SHOEGAZI: Truthers Think Hillary Planned the Shoe-Throwing Incident

Last Thursday, a Hillary Clinton speech was interrupted by an airborne shoe hoisted by a Alison Michelle Ernst, a woman with a documented history of erratic behavior. Seems like a pretty open-and-shut case: unstable person behaves anti-socially. The end. But because Hillary Clinton is involved, and in the eyes of America’s right-wing PATRIOTS (shouted), Hillary Clinton is an all-powerful she-beast capable of controlling human behavior, the incident must have been staged. Yes, let’s offer a warm internet welcome to the Shoe Truthers.

This is the 24-hour news cycle world we live in now. A world of people who can’t find the time to read more than one book in a year or exercise for 20 minutes a day but who do somehow find the time to formulate elaborate “shoe truther” theories. Good morning.

Leading the charge in the opposite direction of logic are the usual suspects: a Fox News commentator’s blog (fun fact: most of Bernard Goldberg’s blog entries are composed in feces on the tiles of a travel rest stop bathroom before they’re transcribed by a weeping Dartmouth sophomore who didn’t know what they were getting into when they applied for this internship) and Rush Limbaugh, a man who was either hugged too much or not enough as a child.

On yesterday’s show, Limbaugh admitted that he hadn’t seen the widely-circulated CNN video of the incident, but, as with most things, knowing the absolute bare minimum about what happened didn’t stop him from weighing in.

[…] in my subconscious, I think it was staged, or set up, or whatever. … I don’t know why anybody would be throwing a shoe at Hillary unless — maybe it’s an attempt to make the Benghazi people look like nuts and lunatics and wackos.

Rush Limbaugh’s subconscious has ruled. Not only does he believe that the “Benghazi people” didn’t already look like nuts and lunatics and wackos, he believes that Hillary Clinton is so preoccupied with the right wing fringe’s pet shouting point that she’s putting people up to committing crimes against her.

Goldberg’s contributor’s musings are even weirder. They’re pretend-you’re-going-to-get-another-drink-but-actually-leave-the-party weird.

There is a political axiom, I believe first posed by Euclid or Archimedes, that when Hillary does something, or when something happens to her, she has carefully calculated it beforehand. This is almost always true, the one trivial exception being the nomination and election of Barack Obama in 2008.

So it would not be stretching logic to suppose that Hillary arranged to have the shoe thrown at her. Remembering the Bush incident, she may have calculated that this would make her seem presidential. This would explain why Ms. Ernst was not pounded to a pulp by Hillary’s bodyguards, and why she seems on the verge of getting off scot free. Don’t be too surprised, the next time you visit Phoenix, if you see her sitting at a table in a downtown Hillary for President store front, stuffing and sealing envelopes.

Hillary Clinton is so powerful that she plans and controls everything, even corralling a probably-ill woman into doing her bidding for her with the hopes that she will remind people of George W. Bush, who a large swath of the American voting public still believes to be the worst President in memory. Sounds legit. What’s the opposite of Occam’s razor? Occam’s beach ball?

But no Fox News pundit endorsed wildly speculative critique would be complete without reminding readers that Hillary Clinton is a girl and girls suck at stuff.

The incident called to many minds the occasion, late in his second term, when George W. Bush, during a public appearance, was forced to duck two shoes thrown by a Muslim journalist. He did so coolly and deftly, like a veteran baseball player trying to avoid being beaned by Roger Clemens. Hillary, on the other hand, ducks flying shoes like a girl, as you can plainly see on the video.

We can’t have a President who ducks flying shoes like a girl! We need a President who bombs the wrong country and gets us involved in a decade-long destabilizing quagmire like a man. Other conservative outlets haven’t been able to resist the siren song of critiquing the way Hillary Clinton ducks flying shoes, either, drunk on the sort of sexist poison Frank Rich thinks will doom them in 2016. Let’s hope so.