The difference between Vic and Carnacki to Sept. 11

My response in Vic's comments (0.00 / 0)

Senator, would you please, please, please reconsider running and let us run you as a write-in candidate for Senate so you can protect us from the big bad Democrats who want to teach the terrorists how to fly planes into buildings and then give them our hard-earned tax dollars to buy the planes and the fuel and point out the best targets to hit and have most effect? Nice job of politicizing the day of memorials, btw.

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by: PDAWV @ Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 10:46:48 AM UTC

PDAWV (4.00 / 1)

Fear. fear. fear. That's all they got. They began politicizing Sept. 11th on Sept. 12th. Dan Froomkin in The Post the other day had a great line about the thing history might condemn Bush the most for is not the mistakes he made, but the opportunities squandered. Think about it. The Republicans don't want to remember this, but on Sept. 11th the world was more united than ever before. They held candlelit possessions in Iran with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands in attendance. In Spain people formed a human chain to surround the embassy and sent the message for it to stay open, that anyone wishing to attack it would have to go through them. The outpouring of goodwill was incredible. They looked to the United States to lead and they would have joined.

From the beginning though, the Bush administration made the decision that the U.S. would act unilaterally in Afghanistan, to show we didn't need anybody.

They made it apparent it would only be a military response and that we were all to go "shopping."

My God! what an opportunity squandered. History is filled with "what ifs" but that might turn out to be the biggest "if" of all.

* If George Bush had decided to treat it as a criminal justice matter - to send division sized swat teams if needed, but that the emphasis would be on justice and not war. We could have shown the importance and strength of our legal system. The rightwingers say that's a typical "lib" response. But that was the exact conclusion reached by the people at The War College and later people at The Rand Corp. when asked how we should have responded to the terrorist attacks.

* If George Bush had used the opportunity and called for a global conference on terrorism to determine how to wipe out the root causes of terrorism. For the price of one month we're spending in Iraq - $12 billion - we could have set up alternative education systems to the madras. We could have got the Saudis to stop funding them. For what we spend on another month in Iraq we could have gotten international cooperation on investigations and provided assistance to governments to transition from dictatorships to democracies. It's easier to do it through persuasion than invasion.

* If George Bush had said, "We've got to stop our dependence on oil, that it has created an unsustainable situation. So today I'm calling for a new scientific effort to develop clean, renewable energy." A Manhattan Project for energy.

But all of those would have been excellent plans that require government to work. For all their flaws, government works under Democrats. A central tenet of the Republicanism is that government doesn't work and when they're in office they do everything to prove themselves right.

When a man embarks upon a crime, he is morally guilty of any other crime which may spring from it. Sherlock Holmes.

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by: Carnacki @ Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 14:02:54 PM UTC

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