. Amid last August’s town hall frenzy, there was a stir over a poll showing that roughly a third of Republicans believed that Barack Obama had been born outside the United States. Liberals trumpeted the finding as proof of the Republican base’s slide into madness. But conservatives had a rebuttal: As recently as 2007, they pointed out, polls showed that a third of Democrats believed George W. Bush knew about 9/11 in advance.
Neither statistic would come as a surprise to a reader of “Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History,” a sweeping tour of the paranoid style in Western politics by David Aaronovitch, a British journalist. Continued