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 Gifts
for all occasions in the Galleria!October 1, 2006 Are Americans This Dumb? By Jan A. Larson As reported in the online version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer a recent poll indicated that upwards of one third of Americans believe the Bush administration assisted with and/or took no action to stop the attacks of 9/11. A USA Today story indicated that over 40% of Americans believe the Bush administration is deliberately manipulating gasoline prices in advance of the November elections. There are also more than a few that think the administration not only blew up the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, but also caused the hurricane itself. Are Americans really this dumb? Certainly some Americans are just plain dumb, without the ability to reason or the common sense to know the difference between the plausible and the preposterous. Others, with their own agenda, namely to discredit the Bush administration at every turn (and appeal to the aforementioned dumb people along the way), certainly know better but go along with the wacky conspiracy theories anyway, at least publicly. It never ceases to amaze me how the Bush-haters can simultaneously maintain that he is the dumbest guy to every occupy the White House on one hand, and insist that he is an all-powerful evil genius on the other. Let us analyze for a minute. (Those of you that answered "Yes, I am" to my question in the fourth paragraph above can stop reading now. The remainder of this article will be over your head.) Let's assume that George W. Bush, or considering how dumb he is, other nefarious individuals in the administration, maybe Dick Cheney for one, conspired to enable the attacks of 9/11. If we assume, as do many of the more popular 9/11 conspiracy theories, that explosives were planted in the World Trade Center towers, those explosives would have had to have been planted without detection. There are only a handful of companies and individuals with the expertise to pull off a controlled demolition on the scale of the World Trade Center. Yet, despite cameras from all angles trained on the towers as they burned the explosions aren't apparent and with the propensity for information leaks in Washington, no one has squealed. Conspiracy theorists also claim that a cruise missile and not an airliner hit the Pentagon. This fails to explain why the 184 people that were on American Airlines flight 77 have never been seen again. I guess that must be part II of the cruise missile conspiracy. The video of the airliner hitting the Pentagon must be part III. Why would George W. Bush (no doubt in cahoots with his rich oil buddies at Exxon and Chevron-Texaco) raise oil prices during the summer (thereby "gouging" consumers) and then lower them now? Why not just keep gouging until everyone was used to it? Alternatively, why go through the summer gouging in the first place and risk alienating voters just to try to appease them now? Maybe he's trying to corner the "conspiracy theorist" vote. Wouldn't it have been much easier for an evil genius like George Bush simply to skim off a few billion here and there off the national budget and give that to his buddies? And don't forget, Bush also has oil buddies not just at Exxon and Chevron, but at the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, Petroleos Mexicanos and China National Petroleum, to name a few. So far, the conspiracy remains a closely guarded secret. The Katrina theories are the best. The last major hurricane to hit New Orleans before Katrina was Betsy in 1965. So, George W. Bush and his minions, with a plan to wipe "chocolate city" off the map, plant explosives in the levees, while remaining undetected, and then sit back and hope that sometime within his term in office, another major hurricane comes along offering the opportunity to set them off. "Luckily" enough, here comes Katrina (or did Bush's "hurricane machine" really work?) and the rest is history. Too bad, though, after all was said and done, Bush was vilified and his poll numbers sank. I don't know if any of his rich oil buddies profited on the levee explosions or not. -- Send feedback to the author. The "What is the Deal?" column will appears weekly on the Pie of Knowledge website. Guest submissions are welcome and encouraged. To submit an article to "What is the Deal?" click here. To subscribe to the "What is the Deal?" mailing list and receive early notification when a new column is available, click here. The Pie of Knowledge will never, ever divulge email addresses to any third party for any reason unless so ordered by a court of law. Contributions to the Pie of Knowledge are greatly appreciated. 
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