My head hurts

Can we accept the loony if it's irrelevant to a visionary's main task? I speak of Montreal's Great Green Hope, Richard Bergeron, who ran on a municipal transit platform in the last municipal election that seemed quite progressive. (True, his promise of heated bus stops was a bit much, but I attributed that silly statement to a brief moment of media-encouraged fancy.)

At a recent bicycle-power meet, Bergeron was a painful talker. Yet, bad speaker that he was, his expand-public-transit presentation was also full of ideas and examples from around the world. (In fact, the worst presenters, I noticed, had the most to say; the suave presenters were almost content-free.)

Bergeron is head of the upstart Projet Montreal party. Shockingly, the newbies won a seat on city council. Go make a fuss, tiger!

But this morning's paper reveals a Bergeron opinion that the media missed the first time around: He's a 9/11 conspiracy nut who believes it possible that the Americans staged the airplane crashes in Pennsylvania and D.C. on September 11 in order to have an excuse to invade Iraq.

Er.

"It may be that what we witnessed on Sept. 11, 2001 was a simple act of state banditry of titanic proportions," Bergeron wrote in his 2005 book, "Les Québécois au Volant, c'est Mortel." And, recently contacted by a reporter, he reiterated the theory! Give him one for honesty. But zero for brains.

Bergeron is a local transit visionary. And whoop-whoop-whoopy-bonkers on international stuff. What to do, what to do.