"New York Times" Urges: Forget 9/11
By Isaiah Z. Sterrett (10/22/04)
Forget about 9/11. It’s no longer important. In fact, it never even happened. Just ask Tom Friedman.
In a truly revolting column entitled “Addicted to 9/11,” Friedman recently argued that Americans should forget about the slaughter of 3,000 of our fellow countrymen. “[M]any Americans,” he wrote, “are worried…that terrorism is transforming us and our society, when it was supposed to be about uprooting the terrorists and transforming their societies.” (By “many Americans” Friedman means “me and Al Gore.”)
Yes, terrorism is transforming our society. Whereas four years ago we were sorting through the rubble of the failed Clinton administration in search of the truth, we are today sorting through the rubble of bona fide terrorism, praying that we’re never hit again.
According to Friedman, “[b]y exploiting the emotions around 9/11, Mr. Bush took a far-right agenda on taxes, the environment and social issues—for which he had no electoral mandate—and drove it into a 9/12 world.”
Four airliners full of jet fuel (and hundreds of human lives) were hijacked by 19 Muslim savages on 9/11. Bush responded by saying that we will hunt down the terrorists and kill them. We didn’t do anything that can be described as “far-right” in response to 9/11, unless you count Bush’s inexorable drive to protect America. If it’s “far-right” to take out 75% of the known members of al-Qaeda and imprison Saddam, so be it.
And what’s this nonsense about “no electoral mandate”? Bush won the election. If he had “no electoral mandate” to cut taxes, Bill Clinton certainly had “no electoral mandate” to storm the home of an unarmed family in Miami and pry a little Cuban boy from the arms of his loving relatives. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in the Constitution about “electoral mandate” dictating marginal tax rates.
Tellingly, Maureen Dowd echoed Friedman’s point in an interview with "Rolling Stone" magazine. When asked to speculate on why Bush remains popular, Dowd said that Bush has “used the war and the war on terror as a kind of carapace under which [he’s] jammed through a lot of superconservative domestic policies—judges and harsh environmental stuff.”
They must be drinking French water at "The New York Times."
In addition to being angry at Bush for annoyingly talking about the War on Terrorism, the Newspaper of Record is irked that the Sinclair Broadcasting Group plans to run the anti-Kerry documentary, “Stolen Honor.” According to a recent editorial, the movie “claims, falsely, that [Kerry’s] antiwar statements inspired the North Vietnamese to step up the torture of American prisoners…”
The only problem is that Kerry’s postwar caterwauling manifestly did inspire anti-Americanism in North Vietnam! That much was admitted by the enemy leader, Vo Ngyuen Giap. To wit, Kerry is still helping shore up the Communist demographic. Kim Jong Il, fun-loving dictator of North Korea, has officially endorsed John F. Kerry, insofar as he regularly broadcasts Kerry’s speeches on the state radio network. If Pyongyang was given the number of electoral votes presently held by New York, Kerry would win in a landslide. (In fact, I believe this option is currently being considered by Hillary’s ’08 exploratory committee.)
It’s simply irrefutable that the world’s dictators vehemently support Kerry. And why not? Kerry supports weakening the well-developed travel restrictions between Cuba and the United States; he supports abandoning multilateral talks with North Korea; and he has embraced Palestinian terrorism. Though Bush has disregarded Yasser Arafat as a murderous crook, Kerry has called Arafat a “role model” and a “statesman.”
President Clinton, of course, who was obviously once deeply involved with Kerry, was also Arafat’s pal. To be sure, Clinton was almost as stuck on the diminutive, oleaginous terrorist as he was on “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” (Arafat’s blue party dresses are still being examined in official government labs.)
Everyone goes at least a little crazy when elections draw near, but conservatives are as calm as a summer breeze compared to liberals. We go to sleep every night praying for a Bush victory, but liberals are apparently working overtime to invent wild hypotheses regarding Bush’s foreign policies. We can take solace in the fact that in just a few weeks all this will end, and liberals can go back to screaming about our imperialist War for Oil.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Isaiah Z. Sterrett
