Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember conservatives' eagerness to center any and every sort of conspiracy around Bill Clinton? The new bogeyman appears to be any economic cooperation whatsoever between the United States, Canada and Mexico, and WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi is the high priest of that little religion.
An Aug. 5 WND article by Corsi endeavors to blame the Minnesota bridge collapse on NAFTA. Really:
Evidence of increasing international trade truck traffic on Interstate 35 through Minnesota raises concerns that NAFTA Superhighway traffic contributed to last week's collapse of the freeway bridge in Minneapolis.
WND has unearthed a Federal Highway Administration report dating back to 1998 that warned increasing NAFTA truck traffic was expected to create a safety concern with bridges in states along the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway, including Minnesota.
Corsi eventually descends into his longtime activism against a transportation corridor in Texas, the only tangental link to Minnesota is that the corridor would run "parallel to Interstate 35." Corsi doesn't explain why transcontinental trade is a bad thing.
Corsi also rails against something called the North America's SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc. (NASCO), which "designates I-35 as a NAFTA Superhighway." he ominously adds: "The original 2005 NASCO website opened with a graphic map of I-35 that highlighted in yellow the continental nature of the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway, illustrating clearly the highway's links into Mexico and Canada."
But the NASCO map Corsi appended to his article shows that its interest in I-35 in Minnesota stopping short of full transcontinental ambitions. The map's representation of I-35 stops at Duluth, Minnesota and does not extend from there into Canada.
And thus, Corsi's bizarre bridge conspiracy starts to crumble.
UPDATE: An Aug. 7 article by Corsi repeats his conspiracy theory, but again, Corsi doesn't explain why trade between the U.S., Canada and Mexico is a bad thing or, if such trade is in fact a good thing, why new highways and trade corridors shouldn't be built and expanded.
Corsi needs to pick a conspiracy and stick with it.
