One of the many problems with being a conspiracy theorist is that once you start, everything seems to have double meanings – and both of them are bad. Take this post for example. The blogger argues that something is afoot with Kinder Morgan because its tied up with the Carlyle Group which “was started by a former Enron executive.”
I don’t claim to know the complete resume of everyone who ever worked at Enron. Even so, I can promise that nobody we think of as “Enron executives” started the Carlyle Group which was founded in 1987. So that’s just not true. But even if it was all true, every word of it: SO WHAT? What difference does it make to this girl in Canada what Kinder Morgan is up to? Why the furor? If it were true, wouldn’t such an alliance make sense, considering Kinder himself is a former Enron executive? Why not do business with folks you trust?
It’s not just her, of course. I get emails every day telling me that Ken Lay is still alive and Dick Cheney protected his friends at Enron from investigation and prosecution. Boggles the mind, considering so many Enron execs were prosecuted and imprisoned. Who exactly is he “protecting”? And whatever he’s doing, its not very effective. It’s all backward and wrong and silly. But the conspiracies metastasize, gaining the weight of truth merely because they’ve been repeated so many times.
One thing that fosters the growth of these types of conspiracy theories is that there are always weird connections in business. You discover that so-and-so worked for so-and-so and he dated so-and-so’s sister and now his sister is running for Vice President so naturally, there’s some huge scandal in that. It’s just not true.
Sometimes a friend is just a friend.
Enron Online: The Enron Blog 