Loose Stools

I you want to inspect one of the piles of steaming elephant shit seeping across the nation these days, spend one hour, 21 minutes and 50 seconds watching Loose Change, 2nd Edition and then head here, here and here to help wash the ick off. (Video above is only the trailer.)

It's actually quite entertaining. There's nothing like a good conspiracy theory to get the blood flowing away from your brain. And the accessibility of information these days makes even a crew of 20-something would-be "documentarians" into Oliver Stone. But without the sense of proportion.

It irks me that anyone would invoke the memory of the victims when painting the attacks of 9/11 as some orchestrated scheme to wage unimpeded war or achieve some Bond-villain global dominance.

I'm not about to get into a pissing match with 9/11 conspiracy theorists on the supposed merits of their arguments. Talking sense to people like these serves as much purpose as licking a bald man's head to solve algebraic equations. And those rebuttal sites linked above do an admirable job picking apart the film frame-by-frame, with appropriate disdain and snark. (Pay close attention to the stubborn replies of the die-hards, blind in the face of contradicting evidence.)

But in case you don't have the patience or spare time, allow me to summarize: 9/11 was a conspiracy. One undertaken by 19 fanatic Al Qaida henchmen supported by a network of terrorists led (at least then) by Ossama bin Laden. All of the untold heaps of evidence collected before and since Sept. 11 point in this direction.

Of course, there's always the temptation to look at all the unanswered questions, apparent inconsistencies or coincidences and scream rat. Without stopping to think that there really wasn't any kind of blueprint for what might happen when fully-fueled jet liners are rammed at top speeds into skyscrapers and fortified pentagonal buildings.

Or wondering how thousands of people across almost every government agency have managed to execute such a perfect plan in perfect secrecy, with nobody speaking a word of it even 4 1/2 years later. [Though the moon landing must have been faked. I mean, who ever heard of a flag waving in the vacuum of space? Huh? Whassat? Wires in the material so it looked unfurled? NASA nerds think of everything.]

Or -- the real kicker -- crediting the administration of George W. Bush with such a crack operation while they can't seem to do much else. Only on 24 is the president both incompetent and a criminal mastermind.

It's absurd that I'm even making these points. Anyone who believes the nonsense in this movie and on the endless parade of nutbag websites likely believes Ryan Seacrest orchestrated the Mexican wrestling cream corn conspiracy.

The people who get their panties in a bunch over such lunacy certainly distrust their government. So do I. But for all its faults, Bush, Cheney, Rummy, et al. are not homicidal maniacs. At least not intentionally.

And picking apart a theory for its supposed gaps doesn't help build a competing theory. This is the fallacy of Intelligent Design, which attempts to undermine the 140 years of scientific evidence in support of natural selection in favor of an untestable theory for which there is ZERO evidence.

Like the OJ Simpson defense team, which argued each and every piece of the prosecution's case without presenting anything resembling a competing theory that might explain the facts. I mean, those smug pricks would argue that the LAPD were both cunning framers of an innocent man and incompetent investigators who allowed the evidence to become contaminated and unreliable.

Those examples weren't selected randomly. At least in the news media, this country is splitting along racial and religious lines. When the obvious lessons of Crash earn critical acclaim and Oscar gold, when Katrina shows us who really gets left behind, when South Dakota proposes a ban on all abortion and the Christianist activists oppose contraception even for married couples , when the way to get elected seems to be advocating discrimination against homosexuals, when scientists are compromised by political interests ... this country is heading for something worse than a fabricated War on Christmas.

So when a local Fox News station airs a segment on the moronic bile of Loose Change, it provides legitimacy to crackpots and marks another step down a path with little opportunity for escape. A path where debate is replaced by the insistence of people who know they are right without having earned their enlightenment through a rational examination of the facts.

We are building a country where half the people are covering themselves with infected diarrhea, happy as blind pigs and incapable of thought.

At least it's entertaining.