A Response from a Kossack

Yesterday I put out a call for the Daily Kos to begin getting more forceful in their rejection of the 9-11 Denial crowd. Today, one of the "Truther" Kossacks takes me to task:

Why exactly does the official story need defending? Didn't we have a 9/11 Commission to take care of all the questions? I mean we know Kean and Hamilton admit that it was a whitewash, but still is this really necessary?

It's not that the "official story" needs defending. It's that the conspiracy theory needs to be defeated. Look, I'm a moderate conservative in the Rudy Giuliani/John McCain mold, so I know that what I say isn't going to cut much ice with the Kos crowd. But what about David Corn, George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn?

And Kean and Hamilton did not claim their commission was a whitewash; that an interpretation by a columnist who thought the report should have been more critical of US support for Israel.

As usual, my concern is misinterpreted (as is my name):

Apparently this new poll which shows 35% of Dems believe Bush Knew has caused a panic of sorts. And with John Edwards recently making a comment about looking into the collapse of World Trade Center 7 there seems to be concern that the Dems could use this as part of their platform. And we've already known about Dennis Kucinich's position on this issue.

Believe me, Republicans are praying that the Democrats embrace 9-11 Denial as part of their platform; it seems likely that would be one of the few ways the Democrats could suffer a humiliating defeat in 2008.

No, the reason why I called for the Kos frontpage diarists to tackle this subject head-on is that I look at 9-11 Trutherism as poisonous to the national debate, and very much more to the liberal side than the conservative side. As I said in my previous post, I don't believe the poll that says 35% of Democrats believe in the 9-11 conspiracy theories.

And I am not opposed to further investigation; for example NIST is still working on their report on WTC-7 and I applaud them for that. But the notion that we need yet another 9-11 Commission is absurd because a) they got it mostly right, and b) the Truthers won't be satisfied with any commission that concludes anything less than "9-11 was an inside job!" which would require a commission made up of kooks like Morgan Reynolds, David Ray Griffin and Dylan Avery.

I can understand that when someone who's part of your political opposition makes a recommendation as to what you should do, you're probably smarter ignoring them. But I am not making a recommendation about politics and anyway, this is an issue about which Kos is on record as agreeing with us. We've applauded the many people on the left who've come out forcefully against the 9-11 crackpots, like those I listed above. They know, as Monbiot wrote:

Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build.