Trutherism Is Now Acceptable

I've been saying for years that Trutherism would eventually gain the credibility of the JFK assassination conspiracies that have created a massive industry for people chasing down the phantoms of right-wing CIA and FBI agents colluding with anti-Castro Cubans and Carlos Marcello henchman to take down the President. Rasmussen reported last year that 35% of Democrats polled believed that Bush had a hand in the events of 9/11. Then today, John McWhorter, an intellectual who has garnered acclaim from the Left and the Right, suggests in The New Republic that it's perfectly acceptable for somebody to hold these views.

There's the standard. It's acceptable for someone to hold these views and still be part of the mainstream. If that's the case, then then no longer can the loons be kept out of the club.

Granted, Howard Dean (head of the DNC the last time I checked) called it an "interesting theory" but that falls just shy of founding a committee that was leading an effort to force Congress to investigate. He later walked that back.

You will see more mainstream Democrats push this theory now. They will do it out of solidarity with the martyred Van Jones and they will do it because they need to broaden the acceptability of the idea. They must do so because so many Democrats already believe it and if they don't make it acceptable, they will see more people like Van Jones fall.

UPDATE: The Nation suggests that the Truther committee of which Van Jones was a part was really just pushing for another investigation of 9/11 because the pre-2007 Congress was too willing to avoid an investigation of the Bush administration's role. So, now we are to believe that Trutherism is really just a desire to reinvestigate 9/11 and not an assertion built on the implicit belief that Bush and Cheney were willing to murders tens of thousands of Americans.

If they can make this assertion stick then they could eventually force a reinvestigation of 9/11. It may seem completely implausible but that didn't stop Congress from reinvestigating the asssassination of JFK fully 15 years after the Warren Commission had published their report.