“When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter. Courts can sustain exclusive presidential control in such a case only by disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject. Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.”

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., et al v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 637-38 (1952, J. Jackson, concurring)

There was apparently much hubbub about this video that was removed from Google and then rejected by YouTube. Take a moment if you’d like to view it yourself. Now then, setting aside any political motives that may have been behind its removal, the video is just plain bad. I have many thoughts on the poor argumentative style of the video’s author, at least based on one viewing about five minutes ago, in between phone calls at work. The video contains three clips from news reports that apparently aired on 9/11/2001:

1. Some schmuck off the street, shortly after the towers collapsed, gave a lucid explanation of how he witnessed the buildings collapse due to the intense heat of the fires.
2. Some schmuck on TV (in voiceover) offers his opinion that it is possible that the towers’ collapse could have resulted solely from the force of the impact of the airplanes and the heat of the resulting fires.
3. Some other schmuck on TV, also in voiceover, explains how Osama Bin Laden, from his safehaven in Afghanistan, has been poised to launch attacks on the U.S. with as many as 3,000 fighters, etc., etc.

The video offers these three clips, again and again, as proof of…something, but I’m not sure what. Clip 1 is shown to demonstrate, presumably, that no ordinary shmuck off the street on a morning as insane as 9/11/01 could possibly offer such a lucid explanation of things unless he was planted there by the true architects of the attacks. I think Clip 2 is offered to make the same points. Clip 3 is apparently offered to show how quickly the puppetmaster of 9/11 introduced the meme that it was all the doing of the evil jihadis. The final conclusion of the video–its exhortation to its viewers? “Think about it.”

OK, I’ve thought about it, and whoever edited this video is either full of shit or so determined to accuse the Bush administration (or whoever else is intended to fill the puppetmaster role, since it is never made explicitly clear–I’m sticking with Puppetmasters, I think) of even more mass murder and mayhem that s/he can so easily ignore the basic rules of logic and argument structure. This is actually no different than the simplistic good vs. evil meme that is behind every thought, word, and deed of the Bush administration, just focused differently. The Bush administration, in this view, is Evil, and anything that helps them in their Evil quest must have been their doing. Or something like that.

Clip 1: The schmuck with the unusual clarity of thought and voice in the midst of such a tragedy. Was he stating an opinion of what he saw, mustering up as much gravitas as he could for what would likely be his only appearance on television ever? Was he in fact a plant put in place by the Puppetmasters to introduce the “myth” that the towers were brought down by airplanes? How the hell should I know?

Clip 2: The schmuck on TV with the opinions re: the cause of the collapses. Was he a readily available public official who could offer the public something, anything, other than the news anchors’ voices on a day when almost everyone sat glued to the TV? Was he purposefully placed in the studio by the Puppetmasters to further introduce Schmuck #1’s elaborate hoax about the airplanes? How the hell should I know?

Clip 3: The question here seems to be how did this schmuck have such a detailed and comprehensive report prepared by 9:30 a.m. on 9/11/01? Could it be that Osama bin Laden was already a subject of much concern after the bombings in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and on the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor, and therefore news agencies likely had information on him and his operation(s) at hand and needed something, anything, other than the news anchors’ voices on a day when almost everyone sat glued to the TV? Didn’t America already have a tendency (whether justified or not) to think of Arabs whenever something blew up? Could it be that this was yet another part of the Puppetmasters’ plot to…uh…bring up some Arab guy to distract the public from the fact that…okay, I really don’t know where the Puppetmaster argument would go from here.

Just a few points (keep in mind, of course, that I am limiting myself to the clip in question and what I guess could be called “conventional wisdom” about the 9/11 attacks; i.e. I have not taken the time to do background research on the specific clips in the video, beyond the commentary offered in the video and the contents of the clips themselves):

– Schmuck #1, to my knowledge, has never publicly opined on the crisis outside of his fifteen seconds of fame on that terrible morning. The conclusion that fires from the jet fuel weakened the steel supports, blah blah blah, came from other people later on. I don’t know who Schmuck #1 is, but I assume that if he was actually quoted in, say, the 9/11 Commission Report as an expert whose opinions and testimony prove the “fire hypothesis,” then the author of this video would have mentioned something about that. So either Schmuck #1 is just an unexpectedly cool customer with detailed opinions offered in a crisis situation, or he is part of a conspiracy so large that it must include both engineering experts and shmuck-on-the-street testimony.

– Regarding Schmuck #2, insert the entire above paragraph, but change “schmuck-on-the-street” to “schmuck-in-the-studio.”

– As for Schmuck #3, I didn’t hear him say anything about bin Laden that I hadn’t already learned, prior to September 2001 from other news sources.

From what I have been able to read or watch (and stomach) regarding the whole 9/11 conspiracy movement, just about all of the “evidence” is based on strange turns of phrase on the day of the attacks or from officials during and after that day and from video evidence that can only be seen if your TV color and contrast is adjusted correctly. There is no (or very very little) positive evidence of any actual event, statement, or deed–rather, it is all based on bizarre inconsistencies in individual officials’ statements and the misapplication of various logical concepts, such as Occam’s Razor (e.g. here). It reminds me a bit of those videos people have of their dogs, where they alone are convinced that the dog is speaking when it’s really just dog noises. Schmuck # 1 and 2, by themselves, prove nothing except that the opinion of the “fire hypothesis” might have been quite common on the morning of 9/11/2001. Schmuck #3 doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, and he only proves that we have a knee-jerk reaction to suspect Arab terrorists when something blows up.

I do not know the author of his video, I do not know where he stands on the broader issues, and I do not know exactly where he stands on who is ultimately responsible for 9/11 (because he certainly doesn’t say so in this video). I can only assume that he is saying that it could not possibly have been just the work of Arabs and burning jet fuel. Beyond that, we might as well say the Flying Spaghetti Monster did it.

Let me tell you where I stand: I think a bunch of crazed religious zealots carried out a plan to do as much damage to the U.S. as they could, and they happened to succeed (from their point of view, they got lucky). I think a president and his administration, who were well on their way to permanent mediocrity in early fall 2001, seized upon the event in the most craven, cynical way imaginable in order to solidify their hold on power. I think that any involvement the administration might have had with the terror plot prior to 9/11 was limited to ignorance and negligence. I think the administration’s obsession with secrecy, an issue long before the morning of 9/11/2001, added to some people’s natural suspicion that those who are in power will do anything to keep and/or increase it, and that this same obsession with secrecy has only encouraged stranger and stranger conspiracy theories, until it is difficult to distinguish between those who contend the Bush administration allowed 9/11 to happen through neglect and those who say that the jet airliners that crashed into the WTC were drone aircraft piloted remotely by someone else.

I also think that Dick Cheney probably masturbates to the stories about how he is the Puppetmaster orchestrating this whole thing from the very beginning, only wishing that it were truly so.

Here’s a “common sense” question for the conspiracy theorists–one that I have not yet seen answered at all: Considering how wrong the administration has been about pretty much everything else they’ve ever done, how did they manage to get this one, albeit enormous, plot to go so incredibly right?

Karl Rove is either (a) a somewhat-high-functioning psychotic, or (b) so accustomed to lying that it comes as naturally to him as a morning whizz. For those not in the know, he is now claiming that the Bush Administration did not want the Iraq war vote to happen in the fall of 2002 because it would be “too political” or some such crap. Watch the clip in the above link. It’s unintentional hilarity.