[Bumped, because Ace has updated with more jaw-dropping blame-the-Jews crazy from Sullivan. - Moe Lane] [And still more, including a guide for the perplexed*.]

No, really.  Just ask Andrew Sullivan (see also The Weekly Standard and Legal Insurrection).

This is the curse of every person who enjoys conspiracy theories (as opposed to believing in them). You’ll be going on, enjoying the creativity that results when people impose pattern-recognition on patternless situations; watching the steadily-more baroque reasoning used, Ptolemaic-like, to justify a marvelous theory; and grooving to the excellent nonsense, and then – WHAMM! The person you’re reading brings up the Jews. And then you realize that the author has reached the tertiary stage of conspiracy thinking**, and is now useless to you as an intellectual diversion.

It doesn’t always happen, thank God, but it happens too often.

Moe Lane

[*See what I did there, Andrew? I made a reference to something Jewish. That's because I'm a neocon, and thus obligated to honor my Zionist masters. I'm pointing it out because... it's a fiendishly clever plot! But you know better; oh, yes, you can see right through all those tricksy and sly Jewish schemes.]

**The stages go like this:

• Stage One: Well, that’s odd. A tentative foray into what may be in fact not conspiracy thinking, but merely heretical scholarship. Many respectable scholars flirt with this stage, and some seem to delight in flaunting their embrace of it; their more staid colleagues are usually indulgent.
• Stage Two: Embracing the Crazy. This is full-bore crank territory, and is typically accompanied by more enthusiasm than rationality. Sufferers are usually disliked for it inside their field, but are often not particularly discriminated against outside of it.
• Stage Three: It’s all because of the Jews. Irreversible. Incurable. At absolute best, rather sad.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.