In the Ottowa Citizen, editor Leonard Stern examined the "tradition of conspiracy-thinking in the Muslim world" (emphasis added):
The Toronto 18 trials wrapped up this week, as the final two accused were found guilty of plotting to commit violence in the name of militant Islam.
Originally, many people assumed the allegations were exaggerated. These were just a bunch of angry young men fantasizing out loud, more stupid than dangerous. In the end, however, it turned out to be the real deal, a textbook example of self-radicalization and homegrown terrorism.
Now that 11 of the original 18 suspects have been convicted, you'd think there would be a sense of relief. Not really. As the Toronto Star reported, focus groups organized by McGill University indicate some 90 per cent of Muslim youth believe the Toronto terrorism case was a government conspiracy, concocted to make Muslims look bad.
It's hard to overstate how depressing this is, even though we've seen it before. The most disheartening event surrounding the 9/11 attack, other than the attack itself, was the mass denial among Muslim communities right here in the West.
When Russian troops attacked Georgia, I expected the "blame America first" crowd to claim it was somehow our fault. And I figured that the purveyors of moral equivalence would suggest that we were in no position to criticize Russia since we invaded Iraq. (Never mind that we liberated Iraq from a brutal, genocidal dictatorship after it defied 14 U.N. resolutions, whereas the Russsians are trying to topple a democratic government and want to take over a free country as a first step to reestablishing a Russian Empire.)
Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government, ending his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.
Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. Iraq invasion.
…
In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia's membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Um, unless I'm mistaken, Saakashvili's "bellicose views" are that Russia should stop supporting rebel armies in two provinces that have long been a part of Georgia, should stop trying to intimidate and dominate Georgia, and has no right to annex Georgia. <snark>What a monster.</snark>
As for the rest of Scheer's screed, it criticizes Georgia's "imperial designs" on two of its own provinces, it attempts to demonstrate that the whole Georgia crisis was manufactured by McCain and his "neoconservative cabal" to further his election chances, and it paints Vladimir Putin as an innocent victim.
I heard an interesting Obama supporter on the radio this morning. He argued that he and millions like him are justifiably "disgusted" with America and feel like they're living in an "occupied" country. He said there's no freedom because corporate interests and the military-industrial complex control everyone and everything. And he said that Hillary Clinton and the Bushes are part of the same groups that are controlling everything. If Hillary got the nomination, he claimed, she'd "run to lose" in order to serve the interests of these groups that control everything.
Listening to his rant, two thoughts occurred to me. First, I was struck by how much his world-view resembled that of some of the more looney Ron Paul supporters I've listened to. There is a space where the "true believers"* in the messianic ultra-leftist Barack Obama are practically rubbing shoulders with the "true believers" in the libertarian Ron Paul. That space is the fever swamp of generalized disaffection, unfocused resentment, and bizarre conspiracy theories involving mysterious, powerful groups that control everything. I expected this Obama supporter to start ranting about the CFR and Bilderbergers, had he not been cut off.
The second thing that occurred to me is this: Just how divorced from reality do you have to be to believe that Hillary Clinton would take a dive?
* If the phrase "true believers" doesn't immediately ring a bell, I strongly recommend to you Eric Hoffer's essential book about how frustrated, alienated, and dissatisfied individuals are drawn to mass movements, The True Believer.
Oh, yeah — congrats, Sen. Clinton, on a great victory in Pennsylvania. I'm sure Rush Limbaugh will be practically giddy tomorrow about how well Operation Chaos is working.
Last Friday, in the wake of the Iowa caucuses, I remarked that, "If I were a Republican muckety-muck, I'd hire Karl Rove to secretly help the Clinton campaign." You think maybe they did? Apparently, many of the nutroots think that's exactly what happened in New Hampshire. And that Diebold is now rigging its machines to help the Clintons.
Joe Tobacco bravely ventured into the Bedlam that is Democratic Underground and linked to thread after thread full of paranoid ravings. I just skimmed a few, and especially liked this comment:
What struck me is how they programmed Edwards to maintain 17% ALL NIGHT
That was some pretty transparent programming, if you ask me.
THIS is what a gerrymandered, computerized voting machine election looks like. From start to finish.
Made me sick.
Here are a couple that express a popular sentiment:
I wouldn't put it past the Neocons to be buggering the vote for Hillary
especially since neocons REALLY WANT HER as the Dem nominee…someone they can "work with" win or lose in the General.
is clinton a preffered oponent for the republicans?
hmmm. clinton was trailing, then she finished ahead. the exit polls predicted otherwise. the exit polls were never this far off before diebold became so heavily involved in the game. it is just like the elections of 2004. so what am i saying… i personally think hillary poses both, a candidate that is easier for the republicans to beat, and, if elected, a president who more entrenched in the traditional political system. so guess what, it doesn't surprise me that the diebold machines once again felt a candidate that aligned closer to their views pulled ahead. coincidence?
As in 2004, large numbers of the nutroots left remain utterly convinced that polls are infallibly accurate, while actual vote counts are unreliable and suspect.
They call themselves the "reality-based community."
UPDATE: Sen. John Effin' Kerry has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama. Obama thanked him. I think Obama would have been wiser to follow the Scrappleface version:
(2008-01-10) — Sen. Barack Obama today declined the endorsement of Sen. John Kerry, saying his presidential campaign is about “hope and change”, and he doesn’t want to “send mixed messages.”
This may be the single stupidest decision to come out of the Pentagon since the Vietnam War days. It's so short-sighted and ignorant and insanely counter-productive that it causes weird conspiracy theories like the ones I sometimes have about the Stupid Party to cross my mind: Could this be the work of someone trying to ensure failure and defeat? Someone deliberately silencing the most knowledgeable, articulate, informative, effective, moving, and persuasive voices in support of the War Against Islamofascism? It might as well be; the effect is the same, regardless of the motive.
It's too late and I'm too tired to write up the lengthy but unfocused rant that's been bubbling up since I first heard this news. So I'll just let Hugh Hewitt fill you in:
I find this decision to be so amazingly ill-informed about how the milblogs have served the war effort and the cause of the military as to raise real doubts about the military's ability to ever get ahead of the enemy in the information war. Really, if such a blunder can happen without anyone even asking about the ill effects on the effort to keep information flowing from people in the know to combat the ceaseless propaganda from the enemy, then the brass involved cannot possibly understand how the information war is playing out.
The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.
"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has — it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."
In my mind, it's anybody's guess as to who's more interested in silencing milbloggers, the Islamofascists or the Democrats. Michelle Malkin has lots more info. The 2007 Milblog Conference is this weekend, making this story even more ironic and infuriating.
I can't even think clearly about what should be done — maybe tomorrow. Some moron with stars on his shoulders ought to be horsewhipped. Express your outrage to somebody somewhere who might make a difference. You are outraged, aren't you?
UPDATE: The online firestorm this ignited seems to be having an effect. The Army is backing off — sort of. Maybe. It sounds to me a bit like, "Well, the regulations don't really mean what they say. Unless your CO decides they do." I suspect we'll be hearing more about this.
I've been thinking about the fiery crash on I-80/I-880 Sunday near Oakland, California. According to news reports, a tanker truck carrying thousands of gallons of gasoline overturned and burst into flames, causing two sections of freeway overpass to collapse within minutes:
Two connector ramps of the Bay Bridge MacArthur Maze (map), located near Emeryville, collapsed Sunday morning after an explosion and fire.
Heat from the fire, which reached temperatures estimated at up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, caused the metal bolts and girders on the highway connector ramp above to melt. The overpass then gave way and collapsed. …
NBC 7/39's sister station in San Jose talked to a witness of the fire. Paul Kochli said he was driving from San Francisco to Napa at around 4 a.m. when he noticed a huge plume of smoke and a mushroom cloud. Kochli said he recorded 59 seconds of the fire. He said the overpass had already collapsed by 4:05 a.m.
Other witnesses reported flames from the blaze reached up to 200 feet high. …
The tanker was under the overpass.
Aerial views showed at least two sections of the maze totaling about 250 yards in length had collapsed.
(Note: The video below isn't the Kochli video mentioned in the story. This one's from a fellow called baconmonkey, and it's shot on a Canon high-definition camcorder — not that YouTube even vaguely approximates high-def, but it's well worth watching.)
Well, the official story says heat from the fire collapsed the overpasses. But of course, we know from concerned scientists and engineers who studied the World Trade Center collapses that fires can't melt steel — that a chemical explosion is required. Ask Rosie! Or check out the experiment by a member of the reality-based community that I wrote about last summer:
I think that the freeway overpass was just as likely to have been brought down by controlled demolition as the World Trade Center buildings. The Governor of California, the President of the United States, and Karl Rove are all Republicans — coincidence? Do we know what ties exist between Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and the California highway construction industry? Why did Caltrans rush its "demolition contractor" onto the site within hours to remove the evidence? Doesn't it strain credulity to believe that the driver walked away from the inferno and caught a cab to the hospital?
These and other questions demand answers! We need a Freeway Truth Movement, with Californians for Freeway Truth, Scholars for Freeway Truth, Press for Freeway Truth, Truck Drivers for Freeway Truth, Freeway Truth Radio, and a whole host of other like-minded organizations committed to uncovering the real truth behind the so-called tanker truck accident.
The Washington Post reported the other day that an aide to Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) called U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton's office just six weeks before Alberto Gonzales terminated Charlton. The aide was seeking information about a federal investigation into a land deal involving the congressman's former business partner, and in accordance with Justice Dept. rules, Charlton notified his superiors of the potentially improper contact from Renzi's office. Captain Ed took a dim view of yet another Gonzales misstep (emphasis added):
First, we should point out that Charlton's removal did not end the investigation. The FBI raided Renzi's home last week, and Renzi stepped down from his committee assignments as a result. If he corrupted his office and sold out his constituents, it does not appear that Charlton's termination has kept that from coming to light.
That being said, this makes the entire process of terminations look even more suspect. At the least, it shows political stupidity on a scale so grand as to be almost unbelievable. Who in their right mind would fire a federal prosecutor who just had improper contact from the Congressman he's investigating — especially in the days after a Democratic takeover of Congress? That call should have alerted anyone with any sort of political antennae that firing Charlton would set off all sorts of red flags if that call came to light.
The Stupid Party has certainly been living up to that disparaging appellation lately, and Alberto Gonzales has worked harder than almost anyone to ensure that it does so. If I were inclined toward conspiracy theories, I'd be very suspicious of people like Gonzales. Could the GOP have been infiltrated with sleeper agents who, like the Manchurian Candidate, can be activated at opportune times to do great harm to the party with their apparent cluelessness, corruption, or ineptitude?
Of course not, I remind myself. Remember Occam's Razor. The facts can be adequately explained by stupidity alone. But, hey, it might make a pretty good novel and movie!
I thought that 9/11 nuts like Rand Fanshier and Spooked (with his rabbit fencing WTC model and United 93 pencil sketches) represented the ne plus ultra of whackjob conspiracy theorizing. But I guess I just hadn’t fully grasped the breadth and depth and glorious technicolor variety of loonieness that exists in the world.
Case in point: Steve Lightfoot called Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Friday, and he left Hewitt completely nonplussed. That’s pretty remarkable — Hewitt is one of the most consistently plussed people I can think of.
But it’s hard not to lose your plussiness when someone explains in rapid-fire fashion that the Bush lies and Iraq war tie back to the murder of John Lennon, which was perpetrated by Stephen King with the help of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
If you’re amused, rather than angered or worried, by people like this, poke around Steve’s site. I especially liked The Killer’s alleged name and letter and the Footnotes and new Developments section. Here’s a taste from the first essay in the latter, "America the ugly":
The people of the San Francisco bay area will never live down the fact that,
when confronted with hard evidence that proves our government murdered John
Lennon, they ducked their duty to take to the streets and demand the arrest of
Stephen King. Before Nixon and Reagan died they failed to demand that they be put
on trial and jailed as well. For over twenty years the American public proved to
the watching world that now dislikes us, that we are anything but American
in practice.
As bad as raping a 14 year old girl then shooting her in the head three times,
then killing her family, including a 5 year old sister, then burning them all to
try to destroy the evidence of their conduct as just happened in Iraq involving
U.S. soldiers. That bad.
Right now you are letting our military help Israel do to the Arabs what we did to
the American indians. You are an ugly people.
I used to be just like you, too. I was raised on television, violence, selfish-
ness, greed and anti-intellectualism. When our government killed the Kennedy’s,
M.L.K., other black activists and rock stars I did nothing. It took the murders of
John Lennon and, later, John Balushi to get me off of my ugly ass and do something.
Many of you probably don’t know that Balushi’s assassin, Kathlyn Smith, was in the
same room with Lennon the night before he was shot in the back, but she was.
Incidentally, the writer of Animal House, Doug Kenny, was also killed that same
year and John Landis, the director of Animal House, almost lost his head with Vic
Morrow in that copter accident. So if some of you still think that that pyro-
technique exposion that almost blew Michael Jackson’s face off was just an ac-
cident, please pull your heads out of your stinky, ignorant, guilty asses right now.
Buddy Holly, Jim Morrison (Lennon was killed on his birthday), Bob Marley, Peter
Tosh, Jim Croce, Jimi Hendrix and many more cultural icons were probably murdered
by our government and your apathy and ignorance.
Whew! There’s a score or more essays, some of them less angry and dark — and more silly and fun. I only looked at a few, but I thought Clint Eastwood is No Good was especially amusing. Enjoy!
Don’t order his booklet, though — you don’t want Steve Lightfoot to have your name and address. 🙂
Speaking of moonbats, LGF posted a chunk of the press release from the University of Wisconsin-Madison explaining why Kevin Barrett would be teaching an introductory class on Islam. Barrett, a convert to Islam, believes that al-Qaeda is a CIA front and that the Bush administration blew up the World Trade Center towers. The UW-Madison Provost decided to let this whack job teach his theories to young skulls full of mush in order to defend free speech (emphasis added by LGF):
Farrell notes that a broader issue at play in the Barrett case is the UW-Madison’s long tradition of protecting classroom expression and encouraging students’ critical thinking by allowing analysis of even the most controversial ideas.
“We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas. That classroom interaction is central to this university’s mission and to the expansion of knowledge. Silencing that exchange now would only open the door to more onerous and sweeping restrictions,” he says.
“It is in cases like this – difficult cases involving unconventional ideas – that we define our principles and determine our future,” Farrell adds. “Instead of restricting politically unpopular speech, we will take our cue from the bronze plaque in front of Bascom Hall that calls for the ‘continual and fearless sifting and winnowing’ of ideas.”
I saw part of an interview with Barrett on Fox News earlier. He struck me as a committed Islamofascist (Wahhabi or Salafist), not just a tin-foil-hat nutjob like Spooked. Of course, I could be wrong. Heck, Spooked is a pseudonym — Kevin Barrett could be Spooked!
I want to ask UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell how he plans to promote free speech, explore "even the most controversial ideas," and stick it to "the man" next: A class on World War II and Nazi Germany taught by a Holocaust denier? A course covering the Civil Rights movement taught by a Klansman?
Moonbat science marches on! Saturday, I posted about a couple of "experiments" conducted by 9/11 conspiracy theorist Spooked to "prove" that airplanes didn’t bring down the WTC towers. The intrepid Instapinch, who brought those experiments to public attention, dove back into the depths of Spooked’s site and found yet another amazing experiment regarding the WTC towers. Plus an analysis of United Flight 93’s crash using pencil sketches to prove that:
None of it makes a lot of sense, but the clear thing is that THE OFFICIAL FLIGHT 93 CRASH STORY IS WRONG!
You can check out the WTC experiment at Instapinch. This experiment predates the more sophisticated — I’m not kidding — rabbit fence and concrete block model. Did I mention that this one involves coat hangers?
But don’t settle for Instapinch’s teaser about the Flight 93 theory, go read the whole thing — not for Spooked’s analysis, but for the many wonderful comments. Priceless! I laughed until tears ran down my cheeks. Here are a few samples:
Anonymous said…
…and despite his "genius" at fooling the world on 9/11, Bush still couldn’t figure out a way to fake WMD stockpiles in Iraq. Go figure.
Anonymous said…
This is satire, right. Please, let it be satire. Otherwise, you need some serious help and it scares me that you’re walking around unsupervised.
Anonymous said…
I saw Condi Rice in the pilot’s cabin on that flight. She deliberately flew the plane into the ground. At the last second she leaped out of the window with a parachute. The word "Haliburton" was stenciled on the ‘chute.
Anonymous said…
The "Condi Rice in a Haliburton parachute" theory has been completely discredited.
We now know that after shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby was cryogenically frozen, cloned, and stored in Rumsefeld’s basement until being thawed out and used to fly the planes into the WTC, etc. If you want I can draw you a picture.
Johnny Drama said…
I’ve only one question.
Is this sort of stupidity the result of public school or lead-based paint chips?
Hopefully, My Last Analysis of the Flight 93 Crash
I think I speak for everyone when I say:
"Please please please please post just one more!"
(Note: The Instapinch post has some pretty good comments, too.)
The humor value of this stuff is undeniable. But, as Instapinch noted, there’s another reason to link to such material:
Without beating a dead horse here …, this sort of idiocy needs to see the light of day. It needs to see that light to show people how unhinged – how simply out of touch with the real world some of the lefty-whack jobs are. Reason and common sense are not given a back seat in these people’s worlds, they are strapped into an ejection seat and are *gone*. …
It’s not just Spooked and all the total whack jobs that he shares links and ideas with. A significant portion of the left, while not True Believers, are sympathetic to the conspiracy theorists and/or "agnostic" about who brought down the WTC towers. At the DailyKos comment that Instapinch linked, Socratic joined the laughter and took a bit of a swipe at DU. But Carolita immediately came to DU’s defense:
Don’t you think the 101 comments refuting this "experiment" constitute an adequate response? Unlike the right-wing blogs, DU doesn’t rewrite history and selectively remove a post from 2005 "just in case" some wingnut might see it. And it is hardly any surpise that instapinch.com would selectively point to a posted comment as if it were an official position of the web site and conveniently forget that a multitude of commentors wrote in to refute it.
Well, each of those three sentences is bogus. First, DU removes posts all the time (it’s not secretive; they’re marked "Message removed by moderator"), including several in the Spooked experiment thread. Second, the 101 comments at the time Carolita wrote (it’s now over 280) were absolutely not all refuting the experiment. I don’t think even half of them were negative (note: there were far fewer than a hundred commenters because there was much "dialog"). There certainly wasn’t a "multitude" refuting it. Some commenters were supportive of a 9/11 conspiracy; some were "open-minded"; some were skeptical of Spooked’s experiment, but in a friendly way. I remember at least one commenter praised Spooked for trying so hard and encouraged him to refine his experiment further — I pegged that one as a schoolteacher.
Only a couple or three commenters (before the recent flood of non-DU sightseers) completely rejected the notion of a 9/11 conspiracy and ridiculed Spooked’s experiment. And they had to fend off repeated attacks and challenges from an equal number of hard-core supporters.
Across a wide swath of the American Left extending deep into the Democratic base, the question of who’s responsible for the 9/11 attacks — al-Qaeda, the U.S. government, or Israel — is open to debate.
All this "moonbat science" is pretty damned funny. But it’s also sad. And a bit disturbing, when you think about it.
I haven’t laughed so much in a long time. It all began Friday with LGF’s Hilarious Lefty Post of the Day, which linked to this post at Democratic Underground:
The post is from last October (I’m not sure what prompted Charles to link to it now; maybe he just came across it). If you’d rather not visit DU, you can read the whole thing, plus some fine introductory and concluding remarks, at Instapinch.
The poster, spooked911, is apparently a regular at DU with over 1000 posts. His "experiment" (fully documented with a series of photographs) consisted of:
Making a "model" from rabbit fencing and concrete blocks.
Simulating "airplane damage" by cutting some of the "support columns" in the rabbit fencing with wire cutters.
Lighting kerosene-soaked newspapers inside this "steel structure" and letting it burn for 20 minutes.
Observing that the heat didn’t weaken the "steel structure" (rabbit-fencing) of his "building."
Ipso facto — proof that burning jet fuel couldn’t have caused the collapse of the WTC towers!
Here’s his "steel structure" during the "experiment":
Now, that’s pretty damned funny. But wait! It gets even better! The aforementioned Instapinch referenced an earlier post of his in which we learn that this Spooked fella has his own blog with yet more experiments (these are from April 2006):
His particular belief is that no aircraft hit the World Trade Center Towers because there was no aircraft wreckage *outside* the building…or the aircraft should have bounced off….or the aircraft should have passed all the way thru, unscathed. ..or whatever.
So, he devised an experiment to prove beyond the shadow of any doubt that there was no way possible, scientifically proven, mind you, that 767 aircraft flew into the WTC.
I can’t do it justice by explaining it here….go have a read (this one first and then this one) and see the light, brothers and sisters!
Well, I’ll give you a taste of the first one, Wings Break Off:
I set up an experiment testing how a plane might break up upon impacting arrayed steel columns like the WTC wall. The plane and the columns were both constructed of similar pieces of wood (which here favors the plane, since in real life, aluminum is weaker than steel). …
I pushed the plane forcefully into the "wall", and while the fuselage penetrated the wall after reasonably strong force was applied, the wings broke off at the root where the wings met the plane. … A few "columns" broke where the fuselage went in, and a couple broke on either side of the fuselage hole, where the wings broke off– but basically the array of columns were much stronger than the long wings. …
This means of course, that no 767 hit either WTC tower.
That’s pretty damned funny, too. But you really need to check out Wings Break Off (and the follow-up, Stronger Wings) for the comments! They are priceless! Here’s one of my favorites:
Anonymous said…
If we assume 9/11 was a massive psy-ops campaign, then we can assume that nothing about 9/11 is really as it seems.
If we assume you are actually a 12 point buck, we can legally shoot you in the chest with a shotgun and mount your head on our living room wall.
What a moron.
Lots more along the same lines. Believe me, you’ll laugh your ass off.
UPDATE: As for the darker side of moonbattery — if you haven’t already read about Jeff Goldstein’s problem with the psychology prof (soon to be unemployed) who gradually went completely psycho online and threatened his kid, check out this post for starters. Assuming he’s back for good — the site’s been mostly down for a couple of days due to DoS attacks. Coincidence?
I was going through the past few days’ mail tonight, and there was the March Colorado Liberty. On page 5, I noticed an ad for a Denver event on March 31 — hmm, bad timing on somebody’s part — called Critical Analysis: 9-11. Well, shucks, I missed it. So I didn’t get to hear Morgan Reynolds of LewRockwell.com and Don Paul of physics911.net present evidence that:
Airliners weren’t hijacked and flown into buildings on 9/11, and the government faked all those cell phone calls from people on the planes.
Autopsies (!) proved there were no Arabs on Flight 77 (you know — the plane that wasn’t hijacked and didn’t fly into the Pentagon).
The WTC towers were destroyed by professional demolition involving scores of people precisely placing thousands of explosive charges over a period of weeks.
Guiliani was in on it.
So were the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Bush, Cheney, the NY Port Authority, the Rockefeller family, international bankers and financiers, the handful of plutocrats who control all the oil and defense industry corporations — I could go on, but what’s the point?
Really, you ought to visit the Critical Analysis: 9-11 web site. Notice that they’re proud to have Ed Asner and Charlie Sheen on their side. Click some of the links they provide for additional information about the 9/11 conspiracy. You’ll discover more fascinating facts: Britain’s MI6 secretly controls and funds al Qaeda, the captured Saddam is a fake, the London bombings were staged by the Blair government, …
Then ponder this: Critical Analysis: 9-11 is a project organized and financed by Rand Fanshier and some of his Libertarian friends. Rand had a column in the Colorado Liberty adjacent to the ad. In it, he described how he became convinced there was a conspiracy:
Then I did the math. An elementary momentum analysis, using a spreadsheet and data and formulas I checked and double-checked with my own hand, proved beyond any doubt that the WTC towers could not have fallen by damage or fires alone—that they were demolished. The implications were obvious; regardless of how implausible, some alphabet agencies—or people in their employ—at the Federal, State and local levels actually were instrumental in the murders of all those people and the destruction of so much property.
But I have continued doing my job in the LP here at the state level, for years, pushing back here in Colorado at the misuse of government power in so many little ways. All the time also pushing back in my mind the reality that these little things make no difference in a country that has essentially just had a coup d’etat, where the leadership doesn’t protect the people but kills them for geo-political utility.
So, despite the hopelessness of it all, Rand’s still doing his job for the Colorado Libertarian Party. What is his job? Why, he’s on the Board of Directors. In fact, he’s the Outreach Director.
Ponder the irony of that for a moment. To promote the LP among the vast horde of Republican, Democratic, and independent Coloradans, to convince them to take the LP seriously and not dismiss us as fringe kooks, to persuade them to consider becoming Libertarians, the Colorado LP relies on Rand "there were no Muslim terrorists, Bush/Cheney did it" Fanshier.
I believe this is compelling evidence that the Colorado Libertarian Party has jumped the shark (definition 3).
UPDATE: Check out also Libercontrarian’s excellent remarks on this subject, which predate mine by 6 days. Apparently, Nick’s Colorado Liberty was delivered earlier than mine, and he read it right away. He’s already officially left the LP.
If it isn’t already clear to you that the Democratic Party has been taken over by rabid, hate-filled, conspiracy-theorist, Jew-bashing lunatics, take a look at this Washington Post story quoted at Little Green Footballs.
A couple of dozen Democratic members of the House held a mock Judiciary Committee hearing conducting a make-believe impeachment inquiry. Unsurprisingly, all the "witnesses" agreed that the President was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors regarding the war in Iraq.
But here’s the part that defies belief (emphasis added):
The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
…
At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations — that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 — that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.
Such insane conspiratorial charges — that Israel orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, that Jews were forewarned to stay away from the WTC, etc. — have been confined to the most radical, extremist, "death to the Jews" Islamofascist publications and web sites, and to a few non-Islamic groups of crazed anti-Semites and Nazis.
Now, these claims are being distributed at Democratic headquarters in support of a Democratic mock impeachment hearing charging that the President of the United States is controlled by Israel.
It’s inconceivable to me that any Jewish person with a shred of dignity and self-respect would remain in the Democratic Party.