From Besty, way above….She writes a fascinating account of her fathers shift from nominally liberal democrat with a scientific approach to the world to a birther,right wing climate skeptic.

I would only add that we need to examine not just shifts but also fixed positions, irrespective of where they stand on the political spectrum…the simple point is that we all use motivated reasoning in the formation of our beliefs, influenced by a dizzying array of factors such as fear, biases, external media and so on…I applaud the author’s attempt to understand this phenomena at its inception here in the case of “deathers” but as the fascinating string of comments shows, I’m not really sure this lends itself to understanding through an attempt to find causation…this is not linear stuff…ouch, my head just exploded
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Quite. And did you believe the newspapers?

About half a dozen of those press reports you mention I can see were in error. But I’m not going to rehash that old argument again. You’re still proving my point, though. If people are motivated to find flaws, they will, and it’s not unreasonable to doubt and require evidence even if senior officials in the US government say so. The press only found and reported those problems because they went looking for them. Obviously the media are not as keen on finding fault with Obama as they were with Bush, but other people I’m sure will dig.

All anyone had to do to doubt their veracity is to read the right blogs.

I know somebody who is a 9/11Truther who nevertheless still considers Al Qaeda to be a terrorist organization because of their attacks on the Cole and the African embassies. When I asked him how he could judge the evidence of those cases–all of which came from the exact same sources as the 9/11 evidence, that is, it all came from the U.S. govt and mass media–as being any more reliable than that which he had already dismissed, he basically said there wasn’t as much money riding on a conspiracy in those cases so it was probably true.

No. It had nothing to do with me expending time and picking holes in Bush’s arguments. Remember that virtually no one had doubted him when he told us that OBL had orchestrated the WTC attacks, and support for the war in Afghanistan was overwhelming.

But Iraq was different. All anyone had to do to doubt their veracity of Bush’s statements was to read the newspaper. Our own intelligence community was contradicting the claims he was making. The U.N. inspectors in Iraq could not find evidence of the WMD programs he insisted were there. The IAEA told us that reports of Saddam buying weapons grade uranium were fraudulent. The CIA told us they were convinced he wasn’t working with Al Qaeda. Despite the accusation that Saddam was directly connected to the anthrax attacks, they couldn’t find evidence that he had engaged in any terrorist attacks on the United States. Army and State Department officials were warning that opening a new front in Iraq would hamper their fight in Afghanistan. Bush’s own economic advisor was fired for suggesting the war could cost $200 billion. Dick Cheney accused the CIA and State Department of incompetence when they couldn’t find evidence to corroborate his allegations and became so irritated with them that he created his own personal intelligence network to ensure he got the answers he wanted.

We knew all of this before the war started. That’s why people doubted him.

Here’s what what the newspapers were reporting before the war started in Iraq:

February 2002 – while Bush and Cheney were telling us that Iraq had high-level contacts with Al Qaeda the NYT reported:

The Central Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups, according to several American intelligence officials.

April 2002 – the WP reporting on the inability of the CIA to dig up dirt on Hans Blix.

Officials gave contradictory accounts of Wolfowitz’s reaction to the CIA report, which the agency returned in late January with the conclusion that Blix had conducted inspections of Iraq’s declared nuclear power plants “fully within the parameters he could operate” as chief of the Vienna-based agency between 1981 and 1997.

A former State Department official familiar with the report said Wolfowitz “hit the ceiling” because it failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program.

On September 20, 2002, The United Press International reported:

doubts about the quality of some of the evidence that the United States is using to make its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser Condi Rice stated on September 8 that imported aluminum tubes ‘are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs’ a growing number of experts say that the administration has not presented convincing evidence that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright said he found significant disagreement among scientists within the Department of Energy and other agencies about the certainty of the evidence.

In February 2003 MSNBC, countering Cheney’s insistence that we were certain Saddam could build a nuclear bomb within a year:

a CIA report on proliferation released this week says the intelligence community has no “direct evidence” that Iraq has succeeded in reconstituting its biological, chemical, nuclear or long-range missile programs in the two years since U.N. weapons inspectors left and U.S. planes bombed Iraqi facilities.

In March 2003, countering Bush’s State of the Union quote that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” the NYT reports that:

Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that a report — which had earlier been identified as coming from British intelligence — that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger was based on fake documents.

And Hans Blix told us that U.N. inspections would be effective even without the full cooperation of the Iraqi government. All he needed was the time to complete them.

Most of the arguments Bush made for going to war with Iraq had fallen apart before the war started. It was perfectly clear to everyone that he was going to war anyway.

“I take you at your word that you believe OBL was shot there.”

Thank you.

“The question is what you would consider concrete evidence of the fact.”

Material being presented that could not easily be produced if the claim were untrue.

“Because you claim that there is none.”

None was presented, at least initially. I don’t know about now – I haven’t been following the story very closely, not being that interested – but I see some people pointing out that the more recent stuff isn’t much better.

“It wasn’t a question of believing George Bush or believing Saddam.”

Quite. So George Bush made statements without being backed by solid evidence, and you didn’t believe them. You expended time and effort picking holes in them, pointing out inconsistencies and errors. The official story kept changing. And those who did believe were puzzled at all the people who didn’t just take the President’s word for it, but kept trying to make excuses and raise objections and do everything they could to show the President was wrong. But there was still a problem with the evidence, whether or not people were motivated by their partisan biases to find it.

You’re not going to take their word for it just because they’re government officials (or the President), you want to see concrete and consistent evidence that stands up to critical inspection.

The specific details in either case don’t matter – and in this case would only lead to an argument – it was the general point I wanted to make.

Unless it’s a statement they already believe or want to believe, people are naturally and rightly sceptical of politicians (and the media). They want to see solid evidence, and there’s nothing wrong in them asking for it.

The distinguishing feature of conspiracy theorists, and what makes them illogical, is not that they demand impossibly high standards of evidence for the official story, but in their credulity for their alternative story without evidence for it – in the way the story is forever being reconstructed to explain away its lack.

When one of the alternative narratives starts to gain traction, that will be the time to talk about “Deathers”. Until then, it’s just scepticism.