September 12, 2001

[Syrinx]

I remember talking with a friend the day after 9/11. I actually said "Well, I don't really like George W. Bush, but he's the president, and I've got to get behind him now."

I'm one of the most cynical, even paranoid, people in the nation when it comes to our political system, but for a brief time, measured in weeks, or maybe a few months, I really believed that Bush was sincere in wanting to defend this country against foreign invaders, and I pushed partisanship aside.

Just like the lawmakers that gathered on the steps of the Capitol to sing patriotic hymns, I was fooled by a political machine that was cynical in the very worst sense of the word.

How could we have been so stupid? How could we have been played like that?

Several weeks later, my eyes opened anew, I saw the manipulation that was going on. I saw the opportunism and the shameless exploitation of the victims of the attacks. I saw it, but apparently the "opposition" in Congress did not.

Have the Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosis of this world seen the truth yet? To this day, are they still being conned by the emperor that long ago was shown to be a nudist? Either they are still being conned, which six years on, shows that they are not competent, or they are co-conspirators. It has to be one or the other. There is no other explanation.

I will never, ever vote for a Republican, but I'm hoping for a sweep against the Democratic incumbents in the primary races that are up. We need new blood. We need honest blood. We need fearless blood.

We need leaders!

Is that too much to ask?

Our "Democrats" need to be reminded that they are the party of the people! They need to be reminded that Habeas Corpus is the most basic foundation of a free society.

They say that the most basic right is the right to stay alive. What wimps! What sell-outs! What hypocrites! What phonies.

Remind your representatives, through snail mail, email, and townhall meetings of the great words of our founding father, Thomas Paine:

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Please forgive my lapse into mindless patriotism in the days immediately following the events of September 11th. I quickly recovered my senses. Our Speaker and Majority Leader are slower to heal, and my prescription for them is tough love.

George W. Bush is still my president, but I've long seen him for what he is. He is a petty, vindicative, intellectually-challenged man that gets his jollies from destroying all that is good. As a child, he amused himself with exploding frogs. As an adult, by some sick twist of history, he has graduated to mass murder, dreams of genocide, and the attempted completion of his grandfather's vision -- the overthrow of the American constitution and the American way of life.

I'm baffled by why so many people that I know can't see what is so crystal clear. But it comforts me a bit to know that my mind was clouded for a time, and I soon gathered my thoughts. Perhaps their minds will clear eventually, and we will shake off this contagion, this poison, this fear, this self-hate, that has enveloped our nation for too long.

[crikkett]

1. We're fucked. Period. We call for leaders but then won't elect them

and I have the courage to vote for Kucinich no matter what the teevee tells me to do, because he's got the courage to stand up for what I beleive in.

He's the kind of leader everyone on DU actually pines for in posts like this.

[Hekate]

2. September 12, 2001: Bush immediately disappointed me by telling us to go shopping. BUT the Congress

I have to give the members of Congress who were there this much credit: they were there when the plane or bomb or whatever it was hit the Pentagon. They basically ran for their lives and were shaken to the core. I have friends who were working in DC that day and they heard and felt the impact. It was a hideous shock for everyone in the city, and I take that into account when judging some of their behavior in the immediate aftermath.

I wanted my President to tell the nation: "You have nothing to fear but fear itself." Like you I was disgusted at what he did and said instead: he told us to be fearful and to consume.

I just want to say that what we were all feeling in the weeks that followed was not so much mindless patriotism as it was deep shock and a sense of solidarity with our fellow citizens. We were clinging to what we knew or thought we knew about what it means to be Americans. The world was on our side, the world stood with us.

The tragedy and the travesty is how the Bush administration used us all -- from the most average citizen to our soldiers to our elected officials. Bush and the Neocons used us and perverted our patriotism to their own ends.

It is past time for Congress to wake the hell up from their trance. They should have done so years ago, but I believe Bush/Cheney/Rove fed them the most outrageous lies in the guise of secret intelligence to keep them compliant. It worked on too many. By now they know they were lied to -- I just wish more of them would admit it publically.

I don't so much want to get rid of all the Dems as I want to ensure a resounding Democratic majority for the foreseeable future. It will take every vote we've got to even begin to make a dent in the mess that Bush has created. We need them, their experience and knowhow. We need to have their backs. But we also need to be ON their backs, reminding them that we are watching, and grooming their replacements if they don't shape up.

Hekate

[Sadie4629]

3. The consumption part

was crucial. On September 11 we took a hit that could have collapsed our economy. Remember what happened to the DJIA? If we had all hunkered down expecting the worst and living with a bunker mentality, businesses would have gone toes up, jobs would have been lost (in massive Great Depression numbers, not what we see now,) and things would have been one hundred times worse than they are now. Instead, Bush encouraged spending, traveling, etc. Fault him for whatever you want to, and there is PLENTY, but telling us to spend shouldn't be among them.

[Changenow]

4. Hogwash. nt

[Hekate]

10. Mr. H agrees with you there: we have a consumer-based economy. It was the crass way...

...that Bush framed it that made me both sick and furious. It was crass, it was patronizing, it was the opposite of what we needed to hear from our president. There was nothing about shared courage, nothing about shared sacrifice.

Consume? I'll give him consume: buy solar panels. Bush could have led the way by slapping solar panels on every government building in the country, and by making them affordable for the average citizen of this nation. Instead we were told to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape, and to cower in our homes.

But we're not "citizens", we're "consumers" -- and this isn't a "nation", it's "the homeland", a racially-loaded term if there ever was one.

Btw, I quote my husband because I respect his knowledge-based opinion on the economy. He despises Bush, too

Hekate

[warren pease]

5. He lost me about the first time he actually said "evul dooers"

Or whatever the hell it sounds like in that phony central casting Texas/Maine accent he dreamed up to get a little cred with the rednecks. So that gave him a couple of hours slack and then, when the "evul dooer" talk began, I put him back in his rightful place as an imbecilic little sociopath and started wondering what 9/11 was really about, who did what to whom that day, and why and how. And who benefited. So I was a BushBot for about two hours and, even though I really hate to get conned, I figure the circumstances were weird enough that day to get just about anybody to think just about anything.

And in the subsequent months, he just kept outdoing himself, rhetorically speaking. This is from an end-of- week wrap-up story I wrote for a Calif. newspaper about a month after "9/11 Changed Everything (tm)." This was back when I was still working as a disgruntled member of our co-opted mainstream media.

The FBI today issued new warnings of possible terrorist attacks that the agency said could occur within the next few days. According to the FBI, US intelligence has uncovered credible evidence that terrorists may be planning to use stolen crop dusters to spray unspecified toxic chemicals over urban population centers. Agency insiders also revealed that the FBI has intercepted "chatter" between suspected Al Qaeda members that indicate terrorists may be planning suicide attacks on US chemical plants and oil refineries in the near future.

At his first prime-time press conference since taking office, President Bush last night delivered messages of healing and hope to American citizens who remain frightened and uncertain in the wake of the September 11 attacks. He also directed some harsh criticism at the international Islamic community which has, Bush maintained, been unhelpful in capturing Al Qaeda leader and September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Domestically, Bush sought to calm a nervous American population still reeling from the shock of September 11. He again called for Americans to return to their normal lives, to resume work and travel and to go shopping. He noted that, while individuals must remain on the alert for possible terrorist activities, the combined resources of the US armed forces, intelligence services and security agencies are working round the clock in an all-out effort to protect Americans from any further terrorist incidents.

Directing his focus to the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, Bush again condemned Islamic terrorists and the countries who harbor them, saying that the US stands firm in its resolve to find bin Laden and will continue to exert pressure on countries who have thus far failed to cooperate fully with the US in that effort.

Bush was asked to explain how Americans might pursue normalcy even as their fears are rekindled whenever the FBI issues new terrorism threat assessments. The President replied, "Well... you know, if you find a person that you've never seen before getting in a crop duster that doesn't belong to (them), report it. If you see suspicious people lurking around petrochemical plants, report it."

And it just kept getting better and better. But not for me; I had to quit reporting this kind of nonsense or lose what little was left of my personal ethics, not to mention my mind.


wp

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. Not to nitpick but the quote is from Patrick Henry not Tom Paine.

[TahitiNut]

13. Patrick Henry, Speech in the Virginia Convention, March, 1775.

Yup. :thumbsup:

Interestingly, the words "Give me liberty or give me death" are a reference to the play "Cato, a Tragedy" by Joseph Addison.

[Syrinx]

14. oops!

Yeah, you're right. Thanks!

[Individualist]

7. 9/12/01 was the day I learned the govt. had been warned that attacks would occur

That was the day I started trying to find answers to why the bastards let it happen; it didn't take long to find those answers.

[Berry Cool]

8. I remember defending him when he first referred to terrorists as "folks"

One of the first public statements he made was along the line of "The folks who did this..." A lot of people came down hard on him for that: "FOLKS?? How can he call terrorists 'folks'?" I said it was just an unfortunate choice of words from a guy who had a tendency to talk like that. Little did I realize at the time that the worst possible choice of words was pretty much his stock in trade.

I also recall not blaming him for traveling around a lot the first few hours afterward: "If terrorists are attacking my country, I'd rather have them NOT know exactly where the president is."

I said these things even though I bore no great love for Bush. I said them because we were being attacked and even though I didn't like him, I thought then was not the time to rag on him, but rather give him an opportunity to prove whether he could rise to the occasion and be the kind of president our country needed. He was going to be baptized by fire, as I saw it, and I was not going to judge him until I saw how he survived that baptism.

It didn't take long for me to find out...very badly. And I was not the only one. And more and more are seeing the light every day.

[Sugar Smack]

9. OK, THAT is what did it for me.

the "terrorists as folks" thing. I felt a sort of warmth up until then that day. Never liked the guy either.

[lonestarnot]

11. I thought OMG and we have a fucking hair brained motherfucker for an imposter leader.

Never behind that sonofa bitch! :thumbsdown:

[TahitiNut]

12. Between the first and second airliner crashing into the towers, I thought "LIHOP!"

I haven't changed my mind, either.

[blues90]

15. My first impression when the towers were hit is it was because bush

was in office and it had something to do with bush sr screwing around with the ME .