News Nuggets 741

Lightening strikes along the Utah-Arizona border.  From National Geographic.

The 9/11 Anniversary
Yes -- it is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a date that will certainly live right up there with Dec. 7, 1941 or October 24th, 1929 as one of a handful of the darkest days in US history.  Sadly, unlike these two previous dates, 9/11 inaugurated 10 years of the most ill-informed, misguided foreign and domestic policies in our nation's history.  Indeed, the enormity of the blunders, stupidity -- and the extraordinary costs to our country -- seem to have only increased with each passing year. For all of the encomiums and reverential musings about sacrifice and heroism that dominate today's media, I have found none worth reproducing here.  There are simply too many darker lessons that Americans have neither learned nor, for many, caused even a modest adjustment or reappraisal in their thinking lo these ten years on.  One need look no further than the Editorial/Op-ed page of today's Washington Post.  What follows are two columns that I think BEGIN to capture the costs of our conduct.  

Time to Leave 9/11 Behind (E.J. Dionne Jr) from the Washington Post
"After we honor the 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind. As a nation we have looked back for too long. We learned lessons from the attacks, but so many of them were wrong. The last decade was a detour that left our nation weaker, more divided and less certain of itself."

An America That No Longer Knows Itself (Kathleen Parker) from the Washington Post
"Putting it bluntly, Sept. 11 caused us to go temporarily insane. Being for or against the war, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, divided us as wars do, but this time was different. Friendships ended, marriages suffered, people crossed the street to avoid those with whom they disagreed. Ten years later, we are still at war. Tack on the global financial crisis, stagnant unemployment, the further dissolution of trust in our institutions, and we have all the ingredients for moral panic. And now, alas, another election season is upon us with all the froth and spittle we love to loathe. President Obama understands that the nation has a psychological problem, but no president in his right mind can afford to speak publicly of such things."

Apparently, neo-con op-ed editor Fred Hyatt felt the need to respond to colleaguesParker and Dionne with a wholly unconvincing, exhausted rehash of GOP talking points:
Don’t Underestimate What America Has Achieved Since 9/11 from the Editorial Board of the Washington Post
"ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.” The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold."
The accounting Hyatt & company present here is SO MISLEADING as to barely warrant comment.  This is what the shrinking band of neo-con dead-enders do: they simply ignore most of the costs and all of the alternatives.  We will never know what might have been if the US had taken a different path.  But certain developments in the Arab Spring uprisings strongly suggest that other far less costly, less nationally debilitating pathways were possible.  

For example:
Al-Qaeda's Zealots of Yesteryear Turning to Politics, Democracy (Doug Saunders) from the Globe and Mail [of Toronto]
"The bearded Egyptian, who was later captured and tortured by U.S. forces, was a pioneering member of the al-Qaeda generation – the frustrated and pious men, mainly middle class and Middle Eastern, who took up arms, bombs and sometimes jetliners against Western governments starting in the 1990s. ... Yet, when he sat down to speak this week in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Mr. Abdel Rahman had a different message. “My vision hasn’t changed, but the political agenda has,” he says. “Egypt now has become a free and democratic country, so I would advise young people to engage in political activities rather than taking up arms – everything has changed.”
This year, millions of muslims around the world are re-thinking past sympathies for terrorists -- and it has virtually nothing to do with Bush's "War on Terror" and everything to do with locating viable alternatives to terror for bringing political change.  Y

Other news of the day:
Merkel is Ready for Biggest Leap of her Career (Derek Scally) from the Irish Times
"The answer is simple, for anyone who cares to listen: in exchange for financial assistance to its neighbours, Berlin wants to reattach the political union carriage decoupled from the monetary union locomotive at the 1990 summit in Dublin. Now Merkel seems to have begun moving towards European finality."
Better too late than never I guess.  For how many weeks have global markets been tanking!?  She'll get her proposals out there just in time for the latest economic figures to show that the world has entered a double-dip recession.   Thanks for your timely response, Angela!  Incredible!

Mr. Banker, Can You Spare a Dime? (Joe Nocera) from the New York Times
"With lending standards extraordinarily tight in the wake of the financial crisis, banks simply aren’t making small business loans, not even to perfectly creditworthy people like David.  Which means he can’t expand — and hire — the way he would like to."

Getting Back to a Grand Bargain (Thomas Friedman) from the New York Times
"While President Obama has talked generally about such a Grand Bargain, he has never put a detailed offer before the American people and his own party faithful. It was a failure of leadership. Thursday night in his speech before Congress, President Obama finally rose to that challenge in a thoughtful, credible and substantive fashion."

G.O.P. Is Cautious in Jobs Response from the New York Times
"Armed with worrisome poll data and seeking to maintain the legislative upper hand, Congressional Republicans who have spent the balance of the year pouring buckets of criticism on the Obama administration are shifting to a more restrained approach as they ponder how to respond to the president’s jobs plan."
I HOPE the Obama people take some lessons from the GOP's response here.  Bring some rhetorical missiles to your fights with the GOP, start landing them, and suddenly they will start altering their behavior.  He and his team need to keep landing them!  

Perry’s Immigration Problem: Even Bigger than it Looks (David Frum) from the Frum Forum
"Byron York has some astute things to say this morning about the immigration issue and its potentially negative impact on Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential candidacy:"