Katie has a soul sister. Her name is Karen Hazel, who “raises her voice” about 9/11 on the District 41 (Minnesota) GOP website here. After describing her September angst and the fact she was an “eyewitness” to the collapse of the towers in New York, she chides the rest of us for not being sufficiently reverential in remembering the events of that day.
Karen says we “talk about it less” as the event draws farther away. Why yes, Karen, that’s true; it is the psychology of healing, not the complacency that you suggest that it is. What would you have us do? Run up and down the streets screaming and wailing and beating ourselves with sticks? It must be so discouraging for you to have that pesky hurricane competing for the nation’s attention, especially since it demonstrates the bumbling ineptitude of the administration in preparing for a national disaster. Utter fools, and cronies of fools.
As Spotty has written before here and here, 9/11ism has morphed into a giant national self-pity party that has made us insane. With time and distance, sanity and perspective are returning to our citizens: not a promising development for George Bush and his clanging claque of sycophants like Karen – and Katie.
This administration manipulated the emotions of the nation whenever it suited: orange alerts, terrorists under every bed, swarthy boogie men everywhere. While all the time doing very little to secure the ports, chemical factories, and nuclear facilities in the “homeland.” Not to mention putting in a half effort to find the terrorists, including bin Laden. And really not to mention the unbelievable folly of the war in Iraq, which is proving awfully counter productive, terrorist production-wise.
And of course, according to Karen, it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. Karen is right about one thing, if Bill Clinton’s presidency had not been beset by the baying hounds of the right wing, he could perhaps have spent more time on terrorism.
Let’s remember, though, that the perpetrators of the first bombing of the World Trade Center were prosecuted and locked away for life. When it was established that bin Laden and al Qaeda were responsible for the African embassy bombings, Clinton struck against bin Laden’s encampments, an act roundly criticized by conservatives as “wagging the dog.”
In the closing days of the Clinton administration, it prevented the planned Millennium attack in part by putting the Customs Service on high alert, a move that paid off. The Clinton administration also presented the evidence that it had collected on the Cole bombing to the new Bush administration, which by all appearance did nothing about it.
In fact, in spite of being warned that bin Laden was going to be his biggest problem, Bush did virtually nothing about bin Laden prior to 9/11. He and Condi Rice ignored the advice of Richard Clarke, and he couldn’t be bothered while on vacation to do anything about a Presidential Daily Briefing in August of 2001 that contained a dire warning about bin Laden’s intentions.
The real problem, Karen, with our recollection of tragedy of 9/11 is that it has been so manipulated by the President and his neocon buddies that the aftertaste is one of increasing bitterness and betrayal.
Tags: Katherine Kersten Minnesota GOP 9/11
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