Anthony Bourdain and the Clinton Body Count

A conspiracy meme sprang up almost as soon as the news of Anthony Bourdain's death began to circulate. According to this meme, Bourdain has become another name on the ever-lengthening list of what is known as the Clinton Body Count. The theory is that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been quietly offing people who have stood against their agenda. A more recent example of this is Seth Rich, who was shot twice in the back and killed in Washington, DC, in 2016. Rich had worked with the Democratic National Committee, and there had been some suspicion that he might have been one of the leakers of information to Wikileaks, back in the tumultuous period of the presidential campaign. Assuming the veracity of the Clinton Body Count theory, Rich's death—which looked like an attempted robbery, although nothing had been stolen—was the result of his having leaked damaging information to Wikileaks.

This brings us to Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain had publicly tweeted his disgust at Bill Clinton's recent non-apology regarding the Monica Lewinsky affair that had plagued his presidency in the 1990s. A few days before Bourdain's death, he had also supposedly tweeted this: "I have information that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton." People online have been referring to this pair of tweets as "haunting" in light of Bourdain's death, which occurred not long after these tweets had been made.

My instinct, upon learning of this latest conspiracy theory, has been to reject it out of hand. While a mean part of me would like to believe the Clintons are the types to murder their enemies, I just can't take this idea seriously, especially in the light of day. The body-count list is indeed quite impressive, but while it looks like evidence for a circumstantial case against the power couple, it stretches plausibility, the way all conspiracy theories do. Note, too, that if you visit Bourdain's Twitter feed, the most recent tweet on it is dated June 3; the above graphic shows a date of June 5. (Bourdain died in France on June 8.) It's conceivable that Bourdain tweeted something, then deleted it, but it's more likely that the above tweet is actually fake.

Let's let poor Tony rest in peace.

UPDATE: the Bourdain tweet shown above is definitely fake. Here's the guy, Owen Benjamin, confessing to having slapped that tweet up as a joke. Benjamin has a good quote, though, regarding his dad, who used to threaten to commit suicide all the time: "When you forgive things that you know are wrong, it doesn't end the cycle." I wonder how this might apply to the Trump-Kim summit. Will forgiving the Kim regime's many depredations somehow end the cycle of death and oppression in North Korea? Probably not.