We Never Gave War A Chance
I wouldn’t blame people on any day, but particularly this past weekend, for tuning out the liberal media.
Nonetheless, you ought to read some of what they wrote in the days leading up to Sunday, the tenth anniversary of the most devastating, consequential attack on US soil in our nation’s history.
The left, represented here by E.J. Dionne, seized the occasion to demand surrender from the right, while the schism of the Republican Party and the conservative movement played right into their hands.
Failed CNN talk show host and Consensitive Mod Squad cheerleader Kathleen Parker took the occasion to bash Americans in the Washington Com-Post for both airing and suppressing emotional outbursts.
In her column, “An America That No Longer Knows Itself,” Parker lamented Americans’ refusal to confront the divisiveness and internecine hostility 9/11 supposedly brought on us.
Then she hectored us for occasions when we do give vent to it, such as when Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at President Hussein.
It sounds as though the cure for denial is primal screaming, while the cure for primal screaming is denial. But it was yet another stupid attempt to reach across the aisle to people who hate our guts by agreeing with their feigned interest in “civility” and bashing one’s own, supposed side.
The onslaught then degenerated into an outright assault on the memory of 9/11 by Dionne, with a piece titled “Time To Leave 9/11 Behind.”
“The last decade was a detour that left our nation weaker, more divided and less certain of itself,” Dionne pretended to weep, before proceeding to berate George W. Bush and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The implication, of course, is that Bush squandered the opportunity to rebuild from the terrorist attacks by committing our nation’s resources to wars, with a perpetual reference to 9/11 as the pretext.
“Our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of [Islam’s] mad fantasies,” Dionne continued, ignoring the painfully obvious truth that the World Trade Center no longer exists precisely because of the caliphate of Islam’s mad fantasies.
He concludes that the heated, partisan and divisive political and cultural battles of the day are the results of responding to radical Islam with military force rather than diplomatic grace.
(Translation: President Hussein is having a hard time in re-election polls because Bush fought back against radical Islam.)
“It was often said that terrorism could not be dealt with through ‘police work,’ as if the difficult and unheralded labor involved was not grand or bold enough to satisfy our longing for clarity in what was largely a struggle in the shadows,” Dionne sneered.
Of course, that obscures the fact that until the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorism was dealt with through police work and in the shadows, with multiple legal walls erected between intelligence, law enforcement and military departments preventing them from sharing information with each other.
The Clinton Administration dealt with terrorism in precisely that manner, prosecuting the first World Trade Center bombers in 1993 and issuing bench warrants, unserviceable outside US borders, for the arrest of terrorism suspects. When US interests were attacked overseas, such as the USS Cole or the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Clintonistas did virtually nothing in response.
Parker and Dionne diagnosed symptoms rather than disease. It’s akin to visiting your doctor with a cold, and having the doctor inform you that you are sneezing, coughing, have a sore throat and a temperature.
“I already know that, doctor,” you reply. “But is it a cold, the flu or something else?”
Parker and Dionne are in flat denial as to the nature of the disease – because they are infected with the disease, and don’t want to be exposed to the treatment. So we, the audience, get haughty sighs of disappointment with our persistent immaturity, as though we are children being scolded by the few adults left in this country.
The real problem facing America is that our liberals have spent fifty years ridiculing, denigrating, questioning, attacking and undermining every military conflict we’ve entered since the 1960s.
We are conditioned in school, in culture and in our interpersonal dealings to be polite, harmless and easily manipulated. If we do happen to disagree with the liberal dogma prevalent in our society, we are dismissed as backward, narrow-minded bigots or Nazi stormtroopers.
Parker is right, but only in her headline: America no longer knows who we are. But this is not because we cannot learn who we are; it is because we’ve already been taught that who we are isn’t worth spit.
We’ve spent our school years hearing about how horribly our forebears treated Indians, blacks, women, gays and other minorities.
We’ve been lectured on the importance of kindness, gentleness, compassion, civility, interpersonal dependence, equality, social justice and empathy – feminized and emasculated.
We don’t remember who we are because socialist radicals despised who we are and sued to prevent us from remaining so.
We’ve become a culture that mocks and eschews values, right and wrong, and standing on principle and honor. We rebelled against the character and morals of the World War II Generation, and replaced them with immoral, relativistic, slippery ones.
It is little wonder that our nation is so divided between the people who listened to our forebears and those who did not. Any skilled infiltrator working in intelligence or special operations will tell you that the quickest way to destabilize a society is by confusing the norms and moral codes, turning natives against one another.
“We know now, as we should have known all along, that American strength always depends first on our strength at home,” Dionne closes – “on a vibrant, innovative and sensibly regulated economy, on levelheaded fiscal policies, on the ability of our citizens to find useful work, on the justice of our social arrangements.”
This argument sounds very reasonable, except when you consider that we already had all of those things on September 10, 2001, and none of it did us any good.
Income taxes were higher on 9/11 than they are now; the deregulation of which Bush is constantly, falsely accused had yet to take place; we had a strong dollar fiscal policy and a balanced budget, and greater upward social mobility than we’d ever seen.
And still, 19 Muslim fanatics slipped easily past our politically correct airport security systems to board three aircraft for a suicide mission that changed the world forever.
“As we reflect on the events of 10 years ago, it would be nice if all sides could resolve to invite America’s better angels back to the huddle,” Parker sighed, channeling President Hussein and Rodney King. “Another terror attack would put things in perspective, all right, but our survival ultimately depends on our willingness to marshal reason and restraint against the emotional terrorism that surely will bring us down.”
It would be nice if that were all it took. But this isn’t Full House, and no amount of emotional pseudo-wisdom from the Olsen Twins is going to turn the clock back to September 10th.
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