Sunday, September 11, 2005

Steyn on Sept. 11 2005

Courtesy our good friend Mr. Lee, Mark Steyn's column today is about the failure of political America to take 9/11 seriously.
It wasn't a "tragic event" or even one of a series of unfortunate events. It was an "attack," an "act of war." I sat at the lunch counter with a guy who'd tuned out the same station on the grounds that "I never heard my grampa talk about 'the tragedy of Pearl Harbor.' " But, consciously or otherwise, a serious effort was under way to transform the nature of the event, to soften it into a touchy-feely, huggy-weepy one-off. As I wrote last year: "The president believes there's a war on. The Dems think 9/11 is like the 1998 ice storm or a Florida hurricane -- just one of those things."
Recent events reveal that political America doesn't take natural disasters seriously either.  Lack of a coherent plan got a bunch of people killed in New Orleans.  I note most particularly the hospital patients and nursing home residents who relied most upon the local government and died as a result of local stupidity.  There was no excuse for their abandonment, and a reconing will come.  That was a failure of both government and society, if anyone cared a damn they'd have got those people evacuated, by stealing buses if nothing else.

There was no excuse for the rampage of criminals in New Orleans either.  Unspeakable acts have been perpetrated.  A caller to the Rush Limbaugh Show said that one of the policemen who comitted suicide after the initial flood did so because he went home after a day of saving stranded people to find his whole family had been killed in a way I will not mention here.  These events and atrocities will come to light.  Again there is no excuse for such men to be free in our society, yet they were.  That is a failure of government and society both.

What government at all levels seems to take quite seriously is power, paperwork and process.  Four ships of the Canadian Armed Forces dispatched to aid coastal hurricane victims have yet to make it to the Gulf, two weeks late, because of lost telephone numbers and lack of political will among two nations.  Airline security doesn't include armed pilots in any Western country.  Levees are allowed to break and flood entire cities rather than be replaced with better designs.  In the midst of looting, rape and murder the City of New Orleans is presently confiscating firearms from NON-criminals and forcibly evicting people from their own property which they are protecting from...the looters.

Et Cetera.  Meanwhile, taxes have never been higher.

The solution to this problem remains elusive.  The majority opinion is that we need less government, however the minority who disagrees is both large and well funded, and furthermore are willing to say or do literally anything to have their way.

I fear the results my friends.  I really do.

The Phantom

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