Today Is September 11, 2008. I Will Never Forget, Nor Will I Forgive.

While many people died in the atrocities in 2001, we tend to remember most the Twin Towers falling.

Many of us watched it happening in real time, even myself here in Melbournistan, Australia.

Seven years after the event, the enormity of it is something that never leaves; perhaps that really was the end of history as we know it, rather than the year 2000.

For someone with the gift of the gab, this is one that renders me nearly speechless, and so I will just leave you with a comment of the frollicking mole’s from Tim Blair’s old blog:

I saw people jumping and never considered it suicide. It was a choice between the auto-de-fe of the islamists or the quick death of their own making.
They made a CHOICE not to die by burning, I only hope they closed their eyes and thought back to when they were 5 and could fly….

In the interests of tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism, and for those who think that America (we) deserved 9/11:

I hope you fucking rot in hell.

God bless America and her martyrs.

(crossposted at RightWingDeathBogan)

UPDATE (Beef): Memories of that morning posted here.

Troofer!

What is it with people named “Jesse” and being stupid?

No3 in the mulgawatch saga.

The federal broadcaster still cant bring itself to moderate the mulga.

Surely they’d draw the line at a truther covering their slime with false sympathy for the brave men and women who were attempting rescues when the towers went down…wouldn’t they?

“The Patriotism Problem” By JOE KLEIN

But there was still something missing. I noticed it during Obama’s response to a young man who remembered how the country had come together after Sept. 11 and lamented “the dangerously low levels of patriotism and pride in our country, the loss of faith in our elected officials.” Obama used this, understandably, to go after George W. Bush. “Cynicism has become the hot stock,” he said, “the growth industry during the Bush Administration.” He talked about the Administration’s mendacity, its incompetence during Hurricane Katrina, its lack of transparency. But he never returned to the question of patriotism. He never said, “But hey, look, we’re Americans. This is the greatest country on earth. We’ll rise to the occasion.”

This is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right. When Ronald Reagan touted “Morning in America” in the 1980s, Dick Gephardt famously countered that it was near midnight “and getting darker all the time.” This is ironic and weirdly self-defeating, since the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature. Obama’s hopemongering is about as American as a message can get — although, in the end, it is mostly about our ability to transcend our imperfections rather than the effortless brilliance of our diversity, informality and freedom-propelled creativity.

Patriotism is, sadly, a crucial challenge for Obama now. His aides believe that the Wright controversy was more about anti-Americanism than it was about race. Michelle Obama’s unfortunate comment that the success of the campaign had made her proud of America “for the first time” in her adult life and the Senator’s own decision to stow his American-flag lapel pin — plus his Islamic-sounding name — have fed a scurrilous undercurrent of doubt about whether he is “American” enough.

Time/Real Clear Politics

2008: Year of the Moonbat?

South Australian Premier Mike Rann has called for David Hicks to apologize for his Taliban training and terrorist sympathies. In response, here are some words of wisdom from a commenter at abc.net

Hicks never trained with al-Qaeda, there was no al-Qaeda until 9/11.The term al-Qaeda was thought up by the CIA, who has subsequently admitted doing so. The falsehood was started in January 2001 by Jamal al Fadl, a Sudanese who had been with Bin Laden in the early 1990s. Jamal al Fadl stole money from Bin Laden, and then sought protection in the USA. The FBI and CIA paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars to create the al-Qaeda fiction. In fact, al Fadl invented the name al-Qaeda.Osama Bin Laden never used the term al-Qaeda until after 9/11, when he realized that al-Qaeda was the term the Americans had invented for him.

This is all about oil, a consortium represented by George W Bush’s father met with the Taliban to discuss the construction of a pipeline through Afghanistan to convey oil from Azerbaijan to a port in Pakistan, where it was to be tankered directly to the US. This consortium’s proposal was rejected by the Taliban, who gave the rights to the pipeline to Brazil. Thus the Taliban became the world’s enemy #1 according to the US.

If the Taliban had agreed to Bush snr’s proposal Hicks would have been a friend of the US, not an enemy. The invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq would never have happened, and life as we know it would not have changed in any way.