From the moment the September 11 commission was authorized, the only important question was when it would propitiate the media gods. That moment has arrived. We have finally reduced the entire story of September 11, as always, to heroes and villains, winners and losers.The malfeasance of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson as commander-in-chief of the Vietnam-era miltary precipitated a crisis in American politcs. Liberalism - journalism, the Democratic Party leadership - reacted to that crisis by abandoning its (always-halfhearted) support for military resistance to the impostition of Communist tyranny abroad and moving to outright opposition to military resistance to the impostition of Communist tyranny abroad.When this exercise is over, we will know very little important about September 11 that we didn't know on September 12.
Recall the famous phrase, "September 11 changed everything." What that meant is that September 11 changed the American mind about terror. ... After September 11 the president of the United States declared war on terror. He then established the fact of war, not merely the sentiment of war, by defeating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein with armies.
. . . over 30 years, an entire industry had grown up to work the terrorism problem. Abu Nidal and Carlos the Jackal were household names. And still the destruction of embassies, hotels, ships and finally skyscrapers continued.
. . . Amid the rubble and death of a September 11, it is everyone's instinct to say these agencies should have been focused on the problem laserlike and 24/7. That has never been and never will be -- short of war.
. . . After Mr. Bush's September declaration of war, the bureaucracies focused and functioned magnificently from Afghanistan to Baghdad. Policy. . . had the backing of the American people.
That shift did not merely imply Democratic abandonment of blanket respect for any American who manifested valor in service to the U.S. It did not merely imply the granting of amnesty for draft evasion. That shift implied the assignment of respect for the draft evader and contempt for valor when exerted under the leadership of a Republican president. The Democratic Party became the the party of the draft-evading Bill Clinton and the military-baiting John Kerry. And the party of bitter partisan emnity to much of American tradition in general. A party which is institutionally incapable of more than the sounding of "an uncertain trumpet" even if faced with violent challenge.
Such a party as that could not fail to produce a strong reaction in American society. In the first instance voluntary service in the military, and in the traditionally militantly nonpartisan officers' corps in particular, became strongly associated with disaffection with the Democratic Party - and thus with affinity for the Republican Party. The tradional, conservative South - institutionally Democratic since before the Civl War - changed more slowly but changed in the same way.
Such a party tears at the informal assumptions which make society cohere; it is essentially an anti-mainstream party. Such a party, to be blunt, is utterly dependent on maintaining, in the mind of each of half of the nation's voters an image at odds with reality (that image need not, unfortunately, be the same to every such voter). Such a party depends on massive PR support. With the support of "objective" journalism, that party has been able to agressively invert the meanings of words in order to prevent the electorate as a whole from seeing throug its image-making fog. "Liberalism" is "objective journalism." Scare quotes belong around "liberalism" because journalism has enabled its meaning to be be inverted from opposition to government regulation/high taxes to demand for precisely those things. Scare quotes belong around "objective journalism" for the obvious reason that journalism's "objectivity" is an egregiously tendentious, self-promoted, fiction.
Richard Clarke. . . . clearly thinks Mr. Bush's declared war was a mistake. . . .. . . Richard Clarke represents bureaucracy.. . . for all his reputation as a bull in the bureaucracy's china shop
Richard Clarke represents the avoidance of moral clarity. Richard Clarke is slippery and two-faced. Richard Clarke represents liberalism.
Source:
Clarke, Condi And the Wars Of September 11
Wall Street Journal ^ | April 2, 2004 | DANIEL HENNINGER
Back in the sixties the antivalor agitators prattled about "the Establishment" which they were opposing but they were able to do it on broadcast TV because the actual "Establishment" - journalism - was on their side.The 911 Commission is a miserable failure for the simple reason that pointing out that it is journalism which is the institution which could have put us on the alert before 911 far more effectively than it did. By alerting the public to the fact that there was more at stake in the hijacking of an airliner than the lives of the passengers and crew, journalism, in fact, prevented the success of the kamikazee pilot who had seized the controls of Flight 93.
That's ironic because as leftists, journalists believe in the magic incantation of big government, whereas when journalism's alert got transmitted via cell phone to the passengers of Flight 93 the people took action to prevent the success of the intended kamikazee attack. Knowing that their own lives were forfeit, either way. Government had nothing to do with it; the people learned that the short straw was in their hand, and they acted on their own initiative.
Web Poll: Should the U.S. send more American forces to Iraq if the situation worsens?