This will just be a short post to remember the day, and also because what I have to say will not be particularly popular.
The 911 attacks were awful, and although there was a short period of good feeling toward each other, in the end what happened to us was exactly what Osama bin Laden set out to accomplish.
In other words, we lost.
It was far enough in the past that few people under 30 will remember it. I have six grandchildren born after Sept. 11, 2001, for whom 911 means as much to them as Pearl Harbor does to me.
In case you’re wondering, the headline on the story in the column on the far right reads, “We are all Americans.” With the exception of radical Muslims, pretty much everyone in the world was opn our side. Within our own country, pretty much everyone from left to right on the political spectrum agreed that we should go into Afghanistan and get Osama.
Even if President Gee Dubya Bush did start out by screwing the pooch when he called it a crusade.
The 911 attacks gave Bush the opportunity to be a great president. All he had to do was say it was a time for national unity and he was putting his partisan political agenda on hold until Osama was captured. Instead, they allowed Osama to escape from the Tora Bora caves in Cecember 2001 and then basically moved him to a back burner.
Instead Bush took us into Iraq, which had had nothing to do with Osama or the 911 attacks. He also rammed through his massive tax cuts for the rich, which started our national debt ballooning from less than $5.7 trillion at the end of Bill Clinton’s term to $35 trillion in August 2024.
Several trillion of that was our wars in the Middle East.
One of Osama’s goals was to bankrupt us and another was to make Americans hate Muslims.
Check and check.
Osama was around until May 2011, more than two years after Bush left office.
Because of him and because we always prepare to fight the previous war, we created a massive Homeland Security bureaucracy that served mostly to make air travel even more annoying than it already was. And of course because we Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine and Remembeer Pearl Harbor, we stop breathing every Sept. 11th to remember the attacks.
As little use as I have for Donald Trump for anything other than shark bait or crash test dummy, I’m not offended by his facial expression in the above picture.
In fact, my only question about the photo is wondering what happened to Rudy Giuliani’s blue ribbon.
Talk about a fall from grace.