In the comments on Making Light, Charlie Stross explains it all for you:

Graydon earlier suggested that the current administration are nincompoops, bunglers, and asset-strippers.

I resent this imputation of incompetence to the glorious leaders of the free world. No mere bungling could have created such a mess. No; there has to be a conspiracy behind it all.

We learn that many neoconservative ideologues are former 1960's and 1970's trotskyites who saw the light of the radiant future of capitalism and were saved, converts to the cause of righteousness.

At least, they say they were saved. Me, I say they're still trotskyites, carrying out a black plan to cause the final crisis of capitalism by subjecting it to imperial overstretch. After all, if their old enemy wouldn't die on its own, why not cause it to choke by biting off more than it could swallow?

It's all so clear, now. Rove, Rumsfeld, et al are all working for Vladimir Putin, former KGB staffer and friend of the White House and the only world leader whose economy has had double-digit growth since 9/11. (Coincidence or conspiracy, you judge!) Dick Cheney is probably a Fellow Traveller. They meet in the White House basement every week to read Mao's little red book, discuss Hegelian dialectic, and place a long-distance trunk call to their mentor, eminence grise Ken MacLeod who confessed this all in his 1996 novel of spectacular trotskyite infiltration, "The Star Fraction", if only we'd had the eyes to understand what we were reading.

(Where'd I put my chlorpromazine? Ah, that's better ...)

Honestly, what puzzles me most about this century is that it makes much more sense if you view it as a conspiracy of insane proportions and crazy intent rather than simply the emergent consequences of a collision between religious bigots, asset-stripping sharks, and incompetent machine politicians.

Good heavens! Vladimir Putin is a Communist?