9/12: Or the further conservative exploitation of 9/11.

This post: some rant, some reason.

The lunacy continues.  Glenn Beck had his 9.12 Project, and now, the moron from South Carolina who interrupted President Obama's speech is jumping aboard this 9.12 thing.  I guess they're too stupid to know that it's college football season, and many of their followers are going to be attending or watching football games.  Believe me, I'm not knocking college football: I love it, but there are a whole load of Southern white 9.12ers who love them some college football.  Which will make me love it a little more tomorrow.  And I hope we absolutely bury South Carolina.  The state deserves some misery for electing the aforementioned moron.

What I really wanted to talk about, though, was 9/11.  That was an absolutely horrible event.  If you want to know the really terrible events in America, simply ask the question:  "do you remember where you where when you heard..."  and if you get an instant answer from everyone, it was one of the really horrible moments.  John Kennedy's assassination.  When the Challenger blew up.  The Oklahoma City bombing.  And 9/11.

I still remember the feeling I had when it happened.  I'm not going to disclose specific circumstances because I'd rather keep a little anonymity, but it felt like I'd suddenly grown a hard ball of nausea in my stomach.  We'd been attacked in an awful fashion.  Why us? Why the towers?  One of my friends has the reflex to stock up on lots of bottled water in the event of catastrophe, so I took her and a couple of other people to Sam's Club.  We watched both towers come down on multiple large screen TVs.  It was awful.

There are some other things I remember.  Some might be faulty; memory isn't exact.  I'm pretty sure either George Bush or Dick Cheney came out not long after 9/11 and talked about how it shouldn't be politicized.  The first thing I thought, was "someone screwed up." That's usually when politicians start talking about not politicizing things.  But that's not all; Republican politicians talk the loudest about not politicizing things when they intend to politicize them.

Some background on my response to 9/11 here.  My first response was this:  George W. Bush gets a clean slate.  I felt like he'd been appointed rather than elected.  I still do.  If you're scoffing at this, then screw you.  At least I'm not falling for fake birth certificates.  That said, I decided that after 9/11, he should get a fresh start.  American history is rife with examples of ordinary or even subpar people rising to greatness in response to crisis, so I thought I would give President Bush the chance to be great.

I thought the response got completely bungled.  I wanted to throw the TV across the room when I saw Orrin Hatch make the first announcement that it was al-Qaeda who did it.  I did scream at the TV.  "You STUPID (several unprintable words)!  You've just given them warning!"  Any cop will tell you that it's a bad idea to call criminals and tell them you know they're responsible before going after them.  And make no mistake:  Hatch wouldn't have said one peep without permission by the Bush administration.  What most of you probably have forgotten is that Osama bin Ladin initially denied responsibility for 9/11.  I think the clever thing would have been to keep saying publicly that we had no idea and parked a missle up bin Ladin's backside and carpet bombed al-Qaeda training camps when they thought they had gotten away with it.  Then say we got them.  Instead, bin Ladin got warning and he's still at large.

What was much worse was when Republican politicians started mentioning 9/11 and Iraq in the same sentences. As the case for war ramped up, and the presidential elections started to get into gear, we started to hear about 9/11 24/7.  Who do you trust to keep you safe?  There are wolves in the forest.  And so forth and so on.  Every single national Republican politician used 9/11 to try to get re-elected.  There were terror alerts.  Coincidentally (you should hear sarcasm in this word), there was a terror alert just before Election Day.  Any time there was a disagreement with the President or any Republican policy, 9/11 was invoked.  And they're still doing it.  Glenn Beck has his "9.12 Project."  He says he wants us to get back to that feeling we had on 9/12/2001.  Really?  What feeling, Glenn?  Do you mean so mad that we felt like our heads would explode? Or so sad that we went to stores in tears and bought candles and made homemade monuments on the sidewalks? Or so stunned we couldn't think or care about anything? Or crapping our collective pants in terror? Or all of those in the same day? Yeah, I know I want that feeling back.

As a side note: isn't it ironic how New Yorkers were real Americans on 9/11, but a couple of election cycles later, Sarah Palin could get mad applause from her audiences by saying they weren't? Isn't it ironic how the same people who hold up all those signs about hating government probably have a FDNY t-shirt or cap at home?

As another side note:  I should be fair.  I don't think your average Republican exploits 9/11.  Not at all.  I think your average Republican voter honors and mourns the 9/11 victims, and I think those feelings get taken advantage of by the people they vote for and listen to. 

But back to the blog, and I've only got a little more to say. It's been 8 years since 9/11.  8 years since 19 terrorists drove four planes into buildings or into the ground and killed 2,974 people.  Today is an important day for us to remember.  But there's another day that I want to point out:  Monday, November 2, 2009.  What's special about that day?  Well, it's really tragic instead of special.  On that day, it will have been 8 years, one month, and 22 days since 9/11/2001.  In other words, 2,974 days.  And on that date, unless something suddenly changes, Republican and conservative politicians, pundits, and radio hosts will have been exploiting 9/11 for one day for each victim of 9/11.