The recent truck accident and resulting overpass collapse must have Rosie convinced that Bush has done it again, but here’s the deal:

Even a C-average Jr. high school shop student knows that steel loses almost all of its strength when you heat it (’cause, you know, they actually work with the stuff).  I can’t say this loud enough, but here it goes, “***The steel does not have to melt, nor will it melt in a typical structure fire, in order to fail as a support material***”.

Get it cherry red hot, and its like putty, or molding clay, in consistency long before it gets hot enough to “melt”.  Adding chromium and molybdenum will help reduce, but not prevent, this phenomenon, which is one reason why so many gun barrels are made of chrome/moly steel.

No matter; every account I’ve heard to date in reference to WTC, and this latest event in Caleeforn-ya, has used the word “melt” or “melted” to refer to the resulting structural failures, displaying in sharp relief the monumental ignorance of not just the average journalist, but every last one of them.

And not a single one of any import, it would seem, bothered to look up the properties of various steels at various temperatures on that there internet thingy, presumably because it would have taken a whopping fifteen minutes of one assistant’s time.  Looking up facts is not in their job description, apparently, nor in Rosie O’s.  Facts get in the way of so many things…

On a related note:  After hearing of the scope of the recent lorry crackup in California, “Republican” Gov., Arnold Schwartzenblather, who ran his campaign using conservative-sounding rhetoric, made the following statement in his response: “Everyone is going to get a free ride.” (And he meant it)

That is a perfect example of why the Republican Party does not now own the House, the Senate and the Whitehouse for the rest of the foreseeable future– they just cannot grasp the concept of Liberty, but instead merely talk about it as part of their shtick, offering themselves as the less socialist socialists in the big, socialist bag of nuts.