Bill Maher: 9/11 Truthers need professional help, not publicity
Bill Maher takes a jab at the 9/11 Truth movement in a recent “New Rules” segment…. “Crazy people who still think the government brought down the Twin Towers in a controlled explosion have to stop pretending that I’m the one who’s being naive,” says Maher. How big a lunatic do you have to be to watch two giant airliners packed with jet fuel slam into buildings on live TV, igniting a massive inferno that burned for two hours, and then think ‘Well, if you believe that was the cause…’…. Stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on the show and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you.”
At the risk of alienating some of my readers, I’m going to have to side with Maher on this one. Not that there aren’t a lot of unanswered questions and things that might make a reasonable person go “hmm….”, but to seriously believe that the US government (as much as I detest this Administration) was involved in a plot to stage the 9.11 hijackings and murder 3,000 Americans simply strains the bounds of credibility.
I’m not about to dispute that there are far more questions than there ever will be answers. Consider this, though: 9.11 just might be as simple as 19 radical Islamofascists hijacking four planes, killing 3000 Americans and toppling or damaging three iconic American buildings. Is it really necessary to engage in a never-ending debate about cutting charges, conspiracies, or whatever else might defy rational explanation? We’re talking about this generation’s Pearl Harbor, an attack on this nation unimaginable in both scope and execution…and yet it happened. Given the stunning breadth of this tragedy, there’s a pretty good chance that not all of it can be wrapped up into a nice, neat little intellectual package. Does this mean that we should just accept the official version of events and call it a day like Good Germans? Of course not. But neither should we be inventing and creating conspiracy theories out of whole cloth.
The truly sad thing is that 9.11 conspiracies have become a cottage industry over the past six years. Academics, nut jobs, and otherwise well-meaning Americans have made careers out of trying to prove the unprovable. Again, there’s certainly nothing wrong with studying the attacks and trying to add to our general knowledge base concerning what occurred on that terrible day. But spinning conspiracy theories out of whole cloth? Sometimes, there are things that are of sufficient scale and scope that they simply defy normal, rational explanation. Does that mean that this should be taken as indicating some sort of insidious conspiracy exists? Of course not. Perhaps we simply aren’t meant to be able to explain or understand some events down to the last iota. Perhaps 9.11 is one of those events…and yes, perhaps that should be enough.
