..........Nevertheless, having said what the gatekeepers were doing, Conover named a fair number of "this cabal of lily-livered leftists":

..............................Among the others lobbing missiles at us from the battlements are Norman Solomon,
....................executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy; David Corn, The Nation's Washing-
....................ton editor; Michael Albert, co-founder of Z Magazine and system operator of the maga-
....................zine's Znet.org; Steve Rendall, FAIR's senior analyst; Chip Berlet, senior research analyst
....................for Political Research Associates; Larry Bensky of Pacifica Radio's flagship station, KPFA;
....................and Noam Chomsky, writer, philosopher, and professor of linguistics at MIT.

.................... ..........Quite a lineup, eh? And there are others.

..............................Ask yourselves why, if we are so loony—and Mike Ruppert is the looniest of all—
....................why these gentlemen are expending so much energy in writing reams of copy denouncing us,
....................with what has become the new epithet, "conspiracy theorists?" Why not simply ignore us?
....................Pretend we don't exist?

..............................What worse punishment can they mete out for our ignominious behavior than ignoring us?
....................Or is there more to their motives? [emphasis added]


..........Consider: All of that was written almost five years ago! And every single one in Conover's entire cabal of "lily-livered leftists" is still "lobbing missiles" and still sticking firmly to their anti-empirical, anti-evidential, absolutely adamantine wall of cover-up, suppression, innuendo, and smear (for pure falsehood, innuendo, smear, and really crappy logic see this particularly purulent and shameless David Corn diatribe from 2002). So what if it's been five years, someone asks? Well, so this: Doesn't anyone with more than a molecule of brains have to agree that, yes, otherwise intelligent thinking people who stick to falsehood, cover-up, smear, innuendo, and evasion of facts for five long unbroken years must have more for motive than simply the frivolous or embarrassing discrediting of their colleagues in the media?

..........Let me just ask, for example: Is there anyone else who—like me—would very, very much love to know precisely what it was that must have happened to Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive magazine between October of 2001 and May of 2002? Whatever it was, I'll bet it would make a real doozie of a one-act play or a short story in the manner of someone like, say, the late Graham Greene.

..........The reason I'm so desirous of knowing just what happened to Rothschild between those dates is that I've read Bev Conover and Carla Binion. Binion, in a piece written shortly after Conover's and called "Conspiracy Theories and Real Reporters", reminded us that in October of 2001, Rothschild wrote the following in The Progressive:

....................The United States does not have clean hands in the world. The history of the last fifty
....................years is the history of U. S. war and repression in one Third World country after another.
....................It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States has acted as a terrorist from
....................Guatemala to Iran, from El Salvador to Vietnam, from Chili to Indonesia . . . [sic] To
....................heighten the level of terror by waging all-out war against Afghanistan or any other
....................country Bush is aiming his bombers at will serve no useful purpose.

..........Good enough: Nothing there that one mightn't expect or hope for from the editor of a significant and historically progressive publication when he's talking about a reactionary, unelected, and militarist administration. In short, Matthew Rothschild in those words was both speaking and telling the truth. I find myself wanting to say, "How refreshing!" But why in non-god's name should one be refreshed by the truth, when it's the truth that should be standard, everyday fare?

..........Well, the answer is that Rothschild's truth of October 2001 quickly turned—by May of 2002—to the long and unbroken parade of lies, stupidity, fallacy, cover-up, smear, innuendo, and inanely perseverant attacks on 9/11 investigators, writers, and scholars as being simple-minded and contemptible "conspiracy theorists."

..........Why the change? And why so sudden a change? Who or what got to Rothschild between October and May? And what did it or they get to him with? What kind of threat, what kind of malice, what kind of fear, what kind of terror—yes, as in the word "terrorism"—could it have been that it or they confronted Rothschild with?

..........Or was it nothing of the sort, nothing like any of that? Is it just that Rothschild really is as dim, non-logical, perfectly hollow-headed a fellow as he seems to be in his anti-9/11 Truth diatribes?

..........If you're a reader of my "Food for Thought" pieces, you may remember that Rothschild wrote a stupendously juvenile, tortured, and inane cover-up piece called "Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already," a piece that appeared in The Progressive and was dated September 11, 2006, the five-year "anniversary" of the 9/11 attacks. So abysmal was that piece of work that I was obliged, in my professional capacity as a professor emeritus of "English," to award it a grade of F. Here's the paragraph where that award was given, in this year's Food for Thought One, part two:

..............................You not only reveal, Mr. Rothschild, that you have never read Mother Goose, that
....................you have never read the Fables of Aesop, that you have never read The Canterbury
....................Tales of Chaucer; you not only, Mr. Rothschild, show either your own ignorance or your
....................criminal complicity in the crimes of murder and treason that were committed on 9/11 (by
....................deceitfully obscuring evidence relating directly to them); but, Mr. Rothschild, you gravely
....................and unforgivably insult our intelligence over and over again in—whether it be criminal or
....................not—your eminently juvenile, childish, infantile, baby-talking piece of writing. Throughout
....................my study and analysis of the piece, it has become increasingly clear to me that all of my
....................professional training to become a Ph.D., and that all of my ethical responsibilities as I
....................honored and undertook them over forty years as an instructor—requiring even now
....................that I evaluate not just student writing but any writing by absolutely the same measures
....................and by absolutely the same rules—all of these, Mr. Rothschild, bring me to the unavoid-
....................able recognition that I can do no other than award your essay with a grade of F, it being
....................so abysmal, so wholly incompetent, and so entirely and thoroughly fraudulent.

..........Not only is Rothschild's piece distinguished as a failure so total as to deserve only pity or contempt, this by merit of its being an ignorant, bottom-feeding, propagandistic, closed-minded, fallacy-filled, tendentious, ungrounded piece of work—but it's further distinguished by the fact that it provides an example of the kind of non-thinking and non-writing on 9/11 that Rothschild has stuck with for no fewer than five long years!

..........Now, to stick that long with a project that self-demeaning and that shameful to anyone in the profession of writing—the threats or forces at work to corrupt a professional journalist so quickly and so entirely and so demeaningly and for so long a time must be some forces indeed.

..........We know from both Binion and Conover that Rothschild's "The Crude Politics of Scandal" appeared in The Progressive and was dated May 29, 2002, and that in it Rothschild hypothesized what would have happened "if Al Gore had been President on September 11." From what we know now, it's unlikely that 9/11 itself would have happened if Gore had been in the White House, and we know now that that's one of the reasons it was imperative to the Bushiscti that he never be in that place or position—hence the stolen, or fraudulent, or non-elective election.

..........Of course, back in May 2002, a lot less of that sort of thing was known—five years of intense scholarship have provided a very great abundance of information as to what was going on when and what plans were afoot as of what dates. Even so, go ahead and forgive Rothschild for having a degree of 9/11 ignorance commensurate with the date of May 2002. And give him credit for saying that "We need an Independent Commission to get to the bottom of this fiasco." Fat chance of that ever happening, as we now know so well. Still, give Rothschild a May 2002's worth of credit just for saying that such a commission was needed.

..........But even giving him those two credits, there's no way in the world that he can be pardoned for turning straight at his fellow progressives and baring his fangs in the contemptuous way he does. "But what we don't need," snarls he,

....................is crazy conspiracy theorists coming from the left. Almost every time I've spoken in public
....................since September 11, I've heard variations of the following theme: Bush not only knew
....................about the attacks, but wanted the United States to be attacked so that he could (and here
....................you can take your pick):

.................... a) Increase his popularity by waging war

.................... b) Justify an increase in Pentagon spending

.................... c) Boost the profits of the Carlyle Group, a private military investment group that in-
....................cludes Bush's father, among other heavyweights.

..........In short, Rothschild has already, way back in May 2002, switched over to his since-then standard mode of smear and innuendo and whitewash and snide condescension toward the naiveté, gullibility, and childish stupidity of his own fellow progressives.

..........Following a quick knife-slash at the courageous and great truth-seeker Cynthia McKinney (to Rothschild she's an "arch-conspiracist"), he concludes his piece as follows, with the result that a person like me understands quite, quite clearly that from here on in Rothschild is one whom "I will trust as I will adders fang'd":

..............................The claim that Bush knew the U.S. would be attacked and intentionally let it
....................happen for his own nefarious purposes is well beyond my significant skeptical
....................powers. It assumes a callousness at the loss of innocent American lives that I
....................wouldn't want to impute to any President. And it greatly underestimates the like-
....................lihood of bureaucratic incompetence. (A hedge fund against such incompetence
....................would be a sure profit-maker.)

..............................When lefties go off half-cocked with conspiracy theories, it does our
....................cause no good. We instantly lose credibility with our fellow citizens, and it dis-
....................tracts us from the main problem: Not that a few corrupt individuals are taking
....................the country over a cliff, but that a system of militarism and corporatism distorts
....................our values, inverts our priorities, and helps to sow the seeds of hatred overseas.

..............................Let's focus on that, and not the Carlyle Group.

..........Skillfully and nefariously done. He's still "one of us," as he makes clear by using "we," by the phrases "our cause" and "our fellow citizens," and by clarifying that he, too, opposes a "system of militarism and corporatism [that] distorts our values, inverts our priorities, and helps to sow the seeds of hatred overseas."

..........But. But the Carlyle Group is just hunky dory, an institution perfectly fine and nice, and it's a big, big mistake to mess around with it. And also, dear children, there's no way that the post-9/11 situation can be so simple as "a few corrupt individuals. . .taking the country over a cliff." So, happy lefties, if you know what's good for you you'd better back off, you'd better declare the red herring of "incompetence" to be the full cause and true source of 9/11 and of all its attendant and subsequent ills, and, above all, you'd better give due respect to the fact of Matthew Rothschild's inability to believe that the Bushiscti could possibly be so bad as you foolish and half-cocked lefties might think.

..........Yes, there it is. Right there is a line worthy of Iago himself; a line stupendous in its faux-naiveté; in its utter inanity; its total and deliberate simple-mindedness; a line desperate to please the powerful; a line that could be written only by one who is so deeply naive as not to be fully adult; or by one who knows no shame; or by one who is terrified to death: a line representative of the most adamantly determined of those once-free, progressive, inquiring minds now committed intractably to the covering up of 9/11 truth and therefore to the more and more certain bringing forth of the first dictatorship of America:

..............................It assumes a callousness at the loss of innocent American lives that I wouldn't
....................want to impute to any President.