Check Under The Bed

I chanced upon Ellen Degeneres on TV the other day. Her talk-show is doing great guns, apparently, thus putting the lie to a limerick I composed upon her coming out; I took great pleasure in rhyming ‘lesbian’ with ‘has-been’, but it didn’t play out like that at all.
Ellen’s a bit too nice-nice to appeal to me, but I will always have a soft spot for her after her round of appearances on talk shows explaining that yes, her character on her sitcom was about to undergo a major shake-up: she was going to come out as Lebanese. “The clues have been there all along,” she’d say, “she’s always liked hummus…”
(Of course, Ellen’s character coming out, which went hand-in-hand with Ellen herself coming out, was a milestone in the identity politics of Western popular culture – at least the big chunks of it that are US-driven. It was a commercial sacrificial lamb but it sure got them there gays on the small screen good and proper!)
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Meanwhile, it’s been clear for a long time the only real question in terms of understanding the world is not, is there a conspiracy, but rather, how big and powerful and sinister is it?
Case in point: this terror raid in the UK. I’ve been reserving comment on the whole affair, after the last time when the big story (“potential subway bomber heroically stopped at the last second”) turned out to be something quite different (“innocent Brazilian electrician pointlessly executed by over-excited policemen”). Better, I thought, to wait until something solid was in.
And it still isn’t. But I have heard more than a few suspicious noises on the left that the raid, and subsequent unprecedented pushing of the US terror alert level into the red, was really stage-managed by the US government to deal with growing domestic dissent.
I didn’t pay too much mind to this stuff. If you start looking for conspiracies you see them everywhere, after all.
Well, turns out the noises aren’t baseless. Far from it. Apparently the raid happened when it did not because an attack was imminent, but because the US leaned on the UK to make it happen then.
Why was the US so anxious? Well, that’s the question. Did the raid happen when it did because:

• the officers in charge of the investigation decided it was the best time to conduct a raid?
• (as the story suggests) the US was just too anxious to allow one suspect to conduct a dry run, and insisted on moving before this?
• the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and war with Hizbollah has been a complete disaster for Israel and a strategic and tactical victory for Hizbollah, and something was needed to crowd it out of the news cycle?
• anti-war Democrat Ned Lamont was selected in a massive-turnout primary against pro-war Democrat Joe Lieberman, and something was needed to crowd it out of the news cycle?
• the stars were right, ia ia c’thulhu fthagn?

You picks your conspiracy, you rolls your dices.