AND NOW…IDIOTS

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

Paul Krugman. Straight-up garbage:

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.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Because you’re a gutless piece of crap. At least Professor Krugman and I agree about something.

This, of course, has been making the rounds just about everywhere. Notice how the right ”knows” what Paul Krugman knows “whether they admit it or not.” Notice also that “in its heart, the nation knows” that 9/11 is “an occasion for shame.” The nation doesn’t know that it knows that so it is good that it has Paul Krugman around to tell it what it refuses to admit to itself.

Next up, egregious airhead Kathleen Parker thinks 9/11 made America mentally ill or something stupid like that.

The legacy of 9/11 can’t be fully measured even now, but perhaps the most damaging aspect can be found in our national discourse.

Taking the long view, it is possible to see the roots of today’s political dysfunction — the hate, fear, anger and resentment — firmly planted in the soil at Ground Zero.

Something was unleashed 10 years ago that bears our scrutiny. It wasn’t only evil, though the attacks were certainly that. The event was so cataclysmic and horrifying that it caused a sort of emotional breakdown in the American constitution. Simply put, it damaged our collective soul and seems to have released a free-ranging hysteria that has contaminated our interactions ever since.

No matter how many prayers uttered; no matter how many hands held or pledges made; no matter how many bombs dropped or coffins draped. A nation cannot heal itself without self-awareness. On this score we have fallen short. We seem not to want to recognize that we don’t have a problem; weare the problem.

Putting it bluntly, Sept. 11 caused us to go temporarily insane. Being for or against the war, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, divided us as wars do, but this time was different. Friendships ended, marriages suffered, people crossed the street to avoid those with whom they disagreed. Ten years later, we are still at war. Tack on the global financial crisis, stagnant unemployment, the further dissolution of trust in our institutions, and we have all the ingredients for moral panic.

And now, alas, another election season is upon us with all the froth and spittle we love to loathe. President Obama understands that the nation has a psychological problem, but no president in his right mind can afford to speak publicly of such things. If Jimmy Carter was brought down by his “crisis of confidence,” a.k.a. “malaise,” speech, imagine if Obama, who already suffers an image of elitist condescension, mentioned that the nation could use a little time on the couch.

With all due respect, that is the stupidest thing Kathleen Parker wrote since the last time Kathleen Parker wrote something. It may make Miss Parker cry to have her idiotic theory destroyed so quickly but as one of Glenn Reynolds‘ e-mailers pointed out, Miss Parker’s “free-ranging hysteria” existed long before 9/11.

I really began to follow your blog on Sept 11, when most other websites were down due to traffic. Looking back ten years, I think it would be true to say that I have never experienced a historical event that has been more whitewashed, and this is almost frightening. There’s the obvious airbrushing of the falling victims, any body-parts or blood, the people cheering in the Middle East, etc. But there’s also the invention of a “we were all united and then Bush ruined it” idea. This is nonsense. The professional and academic left immediately started with “the chickens have come home to roost,” “it’s our fault for supporting Israel, etc.”

On Sept 11, just after the second tower fell, I was walking across campus with one of my colleagues. This was at the point when we thought there were 50,000 people dead. Her very first comment was, and I am not making this up or exaggerating it: “I am most worried about our muslim students.” Most worried. Not a word for the dead, not a word for the suffering, not a word for students who might have lost loved ones, but a concern verging on panic about the utterly idiotic idea that a bunch of students on a small liberal arts campus in New England were about to persecute the four muslim students in their midst. Political ideology trumped human decency, and elaborate fantasies of deranged redneck muslim-haters were concocted out of thin air. People were demonstrating on my campus against a war in Afghanistan even before Bush issued the ultimatum: there was never support for that war among the professional or academic left.

Another thing that has been airbrushed is that the country (and especially the political class) didn’t immediately support Bush. His handling of the crisis seemed inept at the very beginning, and I know that I had a sinking feeling that he would do exactly what had been done with every other attack: stern words, sanctions, some UN investigating committee which would take years. And the left wasn’t exactly giving Bush a break. Mary McGrory (in a column that I think has been memory-holed for its amazing stupidity) actually proposed that Bush make Gore co-president, because we needed a “national unity” government. It wasn’t until Bush said “and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” that I could start to hope that maybe something could be done. The country wanted action taken: most of the political class really did not, but they were pushed along by the public.

Maybe I’m naive, but I never thought I’d see the history of an event that billions of people saw be re-written in less than a decade. My Orwell had a pretty keen eye for the future.

To this country’s leftist intelligentsia, Osama bin Laden’s greatest crime was not the fact that he murdered 3,000 innocent people on September 11, 2001 but that President Al Gore wasn’t living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the time. So there was never any chance for the sort of proper, nuanced and “civilized” American response the left would have greatly preferred.

Washington did not go to the United Nations, ask for and spend a year or two debating totally useless sanctions. There was no opportunity for “churches” like the Episcopalians to issue their standard “We deplore these deaths in the strongest possible terms but…” resolutions and no prolonged national debate about what wehad done to bring this attack on ourselves.

Instead, that uncouth, born-again barbarian George W. Bush treated an act of war like an act of war, shot back, didn’t really care who did or did not approve and accepted the consequences. And it’s a good thing that he did.

Miss Parker worrys about “today’s political dysfunction — the hate, fear, anger and resentment?” Think what todays American politics would be like if Washington had responded to the 9/11 attacks the way the left thought it should.

Think what Americans would have believed about a national government that refused to protect its citizens. Think how Americans would have responded to their government implicitly arguing that the victims deserved their fates simply because they were Americans.

Such a contemptible government could not and should not have survived. At the very least, the Democratic Party would have been annihilated in 2004. And it is not too hard to imagine the United States itself fragmenting as large swathes of the country threw off allegiance to Washington to go it alone.

Which may have been what the hard left wanted and still wants. For various reasons, people like Paul Krugman, Kathleen Parker and their ilk really don’t like this country very much. Maybe Krugman hates this place because most Americans finally see him for the intellectual joke that he has always been while Miss Parker reallyresents having to live in a country where people as low and unsophisticated as George W. Bush and Sarah Palin can even be nominated for, never mind win, high political office.

Or maybe New York Times and Washington Post columns pay a lot of money for something that obviously doesn’t require much intelligence at all.