What do Democrats know now? Ann Coulter whacks Gephardt, Leahy, Daschle for lame posturing on 9-11

Republicans were so dumbstruck by the mendacity of Democrats claiming President Bush had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attack, they have overlooked the most stunning legerdemain of this accusation.

Suppose Bush had known 18 Muslim immigrants planned to hijack four planes on Sept. 11. What could he have done? Throw Arabs out of the country? Put them in preventive detention? Order airport security to take an extra little peek at swarthy men boarding planes?

In a girly-girl, eye-poking attack, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., has demanded an investigation into "what the White House knew about the events leading up to 9-11, when they knew it and, most importantly, what was done about it." The more urgent question is: What do the Democrats know now?

Memo to Democrats: Muslim men are plotting another terrorist attack on America right now! That's what you know. What are you doing about it? Directing airport security to keep searching white paraplegics at the airport?

Gephardt's genius plan for assuring air safety after Sept. 11 was to federalize airport security. But he refused to allow airport security to scrutinize passengers who look like the last two dozen terrorists to attack civilian aircraft. That's what he did when he knew about it.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has thundered that it is "imperative" that Bush tell the Senate "what actions were taken in response" to any advance warning of a terrorist attack.

In response to the next terrorist attack, here are the actions Leahy took: He hauled the attorney general before the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying he was "very" angry at Ashcroft. Leahy was "very" angry not because Ashcroft was failing to do enough to prevent the next terrorist attack. Just the opposite: Ashcroft was doing too much, thereby threatening the civil liberties of Arabs.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., reacted to Sept. 11 by babbling about having the proper "balance" between fighting terrorism and protecting constitutional rights. If the Democrats had shown half as much indignation about terrorists as they did about Ashcroft, their convictions might rate more with real Americans.

Hilariously, Democrats are especially indignant that nothing was done in response to the memo from an FBI agent in Phoenix who had noticed a lot of Arabs enrolled in American flight schools. As the New York Times reported (in the always-crucial penultimate paragraph): "FBI officials said there was reluctance at the time to mount such a major review because of a concern that the bureau would be criticized for ethnic profiling of foreigners."

For Ashcroft's evident interest in immigrants of Mideastern descent rather than, say, currency traders after Sept. 11, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, railed that the detention of Arabs "smacks of racial profiling." Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., hyperventilated that the Bush administration was "literally dismantling justice."

David Bonior, the second-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, leapt to action after the Sept. 11 attack by repeatedly denouncing nonexistent racial profiling at the airports. He even dragged the FAA administrator and eight FAA assistants to Detroit to listen to constituents who claimed they had been profiled at airports.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., warned that "the Phoenix memo is going to come to be one of the most important documents in our national debate about whether we did enough to protect America from the attack of Sept. 11."

After a savage terrorist attack by a group of immigrants of Middle Eastern descent, Durbin has hysterically attacked people who support ethnic profiling of airline passengers as troglodytes "crawling on (their) bell(ies) in the mud at a right-wing militia training camp in Idaho." He actually took time from his busy post-9/11 Senate schedule to write a letter to the editor making this point.

Sen. Hillary Clinton – whose very first act in the Senate was to sponsor a bill prohibiting ethnic profiling – has also demanded an investigation of what Bush knew and when he knew it. (What did she know about her husband's serial philandering and when did she know it?)

Maureen Dowd sneered of the administration's failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attack: "I guess nothing short of a copy of Mohamed Atta's Travelocity itinerary would have stirred the FBI from its stupor."

But back on Nov. 25, 2001, as the corpses of 3,000 of her countrymen lay rotting in smoldering heaps, Dowd was snarling about Ashcroft's questioning of Arab immigrants in the United States. She snippily noted that "the first resistance to his edict to interview 5,000 Middle Eastern men came from police chiefs objecting to racial profiling."

After Manhattan is nuked by Muslims, then will it be OK for the attorney general to question Middle Eastern men?

Liberals may have no basis for complaint with George Bush, but Americans do. Pick your poison, Mr. President: Order ethnic profiling and be subjected to querulous attacks on the pages of The New York Times, or permit American women and children to be murdered in the next terrorist attack.

John,

Great article by Ann as usual.

Speaking of the madness of "racial profiling" that Ann touches on here, let me share this letter by General Hawley. He retired 3 years ago as a 4-star. He was a Vietnam hero, later flew A-10s and F-15s, and was commander of Air Combat Command.

His letter is a classic. I don't know if you will find it anywhere else--it was e-mailed by him and published as a letter to the editor for The Southern Aviator in a copy my dad (also retired) sent me. I might post it as a seperate article....it is that good..

___________________________________________________________________________

General Hawley Speaks Out

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, I have seen, heard, and read thoughts of such surpassing stupidity that they must be addressed. You've heard them too.

1) "We're not good, they're not evil, everything is relative."

Listen carefully. We're good, they're evil, and nothing is relative. Say it with me now and free yourselves. You see, saying "We're good" doesn't mean "we're perfect." Okay? The only perfect being is Jesus.

The plain fact is that our country, with all our mistakes and blunders, has always been and always will be the greatest beacon of freedom, charity, opportunity and affection in history. If you need proof, open all the borders on Earth and see what happens. In about half a day, the entire world would be a ghost town and the U.S. would look like one giant line to see "The Producers."

2) "Violence only leads to more violence."

This one is so stupid you usually have to be the president of an Ivy League university to say it. Here's the truth, which you know in your heads and hearts already: Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky half-measures lead to more violence.

Complete, fully-thought-through, professional, well-executed violence never leads to more violence because afterwards the other guys are all dead. Not "on trial," not re-educated, not nurtured back into the bosom of love. Dead.

3) "The CIA and the rest of our intelligence community has failed us."

For 25 years we have chained our spies like dogs to a stake in the ground, and now that the house has been robbed, we yell at them for not protecting us. Starting in the late 1970's under Jimmy Carter appointee Stansfield Turner, the giant brains who get these giant ideas decided the best way to gather international intelligence was to use spy satellites. After all, they reasoned, you can see a license plate from 200 miles away.

This is very helpful if you've been attacked by a license plate. Unfortunately, we were attacked by humans.

When we bought our spy satellites, we fired our humans, and here's the really stupid part. It takes years to infiltrate new humans into the worst places in the world. You just can't have a guy who looks like Gary Busey in a Spring Break '93 sweatshirt plop himself down in a coffee shop in Kabul and say, "Hiya, boys. Gee, I sure would like to meet that bin Landen fella."

4) "These people are poor and helpless, and that's why they're angry at us.

Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and, ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor, helpless people are the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power.

Mohammad Atta, one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes in the killing grounds, is the son of a Cairo surgeon. But you knew this too. In the '60s and '70s, the marchers against the war were upper-middle class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. It is the same today.

5)"Any profiling is racial profiling."

Who's killing us here, the Norweigians? Just days after the attack, the New York Times had an article saying dozens of members of the Bin Laden family, living in America, were afraid of reprisals and left in a huff, never to return to studying at Harvard. I'm crushed. I think we're all crushed. Why don't they just change their names? It's happened in the past. How many Adolfs do you run into nowadays?

Shortly after that, I remember watching TV with my jaw on the floor as a government official said, "That little old grandmother from Sioux City could be carrying something." No, she couldn't. It would never be the grandmother from Sioux City. What are the odds? Winning a hundred Powerball lotteries in a row? And then a Secret Service guy gets tossed off a plane and we're all supposed to cry about it because he's an Arab? Didn't it have anything to do with the fact that he filled out the form incorrectly---three times? And then left an Arab history book on his seat as he strolled off the plane? And came back? Armed? Let's stop singing "We Are the World" for a minute and think practically. I don't want to be sitting on the floor in the back of a plane four seconds away from hitting Mount Rushmore and turn, grinning, to the guy next to me to say, "Well, at least we didn't offend them."

So, here's what I resolve for the new year: Never to forget our murdered brothers and sisters. Never to let the relavists get away with their immoral thinking. After all, no matter what your daughter's political science professor says, we didn't start this.

Have you seen that bumber sticker that says, "No More Hiroshimas"? I wish I had one that says, "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."

Richard Hawley
General, USAF (ret)

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