Two Speeches

I watched two speeches tonight about the meaning, 5 years later, of 9/11/01. The first was by Keith Olberman on MSNBC; the second was by President Bush, carried by just about every channel on TV.

Olberman's was an anguished plea for understanding, an attempt to comprehend how such an historic opportunity for national unity could have been lost, and why to this day Ground Zero is still a big hole in the ground. Bush, on the other hand, wanted to remind his dwindling proportion of supporters that the same tired platitudes he has been repeating for the past five years still hold some meaning as hundreds die each day in Iraq and as Afghanistan spins increasingly out of control.

Olberman's was filled with anger about those things left undone, the promises unkept, the pledges left unfulfilled. Why is Osama bin Laden still alive and on the loose? Why is there no memorial at the WTC site? Bush's, in contrast, was all about a pathetic attempt to cover his ass for his own failures, explain away his war in Iraq while terrorism escalates there and around the globe.

Bush's argument boils down to this:

I am often asked why we're in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat.

My administration, the Congress and the United Nations saw the threat.

And, after 9/11, Saddam's regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take.

The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.

Olberman repsonds:

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President — and those around him — did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

In the end, decide who you want to believe. But if you didn't watch both speeches live, read them both now start to finish. It's not really much of a contest.

Update: Crooks and Liars has the Olberman video here.

On This Day

While rearranging some books recently, I stumbled upon a slim volume of poetry by Carl Sandburg. I opened it up to a random page and read the poem there. I thought that poem would be worth repeating today, given all the insanity that has been done in this day's name.

A Million Young Workmen, 1915

A million young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads,
And the million are now under soil and their rotting flesh will in the years feed roots of blood-red roses.
Yes, this million of young workmen slaughtered one another and never saw their red hands.
And oh, it would have been a great job of killing and a new and beautiful thing under the sun if the million knew why they hacked and tore each other to death.
The kings are grinning, the kaiser and the czar — they are alive riding in leather-seated motor cars, and they have their women and roses for ease, and they eat fresh-poached eggs for breakfast, new butter on toast, sitting in tall water-tight houses reading the news of war.
I dreamed a million ghosts of the young workmen rose in their shirts all soaked in crimson … and yelled:
God damn the grinning kings, God damn the kaiser and the czar.

The war in Iraq is as senseless as the First World War was. In both cases, a tragic event was used as pretext to start a war that the powers that be already wanted to fight. Both wars were started by men who valued vain demonstrations of their supposed resolve and strength more than they valued the lives of the young men and women they casually sent into battle to die. And as for the deaths of the Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire today, our leaders don't even care enough to keep count.

And yet despite the horrors — both moral and practical — of this useless war, we must "stay the course", we are told, because to do otherwise would be to admit that our leaders' agressive desire for war at all costs was a mistake. Better, we are told, that young men die than that old men admit they were wrong.

So yes, God damn the grinning kings, God damn the President and the Prime Minister.

Finally

After a year of grousing about my inability to successfully connect a USB printer or hard drive to my linux laptop, I'm happy to report that yesterday I finally got that sucker working. The boring details are here.