This might be the singularity we’ve all been waiting for. Infowars, the site that’s brought you such stories as “Mainstream Journalists Expose 9/11 Hoax” and “Syria’s ‘Chemical Weapons’ Turn Out to Be Sodium Flouride,” is out with a report on the “nut-job Obama supporters” who think a “right-wing conspiracy” is behind heathcare.gov’s failures.
“Many Obama supporters have taken to social media,” reports David Barton, “to float the notion that the Koch brothers, Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire industrialists, are funding an army of techies and hackers to somehow infiltrate and take down the Healthcare.gov website.”
What follows is a list of random people on Twitter. The most high-profile person I’ve seen forwarding the theory is the mayor of Elizabeth, N.J.
Is it possible the Repub party is robot calling the affordable healthcare computers and phone lines in order to tie it up so results dismal — Chris Bollwage (@MayorBollwage) October 19, 2013
Twitchy, which lives for this sort of thing, has its own list; the amount of overlap between the two aggregations suggests that the universe of people sharing the opinion is pretty small. Occam’s razor: An Obama administration that’s now scrambling for any reason to explain why the site’s not reactive enough would not cover it up if somebody seemed to be DDoS’ing it. Actually, when asked whether a DDoS was possible, a Health and Human Services spokesman said this had already been looked into and dismissed.
But the first whiff of conspiracy theorizing has a way of seeping out. The tone of Susan Ferrechio’s item on Nancy Pelosi’s Obamacare worries makes Pelosi sound downright crazy.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi believes the new health care law should move forward without delay and said that “sabotage” by Republicans, and not just computer glitches, is hindering implementation.
Pelosi said the offices of some Republican lawmakers “are not giving information to constituents for how they can avail themselves” of the new program. Republicans are withholding the information, Pelosi said, “to undermine the Affordable Care Act.”
This is a real thing that’s happened.
