It stinks of desperation. George Monbiot, inveterate leftist of the foundation financed environmentalist persuasion, has once again taken a swing at the “conspiracy idiots” who believe government is capable of mass murder, including the reflexive murder of its own subjects.

Not unlike his brethren, most notably Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn, Monbiot buys the Ward Churchill version of events in regard to the attacks of September 11, 2001—that is to say Osama and a small number of cave-dwelling Wahhabi fanatics magically made NORAD stand down and defied the immutable laws of physics, thus delivering one to the conclusion a piece of paper cannot be slipped between Monbiot and the moonstruck followers of the neocons, as they all buy the same Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

“Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build,” complains the former BBC employee. “Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues—climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality—are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.”

In fact, Mr. Monbiot and his ilk are part and parcel of the “mainstream political process,” especially considering the degree of foundation funding and support his cherished “movements” receive, from the likes of the Ford, Schumann, Rockefeller, and MacArthur foundations, to name but a handful.

Monbiot’s “progressive” left was long ago sold down the river. In effect, the foundation oiled “movements” so dear to Monbiot’s heart are completely and utterly ineffectual, having accomplished dreadful little over the decades, and instead serve as a facile target of convenience for Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael “Savage” Weiner, Sean Hannity and the neocon fascists dominating the corporate media.

For all his effort and that of his pals, Monbiot has managed to make the machine of progress, as he gauges it, turn in reverse. It is not the 9/11 “morons” destroying Mr. Monbiot’s “movements,” but his own enervated struggle, his own inability to understand reality and deal with it, even as he has made a career out of complaint minus substantial result.

According to Monbiot, questioning the official version of events, replete with bad science and glaring omission, is “a displacement activity” and avoidance “of the real issues we must confront,” never mind Monbiot and his fellows have confronted for decade after decade “issues” they swear are “real,” only to slide backward down a long slope into the muck of irrelevance, made a laughingstock and a cavalcade of clowns by the corporate media.

For Monbiot, the documentary Loose Change is a “concatenation of ill-attested nonsense,” never mind the good professor, from on-high at Oxford Brookes University, does not bother to detail such ill-attestation, caring only to tell us Benjamin Chertoff, the “senior researcher” of Popular Mechanics tasked with slamming 9/11 research far and wide, is not related to Michael Chertoff, a fact disputed by none other than Benjamin’s mother, Judy Dargan, in Pelham, New York. “Yes, of course, he is a cousin,” she told journalist Christopher Bollyn.

Mr. Monbiot is determined to attack the “crazy distraction” that supposedly “presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements,” never mind by and large such movements long ago went to fossil precisely because of the inability of intellectual doyens—represented by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Monbiot—to accept the fact that, indeed, George Bush and the neocons—and yes, even the faceless bureaucrats the progressives submit grant applications to over at the Ford and Rockefeller foundations—are cold-blooded killers who are determined to not only slaughter Iraqis as they did Vietnamese, but no small number of innocent office workers on a sunny morning in New York as well.

But not to despair, George, there is still time.

If you put aside your petty jealousies and hurt feelings and join the 9/11 truth movement you claim to despise, we actually may be able to effectuate change before it is too late.

Short of that, and the possibility of the unthinkable now breathing down our necks, we will know who will share the blame come the day after.