Finally, Someone Held Accountable for 9/11 So We Can Get Back to Protecting Health Insurance Companies from Competition
The nation can rest easier knowing that at long last, someone is being held to task for the myriad failures and incompetence that led to the attack against America on September 11, 2001.
Take that, Van Jones. Take that and put it in your Al Qaeda pipe.
Van Jones, a White House environmental staffer, quote-unquote resigned this past weekend after Republicans howled about a petition he signed in 2004 saying the Bush administration ‘may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.’
The first part of that statement about ‘deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen’ is bogus. But the sentiment behind the second part is 100 percent correct.It would be obscene to claim anything less than that Bush administration used the 9/11 attacks to get us into the Iraq failure. A re-read of Isikoff and Corn’s ‘Hubris’ is more-than reminder enough of how the government manipulated America using the corporate-neutered media as its accomplice.
While the Bush administration was unsuccessful in its overall objective to permanently secure the oil fields of Iraq for multi-national energy corporations in America, on its pissing away trillions of dollars to help military contactors like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and Republicans donors, let’s just say: ‘Mission Accomplished.’
To note: Jones, 40, would have been in his early 30s when the Bush administration spent months ignoring the warnings of terrorism expert Richard Clarke about the Al Qaeda threat. Jones, who was not a member of the intelligence community, would also not have seen the Presidential Daily Briefing from the summer of 2001 which told the Bush administration “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
No, he signed a petition in 2004. Three years after the attacks. And in doing so, he might as well have been the 20th hijacker.
For political context on how long ago this was: It was the year we found out about the horrors of Abu Ghraib, over a year before Tom DeLay was indicted, two years before we found out about Mark Foley preying on teenage interns, three years before Larry Craig’s toe-tappin’ and four years before Sarah Palin would be introduced to the world as the future of the Republican party.
But with the way DC Democrats seem so cowed, you could bet dollars to doughnuts Jones was going to be shown the door. He’s not a conservative Republican senator who has consistently criticized President Obama’s intentions on health care as “socialist,” so why would the Administration show him any love?
Jones is just a loyal staffer who devoted himself to progressive causes. A guy who chose to speak out in 2004, rather than accept Bush’s call that we engage in a two-handed, flag-waving national stroke-fest so his administration and its congressional lackeys could empty our pockets and sign death sentences for thousands of Generation X, Y and Millennial soldiers with its reptilian paws (see also: ‘Freedom Tug’).
So what’s changed? The Bush administration had and still has a culpability of negligence in ignoring the repeated warnings that a terrorist attack against the United States was imminent.
The corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration was legendary. Equally legendary was that unless you were indicted, you couldn’t get fired by the Bush administration. As long as you were a loyal “Bushie,” go nuts.
Make no mistake, it was done through the Bush administration’s willingness to exercise its authority and its power. A willingness to take its narrow (or non-existent) election victories and govern from a position of strength.
Now, with a much larger mandate and many more electoral allies in Congress than Bush ever had, the Obama administration is allowing to be sabotaged real health insurance reform that would permanently end the stranglehold that for-profit, for-suffering health insurance companies have inflicted on Americans for decades.
Unending news coverage has been given to the partisan-orchestrated Republican attacks against Democratic members of Congress. The negligence by the media has been in calling these disruptions at town hall events a movement, rather than the simple fact that angry Republicans frustrated by their party’s ousting from power are showing up to yell. Find one dim, screeching teabagger who voted for Obama and we can consider buying this malarkey about a ‘movement.’
It’s jaw-dropping that signing a petition in 2004 is the root of this false controversy over a young leader determined to help make this world a better place through harnessing the power of green technology. After the media ignored so many of the countless demonstrations, complaints at town halls, marches, protests and petitions against the Iraq war, it’s inconceivable they have made Jones’s 2004 signing of a petition and bitter Republicans going to Democratic town halls to be rude and race-bating to be the today’s dominate the news.
So progressives go into September seeing single payer out of the mix, health insurance companies and Republicans driving the agenda, and now, surprise, surprise, even the modest public option for health insurance reform is in serious doubt.
And at long last, the only accountability of 9/11 appears to be a guy just out of his 30s who had absolutely nothing to do with ignoring the warnings, nothing to do with using 9/11 to get us into Iraq and nothing to do with failing to get us out of Iraq.
Well, if you don’t count Bill Maher.