On 9/11/2001 the World Trade Towers were felled by terrorists. Thousands of people lost their lives then, and many thousands more were killed or injured in the wars triggered by that event. That is the narrative we are familiar with and it is wrong in its key respect.
The problem is the narrative, itself.
Florida's favored candidate among Republicans, Rudy Giuliani, tried to wage a campaign on that narrative. Every other sentence formed around the two words, 'nine eleven', and deflated with the public for reasons beyond his grating character.
At some level, Americans understand that 9/11 unleashed a series of disasters for Americans that go well beyond the horrible facts of that day. In the minds of many Americans, the explanation is not fully formed.
9/11 fulfilled the dream of terrorists, and it served a domestic, political purpose as well. The latter part is what American voters are having such a difficult time coming to terms with. The 2000 presidential vote gave these purposes wings: the increase and consolidation of presidential power, the opportunity to turn the US military inside out, to allow the forces of privatization to "improve" government services, privatizing profit and socializing risk, to politicize the US Department of Justice and federal bench and more than anything else, to secure an energy policy on behalf of Big Oil and Big Coal: to set fiscal and monetary policies along a course to reward key campaign contributors from the core industries responsible for the rise of the conservative right, including the suite of interests leading Americans into worst national economic crisis since the Great Depression.
These key features of the Bush candidacy in 2000 were a continuum of neo-conservative political philosophy-- advanced by the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and other think tanks-- that seized 9/11 and the shock that gripped Aemricans to press through an agenda that has devastated representative democracy.
The planning for 9/11 by terrorists had germinated well before George W. Bush took office. They believe it is possible to bring down the United States and the despots who control oil in the Mid East. I doubt they had any idea how vulnerable democracy is to its worst impulses. Doubt is a hard way to win elections.
Barack Obama puts it in a positive frame: "We are the people we have been waiting for."
But we can only be a safer people if we reform the leadership of our government, starting with the executive branch: the White House.
Our jeopardy, pre-dating 9/11, the use of ideology in pursuit of predetermined outcomes, the deforming of purpose of representative democracy, the hollowing out of regulatory agencies and their missions; all these have put the health, welfare and safety of Americans at severe risk.
If we want to be safer, we must stop thinking of our security in terms of the next threat of terrorist attack here, or in some distant nation whose culture, rivalries, and risks defeat the rational application of force and American treasure.
If we want to be safer, we have to start fixing what is wrong at home. And we can't do that by giving the same political forces the tools to impose a discredited and bankrupt version of reality that put us in such desperate straits.
You don't get to light, by closing doors, secrecy, intimidation, and using government budgets as shark bait for corporations, entrepreneurs and speculators. 9/11 was a terrible tragedy for our nation. The proper narrative puts that disaster in the context of bad leadership and bad ideas that took root in our political institutions well before the terrorists flew jets filled with aviation fuel into the World Trade Towers. The money changers and the fear mongers had their chance. Help chase them from the temple.
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New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Blizzard of Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 11, 2008
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
I always thought Jesus was a carpenter.
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He was a carpenter... a builder of men.
But, he was also an activist and anti-establishment ("change", if you will allow) person. AKA: Community Organizer, just like many Dade County activists are forced to be.
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