CE - Volume 1, pp 1-43

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

Whether Fox is right-wing or not isn't even the pertinent issue in terms of the low regard international news agencies have for it. Rather, it's its uncritical role as cheerleader for the American establishment, and the deference it shows to the ruling bodies that marks it out for special contempt.

It claims to be a serious news agency, yet it unashamedly takes up the pom-poms and cheers the USA on at the expense of actual serious news reporting.

For me, this also leads me on to perhaps the most interesting thing about the fun propaganda piece that is F9/11. Forget the film's conspiratorial bent, its logical flaws, and its humourous and sarcastic lampooning of Dubya and colleagues. That's a fun piece of leftist electioneering, and shouldn't really cause offence. The most frightening thing about Moore's movie is the way it exposes the complicit role of the American mainstream media (not just Fox, by the way) in sanitising its war reporting and propping up deference to establishment thinking. If Moore can access 'embedded' images of the type he did, how come such footage didn't hit the networks? Because the mainstream media just towed the line, presumably either out of cowardice, out of some misguided notion of what patriotism means, or to appease the political wishes of their paymasters in the corporate world. You tell me.

But Moore's real value doesn't lie in his political messages or his humour value, but in this unspoken attack on the culture of American media in general.

[strat-0]

I think that's a fair enough assessment of Fox News, Jllm, though perhaps unfair to the rest of the US media. I agree that we're seeing an unhealthy blending of editorialism with news reporting these days in general, and one who wants to obtain a "fair and balanced" view is obliged to check many different sources, even those that may leave a bad taste in their mouth. Otherwise, you are just re-inforcing your already-held viewpoint with more material to parrot; or worse, letting them tell you what to think.

As for the media "towing the line," I can see how some might get that impression, and it is true in some cases. But the media has always made an effort to bolster cohesiveness in matters of national security when there is a severe threat (Viet Nam notwithstanding - not going to go into that complexity right now). I agree with the Republicans here who approve of Bush's handling of things after 9/11 and going into Afghanistan and who have more or less said that someone else would have possibly handled it similarly and would have also made mistakes. The picture only gets blurry when it comes to Iraq. RocDoc says, "He chose to shake the world of radical Islam, while hoping that the REST of the world would join in that condemnation. Instead there's fucking appeasement." I think there is still a tendency to erroneously wrap up Iraq in the effort to fight militant Islamists who would love to kill us all.

But returning to the media bias question, you have to go back to 9/11 to understand some of this. It may be hard for people of other countries to fathom just how hard it hit most Americans -- rank-and-file on up, left and right, and how much it affected us. I know it did me, on a very intense personal level. I don't think there has ever been anything quite like it. People were nice to strangers or their worst enemies. Drive around an American city or town and you will still see an abundance of "United We Stand" window and bumper stickers, put there by Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and others. The media reflects that feeling. Only when Iraq started to unravel did people start to increasingly get off the bus, media included. Personally, I was against ever going in there from the start. Still, I hope for the best possible outcome, of course, as do many others who may share my feelings. I think it is very unfortunate that Iraq has caused confusion and diluted our resolve, cohesiveness, and resources in stamping out the genuine threats.

As for Moore, he's still a worm.

[shin]

So am I correct in thinking that your point, Doc, was basically "Bush and his administration have royally fucked up, yes, but they MEANT well, while Kerry DOESN'T mean well because he's running on a campaign to bring attention to the fuckups, and even though no one can really guess how well Kerry will or won't do should he be elected, I'd rather vote for based on intent instead of results"?

Is that fair? Because that's what I read.

[Proud]

i see no reason to believe kerry doesn't have good intent.

i don't see why it should matter to anyone what bush's intent is. he's a fuckup. i think he's the worst president in approximately the last half a century, and i fear him being re-elected. i don't know what i'll do if he is.

edit: hitler, in his mind (and we hope in his mind only), had good intent.

[RocDoc]

-- and anyone else who feels Bush is doing a "great job" fighting the terrorists, my own personal reasoning behind why I think that is simply not the case:

I think very FEW would say 'great JOB!' to what has happened so far. It's a horrific and complicated mess into which Bush and his cabinet have done what they believed to be the 'best'
given what was happening,
given what they THOUGHT the intel was TELLING THEM was happening,
given the PERCEIVED danger to America they felt,
given the resources they had to work what most would say will be an absolute miracle IF it works just ½-WAY toward what the US and the UK had hoped to accomplish in terms of a wake-up call, giving 'notice' as it were, to those who'd consider harboring West-hating terrorists or supplying them...

...AND I'd say that you're insane to think that the Kerry ticket, which is riding ONLY on a campaign to discredit, would be somehow giving you the utmost confidence that they will not only improve the situation IF given the chance....but ALSO to think that they would have 100% done a STELLAR job given the circumstances which were presented to GWB & Co, starting with 9 / 11...

NO-ONE can predict an "if 'A', then 'B'" sort of future in the mess which Iraq was, is and will be for the forseeable future as Al Q'aeda stirs THAT cauldron...

Kerry would as be at the SAME near complete loss for what to do at striving for these 'perfect' resolutions which you mercilessly think ANY politico like GWB should have been able to do even in his sleep, given the shifting world order which 9 / 11 signalled.

Ooooh, that's a tough sentence for youse guys...I meeean to say that as complex as what would have been presented to a Kerry-like liberal at 9 / 11, he would have had just as great a likelihood of handling things as IMperfectly as Dubya has.

And fuck yeah, he's been IMperfect...but understandably imperfect....when there's no true 'solution', you improvise.
He chose to shake the world of radical Islam, while hoping that the REST of the world would join in that condemnation. Instead there's fucking appeasement.
Lovely.

Then Shin, interpreting broadly...REAL broadly:

...I'd rather vote for based on intent instead of results.

Nope. More that I definitely WILL vote for a group that was given THE most difficult job, at an absolutely critcal juncture in U.S. history and NOT tar them mercilessly with, 'Well FUCK! They should have handled it THIS way, which would have been PERFECT!'...because NO-one in fucking hell can possibly give me ANY sort of confidence in what THEIR self-same oh-so-confident version of what 'perfect'under these circumstances would be.
Ie YOUR 'vision'.
OR that, given the intel which GWB's administrators(AND Tony Blair's gov't, for that matter), that someone like Kerry wouldn't have chosen to follow a near identical path...well, IF they loved their country and felt a responsibility to the safety of its citizens.
THAT, whether they're some self-serving politician from the opposition party or some lily-livered 18 year old whose getting-high buds have signed onto the armed forces while their only concern was to get their tuition 'taken care of', while at the time the world situation was bit more peaceable. That genie IS out of that bottle and as Chrisfan has said more than once there's a reason why that 'Free Tuition and Traing Organization' is ALSO called the Armed Forces...

[shin]

Was that an attempt to tell me I'm wrong? Because you just told me that I'm 100% correct in my interpretation.

FYI. You talk about what Kerry would have done, and you know, since we're just guestimating...Kerry probably would have listened to Richard Clarke and done something once he got the August 6th PDB. Might have increased security at airports for a 3 month period starting in August and not allowed anyone to, say, sneak box cutters on board, since we knew based on the PDB that the method of attack was apparently hijackings (though the PDB does not specify a 9/11 style attack, a hijacked jet is still the first line of attack...though other chatter suggested such).

But really, no one knows that, since we're guessing and supposing. But given how important Clarke was to the Clinton administration, methinks Kerry (as opposed to Gore, since this is AlternateWorld) probably would have listened.

He also probably would have focused on increasing human intelligence overseas, providing adequate budget support for securing ports and power plants, finished the job in Afghanistan with adequate troops, asked the rich to show their love of country and pay a few extra taxes in this time of great need (eek!) to help pay for everything, and made a serious, serious attempt to bring peace to the Middle East, however unlikely, in an attempt to break down radical Islam's main tug within the hearts of moderate Arabs. You know, instead of doing the whole Iraq thing. Or focusing on gay marriage so much.

But if he had done the Iraq thing, even though the main push for war intelligence wise was done through the neo-conservative/ideologically-driven/Feith-operated Office of Special Plans "intelligence reassessment" agency that was created specifically by the Bush administration to push for the pro-war intelligence, and therefore wouldn't have existed in a Kerry Presidency...well, perhaps he might have planned better, perhaps listened to the Powell doctrine instead of the Shock and Awe approach, doing it on the cheap. Perhaps he would have gotten France Germany and Russia on board (you know, since Kerry's a French-speaking Communist) and this war would have greater legitimacy, and therefore not lend itself to being (one of) the biggest obstacle in getting moderate Arabs on our side.

Among other things toward various other issues. But then again, this is AlternateWorld.

Ya see, "you tried your best" sounds great in little league, it doesn't quite cut it when it comes to actually running this country. I think Jimmy Carter tried his best, didn't really matter in the end for him, did it. If America was a company and Bush was CEO, shareholders would be shouting for his dismissal. This isn't unnecessary tarring, this is asking that for once, just for once, the buck actually stops where it's supposed to, that instead of apologizing and excusing them for what they meant, please, try focusing on what they've done. Because horse shoes and hand grenades this ain't.

But the point, of course, where this really hinges on, and hence my original question, is whether or not you're correct in your statement that "He chose to shake the world of radical Islam, while hoping that the REST of the world would join in that condemnation. Instead there's fucking appeasement."

I'm sorry, man, but disagreement with the way someone "shakes the world of radical Islam" doesn't equal appeasement. Shake the world of radical Islam? All we've done is prove to them that they're right in how they view us. Are they right about us? No. At least not the worst parts of it. But it doesn't matter. If the intent is to change their minds about how to deal with us, to win their "hearts and minds", well guess what, Al Queda recruitment is up, not down, so it seems we've just added gasoline to the fire. Wonderful, huh.

Bush doesn't know how to put out the fire. Better hire someone who can. Perhaps that's Kerry. We won't know unless we find out, will we?




(hope that worked. last panel drives my point home kinda nicely.)

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

Nothing to add to what shin just said. He's just won the battle for hearts and minds in Coventry.

strat-o, I take your point about 9/11. It's easy for Europeans to forget that the US was not equipped through prior experience to psychologically buttress itself against the impact of a major terrorist event within its own borders.

[strat-0]

Yeah, and it was a pretty large hit...

[kats]

JesusLooksLikeMe said:

kat - Yeah, Fox News is regarded as a joke over here too. The British media and tv stations were very scathing of Fox during Iraq.

Yet over here Murdoch's empire is more balanced in his serious papers, though still pretty conservative (and always anti-European Union). His papers actually backed Blair in 97 and '01, which I think proves he just gives the public what they already want, and tries to back a winner.

That's true. They're more about what the public wants, safely going with the majority, that type of thing. Though the Murdoch papers have pounced upon lead singer of Midnight Oil Peter Garrett, becoming a labour minister. I am outrageously happy with having a charismatic potential government! Howard might be dumped after America's security something or other and Bush commented on Australia domestic policy. People over here are really pissed off.

But the more 'intellectual' papers tend to be more reasoned than the ones for the masses. We aren't quite so tabloidy (a new word) over here. Good entertainment pullouts. This week, an interview with Woodly Allen, critiques of poetry, and bagging the shit out of Avril. What more could you possibly want from a paper?

Over here, to an extent, the aussie media has been very critical of all American media outlets in war coverage. It's kinda odd studying it. OUr media is much more like yours than America's.

CNN is a bit of a joke over here as well. Aussie media is very snobby though. Holier than thou and all that junk.


Chrisfan, I couldn't comparatively say how "more" balanced Fox news is, because I really have nooo idea. The only exposure I've had to american mainstream media outlets is some cnn on cable, those awful morning shows, and tapes that our lecturers have from trips to America. And newspapers from the net. But I ony really access those if I'm using them to illustrate a point in an essay or something.

Basically, the difference between the american media and ours would be this;

If Fox news tried to employ the tactics it uses over here, it would probably not even be aired. There would that much uproar...and not because of 'shaking the american pom poms', but even if it was shaking aussie pom poms, the structure and blatant editorialism would never hold here.
Not unless the media undertook gradual and long term changes. But our media is generally pretty right wing. Most journos over here are left wing, and a lot who aren't, put on a persona to score ratings. The sad truth is that people fall for it.

Our news is just news. Not one particular opinion stated. It's very, very objective. Not completely impartial, but I don't think that anyone in the media can be truly impartial. It's the conscious decision to air certain things to FAVOUR a political ideology that makes a media outlet BIASED.

[kats]

"I agree that we're seeing an unhealthy blending of editorialism with news reporting these days "

Trust me, strat...as someone who just finished doing 'old school' journalism subjects it could almost make my brain explode. I go nuts when a newspaper doesn't follow the classic inverted pyramid structure.

Quite possibly the best and worse part of studying media is becoming so damn critical of everything you see that it starts to drive you nuts. This morning, i pulled out a red pen and corrected structural problems in the dodgy 'pleb' newspaper. That's weird.

[Proud]

*squints eyes*

hi, i'm joe scarborough, and today we'll discuss your favorite liberal recipes. stir fried liberal? mashed liberal? or just well-done? hey, we all know we like that last one. welcome to scarborough country.

note: msnbc is the evil liberal station. i will not rest until we make abortion legal and there's prayer in school.

[Dr. Drum]

Enjoyed that last post of yours too, shin.

stratman19 said:

Do I believe that Reagan ended the Cold War? Of course not. Do I believe that Reagan greatly hastened the end of the Cold War? Absolutely I believe that. I believe that by forcing the Soviets to spend so much in an attempt to keep up, that Reagan did expedite the end much more quickly. Reagan also took the very public stance that he would not back down from the Soviet threat.

So we’re agreed then, stratman, that Reagan’s policies didn’t end the Cold War but just to follow up on this, his policies didn’t hasten its end either, in fact, to some degree he may have prolonged it. Reagan’s stance toward the Soviet Union in the early years of his presidency and the resultant increase in tensions between the superpowers led to a situation that came perilously close to nuclear war in November 1983. The Soviets actually believed that a NATO exercise called "Able Archer" was the cover for a nuclear first strike:

edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/22/spotlight/

It’s to Reagan’s credit, and to Mikhail Gorbachev’s, when he became General Secretary of the CPSU in March 1985, that having come so close, they realized there was a need to pull back from confrontation and build mutual trust. Gorbachev had already decided to essentially opt out of the Cold War with a course of domestic and foreign policy reform by the time he assumed the leadership, a decision based upon an analysis of the deep structural problems of the Soviet system. As I said on Friday, these problems were the result of the high percentage of economic output that the Soviets began to devote to the military in the late 60s/early 70s coupled with the disastrous policy of central planning.

The Soviets did not attempt to match Reagan’s increases in defence spending – their level of spending was based on internal imperatives and in fact remained constant as a percentage of their overall economy throughout both Reagan’s terms of office. Gorbachev’s problem in attempting to wind down the Cold War confrontation with America, however, was that anti-reformists within the Soviet hierachy could point to the American military build-up and the belligerent stance of Reagan's first term as reasons not to enact reforms.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/reagrus.htm

stratman19 said:

Drum is also right about the American economy. Under Reagan, it was the greatest economic expansion in the history of the United States up to that time.

Just a small point here, as Paul Krugman pointed out in the article I linked to on Friday, the 1961 – 1969 economic expansion was actually the greatest expansion in U.S. history up till the Clinton years. The expansion under Reagan was third. I don’t think the facts really bear this out, however, if we were to paint the Kennedy/Johnson and Clinton adminstrations as "tax and spend" vs. the Reagan administration as a tax-cutters, so much for the argument that you can’t tax your way to prosperity.

[RocDoc]

Oh, Coventry's been taken?

Was that an attempt to tell me I'm wrong? Because you just told me that I'm 100% correct in my interpretation.

Aaah, so your ESL classes are going so well...
Haven't gotten to 'nuance' yet tho....pity.
Someday, eh?

'Meaning well' is not equivalent to being FORCED to work within heretofore unexplored volatile methods of Islamist political 'dialogue'...ie catastrophic terror.

'The buck stops here' regarding this IS truly bullshit...honestly, wher the fuck IS the 'buck' here? These situations' complexities cloud where that 'buck' lies, IMO.

Oh. And your best-case-scenarios re what the yoda-like Kerry would have done with that ass Richard Clarke's advice...in your fit of convenient 20-20 hindsight omniscience, well, those would work for(**loaded presumption alert***DANGERdangerrrr)someone like you because you've inculcated yourself totally into a mindset of Bush being the boss and ringleader of a group of completely avaricious and amoral men looking to fill their own coffers while paying for those riches with the blood of Americans.
Oh. And that belief that France, Russia and Germany(the ones we should have waited on)had no extra-mural interests in keeping the U.S.'s greedy mitts off of that self-same Iraq which THEY had financial interests tied up in, AND while at least 2 of them work toward the EU becoming the virtual 'equal' of the US of A...even IF it means that to get there, they just might choose to simply knock US down.
While Madrid gets bombed....

If your Kerry The Messiah AlternaWorld comforts you for the vote you'll presumably waste in November, fine.

JAC posted bits of a National Review article by A guy named Victor Davis Hanson with the paragraph:

The oil pipeline in Afghanistan that we allegedly went to war over doesn't exist. Brave Americans died to rout al Qaeda, end the fascist Taliban, and free Afghanistan for a good and legitimate man like a Hamid Karzai to oversee elections. It was politically unwise and idealistic — not smart and cynical — for Mr. Bush to gamble his presidency on getting rid of fascists in Iraq. There really was a tie between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — just as Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton once believed and Mr. Putin and Mr. Allawi now remind us. The United States really did plan to put Iraqi oil under Iraqi democratic supervision for the first time in the country's history. And it did.

...of course you'll now say, 'I never said this was cynically calculated by Bush'.....tho even if you place that denial here, Michael Moore HAS said just that and countless 'War-For-Oil'-chanting idiots have as well....

Good op-ed piece too...thanks JAC.
( www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200407090835.asp )

~

Here's another:


Bush's State of the Union speech redeemed


July 11, 2004

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Do you remember a year ago when the Democratic National Committee was putting out press releases headlined ''President Bush Deceives The American People"?

Yawn. What's new? But last summer the Bush Lie Of The Week was all to do with Saddam trying to buy uranium from Niger. CNN and Co. replayed endlessly the critical 16 words from the president's 2003 State of the Union Address:

''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Sixteen words that could break a presidency! Bush ''misled every one of us,'' huffed Sen. John Kerry. ''It's beginning to sound like Watergate,'' said Howard Dean. Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man the CIA sent to Africa to investigate, wrote a piece for the New York Times titled ''What I didn't find in Africa.''

Can you guess what he didn't find, dear reader? That's right, he didn't find a big package of uranium bearing the address label ''S. Hussein, Suite 27, the Saddam Hussein Centre for Armageddon Studies, Saddam Hussein Parkway, Baghdad.'' Ambassador Wilson said relax, he'd been to Niger, spent "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people,'' and there's nothing going on.

Well, on Wednesday in London, Lord Butler will publish his report into the quality of the intelligence on which rested Britain's case for going to war with Iraq. The report is said to be critical of some of Tony Blair's claims, supportive of others. And, among the latter, he says that the statements about Iraq and Niger are justified and supported by the intelligence. In other words, the British Government did learn that Saddam Hussein did seek significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

As a gazillion e-mails a day shrieked from my in-box back then, ''BUSH LIED!!!!!!" So where exactly in that State of the Union observation is the lie?

Last summer, the comparatively minor matter of uranium from Niger was all over the front pages and the news shows. Do you think Butler's report will be? Do you think Terry McAuliffe and John Kerry and Howard Dean will be eating humble yellowcake?

In July last year, I wrote about the Bush Lie Of The Week in this space. The CIA had disowned the Niger story, and I pointed out that these were the same fellows who'd botched the Sudanese aspirin factory business, failed to spot 9/11 coming, etc., etc.

"So," I wrote, "if you're the president and the same intelligence bureaucrats who got all the above wrong say the Brits are way off the mark, there's nothing going on with Saddam and Africa, what do you do? Do you say, 'Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day'? Or, given what you've learnt about the state of your humint (human intelligence), is it likely they've got much of a clue about what's going on in French Africa? Isn't this one of those deals where the Brits and the shifty French (Niger's uranium operations are under the supervision of the French Atomic Energy Commission) are more plugged in?"

And so it's proved. The fact is almost every European intelligence service reckoned Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa. The only folks who didn't think so were the CIA.

Let's weigh their comparative interest in the story. The Financial Times revealed last week that one continental intelligence agency had had a uranium-smuggling operation involving Iraq under surveillance for three years. In return, the only primary investigation initiated by the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth was to send a narcissistic kook from a Saudi-funded think-tank on vacation for a week to sip mint tea with government stooges. He didn't even bother filing a written report, and the ''Bush spurned my advice!'' column he wrote for the Times reads like a bad travelogue: ''Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger river.'' After that, the great narcissist somehow managed to make himself the center of the story -- But hey, enough about Saddam's nuclear ambitions; let's talk about me.

A few weeks before 9/11, Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a timely piece in the Atlantic Monthly on the woeful state of U.S. counter-terrorism intelligence in a CIA neutered by politically correct bureaucracy. Among Gerecht's many memorable quotes was this line from a young CIA man reflecting on an agency grown used to desk-bound life in Virginia: ''Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen.'' That's Niger in a nutshell: Diarrhea Central. Who'd want to be stationed there when they could be back at Langley monitoring the world's e-mail in an air-conditioned office?

But Niger is a 99.5 percent Sunni Muslim country with the world's second highest birth rate and a load of uranium. It's exactly the sort of place an intelligence agency in the war on terror ought to be keeping an eye on. And that doesn't mean sending Mint Tea Boy to write it up for the travel section.

That's the issue here: The CIA are tourists in the heart of darkness. This spring, the ever-complacent George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that it would take another half-decade to rebuild the clandestine service. So three years after 9/11 the CIA says it needs another five years. Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had turned to Tenet to start up the OSS, the CIA's wartime predecessor. In 1942, he'd have told the president not to worry, he'd have it up and running by 1950.

Bush didn't LIE!!!! He was right, and the CIA were wrong. That doesn't mean they LIED!!!! either. Intelligence is never 100 percent. You make a judgment, and in this instance the judgments of the British and Europeans were right, and the judgment of the principal intelligence agency of the world's hyperpower was wrong. That should be a cause of great concern -- for all Americans.

National security shouldn't be a Republican/Democrat thing. But it's become one because, for too many Americans, when it's a choice between Bush and anybody else, they'll take anybody else. So, in ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' if it's a choice between Bush and Saddam, Michael Moore comes down on the side of the genocidal whacko and shows us lyrical slo-mo shots of kiddies flying kites in a Baathist utopia. In the Afghan war, if it's a choice between Bush and the women-enslaving gay-executing Taliban, Susan Sarandon and Co. side with the Taliban. And in the most exquisite reductio of this now universal rule, if it's a choice between Bush and the CIA, the left sides with the CIA.

There's one for the peace marches: Hey, hey, CIA/How many Bush lies did you expose today?

This isn't an anti-war movement. This is a movement in denial.

[Mjlookalike]

Is it safe?

[Mary]

Just out of curiosity, rocdoc, is there anything the Bush Administratin could do that you would consider a real mistake? I mean, is your position that the situation is just sooo "novel" and "complex" and "heretofore unexplored" that we can't genuinely be critical of a single thing the Bush Administration does provided they genuinely believe they're doing it to protect America?

Can you give me an example of a single thing you would take Bush to task for? Not even necessarily something he's done, but something he might do. Because, honestly, from where I sit, it just seems like you won't brook any criticism whatsoever of the administration.

And are you saying that every American who votes for someone besides Bush in November is "wasting" their vote? Interesting concept of democracy there.

And another thing... all these claims that 9/11 has introduced us to an entirely new, utterly unprecedented kind of threat which has drastically changed the entire world and requires that we scrap many old ways of dealing with international relations and give our leaders a wide leeway to experiment with new, more aggressive and hostile strategies—how quickly we forget. This country lived under the shadow of nuclear obliteration for decades following WWII. We lived through the endless games of brinksmanship which many believed had us teetering on the brink of unimaginable catastrophe. This is hardly the first time in American history that we've faced and struggled with the possibility of an attack that would demolish much of our infrastructure and tragically destroy the lives of tens of thousands of citizens.

9/11 was horrific and tragic. But all this rhetoric about how everything is different after 9/11 seems to me to be awfully hyped-up and hyperbolic, and dangerously uncritical.

M