The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year? (4)

Normally (if you can even remotely apply that word), a 9/11 conspiracy story would come nowhere close to having the stuff to qualify for CSM's Most Ridiculous Story of the Year. These conspiracy yarns are far too trite, and besides, "looney" and "ridiculous" are not exact synonyms.

But leave it to the lunatic fringe to pull together so much paranoia, Bush hatred and bad physics to actually compose a story -- Is Cheney About to Blow Up the Bay Bridge? from Gypsy Taub at the blog Politics of the Heart -- that can clear the high hurdles and qualify.

(The rules for qualifying are this: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic. One could debate that Gypsy is not a serious writer, having posted only 20 posts to her blog since starting it in May. One could also debate whether this article is serious; I thought it first to be a lampoon, but amazingly it is not. Besides, the "one" who could argue these points is me, the sole arbiter, and I say it's in.)

Let's get on with it, then:

Having been a 911 truth activist for 5 years, I have serious suspicions about the Bay Bridge being closed for [an] entire 4 days.

There has been a lot of threats of terrorist attacks coming form [sic] the government. Looks like they are preparing the public. Or else it could be their usual scare tactics.

On the other hand, Bush’s term is coming to an end. The public is pushing to ban voting machines. The power of the Bush administration is deteriorating with major figures resigning, almost daily scandals on the news and constant threat of impeachment. Their only weapon is fear, it’s their last hope. I can see them really desperately needing a terrorist attack in the near future. 911 did them a great deal of good. 911 was, of course, the work of the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and others connected tightly to the Bush administration.

So we begin with the apparent supposition that Bush does not want to leave office in Jan. 08 -- why else would he bother with an attack? But if he wants to stay in office, why the line about the voting machines? He wouldn't need voting machines to stay in office; he'd need a military coup.

And yes, there is constant talk of impeachment, but really, constant threat? The alleged sins of Bush are now five and six years in the past; if no impeachment has happened yet, when are we expecting the train to arrive in the station?

Gypsy then drivels a bunch of 9/11 theory -- or as she quaintly puts it, "911" theory -- which I won't bother with, because she could do that all day and never achieve "Most Ridiculous" status. We then pick up again here:

Getting back to the Bay Bridge, it being shut down for 4 entire days sounds suspicious. They are also demolishing a section of the bridge, so that gives them a green light to bring in a demolition crew. According to their official website they are doing seismic safety work which can, as far as I understand, involve drilling holes in the structure to test it for safety. Also, the new bridge being close to finished would be a convenient time to blow up the old one [sic].

Got it. Close the bridge for four days so as not to raise suspicion, then put your Black Ops crews out in full sight of all to drill the holes. Oh, those tricky bastards!

Of course, she might have read this at the Oakland Bay Bridge Web site and not written a post at all:

Oakland, Calif., Monday, September 03, 2007 - The Labor Day Weekend closure of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge will end at 6:00 p.m. this evening, with the span re-opening 11 hours ahead of schedule.

The bridge was closed in both directions to allow workers to demolish a 350-ft. section of upper-deck roadway just east of the Yerba Buena Island tunnel and to replace it with a new seismically safe segment that was constructed on an adjacent site and rolled into place early this morning. This segment is the first permanent piece of the new East Span that motorists will drive across.

But we have to remember: Nothing the government says can be trusted.

Point of information: The old Oakland Bay Bridge was not seismically sound; a section of roadway tipped in the 7.0 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. That's why a new replacement bridge has been built next to the old one Gypsy's so concerned about. But she wouldn't want to be quoted on anything like that:

Don’t quote me on this, but I have also heard that the old Bay Bridge is not earthquake stable, so if that is true [it is, my dear], then it sounds like the World Trade Center that needed to go because of all the asbestos that it was filled with. Cleaning it up would have cost an enormous amount of money that no one was willing to pay. In other words, it sounds like the Bay Bridge is a good candidate for a “terrorist attack” just like the WTC was.

So, leaving aside the fact that there is no need to remove asbestos unless it is going to be disturbed, and leaving aside the fact that it's only disturbed during a remodel so abatement would occur one suite at a time, and leaving aside the fact that quite a lot of the WTC was built after asbestos was banned and has no asbestos, and leaving aside the fact that the cost of removing asbestos from the WTC was minimal compared to the value of the building, we have a theory emerging: The old bay bridge was no longer needed, so Bush would blow it up to stay in power.

Was the Pentagon also no longer needed? Just asking.

Unable to sustain this story for too long, Gypsy launches into a fresh new "Bush the terrorist" angle, tied to another Bay Area infrastructure disaster (she's a San Francisco "media activist," so she knows this stuff):

Another thing that raises suspicion is the collapse of highway 880 in Oakland this past April and the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge. As far as I am concerned 880 was an inside job. Gas doesn’t melt steel otherwise your engine in your car would have long since melted. Because of 911 it became a well known fact that steel melts at a much higher temperature than gas burns. The story that I read online about the collapse is full of inconsistencies.

Why would Bush set a fuel tanker on fire as a cover for a pre-planned demolition of the 880? Do you really have to ask?

As soon as 880 collapsed the mainstream media started screaming about steel melting from fossil fuel fires and comparing it to 911. I knew they were going to say that. That seemed to be the whole purpose of this incident, to “prove” that the WTC really did collapse from the jet fuel fire. The 911 truth movement used the impossibility of such a phenomenon as a proof of government complicity and cover up. So this was possibly meant to disprove this point.

You would have figured this out too if only you'd realized that the MSM are in cahoots with Bush and the silent Black Ops figures that really pulled off 9/11.

And Minneapolis?

I can see these events being a rehearsal to test out a bridge demolition by “terrorists.” I just talked to Eric Hufschmid and he said that the Minneapolis bridge collapse looks a lot like the 880 collapse in Oakland, very suspicious.

Got it. It's all rehearsals. I wonder what major building collapse we should look to as the rehearsal for 9/11. Maybe the Bush administration was behind the Las Vegas boom, so all those old casino hotels would have to be replaced, giving them a lot of opportunity to plan for 9/11. It would be just like them.

I don't even know how to introduce Gypsy's next paragraph, so here goes:

Also realize that both the mayor of San Francisco (Gavin Newsom) and the state government (the legendary Schwarznegger) [sic] are both unelected puppets installed by Bush and Co.

Geez. I thought Gray Davis' incompetence led to Schwarzenegger's election ... and didn't he beat Phil Angelides in 2006 all by himself? Maybe I'm naive.

As for Newsome, he has been winning elections since 1998 without any help from Bush (or so I thought). Perhaps Gypsy's alluding to the fact that former SF Mayor Willie Brown, a notoriously wheeling and dealing Dem, appointed Newsome to the SF board of supervisors way back in 1996 -- showing Bush's incredible reach. Four years before he was elected president, he was able to get Willie Brown to place Newsome on the board, so that years later Newsome could support gay marriage, thereby solidifying the GOP base. Look how well it worked out for the GOP in 2006!

Let's wrap this up, shall we?

So, the Bay Bridge is between a rock and a hard place. It would be very easy to imagine an investigation being made impossible if the bridge did get blown up by so called “terrorists.”

Having said all this I would like to hope that I am wrong, that it is indeed a legitimate bridge repair work. But if the bridge does get blown up in the near future don’t buy the “terrorist” story! Investigate, document, take pictures, samples of soil, water, anything and don’t let them institute marshal [sic] law or sign Patriot Act 3!

Gee, and here I thought that if the Bay Bridge went and got itself all blown up, we'd all just say, "Shoot, there go those darn terrorists again!" and not investigate it at all.

It must be very hard for Gypsy to through life knowing all the world is crazed and she's the only one who's sane enough to see it.

See also:
The Most Ridiculous Story of the Year?
The Most Ridiculous Story of the Year? (2)
The Most Ridiculous Story of the Year? (3)

hat-tip: memeorandum; Bridge photo: Jimgris