Benghazi Coverup

Benghazi scandal management

Last night John commented on the behavior of the Democrats during the House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday on Benghazi.

Democratic committee members walked out on the testimony of Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, the mother and father respectively of two of the men who were killed by terrorists in the Benghazi assault. John observed that the Democrats on the committee didn’t even have the decency to listen to what these victims of the Obama administration’s gross negligence had to say.

Why would the Democrats do that? They would say that they were protesting the politicization of Benghazi. Their thesis is that looking back at events in order to assess fault and allocate responsibility. Assessing fault and allocating responsibility is political in this case because fault and disgrace run up a chain of Democratic officeholders ending in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The thesis that applies to account for the Democrats’s behavior in this case is the one from A Few Good Men: They can’t handle the truth.

John focused on the second half of the House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday. The first half of the hearing was previewed in good stories by Sharyl Attkisson and Josh Rogin earlier this week and also deserves attention.

Following Benghazi then Secretary of State Clinton convened an Accountability Review Board to conduct a a phony baloney investigation leading to phony baloney findings to protect Clinton and Barack Obama in their phony baloney jobs. The ARB never got around to interviewing the four mid-level employees it found at fault in connection with the Benghazi assault. The unclassified version of the ARB report is posted online here.

The unwritten mission of the ARB was to designate a few mid-level employees to serve as scapegoats for more senior officials including Clinton and Obama. The ARB duly designated four such employees who were placed on administrative leave following the release of the ARB report. Secretary Kerry has now (rightly) reinstated all four employees who were disciplined as a result of the ARB report. I wrote about the reinstatement of Ronald Maxwell here.

The first half of the House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday was devoted to the ARB. ARB leaders Thomas Pickering and Michael Mullen appeared before the committee as witnesses.

The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes attended the hearing. Steve reports that the testimony validated the skepticism of ARB critics and raised new questions about the independence of its work as well as the reliability of their conclusions. Steve concludes that the testimony of Pickering and Mullen discredited the ARB. Among the revelations in the testimony at yesterday’s hearing:

*Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handpicked the two leaders of the ARB who were given the job of investigating her department.

*Cheryl Mills, the chief of staff and senior counselor to Secretary Clinton, was intimately involved with the ARB panel from the beginning. She called the leaders at Clinton’s behest to ask them to serve, she was briefed regularly on the investigation as it unfolded and she received a draft copy of the report before it was finalized.

*Several senior Clinton advisers were provided draft copies of the ARB report before it was released to the public.

*The vice chairman of the ARB testified that he called Mills to warn her that an impending appearance of Charlene Lamb before Congress would be problematic for the State Department. Lamb had done poorly in her interview with the ARB, Mullen said, and he called Mills because he was worried that a poor performance before Congress would cause problems for the State Department and its leadership. When Representative Jim Jordan asked Mullen if he would have placed the call to Mills if Lamb had performed well, he said no.

*The chairman of the panel acknowledged at least one instance in which language in the report was softened after an early draft was sent to Clinton and her top aides. “The draft, as I believe it went to her, said the security posture was grossly inadequate for Benghazi, period. And we made the editorial correction recognizing that there was certainly a very real point that ‘grossly’ was probably not applicable to Benghazi in light of the changes that the State Department had made, but it was clearly applicable to dealing with the specific circumstances of the attack.”

*The vice chairman testified in his deposition that the ARB received “very specific tasking from Secretary Clinton on her expectations with respect to this board” and that nobody on the board had any input on the scope of their work.

*The panel was largely staffed by current and former State Department officials and worked out of State Department offices.

*The ARB did not speak with nine key military officials on the ground in Libya or Germany who were deeply involved in the US response to the attacks. Among those who was never interviewed: Lt. Colonel Steven Gibson, who was on the ground in Tripoli and whom State Department official Greg Hicks has testified was on the receiving end of the “stand-down” order that Obama officials have repeatedly disclaimed.

*Although the ARB did not interview Secretary Clinton as part of its investigation, they provided her with a two-hour briefing about the details of the report before it was finalized and released to the public.

*The board did not interview either Cheryl Mills or Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, another close adviser to Clinton.

*None of the interviews the ARB conducted were recorded in any fashion – no audio, no video, no court reporter. The only record of those sessions is in notes taken by a staff member. According to the vice chairman: “The staff would put a summary of the interview together. We would – the members would be able to review that summary shortly after the interview.” (Those summaries and the notes that produced them have not been provided to Congress).

*The ARB did not investigate the Obama administration’s public response to the attack or the role that senior State Department officials played in shaping that narrative. That response included the highly misleading claim that the attacks had come as a reaction to an anti-Islam video and many other claims that were later shown to be false. Emails between top State Department officials and others in the Obama administration, first reported by TWS last spring, revealed that several top State Department officials were involved in crafting the administration’s post-attack talking points. And Susan Rice, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, a top State Department official, famously blamed the video in her appearances on the Sunday talk shows shortly after the attack. The ARB wasn’t interested.

Steve begins and ends his report with comments regarding the media’s lack of interest in the proceedings. If the media were not a Democratic protection racket, of course, this would all be big news. But they are and it’s not.

Benghazi Victims’ Parents Assail Administration for Lies, Lack of Information — as Democrats Leave the Room!

Posted By Bryan Preston On September 19, 2013 @ 1:31 pm In Politics | 27 Comments

Parents of two of the Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya, last year testified today before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Before these parents testified, however, most of the Democrats on the committee had left the room, refusing to even listen to these grieving parents. Only two Democratic members remained in the room.

Patricia Smith, mother of slain U.S. Foreign Service information officer Sean Smith, testified that she met with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the day the four Americans’ bodies were returned to American soil. Smith says that the three and other senior administration officials lied to her about the cause of the attack.

“I was told a few things,” Smith told the remaining members of the committee, “and they were all lies. Obama, and Hillary, and Panetta, and Biden, and Susan [Rice] all came up to me at the casket ceremony. Every one of them came up to, gave me a big hug. And I asked them ‘What happened? Please tell me.’ And every one of them says, ‘It was the video.’ And we all know that it wasn’t the video. Even at at time they knew it wasn’t the video. So they all lied to me.”

Smith also said that all of the officials said that they would “check up” on what happened and get back to her. To date, she has heard from none of them.

“I don’t count,” Smith said, “the people of America don’t count. The only thing that counts is their own selves, and their own jobs.”
Charles Woods, father of slain Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, also testified. In his soft-spoken voice, Woods also leveled grave criticisms at the Obama administration.

“It’s been over a year since four brave Americans were tragically killed in Benghazi,” Woods said. “And after one year we know very few answers. We’ve been asking for the last year. We don’t know much more than we did a year ago.

“Two of my heroes while growing up were John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” Woods said. “Rev. King made the statement, that ‘Justice delayed is justice denied.’ It’s been over a year. We have no justice. We have very few truthful answers that have been provided.”

Smith and Woods were killed on the night of September 11, 2012 ,at a U.S. State Department facility in Benghazi, Libya. Ambassador

Chris Stevens and SEAL Glen Doherty died in the attack as well. The Obama administration, including the president himself, Clinton and his then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, blamed the attack on a crudely made YouTube video for about two weeks following the attack. But moments into the attack, officials in Washington had been told that it was a military-style, terrorist assault. To this day, no one has been held accountable for the deception or for the stand-down order that was reportedly given to military who may have been able to respond in time to save American lives. The president’s whereabouts and actions on the night of attack also remain a mystery.

To date, more than a year after the attack, despite President Obama’s vow to bring those responsible for the attack to justice, not a single attacker has been arrested.

Media LIES About Ocare

Little Media Lies About ObamaCare

Posted 09/20/2013 07:12 PM ET

Bias: Heard the one about how House Republicans have passed 40-plus bills to repeal or defund ObamaCare, all of which went nowhere? It's not true. Yet the mainstream press continues to peddle this blatant falsehood.
In the run-up to Friday's House vote to defund ObamaCare, the media tried to portray it as part of some deranged anti-ObamaCare syndrome. As evidence, they claim Republicans have already tried this dozens of times before, all to no avail. Some examples:
• "The House of Representatives has voted 40 times to repeal or curtail the Affordable Care Act since Republicans took control of the chamber in 2011 — and each time the Democratic Senate has swatted away their bills." (Los Angeles Times)
• "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And if you're a House Republican, be sure to repeat that process another 40 times." (MSNBC)
• "Last week House Republicans voted for the 40th time to repeal ObamaCare. Like the previous 39 votes, this action will have no effect whatsoever." (New York Times)
• "It'll mark the 40th vote by the Republican-controlled House to repeal some or all of the law. Such measures have died in the Democratic-controlled Senate." (Associated Press)
• "House Republicans have now voted 41 times to repeal ObamaCare, knowing each time that those bills would go nowhere in the Senate." (Huffington Post)
Just one problem: Twenty percent of those bills made it to Obama's desk and secured his signature.
Obama signed House bills to kill a costly ObamaCare reporting rule, terminate its long-term care insurance program and repeal the "free choice voucher" program. He also signed bills cutting funds for the so-called CO-OP program, a public health slush fund and other ObamaCare programs.
Two other House-passed bills — one to end the Independent Payment Advisory Board and another terminating the medical device tax — have strong bipartisan support. Another simply codified the employer mandate delay Obama himself had already ordered.
Yet the media pretend these things never happened. This is admittedly a little thing. But as the Good Book says: "The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones."

Sharia in Britain

British Court Enforces Sharia Over Equal Protection of Law

Posted By Andrew C. McCarthy On September 16, 2013 @ 10:44 am In Uncategorized | 31 Comments

Has sharia accommodation in England reduced the Magna Carta to a dead letter? The question presses thanks to the ruling of a Crown Court in London that permits a Muslim woman under indictment for witness intimidation to wear a niqab – a veil which makes only her eyes visible to observers – during her trial.
The ruling is a compromise. The defendant will be shielded from public and media view; her face will be observable, however, to the trial jury, as well as the judge and lawyers in the case.
As Robin Shepherd of thecommentator.com contends, this resolution disserves the bedrock principle of equal protection under the law. All other citizens will be forced to endure the public examination attendant to being accused of crime – only Muslim women are given this safe-harbor. Shepherd roots his argument in Western tradition. On that account, he might have added that the niqab itself is a powerful statement of the anti-equality principles that undergird sharia, providing another reason why Western legal systems should resist its principles.
Moreover, the argument here is not just about tradition but about the practical administration of justice. The courts in a free society belong to the public and dispense justice in the public’s name. Trial proceedings are presumptively public for that reason and, just as important, because openness to the public and the press acts as a check encouraging faithful and effective performance by the trial participants, including the jury. The administration of justice – which in this instance promotes accurate judgments about a witness’s credibility – obviously outweighs any individual’s interest in concealing his or her face.
The requirement that a witness’s face be observed, like the requirement that a person’s face be visible in a photograph for a lawfully required identification document (e.g., a passport or driver’s license), is generally applicable to all persons and neutral on the matter of religion – its terms do not single out believers for hostile treatment and it was patently not enacted out of hostility toward any sect. Civil society and equal protection require that such basic laws be applied to everyone, equally.
That is not something to compromise about. The compromising is done in the legislative process; if they are lawfully enacted, that should be the end of the matter. And even if, for argument’s sake, it were worth compromising for some reasons, it should never be worth compromising with sharia, an anti-liberty system, particularly in connection with one of its anti-equality provisions, such as dress codes for women.

Clintons in Bed With Islamists

The Clintons Employ Muslim Brotherhood Officials? You Can’t Be Serious …

Posted By Andrew C. McCarthy On September 18, 2013 @ 4:42 pm In Uncategorized | 33 Comments

I don’t know who is more shocked about this, me or Huma Abedin, but it turns out that a former top Clinton Foundation official is also … a senior Muslim Brotherhood official who has just been arrested for – you’ll never guess – inciting violence in Egypt. Not to worry,

I’m sure it was only moderate violence.

The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports on Gehad [as in Jihad] el-Haddad:

A senior Muslim Brotherhood official who, until recently, had been employed by the William J. Clinton Foundation was arrested in Cairo on Tuesday and charged with inciting violence.

Gehad el-Haddad served as one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s top communications officials until Egyptian security forces seized him as part of a wider crackdown on officials loyal to ousted former President Mohamed Morsi.

Before emerging as a top Brotherhood official and adviser to Morsi, el-Haddad served for five years as a top official at the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by former President Bill Clinton.

El-Haddad gained a reputation for pushing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda in the foreign press, where he was often quoted defending the Brotherhood’s crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt.

He was raised in a family of prominent Brotherhood supporters and became the public face of the Islamist organization soon after leaving his post at the Clinton Foundation. However, much of his official work with the Brotherhood took place while he was still claiming to be employed by the Clinton Foundation.

Funny how that works. As I’ve previously recounted, Ms. Abedin began working for then-First Lady Hillary Clinton while simultaneously (a) working at an Islamist journal with top al Qaeda financier Abdullah Omar Naseef (the funding device, a “charity” called the Rabita Trust, which Naseef ran with al Qaeda founder Wael Jalaidan, is a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law); and (b) serving on the executive board of the Muslim Students Association’s George Washington University chapter. (The Muslim Students Association is the first building block of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, and the late, unlamented al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki – an MSA alum, like Morsi, Jalaidan and Ms. Abedin – was the “chaplain” at the GWU chapter at the same time he was providing, er, spiritual advice to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers).

Adam Kredo’s report goes on to explain that Gehad el-Haddad’s placement in the Morsi inner-circle was a natural because of family ties: el-Haddad’s father was a top foreign policy adviser to Morsi, the Brotherhood leader, America-basher, anti-Semite, and now-ousted Egyptian president.

Small world: Ms. Abedin’s parents (her mother and late father) have also been prominent Brotherhood figures. In fact, besides running the journal founded by Naseef, Ms. Abedin’s mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is reportedly a member of the Muslim Sisterhood … as is Morsi’s wife. Mrs. Abedin also runs a sharia promotion organization called the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), which is part of another group, the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR), that has been banned in Israel for providing material support to Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian terrorist branch). Both IICWC and IICDR operate under the umbrella of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi’s Union of Good. Sheikh Qaradawi is the Brotherhood’s chief jurist and has issued fatwas endorsing suicide bombings in Israel and the killing of American troops in Iraq – and his Union of Good is a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law.

Adam also notes that el-Haddad was the Brotherhood official placed in charge of the “Renaissance Project” in February 2011, while he was still at the Clinton Foundation. The report describes the “Renaissance Project” as “a Brotherhood-backed economic recovery program.” Actually, that’s not the half of it. As I outlined in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy:

[In early 2011, just after Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badi announced that jihad was “the only solution against Zio-American arrogance and tyranny”] Khairat el-Shater … began making himself heard. Shater is the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Deputy General Guide.” He is a charismatic figure, revered as the “Iron Man” for his defiant refusal to buckle through two decades of repeated detention and prosecution by Mubarak’s regime[.]…He also brings intellectual heft: after Mubarak fell, it was to Shater that the Brotherhood turned to craft its comprehensive strategy for shaping Egypt’s future.

The Brothers have a name for this enterprise. It is called “the Nahda Project” – the Islamic “Renaissance.”

In April 2011, Shater delivered a lengthy lecture, “Features of Nahda: Gains of the Revolution and the Horizons for Developing.”… Shater’s instruction was remarkable. He emphasized that the Brotherhood’s fundamental principles and goals never change, only the tactics by which they are pursued. “You all know that our main and overall mission as Muslim Brothers is to empower God’s religion on earth, to organize our life and the lives of the people on the basis of Islam, to establish the Nahda of the ummah and its civilization on the basis of Islam, and to subjugate people to God on earth.” Shater went on to reaffirm the time-honored plan of the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, stressing the need for both personal piety and internal organizational discipline in pursuing the goal of worldwide Islamic hegemony.

The lecture dovetailed with a 93-page platform released by the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, under the guidance of its leader Mohammed Morsi, a Shater confidant. The platform proposed to put every aspect of human life under sharia-compliant state regulation. The document was unmistakably anti-Western and anti-Israeli: structuring civil society on the foundation of “Arab and Islamic unity”; making the “strengthen[ing] of Arab and Islamic identity” the “goal of education”; making treaties (think: Camp David Accord) subject to approval by the population (i.e., the same population that had just, by a landslide, adopted the Islamist position on constitutional amendments); and describing Israel, “the Zionist entity, [as] an aggressive, expansionist, racist and settler entity.”

But hey, nothing to see here. And no word yet on whether Senator McCain will be taking to the Senate floor once more to rail against this obvious smear campaign against a Clinton confidant with deep ties to Islamic supremacism.

DEFUND: Ted Cruz is Our Man

How dysfunctional is a political party when futility is passed off as “strategy” and breaking from reality is portrayed as “principle”?

Obamacare isn’t as impactful an issue as slavery but it may as well be considering what it is doing to the Republican Party. Where the issue of slavery nearly destroyed the Democratic Party, weakening it for more than a generation before and after the Civil War,

Obamacare threatens a similar meltdown for the GOP as even the most fervent opponents of the law are now having their commitment to getting rid of it questioned.
 
This is a different Republican Party than the one just five years ago — which was a different party from the one a decade before and the one a decade before that again. The shift has been radical. It has redefined conservatism in the process, eschewing traditional conservative principles and substituting a blindly partisan, wild-eyed extremist ideology that turns on and bites its own at the first sign of apostasy.

Wanting to defund Obamacare is not extreme. But denying reality by believing it’s possible demonstrates just how far around the bend the base of the Republican Party has traveled. And punishing those who point out the futility of such by attempting to promote the idea that they actually support Obamacare is childish. This tenuous hold on reality also manifests itself in wild conspiracy theories, unreasonable demands on the GOP leadership, and a rejection of responsible governance.

Cannibalism is not a sign of a healthy political movement. But Texas Senator Ted Cruz had a few chunks bitten from his hide when he dared point out that, at the moment, the arithmetic in the Senate does not favor the effort to defund Obamacare:

Cruz, a tea party favorite, is one of the most vocal proponents of defunding the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s health care reform law. He’s spent months championing the cause. But on Wednesday, as House Republican leaders unveiled their latest plan for sinking Obamacare — tying a measure to defund the law to a must-pass resolution that keeps the government running — Cruz thanked House Republicans for their fight, and said they’re on their own.

“[Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid will no doubt try to strip the defund language from the continuing resolution, and right now he likely has the votes to do so,” Cruz said in a statement. “At that point, House Republicans must stand firm, hold their ground, and continue to listen to the American people.”

The sense of betrayal from House Republicans is palpable. “We haven’t even taken up the bill and Ted Cruz is admitting defeat?” spit one GOP House aide. “Ted Cruz came here to throw bombs and fundraise off of attacks on fellow Republicans. He’s a joke, plain and simple,” said another.

Cruz pointing out the reality of the situation is apparently too much to bear for many Republicans. In what universe will the Senate ever vote to defund Obamacare? Perhaps some of those fire breathers in the House could invite 15 or so Democratic senators out for a few drinks, slip them some mickeys, and force Harry Reid to bring the continuing resolution to the floor where it can be passed. Other than that, they have no strategy, no arguments they can make to Democratic senators to get them to change their minds, and no threats that haven’t already been made. There are no parliamentary gimmicks that Republicans can use to engineer victory. A filibuster would shut down the government, which the Democrats are perfectly prepared to do. But how long can that go on?

Forget about political blame for a shutdown. Let’s look at what that means for Obamacare. Because unless the Republicans are willing to shut the government down until 2017 when they may be able to repeal it, they have lost. And Obamacare will limp forward with the exchanges already funded and will be up and running in less than a fortnight, the individual mandate will still be the law of the land,

Medicaid expansion will go forward, and the 20,000 pages of rules and regulations that have already been written will still have the force of law. Of course, the subsidies will not be funded, but people will still have to purchase insurance on the exchanges or face the music with the IRS. That will no doubt be wildly popular with the public.

Accusing Cruz of “surrendering” is lunacy. Republicans apparently want to show up on the battlefield only to find it empty. Whom or what are they supposed to fight? How can you “surrender” when you’re the only one fighting the war?

Cruz went even further in remarks to reporters after a speech in Washington:

“Right now, [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid has 54 Democrats and they presumably are going to stand with him … and a number of Senate Republicans have expressed that they may support the Democrats here,” Cruz told a couple of reporters, just after his remarks at an event hosted by the National Auto Dealers Association.

“I think it is likely that it will take another election for a full repeal,” he said.

Household Income - LOST

Going for broke: The multiple lost decades of US household income. Is it possible to have a recovery while the standard of living collapses?

• Posted by mybudget360 in Uncategorized
• 0 Comments

The recent Census data highlights a stark difference between the stock market and what families are facing across the United States.  Households are struggling to keep ahead while the standard of living slowly erodes with the juggernaut that is the banking tide.  There will be repercussions for what the Fed has done in terms of bailing out the banks.  One longer term problem is the decline in household incomes. 

Adjusting for inflation, American families are making what they did in 1989.  How long ago was this?  The most popular shows on TV were The Cosby Show and Roseanne.  In other words, this was a generation ago.  The standard of living continues to decline for many but for others the bailouts are working out magnificently like rubbing on a central bank genie lamp.  The Fed is going for broke here but only a small portion of our population is really coming out ahead.


Back to the Future

While the market went bananas on the Fed’s non-taper announcement, household incomes continued on down a very familiar and gloomy path:


This is not a positive trend if the chart above were not so apparent.  Contrary to the stock market and the booming real estate market being driven by investors, household incomes continue to fall.  Since the recession hit, many organizations have boosted their bottom lines by cutting wages and benefits.

One of the dramatic pieces of data recently released is the amount of income going to the top 10 percent of income earners:


Source: vMother Jones

Back in 1928, the top 10 percent of income earners took in 49.3 percent of all incomes.  Of course a little thing known as the Great
Depression rampaged through the nation only a year later.  Today this income inequality is even more evident than it was nearly 100 years ago.  The problem with this is that most Americans are trying to get by on the crumbs of what is falling from the uber-wealthy. 

For example, over 47 million Americans are getting by on food stamps.  This is an incredibly high number of our population (around 1 out of 6 people in a time when the stock market is at an all-time high).  Even the CEO of Panera Bread is trying to live on a food stamp budget:

“(USA Today) Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich is very hungry. “I can’t stop thinking about food,” he wrote on his LinkedIn blog yesterday. That’s because he was on day 4 of a week-long challenge to eat on just $4.50 per day. He’s doing it to raise awareness of how people on food stamps live: That’s how much a person on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program receives, Shaich explains.”

One of the problems with the mythology of the stock market is that somehow, a high stock market will reflect a booming economy. 

Today with the casino-like transformation of banking, you can have banks making billion dollar bets on people failing and this will turn a healthy profit.  You have trillions of dollars in derivatives being traded in black boxes.  None of this of course translates to a real world benefit and each piece of income data seems to reflect that.

Where the gains are flowing

Many people are one paycheck away from being broke.  Millions are already broke.  The median amount saved for retirement by those 25 to 34 is zero dollars.  Actually, they are in a more dire position since many carry a negative net worth with tens of thousands of dollars of student debt.

Most of the gains have flowed to a small portion of our population:

While most are scratching to get by, the top 5 percent have done spectacular since 1970.  There will no doubt be income inequality in any market based system but these kinds of gains are unprecedented.  Especially when you consider that banks are being bailed out for essentially causing the first financial crisis!  Where else can you implode the economy, get away with legalized bank robbery, and make away with generous bonuses?  This can only occur in a system where most of Congress is in the millionaire ranks and does the bidding for these interests.

People seem to be going broke and as long as the next shiny device is working, all is well.  Well not all is well on the income front as many families continue to slowly go broke.

We Must Remember 9/11 - Cold Open

   
COLD OPEN


It's the terrible anniversary again.

We are now as far away from 9/11 as we were, on 9/11, from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Think about that, for a moment, about how dissimilar the Americas from these three points of time are from one another. It's a chastening lesson in how much, and how fast, the world can change.

On the subject of being chastened, the teenagers entering high school as freshman this week were toddlers on 9/11, and so have no direct memories of the day. Two more anniversaries from now, we'll have high school freshmen who weren't even born on 9/11. And a couple anniversaries after that we'll have, for the first time, young voters with no first-hand recollection of the event that has defined America's experience in the post-Cold War era.

I don't know that 9/11 has any direct lessons for the problems of today. The lessons 9/11 offers—at least to my mind—are much more general. Events are inherently unpredictable. Actions have consequences. Inaction does, too. War, by its nature, places enormous stress on the political order, making the status quo vulnerable and offering the possibility of reshuffling—again, in unpredictable ways.

It was 9/11, for instance, which unmoored some important minds—such as Christopher Hitchens and Ron Rosenbaum— from their liberalism. But it was also 9/11 that revived the paleo-liberal movement, which then grew to sufficient strength that it powered the failed presidential campaign of Howard Dean and, continuing to surge, the successful candidacy of Barack Obama (whom even the New Republic recognized as being “Dean 2.0”).

The biggest lesson of 9/11, however, is the day's exhortation to be clear-eyed—about the world around us and about the nature of man. And on this score, I turn every year to three essays by Leon Wieseltier.

The first, Wieseltier wrote just days after the attacks. It was a perfectly controlled thunderclap:

Is it a little laughter that we need now? Then behold the contrition of yesterday's frivolous, the new fashion in gravity. The man who edits Vanity Fair has ruled that the age of cynicism is over. He would know. I always wondered what it would take to put a cramp in the trashy mind, and at last I have my answer: a mass grave in lower Manhattan. So now depth has buzz. The papers are filled with hip people seeing through hipness, composing elegiac farewells to the days of Gary Condit and Jennifer Lopez.… It has discovered evil and the problem of its meaning. No doubt about it, seriousness is in.

So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony. Everybody was shocked by the attack, but not everybody was philosophically unprepared for it. For a thoughtful life is not premised on an experience of catastrophe, except for the exceedingly thoughtless. There are states of happiness that are not states of stupidity. We should not have to choose between being imbeciles and being mourners.


The second came a year later, from a piece about a literary effort to grapple with September 11:

I have been reading collections of writings about September 11, and they are wearying: so many bruises so feebly expressed, so many people searching for a poem to protect them. Dickinson #341, perhaps? Literariness is a kind of sedative, I suppose, and in this way it differs from literature. There are circumstances, of course, in which unoriginality of feeling or form is not a shortcoming, in which the really advanced statement is the modest expression of a common sentiment, in which banality is a guarantee of decency. In a huge volume called September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, I encounter a letter by Richard Wilbur written a few months after the catastrophe to the book's editor, declining the invitation to art:

Dear Bill,
The only thing I can say right now is this. There is no excuse for the cold inhumanity of 11 September, and there is no excuse for those Americans, whether of the left or the religious right, who say that we had it coming to us.

Dick

The poet's disinclination to make a poem is affecting. It is the truest thing in the book. But elsewhere in this book, and in the other books, there is only banality in the bad sense, and remaindered habits of dissent, and the occasional hilarity, as in the observation by Avital Ronell that when George W. Bush remarked that we were tested on September 11, he "reverted to a citation of pretechnological syntagms that capture the auratic pull of the test." Surely the syntagms were his staff's.


The final Wieseltier essay, also from that first anniversary, was about the challenge September 11 would present to the American memory. It is as apt today as it was then:

A society that is notorious for its inability to remember is about to do nothing else. America eats the past, which is why people eaten by the past run to it; but even the American creed of newness will pause on September 11, and learn its limitations. The yahrzeit is here, and the least lachrymose country on earth is devising its rituals of commemoration. The interesting question is whether the memory will have life outside the media. September 11 will be a test of the American sense of reality, for it marks the anniversary of a day on which reality bested every representation of it.…

It was a measure of the horror that the media were too weak to interfere with our consciousness of it. In American existence, this counts as an epiphany. For the managers of meaning, the anchors and the reporters and the commentators, were themselves too shocked to set to work.

But later they set to work, and "September 11" was born. "September 11" was the deadening of September 11. It was deadened, like all images and ideas that are hallowed, by repetition, and also by sentiment, which is what our popular culture uses to drive away lasting significance.…

I know that Langewiesche knows this; but his articles are in their way complicit in the transformation of September 11 into "September 11," which was in large part a dissociation of the event's political and strategic aspects from the event's social and emotional aspects, so that what remained was a holy day and a homily about heroism.

This concentrated the American spirit, but it dispersed the American will. What we will be commemorating on September 11, after all, is the beginning of a war.

"They forget death, Basil," remarks the wife of the hero in the Howells novel, explaining why she does not wish to move to New York, "they forget death in New York." Her husband retorts with the metropolitan philosophy: "Well, I don't know that I've ever found much advantage in remembering it." These days they forget death less easily in New York; but in truth there can be a certain dignity in forgetting death. Life must not be a long mortification. The frontier between memory and morbidity must be vigilantly policed. But if death may be usefully forgotten, it may not be usefully misremembered. A shallow mourning is a hideous thing.


It is not enough that we remember September 11. We must remember it usefully.