Poisoned Spies and Conspiracy Theories

Now mostly out of the headlines but occasionally poking its head up for air, the ongoing saga of the former KGB operative offed by a radioactive substance continues to titillate conspiracy connoisseurs.

It's the greatest undercover caper since the Twin Towers were secretly booby trapped by government boobies and imploded in league with Islamo-zealot suicide pilots, and reportedly has Kennedy Assassination Plot investigators crawling out from behind their grassy knolls with wild-eyed theories of magic polonium bullets.

A quick recap for folks who couldn't pull themselves away from The Young and the Pantsless: former Russian KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, dying from polonium 210 poisoning in a London hospital, fingered his archrival former KGB spy and current Russian Czarcrat Vladimir Putin for ordering his execution, to which Putin replied with his own finger.

Conspiracy theorists quickly seized upon the polonium angle, a radioactive isotope commonly known to nuclear physicists but not commonly known to conspiracy enthusiasts, thereby making them immediately suspicious of a cover-up. Kryptonite, as everyone knows, comes from the planet Krypton, and plutonium, as every conspiracy aficionado knows, originated on the planet Pluto, which, after astronomers demoted that planet to a "planet-like body" was seen as an attempted cover-up engineered by plutocrats.

Dedicated Jimmy Hoffa conspiracy buffs claim that polonium was not, as the cover-up would have us believe, discovered just sitting there on the periodic table where anyone could have found it, by two Frenchies named Pierre and Marie Curie. They claim polonium was dug up by Alberghetti "Big Al" Polono while burying the former union leader in the end zone of Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, and named the stuff after himself.

To date, no one has been foolhardy enough to dispute his claim.

At this writing, the investigation into the polonium poisoning plot has widened to include England, Russia, Germany and Italy, and may yet stretch its tentacles into Spotsylvania to ensnare the likes of Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. Scotland Yard is reportedly sifting through the de Vinci code for more clues.

While many ridicule conspiracy theories, people worldwide have good reason to eagerly embrace both conspiracy theories and cover-ups. Two good reasons, in fact.

The first reason is that conspiracies happen. Like the multi-member plot to perforate original Czarcrat Julius Caesar to death on the steps of the Roman Senate, at which time, according to Shakespeare, he uttered the famous phrase "et tu, Brute" and not "étouffée," the latter being a word closely associated with the "planet-like body" of Cajun Chef Paul Prudhomme.

Shakespeare himself is the subject of conspiracy and cover-up as egghead English academics argue interminably that Shakespeare never wrote Shakespeare but is a covert cognomen for, well, somebody.

Abe Lincoln's assassination was a plot in which John Wilkes Booth and several others were supposed to simultaneously dispatch the president, vice president and Secretary of State, thereby creating chaos in the Union government when Lancelot Flaccid, a gay congressional page, succeeded to the presidency.

In the case of "the Great Emancipator," who emancipated no one, the cover-up came from government anointed historians who created the "Honest Abe" myth that was fed to generations of innocent school children and otherwise conspired to paint him as a saint. As most libertarians now know, Lincoln was a tyrant, and America's first true Czarcrat, who illegally suspended habeas corpus, illegally imprisoned his political foes, illegally occupied sovereign states by sending in troops, illegally ordered the arrest of his supreme court chief justice, illegally invaded southern states that had every right to secede, among fourscore and seven other illegalities. Now there's a conspiracy for you!

A second reason to believe conspiracy theories is offered by libertarians who point out simply that politicians lie. It's their job. It's what they do. It's their own fault the world sees them as crooks and cover-up cons.

Eisenhower lied (for our own good, as is inevitably asserted) about U2 spy planes flying over Russia.

Lyndon Johnson and his cronies conspired to invent the Gulf of Tonkin attack on American warships as a pretext for escalating the Vietnam War and kept the ruse under wraps for years.

Richard Nixon learned about the plot by his hirelings to burgle the Democrat's digs in the Watergate office building and then conspired to cover it up.

Thanks to the Watergate scandal, every hint of conspiracy since then requires the word "gate" to be idiotically appended to a keyword, which saddles us all with conspiracies like Filegate, TWAFlight800gate, Monicagate, Plamegate, HeavensGategate, ad infinitum.

Welcome to DeadFormerRussianSpyPoloniumPoisoninggate.