Salon Yanks Goofy Truther Piece

Missed this when it came out, but apparently a writer managed to get a Troofer article published at Salon, but it was quickly "pulled" after a number of caustic tweets.  The article itself is posted here.  He starts off with a weaselly explanation:

My point here was not to endorse the 9/11 Truthers, but to explain them. If there were more transparency in government, if so many questions did not go unanswered, such conspiracy theories would wither and die. I wrote that I was concerned that the 9/11 Truthers would be “tarred with the same ‘crackpot’ brush” as the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists—the idea being that the latter were crazier than the former. I was right to be concerned, because I am writing this with tar-stained fingers, having been plastered with the stuff for the last 24 hours. And I am not even a Truther.

 As we shall see, that last line is a bunch of horse puckey.   He's a Truther, through and through.  Here's the crucial passage from the article:

What concerns me about the repudiation of the Hookers is that the 9/11 Truthers are being tarred with the same “crackpot” brush. Yes, many of the September Eleventh conspiracy theories are implausible, and too often veer, as conspiracy theories unfortunately tend to do, toward the anti-Semitic. But unlike with Sandy Hook, 9/11 conspiracy theories flow from a scientific fact: whatever the 9/11 Commission Report might claim, fire generated by burning jet fuel is not hot enough to melt steel.

By Hookers, he's talking about the dolts who think that Sandy Hook was a conspiracy by the government to get our guns.  As you can see, he makes the two most common errors in Trutherdom with the whole "jet fuel can't melt steel" claim. First, the jet fuel burned off rather quickly, so while it was the initiating cause of the fire, it was long gone by the time the buildings collapsed.  Second, the fire does not have to melt the steel; it only has to weaken it, and the fires generated by jet fuel which then spread to office equipment was quite adequate to lessen the structural integrity of the building sufficiently to cause a global collapse.

When this latter point is mentioned in the comments, the writer, Greg Olear, responds:

We can all agree that the burning jet fuel in the towers was not hot enough to cause WTC 7 to collapse, though. ; )

So much for his claim that he's not a Truther.  And I do have to chuckle a bit at his horror at the notion that the Sandy Hook nuts are going to discredit the 9-11 fruitcakes.  In fact, as I pointed out last month, many people have called the former "Sandy Hook Truthers"--discrediting them by association with the 9-11 nutbars, not the other way around.

He goes into the usual cui bono bit as well; by this "logic" the French were clearly behind the attack on Pearl Harbor, as they benefited the most from it.  He's a JFK Truther which fits the pattern; if you're stupid enough to fall for one conspiracy theory you'll probably fall for another.