"Cheer the Perfect Devils"
Thursday, September 23, 2010
RE: President Obama - Politics Trump Victory in Afghanistan
Major Brigadier General (retired) Tata has a post up at Big Peace about President Obama's confidence that we could weather another 9/11...
...For a sitting president to declare to our enemies that it is, in effect, okay to attack our country because we’re strong and we’ll be okay in the aftermath requires swift action from our national leadership to send a strong message to our enemies overseas that, in fact, it is not fine if they attack. President Obama’s callous remarks ignore the reality that men and women were jumping to certain death from their windows in the World Trade Center on 9-11; fire and smoke rolled through Pentagon hallways killing everyone in its wake; and thousands of brave men and women have perished in response so that we may be free...
But the comment of the day was provided by reader DT from the greatest "real" blogger of all time, James Lileks ("the bleat"). This one is from September 2003:
...the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:
But.And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.
I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.
Which is why this war will be long...