Reply #13: You really miss the point

[jberryhill]

Okay, I'll pick one:


What did you think of the original appointment of Henry Kissinger to be the chairman of the 9/11 Commission?


That appointment, like much of the activities and output of the Commission, reeked to high heaven and made it abundantly clear that there were limits of inquiry beyond which the Commission was not going to go, in order to protect privileged behinds.

You might as well ask me what I thought of the appointment of George W. Bush to the presidency in 2001. That also reeked.

Obviously, when you have an act that - even as alleged - involved well-connected Saudis, then having people with good Saudi connections as "investigators" is a clear signal that one is not serious about conducting an investigation.

You might as well ask what I thought of the manner in which Bush and Cheney were jointly interviewed by the Commission. Absolutely, they needed to be in the same room at the same time, because otherwise their stories wouldn't match up. That's the problem with liars, and it is as clear as day.

Do you remember when crop circles were a new and unexplained phenomenon? There is a mindset that is uncomfortable with "I don't know what caused it, but that doesn't mean I buy into any bizarre explanation that comes down the pike." There is another mindset that says, "Aha, something I don't understand fully - therefore it must be caused by <insert pet theory here>".

The "pet theory" that jumps into that breach of incomplete knowledge (and all knowledge is incomplete) always confirms what the person had been thinking all along. For anti-semites, 9/11 was caused by "the Jews". For Jerry Falwell, 9/11 was caused by "lesbians".

My background is in engineering and physics. There are a limited number of things that I feel that I know something about well enough to bother to participate in a forum discussion. When I see nutty engineering and physics then, yes, I respond to it.

But the larger discussion really needs to move beyond this impression that there is a binary choice between being an "OCT'er" or believing in any piece of lunacy that is posted here.