What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
It would help a lot to lock up some of the perpetrators of the post-atrocity atrocities that took the nation down.
2 comments:
I do not pledge allegiance to my country right or wrong but it is still my country right or wrong and it is to that ideal to which I pledge. I was ashamed when our boy cowboy in charge commited the country to a war in the name of 9/11 on a country that had nothing to do with the attack on the towers unencumbered by logic or reason. I feel terrible shame when the names of the dead are read and the names of the six thousand that died since trying to rectify a wrong with an atrocious wrong. I feel shame at the blood on my hands in the deaths of millions of Iragis most of whom had no
understanding of any of it. I feel so much shame that if I traveled I would pretend to be a Canadian.
"And in its heart, the nation knows it."
Like many pundits, Krugman (outwardly at least) overestimates the American people. Oldfool has it right, but too many people see it otherwise.
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