In other words, I and the rest of the Left are just supposed to pretend that the other side is much nicer and more reasonable than history shows them to be. We’re supposed to deny reality with a constant refrain of “Oh, surely they wouldn’t do that!” Just as I constantly heard from people before and during the Iraq debacle; “oh, surely they wouldn’t lie about the WMDs, surely they aren’t killing innocent people, surely they aren’t torturing people, they’d never do that!” Well, they did.
Bush and his followers are liars, torturers and mass murderers. So yes, they are monsters and evil if anyone is. And pretending they are good people won’t make them good.
Problem is, your proof of evilness often requires conspiracy theorist level thinking, or, yes, bigotry, in the form of equating a single person with a whole group.
It’s not “conspiracy theorist level thinking” when they’ve been caught doing exactly what I accuse them of. And this idea that “equating a single person with a whole group” = bigotry is just right wing propaganda; no matter how many of them are caught engaging in violence or dishonest or stupidity, somehow it magically doesn’t reflect on the group. Only if I could somehow prove that the entire group is a single borglike hive mind am I allowed to condemn the group, apparently. If it’s a right wing group, that is.
When pretending to be nice lets the other side get away with torture and mass murder, yes it’s appalling. And since condemning torture and mass murder is “acting like a jerk”, yes it’s OK.
LOL. Speak for yourself. From the moment I heard about the second plane on the radio I knew it was a terrorist attack, and probably Al Qaeda. Of course, I’d been doing research on international terrorism for my job, so I was better informed at that point than most Americans. But I certainly wasn’t better informed than the President.
Never wanting to let the facts get in the way of a good joke I still maintain that he just wanted to finish because it was one of the only books he ever read, he was doing a good job with a lot of the bigger words, and he quite frankly was fascinated by that feisty little goat and had to know how it turned out.
Don’t ever presume to think you speak for “the rest of the Left”.
Who said anything about pretending they are good people, or that they didn’t lie about WMDs, or torture, etc. etc.?
Just to drive the point home, I’ll say it again, as clearly as I can: causing something (even through criminal malfeasance) doesn’t equate to desiring the entirety of the outcome.
One is still criminally and morally responsible for the outcome, but honestly, these guys don’t look in the mirror each morning and tell themselves while they’re shaving: “Daily personal goal - ensure that my actions cause the death of an Arab today”. Most likely they’re too concerned with the price of oil to think about how their decisions affect Iraqi civilians - but being negligent does not mean that they planned the outcome just so, as you seem convinced.
Case in point: If a habitual drunk driver with multiple citations finally kills someone, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, no question. Sure, you drive drunk enough and you know you’re likely to kill someone - but did they actively seek to end the life of the person that they killed?
You seem to think that ascribing the human condition to your enemies (what most would call empathy) is in fact, an act of sympathy. I’m not saying Bush et al deserve one iota of sympathy - they were at best a gang of incompetents, and at worst (and most likely) traitors who sold our country out for the love of cheap oil and father-son one-upsmanship.
But to argue that they did all this with a goal “to kill random brown Muslims for the sake of killing them” (your words, not mine)? This point of view is more likely to cause fence-sitters (i.e. the hoi polloi, the undecided, the folks who actually need to make up their minds before any real progress can begin in this country) to sympathize with the wrong-doers, than to actually win anyone over to your cause, or to even give them pause to rationally consider your arguments.
Oh, wait, there’s that word again - rational. Sorry, I forget who I’m talking to sometimes… continue with your ineffectual outrage, while the rest of us progressives and liberals do damage control.
You know what, I’m just going to proactively sit the rest of this one out, DT - we’re detracting from a valid OP (that you dragged into the pit if I recall), and I’ve beat this dead horse before.
Speaking of the OP, I might as well offer an actual response - IMO, Bush’s handlers could have had a huge mess on their hands by not getting him the hell out of dodge on 9/11. His location was public knowledge, and there had already been suspicious activity in the Sarasota area that week - they should have followed standard evacuation protocols as soon as the reports firmed up of the severity of the first tower’s damage.
But, it does speak to the hubris of the administration that his photo op should take precedent over the stability and safety of the free world.
He’s not liberal. He’s authoritarian as all get out. He does not in any way, shape, or form believe in freedom. You must believe what he believes, or you are evil.
Was United Airlines Flight 93 airborn when these events transpired?
Then I think it’s quiet warranted to ask the question if it was a mistake to not ensure the immediate full attention of the POTUS to events underway.
Hindsight is 20/20 but there could very well have been ten air-born jets about to target god knows what at that moment. Presumably presidential authorization would have been needed to shoot them down while there were innocent civilians onboard. Presumably the POTUS would have needed time to be briefed in order to make an informed decision. Not putting him up to speed on whatever information was available wasted time.
The fact that even many of his discontents are prone to give him a pass on this one is just one more artifact of how the Bush administrations superior messaging and framing capabilities stifled discourse after 9/11.
I’ll pipe in here too. I’d been reading up a lot about Osama Bin Laden and terrorism for a few months before the attack. When the second WTC tower was hit, I was virtually certain it was OBL.
Full disclosure: I never dreamed of this type of attack; expected biological or chemical weapons instead.
President Bush’s reaction? I’m guessing is that he was telling the truth about the kids. But I’ve always wondered with all the warnings he received (before September 11th), if he didn’t have some sort of concern, guilt, or remorse about delaying the confrontation with OBL till the day before?
According to Wikipedia’s timeline, Flight 93 took off last, approx. 25 minutes after Flight 11 had been hijacked, and just minutes before Flight 175 was hijacked.
What boggles when examining the timeline, was that Flight 11 had been crashed into WTC1, and two other flights had been hijacked, prior to Bush beginning his photo op. And no one thought this might be important enough for the POTUS to deal with directly?
Exactly. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any situation that would more require the immediate attention of the Commander in Chief than the country (potentially) being under attack.
Why didn’t Andy Card inform the Commander in Chief that not only a second plane has hit the World Trade Center but that two more hijacked planes are in the air?