Ryan's Rant

A journalist named Robert Parry recently described the Troofer obsession as a "parlor game"; an apt description indeed. Predictably, Waterboy Kevin Ryan goes off on a rant about how for Parry and others in the media, the Troof Movement is a parlor game. All of that is very much pro forma and not terribly interesting.

But then Ryan, warming to his topic, veers into cloud-cuckoo land about Uncle Fetzer. Now, to us debunkers, Jim Fetzer is just a typical idiot Troofer, spouting off the usual BS just like Richard Gage, Steven Jones and David Ray Griffin. Yes, Fetzer's a crank, but the difference is only in degree, not in type. Ah, but to the Waterboy, he's much more:

Fetzer suddenly appeared on the 9/11 truth scene in late 2005, immediately after the publication of a paper by physicist Steven Jones. At that time, Fetzer wrote to many prominent truth advocates, saying – “Steve Jones and I would like to invite you to join us as members of a new society.” Having been known for some dubious contributions to the JFK assassination research community, Fetzer used this new association with Jones to thrust himself into a position of superficial leadership in the truth movement.

Less than one year later, just before the 5th anniversary of the attacks when mainstream media attention was at its peak, Fetzer began speaking publicly about space beams destroying the WTC and other such nonsense. He continued with grandiose claims about theories which had no evidentiary support, as this excerpt from one of his radio shows indicates.

See, to Ryan, Fetzer suddenly started acting like a crazy person when he endorsed Judy Woods' beam weapons from space. And this proves that Fetzer was not crazy, he was deliberately sabotaging the Troof Movement.

Of course, to the rest of us, Fetzer didn't suddenly start acting like a crazy person around the fifth anniversary. He was a crazy person right from the moment he joined the Troofers (and probably well before).

But what I love is the next bit:

What would cause a PhD to say that an unsubstantiated claim of space beams destroying the WTC was “the most fascinating development in the history of the study of 9/11” and that it was “huge?” Why was this claim more fascinating or huge than all the research previously published by the likes of Michael Ruppert, Daniel Hopsicker, David Ray Griffin, Steve Jones, Nafeez Ahmed, Don Paul and Michel Chossudovsky?

Now, you know how it is; on the crazy scale, Fetzer and Wood have pinned the meter. But the rest of those guys are certainly in the red zone. And Hopsicker and Griffin? Hopsicker is the one who got Amanda Keller on tape talking endlessly about "Mohamed" without quite ever getting her to admit that her Mohamed was not surnamed Atta. And Grifter... even the Troofers have caught onto the fact that he's a goofball. Note in particular that Ryan gripes about two claims that Parry highlights as central to 9-11 Troof:

* “Operatives working for President Bush wired 100-plus floors of the WTC towers” with explosives
* “Truthers insist that no plane hit the Pentagon; that Bush’s team attacked it with a missile.”

But on the first one Ryan can only quibble that he and Jones and others don't necessarily believe Bush was behind it. He ignores the second claim, but his respected researcher David Ray Griffin was still pushing that theory as late as 2007 (and will probably start pushing it again, the way he keeps recycling his debunked nonsense from years ago).