Krugman nails this one. There quite simply isn’t enough lipstick in the world to put on the pig conservatives and Republicans made of 9-11 to cover up the ugly.
Guliani tried to use the grief and anger over 9-11 to mount a Presidential campaign, covering up the fact that the reason so many First Responders died had to do with his own self serving decisions resulting in communications systems which failed.
Faux News and conservative brought us “United We Stand” – not as an apolitical joining of American bringing us all together with common purpose – but as a political vehicle.
George Bush dancing in a sock stuffed monkey suit across the deck of a US Carrier with the banner “Mission Accomplished”.
George Bush and Dick Cheney lying us into an illicit invasion of Iraq, with Condo’s “Mushroom cloud in the back yard” analogy, upping the ante on the 9-11 tragedy despite there never being any evidence to support Saddam having WMDs. Saddam paid for his treason against the Iraqi people… You seen anyone here yet pay for murdering 5,000 Americans and bankrupting the country in an illegitimate war whose only real beneficiaries were contracting corporations such as Dick Cheney’s who stole at least a third of the trillion dollars America poured on the ground in Iraq.
The use of 9-11 imagery in blatant political ads.
10 years later, and despite Katrina, First Responder communications systems which are still dysfunctional and can’t talk to each other because of blatant corruption in the halls of Congress, and K street pay for play set up by Tom Delay.
Shuck and Jive, Duck and Cover… And the spending of trillions on a massive “1984” style security infrastructure that crushes Constitutional guarantees and would make the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the KGB in Communist Russia cry with envy.
The Years of Shame
Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?
Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
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