>> "How do you know he's not just another right-wing nut?"
>
> The correct answer to this Berletian drivel: So what if he is?
I think the important issue here is Joseph's trajectory in this thread. It is, afterall, his thread. Here's a quick summary:
- He posts an "article" of Reynolds' "comments" that were available as filler on the Washington Times (!) website. Interestingly, the quotes in this "story" are directly from Reynolds' own posting on lewrockwell.com and aren't as a result of an "interview" ... despite this, here's a quotation:
>> Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard
>> to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate ...
Funny, since Reynolds lives in Arkansas and left Texas A&M some time ago. But I guess someone at the UPI learned how to give interviews by reading blogs and turning statements into answers to unasked questions. Anyway, Joseph offers no commentary other than to label the WTC Collapse story "bogus" (see Subject: line above) and provide this yummy snippet as "evidence" ...
- Doug snarkily calls Reynolds "versatile"
- Joseph asks Doug if he has anything more "concrete" to add
(I was wondering the same about Joseph)
- Doug wonders aloud whether the source is worth our time, since it seems unlikely that an (labor!) economist would have much authoritative to say about structural engineering -- essentially what Reynolds goes on to do in his piece
- Joseph says (despite my sneeking suspicion that this is what brought Joseph to forward it in the first place) that "whether he is an engineer or an economist is irrellevant to the main point" (which he conveniently left out of his first post) namely: "he is former Bush administration official who is taking a position that he thinks that 9-11 is an inside-job" ...
Well, at least that gets us to sit up straight! Because hey, no former Presidential appointee has beat up on his former boss. Er, well, not exactly. But okay. Let's take a closer look.
- In the mean time, Paul gives a go at debunking the WTC7 angle which Joseph blasts with old news about the FEMA whitewash. Paul quotes the NYT, and Gitchee Gumee chimes in with the oddball Silverstein theory. This is clearly going nowhere. Joseph then appeals to reasonableness ("If you look at the video ...") and drags us further into cocktail party chit-chat.
Feh, what happened to the significance argument?
Oh right, he finishes his jabs with a shrug about that not being the point (I love when people make an attempt to disprove something and then casually mention that the something isn't important -- why try to disprove it at all then?), he gets back to "the fact that a top former Bush adminsitration official is taking the position that 9-11 was an 'inside job'"
- Doug takes issue with the "top official" moniker and adds that his credentials include being part of the "think tank world" and asks how we know he's not just a "right-wing nut" ... unstated of course is the fact that no one has established his credentials at all.
- Joseph then says that it "doesn't matter whether he meets a definition of 'top' official" (then why did you say it before?) and backpedals to "he was a significant official" ... and (unclear why or how) labels Reynolds as someone "with solid Republican establishment credentials" (even though just before that he claims "All I know is that he a right-wing economist and public policy analyst" -- which is it? Is that all you know about him, or do you know he has "solid Republican establishment credentials" ...?). Then he goes on to accuse Doug of not taking "a sober, independent minded look at 9-11" -- and if Doug is drunk on this, I certainly know why! :-)
- Ok, so I bothered to go look into the guy, and find that he says a few things about himself:
+ He had the job for 16 months
+ He got the job because of an old contact
+ He was surprised to get it at all (perhaps because his Republican
Establishment credentials had expired?)
+ He was a 3rd-level functionary
+ He had no way to make an impact
+ The best thing he did there was to learn that the govt. doesn't work
- So Joseph acuses Doug of inuendo, making fun of right-wing nutjobs (which Joseph no longer challenges Reynolds might be) and then somehow (and this escapes me) leads into this all pointing clearly to how nobody questions the official story.
Maybe if the official story were to get questioned in a straightforward way instead of how this thread went (and most of Joseph's attempts to jump-start this thread on this list) then we'd listen better. But in the mean time, let's be clear: it's not at all "politically significant" that this guy wrote a rehash of collected factoids on some blog and some UPI hack blasted it into a Moonie paper as filler.
/jordan