If You Call Us Enough Names, Maybe We'll Just Go Away . . .

Rolling Stone, the magazine traditionally devoted to evangelizing tinnitus and brain damage, has attempted to fix its pot-addled focus on those in the 9/11 Truth effort in this latest cretinous yawp by Matt Taibbi. You can mix bullshit and bong-water and spread it on a Ritz and call it peanut butter, but the fact that you have set up a straw man and attempted to define the terms of the discussion doesn't make it so.

Taibbi fires the opening salvo neatly into his own foot, narrowly missing an artery: A few weeks ago I wrote a column on the anniversary of 9/11 that offhandedly dismissed 9/11 conspiracy theorists as "clinically insane." I expected a little bit of heat in response, but nothing could have prepared me for the deluge of fuck-you mail that I actually got. Apparently every third person in the United States thinks George Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks.

According to the poll conducted by the eminent John Zogby of Utica, it's more like forty-two percent of the American public, Matty-boy, who believe that elements within the government were either directly complicit or complicit through negligence in the events of September 11. 2001. Are all those people "clinically insane," or just not responding to your illiterate bullying? (Maybe that's why they're building detention camps--to house all us "crazy people.") But "George Bush was behind" 9/11? Here entereth the Straw Man.

The Straw Man is rampant throughout, with Taibbi affixing his homemade labels to that personage: 9/11 Truth is the lowest form of conspiracy theory, because it doesn't offer an affirmative theory of the crime. The whole basis of the 9/11 Truth effort isn't to try to come up with a Grand Theory of Everything as a template to fit over the events of that day. That's basically what the so-called Official Version does, and is hence the real "conspiracy theory." What 9/11 Truth is supremely about is to debunk the official conspiracy theory, by showing inconsistencies, omissions, and distortions in its narrative.

9/11 Truth has more questions than answers--and they're questions that prats like Taibbi can't be bothered to ask. He's too worried that "every time one of those Loose Change dickwads opens his mouth, a Republican somewhere picks up five votes." It might astonish Taibbi (since he cherishes the phony Right/Left paradigm so dearly) that a huge portion of those in the 9/11 Truth effort consider themselves "conservative." Those traditional conservatives have been emitting the most fiery rhetoric in outrage over the 9/11 cover-up. The Left truly is Home of the Gatekeepers, who wish the controversy would die down so they could get back to telling their hilarious "Bush is stupid" jokes. They're worried that the 9/11 ruckus will backfire on their Artificial Democrats.

But Taibbi is right--9/11 Truth is lousy conspiracy theory, because it's not conspiracy theory at all. At its best, it's all about physics, metallurgy, chemistry, and logic. We'd rather leave the conspiracy theory to the conspirators.