Among people for whom any lie told loudly enough is the same as truth, this should surprise no one

It's become part of the wingnut doctrine that it doesn't matter what the truth is, as long as you BELIEVE that something IS or COULD BE true, it's exactly the same as reality.

So it's hardly surprising that a "terrorist dry run" that seems to exist only in the mind of Debbie Schlussel and her readers once again turns out to be so much horsepuckey:

It's a little easier to understand why a Houston man who claimed to have thwarted a potential terrorist attack on a flight leaving Atlanta has not answered repeated requests to tell his story.

He was not on the plane, AirTran Airways says.

"After conducting additional research into this situation, we have verified, according to flight manifests [legally binding documents] that the individual that allegedly created a first-hand account of events on-board AirTran Airways Flight 297, a Theodore Petruna, was never actually on-board the flight," AirTran said in a statement, which the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the first to obtain.

An e-mail from a Tedd Petruna, in which he told the AJC via a Facebook message Friday was intended only for friends and family, made the rounds online this week after a friend apparently forwarded it to others. In a matter of days, Petruna's account appeared in chat rooms and blogs and on conspiracy theorists' Web sites.

The AJC was forwarded the e-mail dozens of times this week, as readers saw Petruna's tale and noticed conflicting information between it and earlier news reports of the flight delay Nov. 17. Some readers simply asked the AJC to further investigate the matter.

But others who forwarded the message accused the AJC of participating in a politically correct cover-up.

The intriguing story made for intense fodder among bloggers.

Petruna's story appeared in a blog on the Web site for The Project 9.12, a group started by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. A Canadian news site picked up the story. Dallas Morning News airline columnist Terry Maxon made it the subject of his blog for a second time this week on Friday. And snopes.com, a Web site that sniffs out rumors to decipher between fact and fiction, followed the story.

In its continued investigation into the incident, the AJC made several attempts to speak to Petruna about the incident. He has declined throughout the week to respond to repeated e-mail and phone attempts by the AJC to talk to him. That last request was made Saturday.

Additionally, AJC interviews with people on the plane, airline officials and federal agencies did not corroborate his story.

Not that this will change what the Glenn Beckians believe. Because it COULD be true, couldn't it? Isn't it POSSIBLE that there COULD have been a terrorist dry run on that plane just because a passenger speaking SPANISH didn't understand a request to turn off his cell phone? And like all good Cheneyites, the Glenn Beckians believe that if there is a one percent chance that something is true, you proceed as if it is true.

I realize that there are sad little men in this country who simply can't get over that we have a black Democratic president. Their little world of illusory white privilege (I say illusory because the privilege they want to hard to sustain is among people who will never, ever, ever let them into their ranks) is disappearing and they want desperately to "feel like real men." And how better to feel like real men than to regale their fellows with a swashbuckling tale of singlehandedly disarming a terrorist plot iin progress.

Now, I'm sure that Schlussel and her acolytes will tell you that this is all part of a massive cover-up by AirTran, the FAA, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ACORN, Barack Obama, The Homosexual Lobby™, and the 12 Jewish Bankers Who Run Everything. Funny how these are the kind of people who thought people like me should be executed as traitors for even suggesting that perhaps the official story we were told about the 9/11 attacks might not be true.

(h/t)