My friend Rufus is not paranoid. “Besides,” he said, “Even paranoiacs can have enemies.”

Rufus has stated that a Korean torpedo may have taken out Deepwater Horizon, that the ObamaNation tried to destroy the entire banking and insurance industry in order to nationalize health care, and that the ObamaNation did deliberately crash the entire economy in order to steal General Motors from its owners.

I don’t believe the latter theory.

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel said in an interview quoted in the NYTimes. “They are opportunities to do big things.”

I do believe the ObamaNation took advantage of the crashed economy to steal General Motors from its owners simply because they could.

Conspiracy theorists espouse clandestine liberal plans against the common citizens, extravagant murder plots, and other schemes that explain major political and historical events.

Some conspiracy theories have been advanced by government insiders themselves including the Vast International Communist Conspiracy (McCarthy’s right wing accusations of disloyalty, subversion, and treason during the Second Red Scare) and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Hillary Clinton’s left wing defense of Bill during the Lewinsky scandal when she called Monica’s claims the “latest in a long, organized, collaborative series of charges by Clinton’s political enemies.”)

We now know all of those charges were false, and yet …

Rufus makes a good argument linking North Korea’s torpedo attack on a South Korean warship to a possible torpedo attack on Trans Ocean’s Korean ties (Hyundai built the Deepwater Horizon).

Rufus and I both made a good argument showing that when governments drive insurers out of the business, only the government is left to supply the need. Whoda thunk a Chicago pol could understand supply and demand?

And there are plenty of examples of government overstepping its bounds. The City of St. Albans here told a local store owner he couldn’t paint his building yellow. President Barack Obama ordered General Motors boss Rick Wagoner to resign (and that was a year before he ordered Carl-Henric Svanberg to suspend BP’s dividends).

“Look at that Vermont man charged with downloading child porn,” Rufus said. 23 year old Michael Liberty pleaded not guilty to three charges in Burlington last week. Police say they found several images of child pornography on his computer after tracking his downloads; Liberty said he had deleted any child porn he had accidentally downloaded.

“Did you ever wonder how the cops found Liberty?” Rufus asked. “NSA does keyword searches on every U.S. phone call, and Comcast examines every byte that goes over its Internet system to decide whether to throttle its customer usage.

“What’s to keep Comcast from looking at the content you download?” From there, he thinks, it is a short step to slowing competitor’s content or tattling to the very regulators who will approve the NBC deal.

Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company on its way to world domination, is buying control of NBC Universal for $13 billion.

“Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence,” Napoleon Bonaparte warned us.

Supermarket ID cards. ISPs seeing our mail. Local governments telling us what to paint. The nation’s highest official telling us what to think.

Whether malice on the part of the Washington ruling class or incompetence on the part of the voters, we Americans have given up our strong, independent, problem-solving ways in favor of temporary … comfort.

And it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to notice that.