DOES ANYONE STILL BELIEVE THAT SUPPORTING THE DEMOCRATS AS THE LESSER EVIL IS A VIABLE STRATEGY

Date : Tue, Feb 05, 2008 06:49 PM
DOES ANYONE STILL BELIEVE THAT SUPPORTING THE DEMOCRATS AS THE LESSER EVIL IS A VIABLE
STRATEGY?
BY ROBERT HALFHILL

I can't understand why the majority of progressives continue to believe that supporting the democratic Party will do much good. For example, impeachment is the most important issue facing us, given that Bush was never elected, having been APPOINTED by the Supreme Court in 2000 and STEALING the election of 2004. Bush and Cheney are behind the loss of our civil liberties de jure, although not yet de facto, taking the power to declare anyone an enemy combattant and secretly imprisoning them without the right of habaeus corpus or a
fair trial, or even any trial at all. He has introduced torture. He has pushed through legislation allowing him to spy on our emails and phone calls, been malfesant with respect to his duties as Commander In Chief by fabricating the intelligence, i.e. lying, to get us into the disaster of the Iraq invasion, and, when Joseph Wilson objected, committed treason by outing Wilson's wife as a CIA agent. The list goes on.

The issue on that list which renders all other issues minuscule by comparison is 9/11. If you look at pictures of the World Trade Center after 9/11, the majority of the buildings mass is piled up on the surface area that the buildings stood on instead of being scattered all over the surounding area. Only controlled demolition with thermate explosives to melt and cut through the supporting steel girders can bring a building down like this. Yet not only did the twin towers collapse on their footprints but World Trade Center 7, which was not even struck by an airplane, collapsed on its footprint. Numerous experts on fire behavior have testified that never before or since 9/11 has a protected steel framed building collapsed solely because of fire. The steel girders were cut at the precise angle that girders are cut in controlled demolitions. The buildings fell at almost free fall speed, which could not have happened if the upper floors had had to crash through the lower floors on their way to the ground. The buildings falling would have only broken the concrets composing them into chunks and the fall would not have released enough energy to reduce the concret and other material in the buildings to powder; only the energy released by thermate explosives could do that. And Peofessor Steven Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, analysed samples of the dust from the World Trade Centers and found traces of thermate!

The hijackers flew the hijacked the four planes all over the northeastern United States, in the world's most well defended airspace, before three of them crashed into their targets. Only the U.S. government could have managed to sneak explosives into the buildings, especially since several government intelligence agencies had their offices in the same buildings. But still, many have argued that even the U.S. government could not have planted the explosives without being detected. Even if we could not explain HOW they did this, we are still left with the overwhelming evidence that they DID. But when we learn that Jeb Bush's company was in charge of security for both the World Trade Center and both American Airlines and United Airlines, the two companies whose planes were hijacked on 9/11, that some floors of the World Trade Center were vacant in the period before 9/11, that WTC tenants heard banging sounds and objects being moved around on the vacant floors, that a fine dusts entered their offices from the vacant floors, and that the janitor at the World Trade Center, William Rodriquez, heard loud noises from the vacant floors one night when he was alone in the building, and even heard these sounds when he entered one of the vacant floors to investigate before he was frightened away, then it is much easier to understand how the 9/11 conspitators were able to wire WTC 1, 2, and 7 with explosives without being detected.

The conspirators motive is also obvious when we realize that 9/11 catapulted Bush from very low in the polls to their upper reaches and that it provoked a right wing reaction in the United States that enabled Bush-Cheney and the neo cons to embark on course of suppressing civil liberties and wars of conquest.

Yet Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the table even before she assumed her post as Speaker of the House. John Conyers, in spite of the massive tome he produced on the theft of the 2004 elections, refuses to hold hearings or do anything else about it, and has even
had Cindy Shehan and others who protested by sitting in at his office arrested. His telling you that impeachment is not off the table is meaningless if he refuses to do anything about it. Impeachment is the most crucial issue we are facing since it is necessary to stop our country's slide into dictatorship. The electorate, many of whom
were hoping for impeachment, put the Democrats back in control of Congress in 2006. On this one crucial issue alone, if the Democrats won't call impeachment hearings, WAS THERE ANY BENEFIT FROM ALL THE TIME, MONEY AND EFFORT SPENT ON ELECTING THEM?

The Iraq war is the next most crucial issue. And I am not impressed by the Democrats plea that they must have 60 votes before they can override Bush's veto in order to end the Iraq War. Each time a bill to appropriate further money for the war is introduced, it requires 50% plus one of the votes to pass. The Democrats could end the invasion of Iraq by simply voting against further money for the war, leaving Bush and Cheney with no alternative but to pull the troops out.

Single payer is the ONLY way of containing our rising and exhorbitant health care costs but Hiliary Clinton tells us the majority won't accept it. If single payer is the only way of containing health care costs, then the only rational alternative is to keep campaigning for it until the majority is convinced to support it.

So I ask all those who campaigned for the Democratic Party. Was it worth all your time, effort and money if the Democrats won't do anything about impeachment, the Iraq war, and single payer health care? Rob Kall, owner and moderator of OpEdNews, has argued that a third party can never win enough seats to pass their legislation under our present electoral system. But even under our present electoral system, there have been cases where a third party has displaced one of the two major parties. The Whig Party went into the dustbin of history when a new third party, the Republican Party, was founded in 1856 and went on to displace the Whig Party.


I know you will argue that building a third party will take so much time as to be useless as a near term solution. But the evidence is in that your chances of success are zero by supporting the Democratic Party. So though it may take several electoral cycles, a strategy that has a chance of working in the long term is preferable to a strategy that has zero chances of success. You may argue that our present problems are so accute that we don't have time to build a third party. But you won't accomplish anything on these accute issues anyway with a strategy that has zero chances of working. I am sure you can find some legslation, out of all the legislation Congress has passed since the 2006 elections, where the Democrats have been preferable to the Republicans. But if, even after electing them, the Democrats refuse to do anything about impeachment, ending the Iraq war, and single payer, your efforts have been wasted and the results don't justify the time, effort and money you have put into them. So your only alternative to a strategy whose chances of succeeding are zero, it to buckle down to the effort of building a third party.

Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com


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hOUSE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE HEARING CONFIRMS THAT NO PROTECTED STEEL FRAMED BUILDING HAD EVER COLLAPSED FROM FROM FIRE ALONE

FRAMED BUILDING HAD Since I published my article, TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11, on the Atheists For Human Rights meetup, I have become involved in a running debate with someone with the user name of Tom of Darwin. One of my replies to him is published below. It provided additional support to the points I made in TOO MANY ...

Tom:
Flight AA77, which struck the Pentagon, made a 170 degree turn while simultaneously descending 7000 feet to send up flying only a few feet above the lawn as it flew into the Pentagon. Not only would a pilot with only a few hours of training on a simulator have been unable to perform this maneuver but even military top gun pilots say they would be unable to perform this maneuver. In fact, skilled pilots have said no civilian aircraft would have been able to do this.
Two of the experts who testified before the House Committee On Science May 1, 2002 Hearing On the Collapse of the World Trade Center, experts whose testimony I read in the document you sent me, said the there had NEVER BEFORE been a collapse of a protected,
steel framed building because of fire. Dr. W. Gene Corley, American Society of Civil Engineers and Chair of the Building Performance Assesment Team reviewing the WTC disaster said on page 76 of the hearing record that "prior to these events, no protected steel frame structure, the most common form of large commercial construction in the United States, has ever experienced a fire-induced collapse." Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology said on page 103, "The Twin Towers and WTC 7 are the only known cases of total structural collapse where fire played a significant role." So we have here an admission by a spokesperson for NIST that allegedly accounted for the collapses that fire had never before brought about such a collapse of a protected, steel framed building. And Dr. Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Safety Studies at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute said of page 133, "Up until 9/11, we never had a collapse of a protected steel building." On page 163 he said, "This was the first time we had the collapse of a protected steel structure." Dr. Bement said on page 169, "...there have been instances where buildings have had major fires that have burned to completion without the buildings collapsing." And on page 172, Dr. Barnett said of the partial collapse of WTC 5, "But building 5 was a normal building and it had a fire and it had a major collapse. This has never happened before."
I subscribe to SCIENCE NEWS and the August 25, 2007 had an article about the collapse of the World Trade Center on pages 122 - 24 entitled FIRE INSIDE: STRUCTURAL DESIGN WITH FIRE SAFETY IN MIND by Carolyn Berry. The paragraph in the first column on page 124 is
particularly significant in evaluating the NIST computer simulation of the collapse of WTC 7:"The NIST simulation, like all models of building failures to date, couldn't follow the 9/11 collapses through to the end. No computer is yet powerful enough to follow the chaotic sequence of events that ensues when components break apart and a
building falls, but this is where research is headed."
In other words, the much vaunted NIST simulation which purported to dispose of the arguments of we conspiracy theorists didn't actually demonstrate how fire caused the
buildings to collapse; they just waved their hands when the computingpower currently available had took them as far as it could and said: "This is far enough; the buildings collapsed somewhere about here." Of course we all know we have accounted for how the buildings probably collapsed once we have gone this far. It HAS to be the probable explanation because the only alternative explanation is those NUTTY, WACKO CONSPIRACY THEORIES! We know a priori that that CAN'T be true!
I might as well add the statement of Allen Hay, chief fire safety officer of the New York City Fire Department, about WTC 7. "We just expected it to burn out -- we didn't expect it to fall down." "It's the only building I know in New York City to ever collapse (strictly) from fire."
But I want to return to the repeated Congressional testimony that a protected, steel framed building have NEVER BEFORE collapsed because of fire. And never afterwards either. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we have a purported fact about the behavior of protected,
steel framed buildings in fire that dare not be true again!
You say that 9/11 was the first time a protected, steel framed building had had an airplane crash into it and knock the asbestos insulation off its steel girders. Actually smaller planes have struck skyscrapers. It happened to the Empire State Building in 1929
and 1942. But this may well be the first time a 757 has crashed into a skyscraper.
However protected, steel framed buildings have caught fire in earthquakes (I remember seeing a movie about the Los Angeles earthquake of 1906 watching high rise buildings burn.) and
earthquakes can shake asbestos insulation loose better than a 757 can. The effect of a 757 on a building is minuscule compared to the effect of an earthquake. But we know that if the buildings weren't toppled by the earthquakes, the fires never caused them to collapse. We know this because of the repeated and reiterated testimony before the Congressional Committee that NO protected, steel framed building prior to 9/11 had EVER collapsed solely because of fire. Once again, NIST has given us an assertion about the behavior of steel framed buildings in fire that dare not ever be true again!
I have not yet had the time to check all the claims in the extensive material you emailed me. But as for the claim that the molten metal at the bottom of the wreckage of the World Trade Center could have been molten aluminum, molten aluminum has a silvery
color. The molten metal that spilled down the sides of the World Trade Center had a bright yellow color, indicative of molten steel at a much higher temperature. Some portions of it glowed white hot because of an even higher temperature.
You are no doubt aware of the pressure the Bush Administration put on officials to report the results they wanted to hear. Generals in Iraq kept being replaced until they not only reported that they could be successful but sucessful with the number of troops the Bush Administration allocated. The Bush Admistration kept demanding intelligence that there were weapons of mass desruction in Iraq until they got it. So it is not surprising that those federal employees in NIST produced the results Bush wanted. Nist is part of the Department of Commerce whose head is a member of Bush's cabinet. Philip Zelikow, who ran the 9/11 Commission hearings was a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and as such part of Bush's inner circle. So when you juxtapose the enormous number of experts cited in the NIST report against the few I cite, you are not citing a vast number of independent experts but a vast number of federal employees whose livelihood depended on remaining in the good graces of an administration known for not demanding the facts but the assertions of facts they wanted.
Finally, a number of people have rejected the controlled demolition theory of 9/11 on the grounds that there is no way they could have planted all the explosives without being caught. But the crucial consideration is that there is no way the World Trade Center
buildings could have collapsed on their footprint without being brought down by a controlled demolition. That is the only way of bringing buildings down without either demolishing it brick by brick and girder by girder or knocking them all over their surroundings. Since we know the buildings were brought down by controlled demolitions, our task is to figure out how they planted the explosives without being caught instead of arguing that they couldn't have brought the building down by controlled demolition because they couldn't have preplanted the explosives without being caught.
An analogy might be a person in the 1940's who believed it was impossible to make an atomic bomb. If that person had been in Hiroshima on July 6, 1945, they would have known it was possible to construct an atomic bomb even if they still didn't know how to do it
themself.
Robert Halfhill


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