If I had a nickel for everyone I’ve talked to who thought Barack Obama was a Muslim, I’d probably have enough nickels to make a roll. Then I’d put that roll into a sock and gleefully beat the fools who spread lies like this to support their own political agenda. And that’s just one piece of nonsense propaganda thrown on my plate this week.

Usually when I write these little opinionated nuggets, I spend many hours peeling through magazines, newspapers, and blogs trying to get my facts straight. But in this era of “modern journalism,” I have to wade through a plethora of online conspiracy nonsense to find the core of rationality. You name the conspiracy and there’ll be blogs, badly edited documentaries, and in-depth discussion about it. I don’t understand the mindset that takes something very banal and obvious then transforms it into some grand maniacal scheme. And I don’t understand the mentality that takes that morsel of paranoia, turns it into a spamming e-mail, or a bad documentary, and then pushes that theory like some paranoid Jehovah’s Witness.

I’m not an idiot. I don’t believe that the government is behind the attacks on 9/11. I don’t believe the Freemasons, Illuminati, or the Skull and Bones group have some master plan to create chaos and take over the country. And I don’t believe in some vast conspiracy to create a one-world government, which I’m not even sure is such a bad idea. If we can’t manage what’s happening in Iraq, how is one government going to run the entire world?

If the people who believe this crap are waiting in anticipation for a really bad leader who doles out fear in order to gain political ground, then feel free to read about the guy who currently lives in the White House. There’s your bogeyman. Except that’s far too obvious and rational. All the governmental indiscretions you could ever need are broadcast on C-Span and written in bold letters in The New York Times. But who wants to keep up with boring bills going through the House and Senate when there are conspiracy theories that give an obvious evil, and make politics black and white.

I make no distinction between liberal or conservative propagandist.

Bill O’Reilly and those nuts that are sending out e-mails to boycott The Golden Compass (because it will apparently make kids hate God) are no different than Alex Jones and his Prison Planet website. They all work in the same realm?spreading fear. The question is, what you do when you have the fear? Even if everything these people are saying is true, what do you do?

If George Bush is part of some evil group whose agenda is to destroy Earth, and if liberals are trying to destroy Christmas as O’Reilly believes, then what?

It’s a rhetorical question because the answer is: not much. People will continue sending me crazy e-mails, writing conspiracy books, and making bad documentaries, but nobody is going to storm the castle because that would end their way of life. That’s the entire purpose of conspiracy theory culture, to sell an identity to the paranoid and willing.