DOWNING STREET: PERSONAL AND POLITICAL

 
DOWNING STREET: PERSONAL AND POLITICAL
When People Make the Connection Between What Might Have Been and What Most Surely Will Be, George W. Bush Will Pay His Inevitable Price.  Nobody can forget 9/11.  Not me, though I wasn’t in New York that day. My brother was.  He and his family were safe. He saw the first plane fly low over his head down Broadway, loud and low.  Then he heard the explosion.  And another explosion. The building where I spent my wedding night came down that day.  The hospital where my mother had worked, where my brothers and sisters were born, where my children were born became a place of one visited horror after another that day of two explosions. Our world was ash.

This country exploded with a shared feeling of sadness, of strength in our freedoms.  The politicians in charge that day made much of those explosions.  We are not so free as we were, not in our spirit, not in our souls, not in our freedoms.  Something was taken from us that day.  You would think those responsible would be found. Osama Bin Laden laughs somewhere.

We went after the wrong guy. The country we invaded is hovers over  the cauldron of civil war.  Years from now, people will not have forgotten 9/11. But for now we must remember the cost of rushing into a war. We see the disconnection our leaders have from reality, what the cost will be, and what it has been. 

The personal cost of 9/11 is infinite, the sad  stories endless.   Here is what it means for Echidne of the Snakes:

Let me take you back to that horrible autumn of 2001. America was on its knees, grieving over an unspeakable butchering of the innocents. We were all stunned dumb with grief, trying to cope, trying to help each others to cope. The smoke and the smell of burning and death hung over New York City. I know. I lost a relative that day. He never came home to his waiting bride. His mother died recently. She gave up on life on 9/11/2001. She wanted answers, an explanation, something, and she got nothing, not even one speck of his remains. Then she grew tired and neglected her checkups and told nobody about the pain and then she died. Another victim, and there are probably many of them.

The great thing about this nation following 9/11 is that we could rise above ourselves and find some kinship with others in mourning for the dead, in celebration of the spirit of the living. When things are their worst, we have proven to be our best.  We should expect no less from our leaders.  In this time of hardship, is this what we have gotten from George W. Bush, his best in our best interests?  Has he well served the grieving and the dead?  The dead ask much of the mourning. They demand we be our best in their memory. The dead would hold our leaders to the same account. Again Echidne

 

America was grieving and burying its dead but it was finally ready for justice, for the hunt of the killers to be made real. And what did George Bush give us?

He gave us a long-hatched vendetta against Iraq, a country ruled by an evil dictator, true, but a country that had been ruled by the same evil dictator for a long time and once the Americans liked him well enough. But suddenly, in the middle of this major crisis, when bin Laden was using the world media to bare his butt to George Bush, suddenly, when there wasn't enough money to inspect the ships coming into the U.S. ports for nuclear weapons, suddenly, this was the right time to go and take Saddam out. Not to go after the real terrorists that threatened the U.S., but to take out someone who had nothing to do with 9/11.

When you are told that you suffer from a frightening form of cancer, do you go out and spend all your savings on getting those varicose veins removed? Well, that is pretty much what George Bush decided to do. Except that it's not just money we are spending on the varicose veins of Iraq but also lives. And all for what? Oil? Weapons of mass destruction? Some old Bush family quarrel having to do with prick sizes? Now, remember that in 2001 we were told nothing about the big boots of freedom marching all over the Iraqis. That's a later recreation of the events. In 2001 we were told that getting the varicose veins removed was more important than fighting the cancer that was spreading rapidly. So.

This is the place where the Downing Street memos fit. The proof that all I have said here is true. The proof of not only lying by our government but of incompetency, of voluntary sacrifice of all those lives that have been lost in Iraq.
....................
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Somewhere Osama Bin Laden is laughing.  I pray the dead not hear him.

 

 

Comments

[Pope Snarky Goodfella of the undulating cable, JM, CK, POEE, KOTHASK, DSOCPL, EOTHP]

Hail Eris!

Back in 2001, on usenet, in the days and weeks after 9/11, I was one of a pathetically small number of Cassandras -- not necessarily predicting these current circumstances, but the general idea: That the attacks were ideal for drumming up support for a fascist takeover of the US, with wars of conquest to follow, and the US could find itself drowning in sand. Some people thought I was a wacko for even suggesting it, but I was only a wacko for thinking it would take longer to get to this point. I vastly underestimated Karl Rove...This scandal, too, will pass. Leaking it was part of his strategy of overwhelming us, overwhelming the world, with horrific corruption. It can only fail if civil war erupts in the US, but that could have even worse consequences for the world, because China might well seize the opportunity to make its own bid for power. Damn you, Karl Rove.

Snarky