"We were united on 9/11. The commission seems hell-bent on never letting that happen again," writes Rob A of Fine? Why Fine? in a righteously indignant tour de force that got us intoning "Amen!"
We put firemen, police, and other first responders on their rightful pedestal honoring the sacrifice of dead Americans who "ran in as others ran out."
The commission chastised them.
The whole world saw Rudy Giuliani as a man who seemed born for the moment, a civilian leader with the fortitude of the great generals of history when the country needed one.
The commission berated him.
Nobody in the country could ever envision a time when fighter jets would be asked to shoot down passenger planes.
The commission never [gave] a second thought to what such action would really mean: the American military killing innocent Americans. Imagine the outrage.
A Democratic justice department razed "the Wall" on intelligence sharing.
Four widows, well spoken and funded in part by John Kerry's wife's foundation, are the only voices we hear from the families in the media and more disgustingly in their little outbursts at hearings.
Silently thousands of other families quietly watch and miss their loved ones.
The media runs with one paragraph of a report about the connection between Saddam and AQ, misrepresenting that paragraph and the last 15 years of history as they do.
As we blogged here yesterday, citing Hindrocket of Powerline, " the claim that the Bush administration alleged a connection between Iraq and Sept. 11 is, of course, false." Andrew Sullivan nailed it this morning:
The vice-president's direct attack on the New York Times' portrayal of the 9/11 Commission report was a zinger. On balance, I think Cheney is right. The links between al Qaeda and Saddam may not have amounted to a formal alliance, but they existed all right, as the Commission conceded. The NYT itself reported that "The report said that despite evidence of repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 90's, 'they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.'" But if there were "repeated contacts" between al Qaeda and Iraq, how can it be true that, as the headline put it, that "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie"? Headlines truncate things, of course. But Cheney is dead-on in describing this headline as misleading.
I was really pissed this morning when I banged that out. But that pales in comparison to where I am right now. Maybe that's the difference; I may be disgusted with the commission on a political basis, but they didn't just behead an American and Bush didn't fly those planes on 9/11. Why can't they see who the enemy is?
Posted by: Rob A. | June 18, 2004 at 04:44 PM