30 Seconds Until Takeoff... (Yes Wolf Blitzer is actually having a countdown)
Here we go!
President Bush on 9/11: 5 Years Later
- The attacks were of a barbarity unequaled on our history
- It was the initiation of a war on the entire free world
- Today we are safer, but we are not yet safe
- People praying and calling their children in times of disaster are "uniquely American" acts
- Fire fighters and police officers are "choking up" (maybe because of the permanent lung damage they sustained when they were lied to about the air quality at Ground Zero?)
- What we've learned since 9/11: The enemy kills with purpose and despises dissent (sound like another regime we know?); their goal: lock women up and beat men who miss scheduled prayer
- We put Al-Qaeda and the Taliban on the run (it was a gradual circle they ran: through Tora Bora into the NWFP in Pakistan and now back to where they stared in Afghanistan!)
- The world is safer without Saddam.
- Sectarian violence in Iraq is directed at the US (hmmmm -- now THAT'S some good "this isn't a Civil War because it's not internally directed" logic lol)
- Bush is of the same mind as Bin Laden that this is WW3 and if the US loses then it will be forever shamed
- The Iraqi people have been steadfast (probably because we don't grant them visas)
- Home Land Security was the magic key to monitoring terrorist phone calls (ok...and our phone calls, too)
- The most powerful weapon in the Executive arsenal is the power of freedom -- the pulling of voting levers makes terrorists wet their beds
- This is not a clash of civilizations; it is a struggle for civilization (there is only one, apparently, and it's found in a Texas church)
- Do we have the courage to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers did in Europe and Asia (drop a nuclear weapon or two? ignore a genocide or two?)
- Bush believes that he is analogous to Roosevelt and Truman, because they also pursued global peace with unforseen negative short-run consequences
- The war will be over when the sky parts, clouds clear, and radicalism disappears (so no more Evangelicals?) at which point we will enter a shining age of human liberty, with faith in a loving god who made us to be free
- Sons should go to war, and mothers should cross their fingers and pray (I'm not kidding!)