Playing up 9/11 as a GOP victory

Fabulous Toxic Dust Watch

At the end of 2001, Dim Son issued a statement summing up his first year as president. He said, "it's been a fabulous year for Laura and me", and indeed he probably meant it. He had been sworn in as the 43rd President despite having lost the popular vote both in the country and in Florida. He had instituted massive tax cuts for his cronies. He had spent an entire month on "vacation" at the pig farm he bought in 1999. He had been given extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional powers as a result of the PATRIOT act, which most legislators signed without even having read all the way through it in the weeks following the terrorist attacks. He was praised as having "grown into his job" by the media, despite the fact that it was his administration's gross incompetence and negligence which allowed the attacks to happen. He had started a war to "git Al Qaeda" which also had the happy result of toppling the Taliban, allowing oil companies to use the US military to guard a new oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan, installing a former oil company executive to lead Afghanistan, and sending massive profits to his family's war-profiteering business. All in all, a banner year for our littlest dictator.

You may recall feeling differently at the end of 2001, horrified, terrorized, exhausted, and amazed at how quickly our country could be turned from peace and prosperity to an impoverished police state by such a seemingly small thing as who "won" the presidential election. You may remember the jarring disconnect between Bush's quote and how you felt about 2001.

It is coming up on the 2nd anniversary of 9/11, the seminal event which turned 2001 into such a "fabulous year" for Dumbya. You'd think that he would want to celebrate it. Certainly, the third anniversary of 9/11 will be much ballyhooed by the Republicans during their convention, pushed off to an unusually late date in order to game the federal elections finance system, extending the "primary" season as late as possible. But this year, Bush will "celebrate" 9/11 by staying in Washington, sending Cheney to ground zero instead.

Why the reluctance to play up this event, which has been used to justify every ill wind issuing forth from this administration? Maybe it's because the Bushies lied about the health dangers of the dust from the collapsed towers in NYC in an EPA report. It has recently come out that the administration leaned on the EPA to doctor the report so that people wouldn't panic, Wall Street would open as soon as possible, and they would appear to be in control. Unfortunately, 8 million people were also breathing in toxic dust all of that time. See Paul Krugman's Dust and Deception for a discussion on this, including:

What does all this have to do with toxic dust? Think how much harder it would have been to stiff New York if the public had understood the extent to which Lower Manhattan had become a hazardous waste site. I can't prove that was what administration officials were thinking, but otherwise their efforts to play down the risks seem incomprehensible.

New Yorkers are going to be pissed. Watch for massive protests when Dick "Snarl" Cheney shows up in NYC.