Few things in contemporary American life can so perfectly illustrate what’s wrong with this country, than our curious relationship with 9/11.
In the nascent stages of a presidential campaign, a Bush commercial appears that gently refers to the terrorist attacks. Immediately, the elite media-driven hallelujah chorus is crying foul, replete with assorted widows, appearing on all the usual TV shows, most notably on Today with the execrable Katie Couric. Why, that dastardly Bush is exploiting the sacred memory of the victims!
Would it be impolite to remind the clueless Katie that her hero FDR, who undoubtedly goaded the Japanese into their “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor, never missed a single opportunity to work the people into a bellicose frenzy with “Remember Pearl Harbor”? And no matter what you believe regarding whether we knew about the attack of December 7, 1941 in advance, the bombing of Pearl was clearly a military objective, while the Twin Tower attacks were nothing more than a cowardly massacre of 3,000 civilians. To NOT mention this horror in a presidential campaign would be craven, irresponsible, and vacillatory.
But if you want real exploitation, you can start with the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. In an act of sheer political expediency, dressed up as compassion to fool the public (and it apparently did) each bereaved will be entitled to about $2 million, tax-free, courtesy of Uncle Sugar—and that includes every one of those complaining widows on TV.
Supposedly, one reason this survivors’ fund was set up was to relieve the airlines of their legal obligations for 9/11. And what, pray tell, were those? An airline should have predicted that 19 madmen would get onto flights and crash them into the Twin Towers? Now suppose they did. Under what authority could they have barred these men from boarding the planes? I argue that even if they KNEW what was going to happen, they would have been unsuccessful in preventing their boarding. Altercations would have broken out, and under the PC rubrics of law enforcement, the airline would have given in. If the pilot had refused to fly, he would have been severely disciplined or fired. Never even mind that there is no possible theory of tort liability that could justify lawsuits against the airlines. These days, no theory is needed as long as there are greedy clients and unscrupulous plaintiff’s lawyers.
What, exactly, makes a death in the 9/11 attacks any more tragic, or worthy of special compensation, than if that same employee of Cantor Fitzgerald were killed in a car accident on September 10th? Or better yet, why are 9/11 deaths more important than those related to the 1993 World Trade Center or 1995 Oklahoma City bombings? Heck, what about the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl at the hands of Islamist terrorists in Pakistan? His widow is trying to cash in, making the reasonable point that he was killed by the very same people who brought us 9/11.
As it is, Mariane Pearl has already exploited her dead husband with her book A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl. Pearl notes that she has few long term options that would come close to replacing her husband’s salary of about $100,000 per year. Well, Mariane, there was always life insurance—not a bad investment for families whose prime breadwinner is stationed in dangerous countries, doing dangerous things such as investigating Islamic fundamentalism.
To make matters even worse, if that’s possible, a special commission was set up to investigate what went wrong with our intelligence, and how 9/11 could have been prevented. Make no mistake: It couldn’t have. Under today’s gelded PC law enforcement environment, and a court system with way too many squishy judges, brimming over with misplaced compassion (always for the offender, hardly ever for the victim), any preemptive act would have been roundly condemned. And it is for just this reason that blabbermouth Richard Clarke has been raised up as a hero. He never actually DID anything about terrorism in his many years in Government, but he sure talked about it, didn’t he?
For far too long, most Americans have been quite happy with “feel good” as a substitute for reality. From a War on Poverty that didn’t even lift its TV poster child out of that condition, to pious musings about what might have been on 9/11, it is clear that the effects of culture rot, secularism, socialism, drugs, and a miserable public education system have definitely taken their toll.