STELLA PAUL: OBAMA AND OUR 9/11 TRAUMA
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Where did the idea of Obama come from? Let’s examine an obvious, yet overlooked source: the rubble of the Twin Towers. 9/11 was the most traumatic day in American history, and its horrors left deep gashes in our national soul. We stumbled around in pain and confusion for years, groping for a magical salve to heal our wounds — and there, suddenly, was Barack Hussein Obama.
As we turn our gaze from our current Obama-induced agonies to remember the terror attacks ten years ago, let’s do ourselves the favor of honesty and admit how tightly the two are connected.
On that fatal Tuesday, as the World Trade Center and Pentagon lay in ruins, President George Bush spoke to the American people, with simple words that pierced the heart of our new situation: “Freedom itself was attacked this morning… And freedom will be defended.”
But as it turned out, millions of Americans were not ready to defend freedom. Despite the “United We Stand” posters plastered everywhere, Americans almost immediately divided into two irreconcilable camps: those willing to understand the nature of our enemy and those who wanted to deny it, at all cost.
Within days of the attacks, a friend coolly informed me, “the people in the Twin Towers deserved it.” Still reeling from that shock, I almost lost it when another friend admiringly compared bin Laden to George Washington. Soon thereafter, a well-known academic in my circle complained that the sudden outpouring of patriotism made her sick.
This utter madness, which I thought would be confined to the fringe, rapidly spread to every corner of elite society. The more we learned about the savagery of the Islamist world, the more our moral and cultural superiors turned their wrath on us, instead of the enemy.
As headlines blared the almost surrealistic brutality of Al Qaeda, Senator Patty Murray told a group of high school honor students that Osama bin Laden was popular in poor countries because he paid for day care centers. “We haven’t done that,” Murray said. “How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?”
While patriotic Americans were learning that Saddam Hussein used poison gas on his own people and gave his psychotic sons “rape rooms,” American college students were learning enemy propaganda. On the eve of the Iraq war, Professor Nicholas de Genova of Columbia University convened an anti-war teach-in and proclaimed to the students, “The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus.” Despite his public yearning for the mutilation of the American soldiers who’d volunteered to defend his worthless derriere, de Genova went on to a distinguished career at Columbia and the University of Chicago.
And so it went: The more evil the enemy committed, the more hysterical grew the attacks on us by our own elites. Wall Street reporter Daniel Pearl was beheaded by Al Qaeda operatives, who filmed the procedure and proudly put it online. Al Qaeda agent Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane headed to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoe. Jihadis in Spain blew up the morning commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people.
Meanwhile, Majority Leader Tom Daschle brought every Democratic Senator to the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s viciously dishonest smear job of America and its president, and led the standing ovation. The Democrats then honored Moore with a seat next to Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention, serenely untroubled by Moore’s gushing comparison of Saddam’s armies to America’s Minutemen.
The yellow brick road to Obama was paved with febrile insanity, a self-induced blindness that staunchly refused to see the massacres unfolding before our eyes. In 2005, the same year that homegrown Islamic terrorists blew up London’s busses and subways, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry went on Sunday morning television and said, “And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women.”
A little-known incident in New York crystallized for me the obnoxious lunacy of our times. To the world, New York symbolizes the Ground Zero of pain, sacrifice and loss. Yet, New York almost immediately succumbed to self-hating delirium, desperate for vengeance against its greatest enemy: America’s Commander-in-Chief. In 2006, New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi spoke at the graduation ceremony of Queens College, a public university. Here’s how he introduced New York’s Senator Charles Schumer to the fresh-faced graduates: “The man who, how do I phrase this diplomatically, who will put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”
And thus, from the ashes of the World Trade Center arose Barack Hussein Obama — the One who would redeem us, floating above the world like a multicultural Messiah. He bore a miraculous name, redolent of our two worst enemies, which seemed to promise some sort of divine intervention. He offered us the Muslim heritage of his father as a magical shield, deflecting the homicidal rage of seething hordes in scary, far-off places, and preserving our peace with no price to pay. His jutting jaw, tilted upwards a la Mussolini, would be our amulet, as all the world marveled at the Lightworker, the brilliant new god America had made.
The hysteria that accompanied Obama’s campaign — the fainting at his rallies, the Il Duce-like graphics, the Styrofoam Greek columns, the singing of his praises by glassy-eyed students led by enraptured cadres of apparatchik teachers — bore no resemblance to anything that had ever happened in mainstream American politics. We tried to create a god to defend our freedom, because it was easier than the hard work needed to defend it ourselves.
Alas, the destruction that Obama wrought may ultimately dwarf the wreckage of 9/11. As we are now relearning, there are no man-made gods; only the All Mighty who never tires of teaching us that the road to freedom has no shortcuts.
Write Stella Paul at Stellapundit@aol.com.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/09/obama_and_our_911_trauma.html at September 11, 2011 – 06:15:45 AM CDT
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