Obama and Our 9/11 Trauma
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/09/obama_and_our_911_trauma.html at September 11, 2012 – 10:31:42 AM CDT
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.