I was thinking about putting up an anodyne, apolitical post about 9/11 this year (I am a New Yorker, I had friends killed in the attack, and friends who died of illnesses related to the attack, and friends who are suffering the aftereffect of the attack), but then I saw Dotard's Twitter feed and decided to take the gloves off.
9/11 was a Republican disaster, pure and simple.
The attacks succeeded because a Republican president, unelected but installed by a 5-4 Supreme Court majority, decided to ignore the intelligence warning of a coming terrorist attack on the United States.
The Republican mayor of New York City, advised to put the emergency command center in downtown Brooklyn's Metrotech, put it in World Trade Center 7 as a favor to a well-connected real estate mogul, putting the nerve center right in the middle of the city's biggest target. There is a reason why Rudy was wandering the streets of downtown Manhattan, gaining an undeserved iconic status- it was his incompetence, not his valor.
After the attacks, the Republican administration decided not to go after the perpetrators of the attacks, but to prosecute a war against the innocent population of Iraq, ending up in the deaths of countless Iraqis, thousands of American servicemembers, and resulting in a destabilized Middle East and a refugee crisis which is now destabilizing Europe. The Republican administration also put into place a surveillance state which still threatens the civil liberties of all Americans.
Most of the Republicans in Congress voted against a benefits package to aid ailing first responders, even filibustering against it in 2010. Jon Stewart was instrumental into shaming Congress into voting the act into law.
Trump himself has a shameful record regarding his statements and actions in the aftermath of the attacks, and even today, he can't help but bring an immature note of triumphalism into what should be a sober day for reflection.
9/11 was a Republican disaster, the responses to 9/11 were a Republican disaster. 9/11 should have marked the end of the Republican Party, but complicit corporate media persisted in portraying Republicans as 'strong on national security', all evidence to the contrary. 9/11 has degenerated into Right Wing Christmas, with all sorts of crying eagle kitsch (as an aside, those eagles would have gone extinct if environmentalists hadn't pushed for DDT bans). I hereby invite all of the Deplorables, MAGAts, Teabaggers, and the like to shove all of their kitsch, their victimhood, their false piety, their jingoism up their asses. Real people suffered, and are suffering, because of the incompetence of the people you voted and vote for, leave them to their remembrances. This isn't your day, assholes.
Nice. I agree.
ReplyDeleteBut two points. First, there's no way to make the assumption that the Gore administration would have actually thwarted the attacks. They were carried out by focused, dedicated young men, they were well funded and years in the planning. There had never been a coordinated suicide attack like that. The use of box cutters to murder flight attendants and pilots was entirely unanticipated. Even though they were the bad guys, you can't pretend they weren't every bit as prepared/trained and committed to their mission than any other soldiers on the planet - including our own.
Second, this statement that it was 'the media' that somehow made Americans stick to the Republican party in matters of war and peace. AMERICANS in large numbers believed that, and the media narrative was no different than it was when Clinton was elected. It is self-defeating to give the American electorate a pass - they are largely authoritarian tribal bigots and they'll always vote that way. The media didn't order the invasion of Iraq, Bush and Cheney did. The media didn't order torture, Bush and Cheney did. The media did not commit war crimes, Bush and Cheney did.
Years later, these same people - with a little help from the GRU and James Comey - gave us Trump. They're not quitting, they're not standing down, they're not going away. You're going to see what they're capable of after the GOP takes a pounding in 55 days. The tantrum will be epic, the conspiracy theories wild, and violence is not out of the question...
bbbb, you and mikey both make excellent points
ReplyDeletethe militarism that has made the us air force the most destructive terrorist organization in the world for the last half-century is promoted by the "military industrial complex" that eisenhower warned of - what i have termed more inclusively the MICFiC, , my not-catchy-enough acronym for the Military Industrial Congressional Financial Corporate Media Complex
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=MICFiC
the twin "original sins" at the inception of our nation state - displacement of the original inhabitants by any means necessary, and unpaid labor by involuntary immigrants - have left their mark on the national character, and promote the acceptance of the two big lies identified by howard zinn that maintain the status quo and keep the things going in our relations with the rest of the world - that there is no class struggle, and that the u.s. acts internationally from unselfish motives
during the 2016 election i gave bernie sanders $27 - multiple times
now i am less hopeful - at present i think of the u.s. of a. the way i think of the church of rome - each are large scale systems which i could escape, but at a price i am unwilling to pay - each are fundamentally flawed in ways that i think i will not live to see corrected - as the firesign theatre said, during the previous milenium, THIS is the future - you got to LIVE it, or LIVE WITH it -
now i add, and eventually, get out of the way
but as yogi berra could have said, you never know when something surprising might happen
in the meantime, i try to live with awareness, and with love