My take too, and I was myself skeptical— it smacked of urban legend, and fit too perfectly the shape of a convenient simple minded narrative of right wing villainy—however we live in a time when each day reveals as true claims which only the day before any reasonable person would have had to dismiss as mendacious slander and impossible nonsense.

It’s as if we are watching a James Bond movie in which a cartoonish villain builds a huge island hideaway full of spaceships and private armies of gloating henchmen, and we leave the theater saying, well, Im afraid even though I wanted to I just couldnt get my disbelief suspended enough, that was so ridiculous and just too absurd even for a spy movie —but when the news comes on we find out it was all true.