Frank Rich writes: "It is that America - the country where rampaging greed usurped the common good in wartime, the country that crashed just as Bush fled the White House - that we live in today. It has little or no resemblance to the generous and heroic America we glimpsed on 9/11 and the days that followed. Our economy and our politics are broken."
Mid-September 2001. (photo: Peter Funch)
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I just wish Frank Rich had added our home-grown terrorists to the mix, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and every member of the now defunct Project for a New American Century.
Of course you're right. If anything, Frank Rich's entire article is the best argument yet about how and why the terrorists won. I can't fathom why the writer himself doesn't see that.
IN the context of the article, you would no doubt be referring to all the "gentlemen terrorists", from Hank Paulson, thru Timothy Geithner, and onward through the myriad chiefs and war lords of banks and hedgefunds? There is no attack on the economy from without, there is only America's own attack on its own economy by banks and corporations whose primary goal is to destroy the economy so that it can be rebuilt to better suit their needs. That is the definition of what they did to Greece and Argentina and countless other basketcase IMF "salvage jobs" and that is exactly what they are attempting to do in America. America's position in the world? from top dog to just plain "doggie"... in ten short years. Who won? come now.
"The terrorists lost. But who won?" - who won? US militarism and AIPAC induced US foreign politics. Libya fits in the pattern. And now to liberate Syria and Iran and put whole Palestine behind the barb wire (wall could be completed by now - 3 billion + billions more donations from US "friends")
No terrorist group made the decisions the U.S. government has engaged in or forced it on the government from without. The U.S. agenda was already set and the scenario for garnering hate for the U.S. already in motion
Kruschev said that there was no need for the USSR to attack the U.S., that they would rot from within. He was right, but too bad the U.S. is taking a lot of decent people and countries down with them.
I would also put the American people as big losers. We 3,000 in the attack on 911, we have lost most of our rights, we have to pay for the war profiteering, and our economy is in the mud.
Bush-the-twit's ratings were about as high as a snake's belly and his "Shadow - Chancellor", Cheyney, was deeply unpopular, even with conservatives of the traditional type. And their reaction to the disaster was so totally predictable that even a complete moron could have forseen the resultant backlash against the American people, almost tantamount to martial law and the "You're either for us or against us" mentality.
It was a big "Duh!" -Even from a cave in some Pakistani or Afghani mountain with a communication network worldwide.
And THAT'S the danger of the reactionary right in all it's well-worn and O'-so belligerent manifestations.
I'm sure that, in it's bent and convoluted but still-predictable way, the ol' Heart-attack-waitin'-to-happen's book will illustrate, from his castrated, fear-of-being-Pinochet'ed defiant stance.
Sure, we got OBL, Al Qaeda is diminished, and the professional shadows of our limitless War on Terror can claim a technical victory. But Rich's whole article is a repudiation of any superficial claim to victory by "us" against "them".
It's a trenchant and disturbing chronicle of how we allowed the palpable unity of purpose we felt right after 9/11--the uplifting "oneness" that must have gripped most Americans after Pearl Harbor--to slip through our fingers, to decompose, through mass distraction, denial and head-up-your-ass stupidity, into the present moral, political and economic mess we barely discern before us.
We bought Bush's Grand Canard that 2 wars didn't require shared sacrifice; the single most compelling point in the piece. "The magic credit card"...a new slogan for buying needless shit! No draft, no new taxes, no hassles, no limits, aahh, "Pleasantville"! To Hell with reality; everyone's a victim. We bought all of it; We got the rigged government we deserved. No harm, no responsibility, no limits, no regulation, no awareness, no accountability, no job, no house, no savings, no hope, no point.
Top-down cynicism and greed meets bottom-up fecklessness and greed. The GOP's America.
In this day and "age" of asymmetrical warfare, can you spell, p-r-o-v-o-c-a-t-i-o-n?
We're all adults in this room, although our "fearless leaders" believe otherwise.
I'll tell ya, it's a good thing we all don't live near the Grand Canyon, because we the American public have sure shown ourselves to be Lemmings over the last decade... perhaps the better analogy is the frog in the slowly boiling water... and now we're gona put everyoe back to work by giving the rich even bigger tax breaks... WAKE UP People! Before it's really too late...
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