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More Herald-Trib suckage Got a comment? Make it here. RELATED: A nitwit with a keyboard is a dangerous thing According to Glenn, Hopsicker writes that "...everything from the flight school where the hijackers trained until the day they crashed commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and Pentagon -- was a CIA conspiracy." Which is not true at all. Hopsicker never wrote that the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon was a CIA operation. Such an idea is ludicrous on its face, which is entirely the point -- Glenn's straw man article invents facts, then attacks the fictions created by Glenn. One example: Glenn dismisses OnlineJournal.com, a Democrat web site that occasionally reprints some of Hopsicker's articles, as a conspiracy theory web site. And that's only in the seventh paragraph of a piece that ultimately fills up a whole newspaper page with copy. Another: she quotes second-person Amazon.com affiliate ad copy that appears on Venice Florida! dot com about Hopsicker's book and attributes it to me by name as first-person news copy. Then she states that this same quote attributed to me appears on an unrelated local real estate firm's web site which Glenn states that I'm responsible for (venicefl.com), dragging Exit Realty unknowingly and unwillingly into the fray. And on and on and on. Those were just the easy ones that jumped out. Another funny was her portrait of flight school operator Rudi Dekkers as a victim. Locals will long remember Dekkers' face getting plastered all over our television sets on the evening of 9/12/01 when it was revealed that he had taught Mohamed Atta and his wacky bunch how to fly right here in Venice. Venetians were horrified, but Dekkers, thrilled with all of the attention, turned his Warholian 15 minutes (that stretched out to an ungodly four or five days) into a long-form ad for his delightfully inexpensive flight school while making it appear to outsiders that Venice's citizenry was entirely comprised of terrorists and ne'er-do-well foreigners with unpronounceable names. Simultaneously across Venice on that same evening, shouted voices aimed at Dekkers' televised visage could be heard: "STFU, you idiot!" Within days it would be learned that Dekkers had significantly jacked up his low, low discount prices when it came to the 9/11 terrorists. Our nation's most terrible moment had provided quite a windfall to the flight school entrepreneur. It appears that if you attended Huffman Aviation's flight school and you didn't want to learn how to land, it would cost you extra and Dekkers had collected that extra. Jump to present day and, according to Glenn, Dekkers is now a victim and Hopsicker is an evil man out to crush the "Naples businessman." That image alone, that of Dekkers as victim, made me throw down the article in disgust. Up until that point in time I was amused by the tourist nature of Glenn's naive and revisionist stroll through dangerous ground, but here, with Dekkers, it became apparent that she has yet to figure out how to use her own paper's electronic archive. If she had figured out how to access her company's internal database, she would have stumbled on a few H-T articles that were none too kind to the "businessman" from Naples. I've spoken with Hopsicker and he states he is working on a response that will appear shortly on his web site, so I'll leave with just these examples. I am gleefully looking forward to Hopsicker's response in the same way that I look forward to a NASCAR wreck -- sure, the carnage is ugly, but you can't beat it for its entertainment value. Yo, H-T: bring back Julian Pecquet. At least he could tell the difference between ad copy and news copy.
John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times. |
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