THE SLEAZEBAGS MAY NOT HAVE DONE WHAT KRUGMAN CHARGES THEM WITH, BUT IF SO, IT'S NOT FOR LACK OF TRYING
The right-wingers have their panties in a wad because Paul Krugman posted this on his New York Times blog today:
Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?
Actually, I don’t think it's me, and it’s not really that odd.
What happened after 9/11 -- and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not -- was deeply shameful. Te 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....
I don't know that most people's memories of 9/11 have been poisoned -- I'd say most people aren't that political, and I'd say they remember 9/11 at a human level.
What's been poisoned, for everyone except right-wing partisans, is any opportunity to link that day to a subsequent sense of common American purpose. Our lives since then haven't tapped into any of the shared sense of humanity we felt that day, and we've barely been able to join together in a shared sense of outrage about the culprits, because, not long after 9/11, we were hectored into supporting a war against an unrelated enemy, along with other odious policies, and, yes, these were wedge issues, all designed to put us at one another's throats for right-wing political advantage. The only people who've felt a shared sense of purpose for ten uninterrupted years are the rage junkies of the right, who are eager to hate everyone Fox News tells them to hate -- a group that very much includes the rest of us.
So 9/11 hasn't been poisoned -- just everything since.
