OUR NEXT LETTER TO THE O-D

The following is a true collaborative effort between Herb Smith and me. It will bear my signature for the Utica Observer-Dispatch, and be co-signed for other publications:

Ya gotta love semantics. Rush Limbaugh is being paid $50 million a year through 2016 mainly for services rendered in making "liberal" the dirtiest word in the English language. Democrats in Congress are so fearful of the epithet that they've taken on the protective coloration of Republicans. Only those specially trained can tell them apart.

Likewise, when one suggests that the buildings at the World Trade Center were brought down by controlled demolition, he is immediately labeled a "conspiracy theorist," a term meant to evoke tinfoil hats and lapses in medication. By the same token, you might as well call Isaac Newton a "gravity theorist."

The controlled demolition hypothesis is a scientific argument which states that the use of pre-positioned explosives is the only possible explanation for the manner in which the buildings fell and for the amount of energy released in their destruction. There's no "theory" here about the identities of any possible "conspirators."

In scientific terms, the argument for pre-positioned explosives is perfectly rational. The collapses exhibited features seen exclusively in controlled demolitions. No additional theories are required to explain the relevant evidence.

Actually, it is the official explanation of a fire-induced gravitational collapse which violates known laws of physics. Whether one adheres to it depends on how much stock one is willing to invest in the wild-eyed rantings of Mr. Newton and the hallucinations of that other nutjob, Galileo.