Ms. Garafolo started in Toronto with City T.V. That station lies and dies on tabloid sensationalism - it is less now - and ‘bumper-sticker intellect.’ Everything is only black and white & everything is essentially entertainment (esp this claim). Her specialty was Fashion, Silly people, and dumb-people-trying-to-seem-intelligent. City t.v. has done more to employ dumb people and silly people in Toronto than any social programme ever known. They have improved since the departure of Moses Z. (the bizarre founder), but they are still mostly circus midgets. I would ask any horse, or school child or mailbox its opinion and regard it equally with Garafalo’s.
What special qualifications do Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, et al., have? They’re the ones I always hear bitching about this, but they’re no more expert themselves. They’re just paid to talk. Same thing.
This is only slightly less ridiculous.
I took a less crazed view HERE
It was not appreciated, yet I still wonder…
Whoa! I’ve got to be in on this one (in GD, surely), but first things first;
Cheeseburger time.
Peace,
mangeorge
I can’t speak for Rush, but Bill and Sean have a staff of researchers working for them to collect info and help formulate their analyses. You may not agree with their analyses, but it is disingenuous to imply that they are speaking off the cuff, as Ms. Garafolo is.
It’s definitely not “mainstream” in the American political left; I read progressive newsmagazines like The Nation and American Prospect, and I’ve never seen any “Bush caused 9/11” conspiracy taken seriously in their pages.
Nor would I consider PNAC rhetoric about “Pearl-Harbor type catalyzing events” a reason to take such conspiracy theories seriously. The PNAC folks may have been quick to seize the opportunities that 9/11 provided, but I don’t believe they’d deliberately or even negligently let thousands of Americans die just to create such opportunities.
Exactly. The “catalyzing event” idea is only one step removed from the tinfoil-hat crowd. You can’t predict how the public will react to a tragedy like 9/11. Remember, the terrorist attacks in Spain swung voter sympathy against the incumbent. Bush might have had an advisor who thought that a major terrorist attack might galvanize the public behind him, but Bush (or any other president) would have to be totally insane to gamble his political career on such a tenuous theory. That would be like signing a lease for a multi-million-dollar house on Malibu beach, based on the hope that you’ll win the lottery next week.
Oh, so it’s the democrats now? I thought we were talking about liberals.
I’ll bet that the number of times “tinfoil hat” has been mentioned here far exceeds the number of people who have actually ever worn one. 
I myself can be pretty wacko. I admire Michael Moore. I think that Nader makes a lot of sense. I know a couple who think he tends to conservatism. Nobody believes the admin had an active role in the attacks of 9/11. Nobody.
But, did Bush look surprised when he got the news in that classroom?
Peace,
mangeorge
To me, it sounded as if she really believed it.
Zev Steinhardt
Most people I know feel Bush and team expected the attacks and allowed them to happen.
When I first heard about the attacks, and after a few minutes of the scope of the attacks played out in my head, I knew right away Bush would invade Iraq. If you could dig out the threads on this board from around that time you’ll see others said the same thing along with me.
Well, then, the next question would be how close are you and your associates to “mainstream” liberalism? I know a lot of conspiracy addicts and only a very few of them actually hold the position that the administration had any concrete prior warning of the attacks, and fewer still hold that they had any complicity in the attacks.
My impression is that the position outlined in the OP does tend to be a fringe position–and Ms. Garolfalo’s participation does not change that assessment.
Mr. Bush expressed a will to attack Iraq during his candidacy for the prsidency, so perceiving the WTC/Pentagon attacks as an excuse for his to carry out that threat is not farfetched, in itself. I would point out, however, that your earliest comment on that scenario on this MB only occurred 13 months after the WTC/Pentagon attack, not right away. Even comments by other posters did not begin linking the WTC/Pentagon attacks to an Iraq war for over seven months following the September attacks.
If Bush was going to stage these attacks, I’d think he would’ve seen to it that there were some Iraqis involved, as it would’ve helped his case for war tremendously. Seems like a lot of effort and risk to go through the effort of staging 9/11 and then not tying it to your number 1 foreign policy objective.
I have a lot of liberal friends, and not a one of them think Bush (or Israel, or aliens) staged 9/11. A few of my conservative friends to think Saddam was behind it though.
You missed Dennis Miller and that guy thats on after the Daily Show (Colin something?). But regardless, its a democracy, the idea is that everyones qualified to asses our politicians. The fact that some comedians express thier opinions is a good thing, even if their opinions are a bit batty. And if nothing else, it gives them something to make jokes about other then mattress tags and their parents.
Fringe liberals aren’t the only ones behind the “Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11” conspiracy. Black helicopter libertarians such as Alex Jones are also part of it.
I’ve heard a fair number of leftists voice this opinion, but I don’t think it’s a majority opinion of the left. Of course, I’m not sure what majority means here, much less the left!
To the everlasting fury of my radical friends, I am a critical thinker a skeptic, and a realist. For this reason, I don’t think that 9/11 was a right-wing conspiracy. Some reasons:
I think we have solid psychological evidence to show that conspiracy theories abound in times of chaos and fear. People feel that their lives are out of control, so they have to make up something else that is in control, some malevolent force that is pulling the strings. With the Nazis it was the Jews.
I also think that if I was designing a conspiracy of this type, I’d get people just angry enough to do my bidding, without going completely overboard. For one thing, simplicity is much easier to implement and conceal. After all, when the Nazis burned down the Reichstag, they did it when it was empty! That was enough for their purposes. Blowing it up with a lot of legislators in it would have caused way too many questions. And don’t tell me that some Nazis would have been killed; Hitler would not have cared.
This is like the conspiracy idea that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor but let it happen so that we’d be drawn into war. If so, the really smart thing to do would have been to tell the Pacific Fleet in secret, then be waiting for the attack. Even if we lost a few ships, we wouldn’t have been in such dire straits.
In short, you can’t have people smart enough to try to con the entire American population, and yet dumb enough to overdo it so badly that everybody immediately starts asking questions.
Many well-meaning leftists look at the world the way it is, compare it to the world the way it ought to be, and descend into despair or impotent anger. The US population seems to be reactionary, afraid, and warlike: that’s scary. Nobody cares about civil liberties any more. The fundamentalists seem to be running the government. In our deepest fears, we think that this was all a set-up.
The setup was that we’ve been hit by a bunch of shocks. The so-called progress of the Reagan era, the so-called end of the Cold War, all disappeared. The world is, and will remain, a scary place. We’re not completely in control, and never were. Fight hard for what you believe is right; that’s the best you can do.
For what it’s worth, Democratic Underground believes in this conspiracy with few exceptions. I’m not sure if they are representative the left wing or not.
They call it LIHOP or MIHOP = (Bush) Let It Happen On Purpose and (Bush) Made It Happen On Purpose. LIHOP seems to be the prevailing opinion with a good percentage going for MIHOP.
Likewise, PNAC, with their 4 paid staffers, gets a whole lot of play in Democratic Underground and is a major component of their LIHOP/MIHOP hypotheses. This thread was the first time I’ve seen someone bring up PNAC in a context unrelated to Democratic Underground.
How you extrapolate DU to the rest of the left wing is up to you. I’m not even going to try.
Didn’t really matter in the end, did it?
Anyway, no, this is not a popular belief and DU does not represent a significant chunk of the left.
I don’t believe that he could mastermind breakfast, much less that attack, but I DO think that in the aftermath and chaos, he allowed law enforcement under his control to pin almost every move on the dead hijackers. He didn’t allow any messy investigations in to his family friends, the Saudi Royals. And as if to directly prove my point, he fought the 9/11 Commission until enough people shouted him down. Lastly, I agree he was war-bent from the beginning and relished attacking other countries. Some men never grow out of playing at soldiers, or else games like Halo wouldn’t be so damn popular.