Monday, September 11, 2006

Bush 9/11 speech: leading the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty


Even if you think that war is the appropriate response to 9/11, was it in good taste for Bush to make a broadcast on its anniversary entirely oriented towards war? But of course this was not a commemoration of 9/11, but of the start of The War Against Terror (TWAT).

Evidently it’s not a clash of civilizations, it’s a struggle for civilization. Which is us, I guess. Maybe that’s just a piece of rhetoric, but it sounds to me like a rejection of pluralism and a denial of Muslim civilization. Elsewhere in the speech he said that the response of people who tried to rescue the victims of the 9/11 attacks was “distinctly American.” Presumably anyone not an American would just start going through the victims’ pockets for loose change.


If the speech was ethnocentric, it was also Christian-centric, like that bit about how they brought America to its knees, but “united in prayer.” Uh, dude, you do know that some religions expressly forbid kneeling when praying?

Terrorists, he felt the need to say in various ways over and over, are bad. We “saw the face of evil,” they “kill without mercy,” blah blah blah. And they are still “determined to attack America”. Funny, where have I heard that phrase before? Let’s see: “bin Laden determined to attack...”


The people of the Middle East “have one question of us: Do we have the confidence to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers accomplished in Europe and Asia?” Um, incinerate their cities?


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