A Big Honking Plate of Stupid

It's hard to say what part of this interview between Roseanne Barr and Jon Gold (with Coleen Rowley) is my favorite. Is it when Roseanne says, "Thank God for Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone?", apparently unaware of what Matt wrote about the 9-11 Truthers? Is it when Roseanne's buddy calls in to suggest that the Truth Movement is a CIA plot? Is it when he goes on to suggest that the Truthers should drop their focus on 9-11 and instead concentrate on campaign finance reform and Jon Gold agrees? Or is it when Gold himself suggests that the vote be banned for whites and males for a couple centuries? Correction: Idiot Jon Gold stops by in the comments and says it was not he who suggested banning the vote for whites and males, and listening to it again I can hear it was Roseanne's buddy. My apologies to idiot Jon.

No, for me the best part is that Coleen Rowley sits there contributing to the conversation, and doesn't once seem to realize that she's talking with a bunch of insane people. I've known since her participation in the Treason in American Conference that she was a few slices short of a loaf, but still it's a bit jarring to realize that Time Magazine's co-person of the year for 2002 is so clueless.

Coleen Rowley Makes Some Sense

In this interview at Antiwar.com. I've slammed her a few times for failing to articulate clearly that she doesn't believe that the government allowed the 9-11 attacks to happen, but here at least it is clear that what she is talking about is how some incompetence (particularly at the CIA) resulted in the attacks not being stopped.

And there I find it hard to disagree with her. She points out that the Moussaoui case was brought to DCI George Tenet's attention in August of 2001, in a Power Point presentation entitled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly". She makes the interesting point that it was not Moussaoui's laptop computer that contained the information that would have linked him back to KSM and Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh; rather items in his personal possession.

I suspect her case on the preventable nature of 9-11 is weaker than she claims; even if they had traced Moussaoui back to KSM, would that have revealed the hijacking teams? I don't know, but certainly it would have resulted in a lot of attention being given to Muslims learning to fly in the US.

We spend a lot of time here debunking the 9-11 Truthers for their fantasies of controlled demolition and the missile at the Pentagon. So I was disappointed that Coleen showed up at a 9-11 Truth conference to lend them some of her credibility. But after listening to this interview, my sense is that Rowley's no kook. She's clearly very much anti-war, but that's not a kook position, even if it's not my position.