Never Forget…
…that the attacks on 9/11 were a successful Al-Qaeda operation, that George Bush turned into a HUGE Al-Qaeda victory through his bungled, nonsensical, and ultimately tragic response.
Of all the fines levied against him, how much will Donald Trump actually pay?
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And that an assortment of far right war pigs in the senate want to “go back to Iraq”, after they start a war with Iran of course.
Going back to George Bush, really??
I never wanted war and I knew many who went over.
Let’s remember the people who died, to no fault of their own and leave it at that!
I will never forget that day.
I also will never forget how short lived the unity was.
Anonymous – GWB used this day as his justification to invade two countries. It is the beginning of his abused Global War on Terror. GWB squandered the memory of the lives of the innocent people killed on this day. That’s why Jason invoked GWB.
LG … you know … the longer I think about what happened then … that’s horseshit.
Sure Dubya was President and Colin Powell went to the UN with faked evidence … but our “leaders” right and left were “unified” and while he was invading two countries with their voted support … they joined in the destruction of American civil liberties and the creation of a Patriotized police state, stood by while we tortured at Gitmo, and continued the drone wars against civilians long after he was out of office …
I lost friends in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and I deal with students every day who have PTSD … and while Obama gets marks for the Iran deal his own administration has increased not decreased the US military (and contract military … and paramilitary) footprint around the world at the continuing expense our standing in the world, our own economy, and 99% of the rest of us …
Going back to Dubya is a convenient way for not going back to revisit what all of us allowed our society to become …
The post is factually accurate. I have plenty of scorn for Biden and Clinton for thier cowardly votes, but that does not diminish Bush’s guilt for being the architect and builder of the calamity.
The post is factually accurate in such a narrow sense that it serves to let everybody who wasn’t Bush or Cheney off the hook. And that’s revisionist history.
Yeah, Team Dubya wasn’t at the head of it at all. Karl Rove wasn’t marching us to war with focus group tested hot phrases, talking points and outright lies. It was a few in congress that designed the whole thing. Yeah, that’s how it all went down.
Going along with some bullshit for the sake of political expediency and re-electability is bad. Really bad. Like catastrophically bad. Being the architect of the biggest fuck-up in US history, lying to everybody to do it, calling people unpatriotic pussies if you disagree and committing war crimes along the way is another thing entirely.
” it serves to let everybody who wasn’t Bush or Cheney off the hook.”
That’s how accountability works. It is especially important to focus on the top guy when somebody who looks just like him is running for President with the same war plans and the same economic plans. Forgetting how the disasters were created would be the real revisionism.
Steve.. ask yourself this one question. If Al Gore were president and 9/11 happened, would we have lied to go to Iraq?
The answer is no. And that is all you need to know.
DD, you don’t really know how Al would have handled it? Your making an Assumption.
My point is, Let’s morn the ones we lost, both on 9/11 & those who fought.
Sorry, but the period of public mourning does not last 14 years, except for the families of those lost. Being stuck on that is even more counterproductive than trying to apportion blame.
“Remember”, would have been a more appropriate word. Thanks
Steve – Those things are EXACTLY what GWB and his enablers caused. I don’t let the cowards in the Senate that went along with him (Hillary included) off the hook, but Bush and his admin questioned the patriotism of everyone that disagreed with them and half of this country happily joined in.
As someone who was against the Iraq war from before it started, I know that pressure. I’ll allow that they didn’t act alone, but they set the stage and handed out the sheet music to sing. Millions sang along, but I blame the composer and the director.
Sorry folks, but that’s the excuse we keep using, time and again, and it just doesn’t wash.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc. ginned up the plan, and from the Patriot Act on through the Iraq War and the surge, and Gitmo and the Dixie Chicks getting railroaded, nobody (except maybe Howard Dean, I’ll give him that, and Ron Paul being your crazy uncle who got one right) had the guts to stand up to it. We have a legislative branch for a reason, and the gutless wonders there put politics atop ethics and went along with it. They had both the power and the responsibility to do better.
I lost friends (people I served for years with) over there BOTH because Dubya had the plan (can’t believe I’m typing those words) and because people like Hillary and Joe and John wouldn’t risk a career for the people they were ordering to risk their lives.
They pandered to the fear and the jingoism and sang “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps, and voted to take away our civil liberties and bomb innocent people. Now they (and you) want it to be gone under the rug as “GWB did it.”
We let it happen. If a guy as stupid as Dubya could damn near singlehandedly hoodwink an entire nation (to the extent that much of his strategic worldview is STILL US foreign policy today–we’re just pulling away from it in the last years of Obama’s SECOND term) then I guess that as a nation we’re neither as smart or as moral as we like to pretend to be.
There are lots of people running around with evil plans. But only the President can appoint them to national security positions.
“I guess that as a nation we’re neither as smart or as moral as we like to pretend to be.”
No guessing required.
I find that one of the biggest problems with politics is the way problems are framed. It’s always “they did it.” The enemy!
Prof Newton is right, we all did it. The presumptive Democratic nominee cast a vote. Continuing to bad-mouth those guys and not us guys has no value.
It spits in the face of realty to suggest that the Democrats and Republicans were equal partners in the Iraq war clusterfuck.
When I hear normal fuckwits rationalizing away reality to keep their worldview unruffled, “I think oh well.” But when someone I respect does it, part of my heart dies.
I have no idea what that second sentence means, but on the first bit… I’m not doing any math. I don’t know what the percentages are (who’s responsible for how much), but liberal people can bitch and cry about what a fucking war criminal Cheney is, say, unfortunately that has zero value.
If we hold our own to task we may (may) get some result.
In 2002 the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stated that Saddam Hussein was “a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security” and that United States has “no choice but to eliminate the threat.”
Who was the Chair of the committee? I don’t remember.
Yeah, I’m having trouble with the equal partners thing, as well.
Here’s why: While I was furious with Dems for their vote on the war and the Patriot Act, I remember what it was like speaking out against those things. My patriotism was questioned. I was told I sided with the terrorists. That by not supporting the Patriot Act/invading Iraq that I wanted another 9/11, etc.. Did the Dems (not all) cave to public outrage, hysteria, fear, panic? Yes.
However, there was one side (Bush and Co.) who played (preyed?) on the public outrage, hysteria, fear and panic. Talk about cool and calculating heads. They used the public outrage, hysteria, fear and panic to enact an agenda that existed long before 9/11. It wasn’t a fluke that so many Americans blamed Saddam Hussein for 9/11. That was deliberate.
Looking back, I am stunned at how Bush and Co. used 9/11, not only to enact their agenda, but as a way to shut up those of us who dared question a plan that really did exist before the towers came down. That’s what makes them more culpable. Dems caved under political pressure from the American people, and I’m fine with holding them accountable for that. However, Republicans used the American people’s emotion, and the 9/11 attacks, to enact an agenda that had nothing to do with the attacks. In other words, they didn’t let a crisis go to waste. That’s the difference.
Like I said, I’m not arguing for equal blame. I don’t see what use the blame game is now. It seems to me that there’s more value in ensuring candidates we support don’t get fucking played again rather than just bitching about those bad guys who duped us. It says something about powerful people when they just allow themselves to be used in this way.
I don’t think DG and Steve are putting this post in context. The “Never Forget…” header is in reference to the fetishization of the attacks by people who equate saluting the flag with patriotism. For me, it is worth taking a moment to look past the attack itself and all the maudlin self-congratulation the memory of the attacks evoke, and remember that George Bush turned the attacks into a HUGE Al-Qaeda victory through his bungled, nonsensical, and ultimately tragic response.
That is a simple fact of history. It is troubles anyone, their grievance is with reality, not with me.
I agree with everything you wrote with one slight caveat. George Bush didn’t act alone in it. He couldn’t have and it’s not healthy or productive to pretend he did. Is GW Bush responsible for the Biden quote I noted above?
That’s all.
jason I put the post in context, I just don’t agree with it. And I’m sorry for dead heart tissue, but where I don’t agree is in the assumption that all sorts of people make here (including pandora) that because the incumbents can make it tough, make it unpopular, make it unfair, make it so your patriotism is challenged for standing up for what you believe in (especially when you’re a fucking elected official who swore a fucking oath) that this difficulty somehow relieves you from the responsibilities for the outcomes that you fucking voted to support.
Bush is gone. The Patriot Act isn’t. Drone warfare isn’t. The US acting covertly to de-stabilize regimes isn’t. The burgeoning military spending for overseas adventurism isn’t. “Black” prisons overseas aren’t. We still have troops in combat for reasons nobody really understands.
If George Fucking Bush was such an idiot and yet such an evil mastermind that he managed to control foreign and domestic policy from Texas eight years after he was out of office, then he’s not the problem. We are. And the amount of effort that Obama had to spend to get Chris Coons and John Carney into line on a common-sense Iraq treaty is a large part of the evidence.
Yes the GOP built a gigantic noise machine and took every advantage of every piece of repressive government policy they could find to institute their plans. But in part they succeeded because their opposition turned into (or had always been) ineffectual clowns (I started to say “cowards” and I’m not sure I shouldn’t).
jason is pissed because GWB existed and put it over. I’m pissed because WE let him.
Cowards is indeed the correct word.
I called them cowards on Saturday. I’m on-board with the term. I also blame LBJ for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (although I think Bobby Kennedy bears some responsibility, too).
Like it or not, the Pres gets the blame. Drone warfare is also largely a product of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Bush was just there when the arming of drones became possible (requested by the Clinton admin).
“We still have troops in combat for reasons nobody really understands.”
As if we haven’t been doing THAT for the last 100+ years. This is America, dude, it’s what we do.
One of the interesting things Steve alludes to and then does not delve into deeper, is that it is hard now to get truth… Those of us who’ve studied history for a while, know that this has often been the way of the world… I think as some of us who still remember the Vietnam War era… and (some of us who lived during that same time frame but have those years erased, lol.) were very lucky to have had news sources in which we could trust. The journalistic code of ethics is no longer in journalism.. I guess it matured to the blogger’s code of ethics. But as blogging took root among those blessed with ethics. those without them invaded as well to disrupt and disseminate bad info.
But on both sides of the political spectrum I see people confiding they want more information, but like needles in haystacks it has now become too difficult to find….
Which is no different then back in the old days, trying to find a certain book in a library… You went around to fifteen or more libraries before you finally found it. But with TV being new, we were spoiled by turning on the TV and having Walter Cronkite tell and show us something we could believe…
What changed it the last time our press got out of control… was WWI… particularly in Europe… As the war ended, and the borders of the Western Front turned back to exactly where they originally were, those young intellectuals who’d survived, looked around and said what was it all for….
They then recognized a need to tell the truth so people could correctly assess danger or be able to dismiss false threats of danger, and make corrections in advance, minimizing the costs…. We do that here. But for most people who come home after work and click on a tv… they really have no idea what is really going on.
Which is why our nation is careening around a three ring circus in a clown car.
Loss of faith in the media, especially as an arbiter of truth and accuracy is only one of the many institutions that have lost stature.
Political parties, the Church, “Business”, the police, Academia, they all appear to be a con games, staffed up by a bunch of liars and frauds who are concerned only with their own comfort.
The only institution that appears to have any little bit of validity and integrity is the micro-network of trusted friends and contacts. So, it is impossible to see how we’ll be able to do anything that requires large groups to work together over some period of time.
It is Hobbesian state of nature out there.