Hugh Hewitt interviews Rudy Giuliani on a wide range of issues, including Rosie O'Donnell's recent conspiratorial meltdown on The View:

HH: Let me play for you a little Rosie O’Donnell on 9/11 looking back.

RG: (laughing)

HH: Have you heard this clip yet, Mayor? Have you heard her talking…

RG: I don’t know.

HH: Let’s play Rosie O’Donnell from a couple of weeks ago.

RO’D: I do believe that for the first time in history, that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower 7, Building 7, which collapsed in on itself, it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved. World Trade Center 7. World Trader 1 and 2 got hit by planes, 7 miraculously, the first time in history steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.

HH: What do you make of that, Mayor?

RG: I just never thought of her as like an engineering expert, but you’d have to go back to the people who studied that. And World Trade Center 7, if I recall correctly, came down around 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon. And my partner, Mike Hess, who was then my Corporation Counsel, was one of the last two people to get out of World Trade Center 7. He almost died there. And I was in a building that was pelted by…what really happened is World Trade Center 1 and 2 bombarded World Trade Center 7. And I was in a building next to World Trade Center 7, and we were trapped in that building for 20 minutes, and that building took a considerable amount of building.

HH: But what do you make of public people…

RG: It was a little further away, so…

HH: What do you make of public people firing up this nutter conspiracy theory? Does that injure our understanding of what we’re in?

RG: Well, I’ve always thought that conspiracy theories, and I’ve heard all the wild ones, you know, I’ve been subjected sometimes overseas, sometimes here, you know, kind of really wild ones. I won’t even repeat them, they’re so wild. I’ve always been very clear on September 11, and I don’t know why we have to have conspiracy theories, when we know who did it. (laughing) You know, we know that these 19 people took those airplanes and flew them into buildings in order to kill innocent people. They’re the ones responsible for it. None of this would have happened unless they did that. Everybody else, you know, everybody else involved, and it was doing the very best they could to save as many lives as possible. Some did it effectively, some didn’t do it as effectively, but they were all trying, you know? This idea of going back and trying to figure out what did the Bush administration know, what did the Clinton administration know in order to blame people is really unfortunate. If either anybody in the Bush administration or the Clinton administration had known about September 11, I think they would have done everything they could to stop it. What we do is, we just…when we do that, we displace the responsibility where it belongs.

HH: Yeah.

RG: It’s squarely in one place. It belongs with the Islamic terrorists who planned it over a long period of time, and carried it out. And everybody else, everybody else tried real hard to do the best they could to save lives. And as I said, some were successful and some weren’t, and some of the decisions were right and some were wrong, but the criminal, horrible, inhumane decision was the one made by those terrorists.

Bill Whittle has a tremendous essay online this week on the dangers of conspiracy theories, and why the displacement involved them has become increasingly attractive to so many people over the last 30 or 40 years. As usual with Bill it definitely qualifies as long-form blogging; this is merely a taste:

Now most normal people do not look at life from within a pit of failure and despair. Our lives are measured by small successes -- like raising children, serving in the military, doing volunteer work at your church – or just doing the right thing in a thousand small but important ways, like returning money if someone makes you too much change.

These are simply the small, ordinary milestones of a life of value. They give you a sense of identity.

But if I didn’t have that sense of identity rooted in my own small achievements, I wonder how likely it would have been for me to grab onto that sense of sudden empowerment, of being an initiate in some arcane club of hidden wisdom. I wonder what might have happened to me if being the Holder of Secret Knowledge had been my only source of self-esteem…the one redeeming landmark in a life of isolation and failure. Indeed, I wonder what power such a worldview would have over me if I could believe that behind the scenes lurked vast and unknowable dark forces – forces that could topple a president and perhaps even explain why a person of my deep, vast and bountiful talents was not doing a whole lot better in life?

I wonder what might have happened to me then.

Because I did not need to believe in Giant Wheels of Conspiracy grinding John F. Kennedy to dust, I was relieved and not a little embarrassed when I finally read Case Closed. It was – quite vividly – like opening a window in a musty, cluttered, book-filled room and feeling the cool breeze of reason and logic air out the mind.

This is not the place for me to debate whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin that day. That would take an entire book, exhaustively researched, with extensive footnoting and reference to primary sources. There is such a book, it is called Case Closed, and as I said it performs its function better than any book I have ever read.

I am more interested in the psychology of someone who believes in these conspiracy theories. I exempt people who have only heard one side of the story, as I did. Sadly, skepticism doesn’t sell as well as hysteria. With regards to The View, ABC and Disney would rather count their ad money than waste potential revenues placing the truth for sale. If this offends you as much as it does me, you may make your purchases and plan your vacations accordingly.

Intellectually honest people, people without a deep, vested emotional need to believe the worst, are usually relieved to hear the facts that demolish superstitions like the Bermuda Triangle and the Loch Ness Monster. While there may be disappointment at the loss of an unseen world, people who have chosen to live in reality find comfort in the fact that reality is, in fact, made up of the real and not the wished for.

As Umberto Eco wrote a couple of years ago:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

If this sounds like you, the first steps towards a cure are simple. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, listen to the interview, read the essay, repeat the dosage as necessary.