Two decades after her brother committed suicide, Vince Foster's sister Sheila Foster Anthony takes to the Washington Post to excoriate Donald Trump for "cynically, crassly and recklessly" spreading old lies about him.
This is scurrilous enough coming from right-wing political operatives who have peddled conspiracy theories about Vince’s death for more than two decades. How could this be coming from the presumptive Republican nominee for president? [...]
These outrageous suggestions have caused our family untold pain because this issue went on for so long and these reports were so painful to read. For years, our family had to wage a court fight to prevent release of photographs of Vince’s dead body. My heartbroken mother was plagued by harassing phone calls from a reporter. [...]
For Trump to raise these theories again for political advantage is wrong. I cannot let such craven behavior pass without a response.
It needs no response but it's worth reading the whole thing, if only as a reminder of how offensive and pointlessly cruel the Republican conspiracy machine continues to be. It is one thing to have random nobodies swill their dark guesses and suppositions in the far corners of the internet, but the theories about Foster were elevated by supposedly serious political operatives, packaged for reporters as part of an industrialized, openly partisan effort to create "scandals" where scandals did not exist.
No longer new or unusual, that same dynamic has at this point been institutionalized into the conservative movement.
From Donald Trump's birtherism to the House Republicans' literally unending quest to find partisan conspiracy in the attacks in Benghazi, from Frank Luntz's lists of key words to use when describing liberals to the NRA's insistence that the outgoing president will likely be coming for our guns any week now, it is all the same unkempt pile of mean, crass, cynical crap. The completely fictional notion of creeping sharia alone has been responsible for an uncountable many incidents of misinformation, and hatred, and violence—and that was before men in the streets started citing the words of a presidential contender when committing violence against supposed immigrants or hypothetical Muslims.
Why should we be surprised that the conspiracy theories are now a factor in the race for president? Wasn't that what all those earlier scandal-peddlers had been working toward all along?