Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Oh Outrage Fatigue...

The September 11 attacks (often referred to as September 11th or 9/11) were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States on September 11, 2001. On that morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania, after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward Washington, D.C. There were no survivors from any of the flights.

2,976 victims and the 19 hijackers died in the attacks. The overwhelming majority of casualties were civilians, including nationals of over 90 countries. In addition, the death of at least one person from lung disease was ruled by a medical examiner to be a result of exposure to dust from the World Trade Center's collapse.


That's the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia entry for the September 11 terrorist attacks. Just wanted to be clear.

And if you're reading this, you probably know all that. In fact, I would be willing to bet you could give all sorts of more information and details and would think it were laughable if someone didn't know about these attacks.

But that would put you far ahead of Bush Jr.'s former press secretary Dana Perino, who just recently claimed there were no terrorist attacks during Bush's presidency. Go ahead: click on the link and watch her say it.

Let me repeat that to be clear: Mz. Perino apparently does not count the attacks of September 11, 2001 (well over 9 months into Bush's first term) as terrorist attacks. Apparently they were friendly misunderstandings.

Of course, Dana Perino makes her living lying out of her ass. And once again, maybe this was just a really, really stupid mistake.

But I highly doubt it. This is just another example of how the right-wing attempts to re-write history to make it fit their pre-conceived notions. Because of course her completely-wrong assertion about never suffering a terrorist attack under Bush wasn't just a mistake, it was to illustrate how strong a defender of the homeland Bush is, as opposed to that queer-o-sexual, Muslim terrorist currently in the White House.

And, of course, it doesn't matter that Bush was warned months in advance of the worst terrorist attack on our nation in the past 60 years, and then did nothing to prevent it. And then took actions to make matters worse and another attack far more likely.

No, like Reagan, Nixon, and all the other fuck-ups ahead of him, he must've been a brilliant and noble man, so surely something as inconsequential as the fucking objective truth shouldn't inconvenience your narrative at all...

1 comment:

revdj said...

You forgot the second one - the anthrax attack that was used to justify the Iraq war. That's okay. You're young.