SOCIOLOGISTS OF THE BLOGOSPHERE TAKE NOTE: Ron Rosenbaum describes his treatment of Gore Vidal’s latest conspiracy screed as a “combination of fisking and misting.” This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first Legacy Media use of the term “misting,” though I agree with Charles Johnson that it doesn’t really apply: “You can’t have a MiSTing without robots. Everybody knows that. And Rosenbaum’s essay, excellent as it may be, contains no robots whatsoever.”

Yep. It’s still worth reading, though. And despite a distressing absence of robots, there are multiple references to Richard Nixon’s penis, something you don’t see every day. The references, that is. Well, or the penis. And thank goodness on both counts, actually. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

In any case, much subsequent Vidal verbiage follows designed to prove the Sherlockian discovery that this is all “The Case of the Afghan Pipeline,” that the “Bush junta” countenanced or caused the murder of thousands of Americans in the hopes of provoking a war to expedite an oil pipeline that might increase the profit margins of their oil companies. Standard boilerplate Left conspiracy theory.

But then our essayist assumes a disingenuous passive voice and takes one passive-aggressive step beyond all that, into Protocols territory. That step can be found in this sentence: “Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan …. ”

It’s really the first three words that give the game away: “Osama was chosen …. ” Poor Osama isn’t even given any credit for “agency,” as the postmodernists say. Couldn’t think it up by himself. He “was chosen”—implicitly by his white masters in the West, the “Bush junta”—to commit the mass murder of Americans (although remember: “we still don’t know” who did it).

Osama was chosen. Not a word about fundamentalist Islam’s hatred of America, of Jews, of the West. No, it was the West—we did it to ourselves. Well, the Bush cabal did it in our name. Is comparing Mr. Vidal’s screed to The Protocols extreme? Not as extreme as Vidal comparing George W. Bush to Hitler.