Today is the first day of the rest of America's life

Many people are writing rememberences of that tragic day right now, they are all important and all memories surrounding the attacks are unique impressions of a common event. Mine was probably shared by thousands of others, I was working third shift at the time and first heard about the towers at a friend's house. Then, of course, I had to try and get some sleep without knowing whether the world would be here when I woke up. That was difficult. When I went to work that night I passed a gas station, and what I saw there might wrap up the American experience ever since. The line was out into the street and the price had doubled...

Selfish, gullible people being preyed upon by unscrupulous business. That's about it. And America has pretty much gone downhill since.

And the "since" is the more significant part. Putting aside conspiracy theories for a second about what really happened that day, the history of the last decade is pretty bleak. I remember chatting with a friend at college not long after, somehow the topic of Al Gore came up. Long before the tea party belly-crawled onto the political scene my friend said "Gore would have surrendered to the terrorists and tried to understand their feelings." Umm, right. Glib, without a trace of evidence, that's just how wingnuts roll.

Now, what do we actually know about the events leading up to 9/11? Investigative journalist Greg Palast laid out a great deal of the scam in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Especially his section on Florida, katherine harris, jeb bush, and the criminal purge of voting rolls that went on but was not touched by most media. Now, after a dozen years of outrages, atrocities, and crimes against civilization, it is not considered such horrible to say in public that the election was stolen. Sure, the Democrats are hardly blameless in the coup, but the republicans showed their extreme contempt for democracy long before they started passing disenfranchisement laws two years ago. In hindsight, not fighting for democracy out of some sense of misplaced manners really looks silly, doesn't it?

The road to 9/11 was best laid out in (now Senator) Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Senator Al gives some credence to the tale of "misplaced priorities" in the bush administration on the screaming warnings from departing Clinton officials and members of the FBI, CIA, and others about al queda. After all, those taxes won't cut themselves. There were plans a plenty, such as vp cheney poring over a map of Iraq with his secret energy task force, i.e. oil company ceos, government agencies to wreck and staff with incompetents, and all sorts of rents to be handed out to cronies. This was before they actually invaded Iraq of course.

To be continued...

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/09/11/bush-white-house-ignored-bin-laden-warnings-because-they-wanted-iraq/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=2