Thursday, September 11, 2003
Today's rant will be entitled
Patriot Day My ASS!!!!!If you want to read my more benign feelings about this day, go to my other blog cause this one ain't gonna be pretty.
Where to begin. September 11, 2001. 09/11/01. Personally, I was working at MECA in Portland at the time. We heard that someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center. I thought "Oh geez. Some idiot in a Piper Cub got drunk and slammed into a building." Then we heard that it was a commercial airliner and I thought "Dang! Some commercial pilot got stonned and flew into a building. Remind me to drug test the crew next time I fly." I started thinking about the jet fuel in that thing and figured that they would be doing some serious repair work on the upper floors of that building. Then we heard that another one hit the other tower. Ok, that wasn't some drunk, something was going on. We all thought some kind of sabotage or something. We were turning on radios, going to CNN.com, running downstairs to the media production company to watch their TVs trying to see what in the hell happened. When it finally all came out, the president of the school came in and told us they were shutting down for the day and we should all go home and be with our familes. Which we did.
I came home and plopped on the couch. John had CNN on and Ian was playing on the floor. He was almost 3 at the time. He didn't understand what was going on. He just knew the buildng went on fire which, since it wasn't his house, had little to do with him. I was numb. I didn't know what to do. I just felt like hugging everyone. I really needed human contact that day. And I knew, almost before anything was said that if Osama bin Laden didn't have something to do with this thing it would be a miracle. But what shocked me was when they started mentioning Saddam Husein's name in conjunction with it. Saddam and Osama
HATE each other. They wouldn't cross the street to spit on the same American flag! Well, everyone is just upset (and rightly so) and they are looking for people to blame. It's natural to want to strike back at someone, to blame someone when something like this happens. Human psychology. They will evaluate the data and realize how wrong they are. And things sort of strayed away from Saddam for a while because they knew where Osama was and felt like they needed to go pound the crap out of Afghanastan for a while. Again, I didn't like it. I thought it was really the wrong way to go in the face of what happened. From a purely political standpoint, we had the world on a string. Public sympathy from every quarter (well, most every quarter) was with us. I felt we should have taken the high road a little bit at that point and worked within the system to get justice done. Yes the Taliban was a really bad pack of fundamentalist nutcases. They blew up one of the largest statues of Buddha in the world on principle rather than letting someone come in and take it out. They regularly torture and persecute women. Bad bunch, I agree. And yes, they were responsible in some if not most part for 9/11. But going into a country that was nothing but desert and big rocks after how many years of fighting with the Soviet Union and others and turning it into a desert with lots of little rocks seemed extrordinarily uncalled for. Rather like swatting a fly with a bazooka. But considering who we had in the White House at the time I thought, "Well, let him get it out of his system. Let him play big cheif shoot 'em up, we're gonna get all y'all cause we're 'merica" and then we can go about the business of building on the momentum we had with the world community and rally them all toward eliminating terrorism. Now they would have a reason to police themselves because it could be them next.
CRAP NO!!! GW showed his true colors after this world tragedy. He took a country that was starting to unite against an outside force, a world that was tripping over itself to rally around us and shoved 'em up everybody's ass. It was about 2 weeks before congress started fighting again and GW was looking for someone else to beat up on. Of course he hadn't finished up in Afghanistan yet. Then Saddam Husein began cropping up in the conversations again. WMDs, UN inspectors and connections to Al Quaida. "We can't let another 9/11 happen. We have to stop them now." Granted
NONE of the intelligence supported any of this. 17 of the 19 men who hijacked those planes were Saudi Arabian and we knew that the day the planes hit. But people were so caught up in the "Let's get em" propaganda that they didn't care. Whatever GW and the media spewed they lapped up like cream.
And GW and his Inner Circle of Neocons had a plan. They had had this plan since 1997. Which is why Saddam's name started coming up the afternoon of 9/11. The moment they all got on a secure communications channel that day they hit their collective knees and
thanked GOD for those planes. They couldn't declare martial law so instead they rammed through the Patriot Act. "Don't let it happen again" Racial profiling shifted from blacks and asians to arabic "Don't let it happen again" WMDs! Nuclear Program! "DON"T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!!!" Anyone that questioned these things was automatically branded a traitor. He made speech after speech telling us that Saddam Husein had a stockpile of weapons over there and was just poised on the brink of attacking us. People saw visions of missles dropping on their homes and schools which blended in quite nicely with the images of smoke billowing out of the Twin Towers. So they said "Yeah! Whatever you say! Go get em!"
So he did. Now he
still wasn't done in Afghanistan yet. And he and Rummy tried to get that thing over as quickly as possible so maybe we wouldn't notice that all that hubbub was just a pile of whitewashed excrement.
Do the souls of the dead from 9/11 rest easier because of all this slaughter? I don't know. I doubt it. I have never been a nationalist, but I used to enjoy living in America. I don't now and these last two years are why. I am embarassed to be from here. And to those who would say "If you don't like it, leave" I say "
HELL NO!!! I ain't gonna leave!! It's my country too and it has the potential to be an amazing place! And I am going to fight tooth and nail to CHANGE it!!" That is my vision of Patriot Day. The celebration of us making the U.S. the best it can be and bringing the rest of the world with us.
Dammit!!
posted by Kimber
at 1:57 PM ::
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Monday, September 08, 2003
Denial is no solution to global warming Editorial by Fred Krupp, President - Environmental DefenseThe Bush administration repeatedly has called for more study of global warming. It is disappointing to learn, then that the White House recently deleted inconvenient climate findings from a state-of-the-environment report, promoting instead an industry-funded study so widely discredited that the editors of the journal publishing it have resigned. The administration's actions are eerily reminiscent of the tobacco industry's refusal to acknowledge the harms of smoking.
Rather than hiding the facts, the administration should endorse cost-effective solutions. Instead, EPA has hushed up its own findings that a plan to limit greenhouse gases along with other power-plant emissions would save more lives and produce about $50 billion more in health savings at an extra cost of just $2.2 billion.
If the United States doesn't start to address global warming economically, businesses could find it far costlier to make steeper pollution cuts down the road. Several major companies like our climate partners BP, DuPont and Shell are commendably cutting greenhouse gasses today. Voluntary actions, however will not give us the guaranteed nationwide emissions reductions we need.
Fortunately, leaders in Congress are standing up. The Climate Stewardship Act by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) has emerged as the litmus test of political responsibility on the gravest environmental problem of our age.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study shows the bill's impact on the economy would be negligible. With bipartisan support growing, the bill is scheduled to be voted on this fall as a free-standing measure. We hope the president will come to support it. Over time, with your help, we will make it imperative that elected officials support action to protect us and our children from this looming threat.
posted by Kimber
at 10:59 AM ::
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