Jason Linkins Pisses Me Off

I doubt that George knew (why tell the dumb guy?) but I'm convinced little brother Marvin was in it up to his eyeballs.

Normally, I like  Jason Linkins, who writes for the Huffington Post – he’s a bright enough guy, he writes clearly and I agree with him more than 50% of the time – but today’s column seriously pissed me off.  He dismisses those of us who think that Sarah Palin is not Trig’s mother, but his grandmother,  by saying we’re a bunch of whacko conspiracy theorists engaging in backwards logic.  I admit that sometimes I work backwards – out here in the land on news consumers, what else can we do? – we see the news, we feel instinctively that they are lying to us, and we try and figure out what’s going on.  We theorize. 

But I am not an irrational person and if someone can prove me wrong, I’ll cede the point.  I no longer believe that crop circles were made by aliens, for instance.

But then he says that everybody who believes that Trig is not Sarah’s daughter also believes in Area 51, Bigfoot, and a whole lot of other conspiracy theories including that 9/11 was an inside job.  I believe that one, too, and I don’t like it being dismissed lightly.

 Trig birtherism, and the belief that 9/11 was an inside job, are both based on quite a bit of evidence – and lack of it.
They have nothing to do with flying saucers, bigfoot, Obama’s birth certificate or any of the others on that list that he throws into the mix just to try to make them look ridiculous. 

What about the flight attendants not noticing she looked pregnant?  What about that 20 hour flight?  What about her staff being surprised when she told them she was 7 months pregnant?

re 9/11: What about the Larry Silverstein confession, the PNAC “Pearl Harbor” statement, the identical collapse of building 7 which was not struck by a plane and did not have a similar structure, what about Bush’s whereabouts from 9/11-9/13, what about the fact that he just happened to be at a beautiful photo-op in front of school kids (I’d find the whole thing much more believable as a surprise if he’d been playing golf or clearing brush, as was his routine), what about the fact that Marvin Bush was director of security for the WTC, which was closed inexplicably several times in the months prior to 9/11, what about the lack of physical evidence at the Pentagon (I remember the Lockerbie incident – how investigators were examining the LUGGAGE for clues), what about the amazingly swift, and uncharacteristic, insurance settlement…the list goes on and on.

No, in both these cases, there is plenty of unexamined evidence, there are plenty of unanswered questions, and you cannot just sweep them under the rug of revisionist history by saying hahaha, you’re all nuts just like the birthers.