If you want to catch sparks in the wind these days, you need look no further than watching the cripple-fight between Rosie O’Donnell and Bill O’Reilly. I say cripple fight in the terms that if you were to mark the handicapped symbol on their car’s permit with red ink to indicate their malfunction, their heads would be a bright crimson dot.
On one side of this circus, you have Bill O’Reilly. Seriously, if anyone can find a better poster child for the type of intolerant horseshit that the far right represents, please tell me. I thought Rush Limbaugh was bad, but O’Reilly simply takes the cake for spewing nonsense with the air of authority. Add into that delightful mix; cutting the mic off from anyone he’s personally declared to be a terrorist sympathizer, or “America hater” because they don’t agree with him, yelling over the top of people as if being louder means that you’re correct, and parroting the same regurgitated spew every other far right monologue has uttered for weeks as if it was an O’riginal thought – and you get one ugly cake mix of pure bad. He’s also an arrogant son of a bitch, but that really dozen’t set him apart.
On the other side of this media maelstrom is Rosie O’Donnell. If anyone can find a better poster child of self-exalting blowhard, let me know. She’s loud, generally obnoxious and also likes to yell over the top of people as if being louder means that you’re correct. She likes to parrot the left wing regurgitation as much as O’Reilly does the right. She an arrogant daughter of a bitch…
But you get the picture. It’s deja vu, all over again.
The big controversy: Rosie O’Donnell has come out calling for “9/11 Truth”. This can mean a lot of things, but in her case she seems to be at least convinced that the government is not coming clean in telling everything it knows about 9/11 – to the point that she infers that they had something to do with it. Then she makes the predictable mistake of blathering about George Bush being Hitler’s evil twin, ad nausium.
O’Reilly, predictably, doesn’t see it this way and because Rosie has the audacity to say such a thing, she should be sent to Gitmo for the holiday season special. We’ll supply the batteries.
First thing: I don’t like Rosie. I don’t like Bill. They both suck rancid canal water and I could go the rest of my life without ever hearing their voices again. However, I have to give Bill an extra kick in the groin on this one, because even if you don’t agree with Rosie, she should have the right to say whatever she wants – and let the facts come out to show whether she was right or wrong. Calling for someone to be silenced because you don’t like what they’re saying, is not the American way. Something about a First Amendment?
Furthermore, the one thing that the far right has not done with Rosie O’Donnell, or Martin Sheen, or Dr. Steven E. Jones of Bringham Young University, and many, many others; is actually address their questions. Every effort is made to demonize them for even considering the idea that the official 9/11 report was a shoddy piece of bird cage lining, to calling them names, to hold them up as examples of Bad American’s(tm) – but not one tiny bit of effort goes into responding to some pretty fucking serious questions.
How does a steel building fail from fire, when the burning temperature of jet fuel is less than half of the melting point of steel? (Office furniture burns at an even lower temperature, for that matter.)
How does a steel building suffering core structural damage do so in such a way that it collapses just slightly longer in time than free fall?
How is it that Tower Seven, which wasn’t hit by any aircraft, falls the same way as the two which were?
How is it that similar, even worse, fires in the past have never produced any of these behaviors?
That’s just the tip of the iceberg…
I like that Rosie is stirring people up enough to start asking questions that some of us have had since the day the attack happened, but I would really, really like to have a better spokesperson for the job. I wonder if Clint Eastwood has any misgivings?
The subject is ultimately a serious one and deserves serious attention. You can find a slew of sites with a Google search for “9/11 truth”, which will have everything from reasoned timelines to conspiracy theories that space aliens used it as a distraction to try to kidnap Tom Cruise onto a Xenu slave barge.
I like to take the scientific route.
Start here and here. There are physicists and engineers, probing the problem with scientific analysis.
If you have eight months free, work your way up to visiting the most complete 9/11 time line on the net.
Others have said it, and I’ll repeat it: the idea that 19 Arabs, none with enough piloting skills to fly a Piper Cub, managed to high-jack four planes and properly navigate the aircraft to three of their targets; is the biggest conspiracy theory I’ve heard yet.
