Still truther after all these years.
“Pay Attention, ABC: Rosie O’Donnell Just Doubled Down on Her 9/11 Truther Conspiracy Beliefs,” Scott Whitlock warns at NewsBusters, after the above Twitter conservation with the former VH-1 VJ turned talk show host and expert on skyscraper construction, jet plane fuel, and metallurgy:
Rosie O’Donnell, the past and future co-host of The View, on Friday reaffirmed her support of the 9/11 truther conspiracy theory. When asked by this writer if she continues to reject the idea that Muslim terrorists flew planes into buildings, O’Donnell tweeted in response, “i still do not believe the official story.” [See [above] for a screen shot of the tweet.]
O’Donnell left The View in 2007 after battling with conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck. On March 29, 2007, she promoted trutherism, saying of September 11th: “I do believe it is the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower Seven, building seven, which collapsed in on itself, it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved…” ABC invited O’Donnell to return as a View co-host for the fall 2014 season.
So let’s review. Rosie has access to the news department at the American Broadcasting Corporation — aka, the House of Stephanopoulos, and surely no friend to Republicans. Mr. Obama and his wife have appeared on The View. One way or another, through her connections at ABC, Rosie can get in touch with any reporter there she wants — and/or a White House press liaison — and say, OK, give me the straight dope: What really happened on 9/11? But she’d rather remain a Truther than believe either ABC News or the Obama White House.
Rosie’s relationship with the ABC News Department puts her only a few more steps away from the center of world power than another Truther, former Obama “Green” “Czar” Van Jones, who was reluctantly jettisoned by the Obama White House in September of 2009. As Mark Steyn told Hugh Hewitt back then:
HH: In Obama’s America, Van Jones has come to great prominence. Today, the latest, he’s President Obama’s green jobs advisor, last night he had to apologize for calling Republicans a**holes.
MS: Right.
HH: And the remark said they do not reflect the view of this administration. Actually, I think they do reflect the views of this administration. But today, it was revealed, he’s a truther. He joined, in 2004, he signed a statement calling for then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and others to launch an investigation into evidence that suggest high level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur. How long would a Bush administration official who called Democrats a**holes and was a truther lasted, Mark Steyn?
MS: Exactly. I mean, this is the thing. We’re supposed to be the crazy guys. We’re supposed to be the ones who don’t distance ourselves from the loons. You know, we’re the…Glenn Beck is supposed to be bananas. The birther movement are supposed to be the nuts. And yet, and yet, it is somehow the reality-based community, or whatever these guys call themselves, that has managed to put a 9/11 truther two doors away from President Obama in the Oval Office. And if he really thinks that the federal government pulled off 9/11, then he’s inside the system. Why doesn’t he uncover the truth of it? He’s the green jobs czar. Presumably, in the previous administration, George W. Bush was the steel melting czar. So why doesn’t he just take a look in the filing cabinets, and expose the truth on it? It’s an absolute, it’s not just ludicrous, but it is absolutely outrageous that this fellow has been appointed as one of Obama’s various czars. What I found interesting about the guy is that he’s a communist. Now I assume when people say oh, he used to be a communist, that they were communists in the 60s or 70s, you know, when it was cool, the spirit of 1968 and all that. This guy became a communist in the 90s. He became a communist after the Russians and the Bulgarians and the Romanians and the Czechs and even partly the Chinese, and even the Vietnamese had all given up on it.
Beyond her solipsism, what does it say about what Rosie thinks about America? Blogger and frequent PJM contributor Kathy Shaidle had the definitive take on that aspect of Trutherism, which Steyn quoted back in 2006 — a year before Rosie’s very public “fire doesn’t melt steel” meltdown:
When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that’s one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:
“I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don’t think I could still live here. I’m not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?”
But Rosie isn’t sitting in Starbucks or standing on a street corner espousing wild conspiracy theories like a deranged hipster or shopping cart lady; she went full truther on a national network TV show — in 2007, while the man she accused of blowing up the WTC was still very much in power.
Back in the mid-’70s, after they shared a symposium together, Tom Wolfe quoted German intellectual Günter Grass in his Purple Decades anthology:
“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
But talk about sophistry — on the one hand, Rosie believes that the American government is bloodthirsty enough to kill 3000 people — and yet, like Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, doesn’t even wonder why she feels perfectly safe enough to openly espouse her theories on national TV and on Twitter.
In any case, immediately after 9/11, Rosie was singing a far different tune:
Talkshow host and ardent Democratic activist Rosie O’Donnell stunned Los Angeles radio listeners Thursday morning by declaring she’s changed her opinion of President Bush.
“I love him now!” O’Donnell told KRLA-AM’s Dennis Prager.
O’Donnell said she even got to Yankee Stadium an hour early for a World Series game so that she could videotape Bush!
‘I brought a videocamera and my six year old son and no security so that my son could see the president,” said O’Donnell.
“We left at 6 o’clock in order to do that. And since September 11, I have had nothing but accolades for the job he has done for this nation… I am in full support of the President.”
O’Donnell added: “Honey, I love him now! He is our President. We are at war.”
Many presidents enjoy an initial wartime rally-round-the-flag bounce in their poll numbers, and from LBJ to Obama, it’s normal for the far left to initially rally round a president and then quickly discard him for not living up to their platonic ideal. But talk about bipolar (and for a time, there was certainly talk that Rosie was just that): how does one go from “Honey, I love him now! He is our president. We are at war,” to: Hey, Bush killed 3,000 people, ya know. Oh, and give me a decaf vente latte with extra soy milk, to go.
Earlier: Has ABC Hired the Perfect Distaff ‘Conservative’ For The View?
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