What is it about people and their conspiracy theories? I had a little fun this morning on an Internet bulletin board twitting a guy who thinks that George W. Bush and John Kerry are conspiring together to create a New World Order because they are both alumni of the Skull and Bones society at Yale University. I always thought Skull and Bones was a campus fraternity, meaning that members drink themselves silly and work harder at getting laid than at taking control of the world. My understanding of the conspiracy world is that Skull and Bones is part of a larger conspiracy started by Cecil Rhodes and involving Oxford, the U.N., the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, and numerous investment banks. It has to do with placing everybody under the control of one world government. Looking at the world as it is right now, I'd say that this conspiracy, if it exists, is a pretty dismal failure. Nationalism, Islamo-fascism, tribalism, and other nasty -isms are running rampant, despite the work of these dastardly conspirators.

Then there are the left-wing conspiracy theories, most prominently those portrayed by Oliver Stone and Michael Moore. I laughed myself silly throughout the movie "JFK," which posited that Lyndon Johnson, a bunch of evil Texans, and the military-industrial complex conspired with anti-Castro Cubans to murder a president who was going to withdraw American troops from Vietnam. Now I suppose it's a bunch of evil Texans conspiring with Halliburton and the Saudi Royal Family. Whatever. Hey, I'm a native Texan, so you shouldn't take my word for this or anything else.

I suspect that a great many people cannot understand or accept the complexities of political reality, so they come up with elaborate conspiracy theories to explain everything. One of my far-right relatives told me that she believes that everything in politics is conspiratorial. I, of course, think that she's totally insane.

What do y'all think of political conspiracy theories?