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* If I may be as blunt as those who characterize Lone Nutters (and me in particular) as hopeless, unworthy dolts: I am very, very familiar with conspiracy communities and the dynamics of how they operate. There is a point at which conspiracy thinking becomes so irrational, so credulous, so divorced from reality, that it is a species of mental illness. I don?t characterize all conspiracy theorists in this manner, but this illness is rampant on these forums, up to and including some of the most prominent and active posters. It is screamingly obvious to me, and I don?t think I?m uniquely discerning. I assume that others who have not descended into this madness can see it as well. As DVP keeps pointing out, when the entire conspiracy scenario hinges on every damn document being faked or altered, every agency from the CIA to the Postal Service being corrupt, everyone from the President to the janitor being in on the conspiracy, LHO of all people being an innocent ?patsy," every gap in the record being filled in with raw conspiracy speculation ? well, sorry, but you?ve descended into madness. There?s no polite way to say it. The sin of participants such as myself is that we live in the real world, where humans and agencies are sloppy, fallible and error-prone, where most things are at least pretty much as they seem to be, where successful conspiracies are neither elaborate nor convoluted, and where common sense and logic are valued.
Can we stop the "patsy" silliness now? He said he was a patsy of the DPD, who had arrested him only because he was a known defector. He said this to a crowd of reporters. Yet when he was interrogated by the DPD, FBI, Secret Service and Postal Service, he said NOTHING about being anyone's patsy or even vaguely suggesting he'd been duped into some role in an assassination conspiracy. Never has no much mileage been derived from nothing. The conspiracy community has become like some crazy parrot who thinks he's going to get crackers if he keeps squawking "patsy."
Humor me here: Oswald was a troubled youth from a troubled childhood whose Marxist "working man" fantasies began at the age of 15; who followed his two brothers into the military because there were no other options to escape the mother from hell; who as a Marine had engaged in some unusual activities (the high-dollar Japanese hostess, the plane photos in the duffle bag, the in-your-face interest in the USSR, the conversations with a fellow Marine about joining the revolution in Cuba); who said that he had begun formulating his defection plan more than a year before he carried it out; who got himself sent home early for an entirely bogus reason (Mom's health); who almost immediately left Mom and entered the USSR via the very route that would ensure the least delay or chance for snafus (Helsinki); who put on a comical show at the American Embassy; who made a half-hearted suicide attempt when it appeared he would have to go home; who wrote comical I'm-a-Russian-now letters back to Mom and Robert; who quickly became disaffected with the Marxist utopia and began ridiculing the very things the Soviets held dearest; who engaged in sit-down strikes and stole military-sensitive parts to try to make "grenades" in his apartment (and asked his best friend's advice about the chemicals to use), conduct that would've caused the typical radio factory worker to be shot or sent to Siberia; who showed utterly no interest in any of the sensitive things the KGB dangled in front of him to test whether he might be a U.S. operative; who had decided to return to the U.S. and wrote the U.S. Embassy barely a year and a half after his arrival; who married Marina six weeks after meeting her and assuring her and her MVD uncle that he was fully committed to staying in the USSR; who greatly complicated his request to return the U.S. by marrying Marina; who, in the KGB's extensive monitoring of his apartment, never showed himself to be anything other than a harmless, troubled young man; who returned to the U.S. a completely different and more angry man (according to Marina); who saw his marriage collapse, who lived in nothing but abject poverty, and who could never rise above a minimum-wage job despite his delusions of grandeur; who shifted his dreams to Cuba and engaged in a series of activities to make those dreams come true, including a nothing-short-of-bizarre visit to Mexico City.
THAT Oswald - THAT is your portrait of a CIA false defector/operative??? Hey, I don't doubt that the CIA and KGB had a "keen operational interest" in Oswald, as in: "WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS GUY UP TO, because we've never seen anything like it?" (The KGB said as much: Oswald's behavior was so completely at odds with a false defector that they thought he might be part of some weird new program.) What I think he was up to was "being Oswald."
