9/11 Truther Madness

I see that Bill Maher had some problems with 9/11 Truthers in his audience the other night. Now, I can't think of a more appropriate person to wish 9/11 Truthers onto than Bill Maher--who represents everything that I find offensive about Hollywood leftism. But I guess that Maher isn't a complete idiot, because he recognizes the absurdity of the 9/11 Truther delusions.

Look, if you tell me that the 9/11 Commission might have left out information about 9/11 because they were trying to protect national security technical methods, I won't be surprised. If you tell me that they didn't investigate certain questions (such as the wall between FBI and CIA) to avoid embarrassing members of the Commission who set up that wall, I won't be at all surprised. Governmental officials often do stupid things (Waco, for example), and sometimes intentionally evil things, and afterwards, they have to cover up their stupidity. But this notion that Bush intentionally set up or allowed the 9/11 attacks to have an excuse to start a war is madness.

I've pointed out in the past that to set up something like this would have required an army of people--and the chance of all them of staying silent, especially now that one of the consequences of 9/11, the Iraq War, has been such a costly fiasco, is zero.

I've pointed out in the past that the 9/11 Truther crowd thinks Bush was such a genius that he managed to make the 9/11 attacks happen, look like al-Qaeda did them, persuaded Osama bin Laden somehow to take credit for them--and then couldn't figure out to plant fake WMDs in Iraq to justify the war. If Bush is dishonest enough and smart enough to set up 9/11 as a false flag operation, then why he suddenly get stupid or honest about not finding vast quantities of WMDs in Iraq?

Everyone expected to find WMDs in Iraq. Opponents of the war argued against it because of the massive casualties that would have resulted from Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Coalition forces. Even Hussein's own generals thought that other Iraqi military units had chemical weapons. If the CIA had "found" a metric ton of sarin a few weeks after the invasion, demonstrated it on a dog for reporters, then destroyed it all to avoid putting others at risk, no one would have been the wiser.

What is driving this now relatively large movement of people with these elaborate and completely unbelievable theories about 9/11? I noticed that one of my son's friends was both an early 9/11 skeptic--and a skeptic about the Moon landing. This is not a coincidence, I'm afraid.

Over the years I have noticed a number of rather common characteristics of conspiracy buffs.

1. They are often markedly smarter than average people.

2. They are often not college graduates, in spite of their superior intelligence. Often, financial difficulties made this impossible.

3. They believe that the government is filled with people who are at least as intelligent as they are, and have the additional advantage of being well educated, from families of high socioeconomic status. As a result, they are often struggling with an intellectual inferiority complex which they must have overcome with a moral superiority complex.

It is very difficult to persuade such people that what they see as conspiracy is more easily explained by stupidity--because that would imply that governmental officials, captains of industry, and others involved in these elaborate conspiracies are actually not their intellectual superiors at all--just people who ended up in the right place at the right time, or who were born into a higher status family.