Posted on 10/02/2001 8:24:10 AM PDT by Antiwar Republican
Investor’s Business Daily Government Trust Grows Despite Its Inability to Protect
October 2, 2001
by JAMES BOVARD Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Americans’ trust in government is soaring after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The number of people who trust the government to do the right thing has doubled since last year, and now is more than three times higher than in 1994. According to a Washington Post poll released on Sept. 27, 64% of Americans now "trust the government in Washington to do what is right" either "just about always" or "most of the time." Ronald Brownstein, a Los Angeles Times columnist, declared on Sept. 19: "At the moment the first fireball seared the crystalline Manhattan sky last week, the entire impulse to distrust government that has become so central to U.S. politics seemed instantly anachronistic." Brownstein’s headline - "The Government, Once Scorned, Becomes Savior" - captured much of the establishment media’s response to the attacks. It is puzzling that trust in government would soar after the biggest intelligence/law enforcement failure since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. At least in the first weeks after the attack, the federal government’s prestige appears higher than at any time since the start of the Vietnam War. The Post poll also revealed that the disastrous attacks of Sept. 11 greatly increased Americans’ confidence that government will protect them against terrorists. From 1995 through 1997, the results consistently showed that only between 35% and 37% of Americans had "a great deal" or "a good amount" of confidence that the feds would deter domestic attacks by terrorists. In hindsight, the public was far more prescient than were the Washington policy-makers who chose not to make defending against such attacks a high priority. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, confidence in government’s ability to deter terrorist attacks has soared - clocking in at 66%, almost double the percentage in the most recent previous Washington Post poll on this question in June 1997. The bigger the catastrophe, the more credulous many people seem to become. The worse government failed to protect people in the past, the more certain most people become that government will protect them in the future. Prominent liberals are capitalizing on the new mood to call for razing the restraints on government power. Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt says it’s "time to declare a moratorium on government-bashing.... For the foreseeable future, the federal government is going to invest or spend more, regulate more and exercise more control over our lives," he rejoices. "There is no real debate over expansion (of government power) in general." Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland snipped, "Ideologues on the right saw government as an evil to be rolled back." In a breathtaking leap of logic, he reasons: "The terror assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ... should profoundly shake the less-is-more philosophy that was the driving force for the tax-cut politics of Bush and conservative Republicans." But there is no evidence that Osama bin Laden targeted the U.S. because of ire over George Bush’s proposal to reduce the estate tax. Hoagland’s effort is reminiscent of liberal efforts after the assassination of John F. Kennedy to paint right-wingers everywhere as unindicted co-conspirators in Kennedy’s killing. It is difficult to understand how the failures of the CIA, the FBI, and the Federal Aviation Administration could generate a blank check for all other federal agencies to exert more control over 270 million Americans. The success of the disastrous attacks of Sept. 11 were due far more to gross negligence and a shortage of competence than to a shortage of power. The federal government needs sufficient power to protect Americans against terrorist attacks and to harshly punish the perpetrators of the recent attacks. But such power shouldn’t place a golden crown on the head of every would-be bureaucratic dictator, from the lowest village zoning enforcer to the most deluded federal agency chieftain. The blind glorification of government, now popular, puts almost all liberties at grave risk. At least for the time being, people have lost any interest in government’s batting average - either for actually protecting citizens or for abusing power. The best hope for the survival and defense of liberty is that enough Americans will recall the type of history lessons that public schools never teach. At this time of national crisis, we must forget neither our political heritage nor the inherent limits of any governmental machinery. Government has a vital role in defending Americans from deadly foreign threats. But nothing that happened on Sept. 11 or since changed the fundamental nature of American government.
James Bovard jbovard@his.com is the author of "Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion & Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years"(St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and a policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Considering that he was elected by claiming that he would NOT involve America in the war unless America was attacked, the attack on Pearl Harbor proved rather "fortuitous".
Considering that Bush had already planned an incursion into Afghanistan several months ago the tragic attack on civilians on September 11, 2001 would also, from this cynical perspective, appear "fortuitous.
I think the underlying concern regarding a poll in which opinion swings in a such a broad arc speaks volumes about the American public. Public education and media propaganda has succeded in creating a nation where principal is abandoned and hysteria holds sway. The sad part is that our government is so quick to jump on hysteria and ride it to oblivion.
As for Al Hunt, one could not go far wrong, in getting a hold on reality, if one were to chose to believe the negation of everything he says. You'd have to flip a coin when he contradicts himself, but he so consistently gets it wrong that that would rarely happen.
The WTC was a grotesquely outsized elephant built by the Port Authority at the bequest of then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller for his investment-banker brother, David Rockefeller. No tin-foil hat time on this one; the names are on the contracts. Thus, we created prime targets for terrorists to destroy.
The WTC did not follow the building standards required for other projects in New York City, because it was built by the Port Authority.
On the day of the disaster, the people in the second tower tried to evacuate. The Port Authority positioned security guards in the stairwells with bullhorns, instructing people to return to their floors. The argument is, "They were only trying to keep them from being hit by debris in the plaza -- and besides, who knew there would be a second attack?" Well, apparently the 25,000 private citizens in the second tower figured it out, because they tried to evacuate. And couldn't they have at least been allowed to evacuate to the lower floors and lobby?
We praise New York Mayor Giuliani, but what did he really do? The city sent firemen and policemen to their deaths. Other policemen interfered with the attempts by private citizens to evacuate the city. You can praise the mayor's presence at Ground Zero for its symbolism -- but that's all it was, symbolism. The illusion of safety.
Did the FAA save us? No, the FAA did nothing at all. Its airport security measures did zip. Its vaunted black boxes have yet to provide us with as much information as we got from the cell phones of private citizens aboard the doomed flights.
The FAA disarmed the pilots -- and it doesn't have the guts to do it outright, it hides behind regulations stating that pilots be required to attend 'certified' courses in firearms handling before they are allowed to carry firearms -- and then it doesn't define what 'certified' means, which means there can be no courses, and hence no firearms. Only a bureaucrat would find solace in that logical tangle. Certainly, the relatives of the dead airline passengers will not.
Moving on, let us consider the CIA, which receives $30 billion a year to track America's enemies. Only a couple of years ago, the head of the CIA stated that Osama bin Laden was the country's biggest security threat. Okay, figure this out . . . thirty billion dollars, and they can't handle a guy who lives in a cave in Afghanistan.
Then we have the US military, which failed to protect even the Pentagon. Here's a little news flash for all you wannabe terrorists out there: you could rent a Cessna 172 and drop Molotov cocktails over the White House and Capitol, and the entire United States military will be unprepared to do anything about it. Instead of locking me up for saying that, why not lock up the bureaucrats and politicians who've allowed that state of affairs?
Then let's consider our foreign policy. We give $3 billion in foreign aid to Israel a year. And we get back . . . nothing. We certainly don't get back protection from Middle Eastern terrorists.
For $3 billion a year, we could probably bribe every Palestinian to leave the West Bank and move to somewhere else . . . like Lower Manhatten.
Every terrorist who is interviewed never fails to mention that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the center of their grievances, and that they hate the US because we aid Israel. Yet we persist in believing that the terrorists attacked us because of 'our way of life.' So basically, the government and its flunkies are telling us that capitalism got people mad at us. It certainly wasn't anything the US government was doing. The US government takes care of us. You must believe that. Because if you don't, you're unpatriotic.
Never mind if the country is destroyed with such misplaced faith. The government is more important!
And in the aftermath of the September 11 horror, what is the United States government doing to protect us? It still won't allow pilots to carry guns. It has taken away steak knives from the passengers. It talks about issuing national ID cards. Our borders are still porous. (Has anyone considered that the influx of criminals from Mexico has over the years probably killed more than the 6000 dead at the World Trade Center?) In other words, the government has found new ways to restrict us, but is doing nothing to protect us.
Sure, let's go get bin Laden. Catching crooks is what government is supposed to do. It's the very reason that governments were first instituted.
But somewhere along the way, after using government to provide Social Security, welfare, and national health insurance, we seem to have forgotten the basics of Protect and Defend. We're so busy worrying about drugs for senior citizens that we left our borders open and our cities unguarded.
I entertain the fantasy that the September 11 tragedy took far fewer lives than the government claims. They haven't found anywhere near 6000 bodies at the WTC. And the death toll at the Pentagon was revised downward from 1000 to 100. Maybe there's been some bureaucratic incompetence at work in making the list of the missing at the WTC, and the actual number is far lower. I can't imagine too many people in the second tower seeing what happened to the first one, and then climbing back up those steps because a security guard told them to. So maybe the death toll is even lower than the government is saying.
Well, that's a harmless fantasy on my part. But here's a not-so-harmless fantasy: believing that we can trust the government to take care of us. The government failed us on every level. After September 11, the very legitimacy of government should be called into question.
If it can't protect our lives, maybe it can't protect our retirement funds, or health care system, or education system. Maybe it's doing an even crappier job in those sectors. After all, those are areas that historically government has never done well. And the deteoration is slow and gradual, so we don't notice it like we do when a building explodes. But in the end, maybe even greater tragedies will result.
A cabinet-level organization called Homeland Security doesn't make me feel at ease. It makes me feel like Stalin has come to America. It makes me feel that Osama bin Laden may have indeed destroyed our way of life, in ways that he never imagined.
It certainly doesn't make me feel that the Homeland is Secure.
Fools.
The naked grab for power by the USG in the wake of the WTC tragedy and the subsequent photo ops pursued by politicians of all stripes only feeds my cynicism of their motives and motivation. I love the Republic and the Constitution. If I risk being labeled as unpatriotic for noting the same tendency today for war-mongering and power-grabbing by Congress as in times past, and the subsequent shelving of Constitutional limits and Republican principles, then so be it.
Now, more than ever, vigilance must prevail.
Ah, if only it were true. Stockholm syndrome is being visited upon the country. Trust me, I am from the government, I am here to help you.
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