Losing Our Will, and Our Minds

Have people and institutions forgotten?

The memory of New York's Twin Towers crashing to the ground on September 11, 2001, seems far removed from the minds of a sizable portion of the American public. Because we live in a country that permits the lives of ordinary citizens to quickly resume their normal activities and concerns, September 11--and the fight against terrorism as a whole--has taken on the aspect of a new Broadway play: culturally popular and required viewing in its debut, then suffering from lack of interest and novelty after the newness of it wears away.

These sentiments are what President Bush warned the public about in the early days of 9/11, and continues to do unto this day. Along with the large segment of the public that has grown blasé toward the war on terrorism and the winning of it, so too have the mainstream media and most noticeably as of late, the Democratic Party.

Witness Senate minority whip Dick Durbin’s (D- IL) Senate floor remarks on June 14, 2005. Durbin compared the treatment of suspected al Qaeda terrorist held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to the infamous tortures of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot.

Reading from an e-mail message sent to him from an FBI agent, Durbin accused the White House and the United States military of torturing prisoners.

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe that this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad régime--Pol Pot or others-- that had no concerns of human beings.”

One wonders if Senator Durbin realized that between these three dictatorial murderers, some 15 million people (a conservative estimate) were slaughtered without ceremony.

At Guantanamo Bay--which was the basis for Durbin's remarks-- the United States holds approximately 530 of the Middle East’s most committed killers. To date, not a single one has died.

It is astounding to me that such words and comparisons can be uttered on the Senate floor without instant and severely harsh censuring. But the winged-tipped scoldings usually handed down by the world’s most deliberative, yet elite body--the U.S. Senate--is not enough. What is also called for is the “torch and pitchfork” outrage of the greater body of American citizens.

For anyone, whether they are a Republican or a Democrat and who calls themselves “an American,” should be tripping over one another to see Durbin politically punished. For such were the rhetorical weight of Durbin’s words that he provided the terrorist and the “hate America” crowd--like the mainstream media--to take license in repeating Durbin’s charges for months to come.

Why? Because this unthinking terrorist-enabler is a sitting U.S. Senator, and a Senator’s words--even Durbin’s unthinking commentary--echo.

Senator Durbin may be said to have been playing it up for the C-Span cameras on Tuesday night--for the Senate chamber was nearly empty. Such is the way of Washington politics, and the necessity of getting face-time in the news.

What Durbin’s loathsome comments reveal--even as he tries to manufacture an explanation as to what he really meant--is that he and a sizable band of Democrats on the Hill have chosen their party over their country. It is the basest of acts in a political-play that started some four years ago, when the Democratic Party allowed its acute hatred of President Bush to say and do things that directly come into conflict with the U.S. war against terrorism.

Remember Senator Kennedy’s outburst on April 5, 2004? He stated that Iraq was “George Bush’s Vietnam.” Consequently, Kennedy’s outburst had a receptive audience in Shiite radical Moqtada al-Sadr, a man directly responsible for the killing of U.S. troops.

Of course, the mainstream media enable both Democrats and terrorist by their loose and wishful interpretation of the facts, as in the May 9 Newsweek story accusing U.S. interrogators of flushing a Koran down a toilet.

It’s hard to figure out just who biggest offender to our military is: a media that breathlessly report that Guantanamo Bay prison is the “gulag of our time,” because Amnesty International said so, or a political party with members like Dick Durbin who--by virtue of his true heartfelt feelings--have soiled the flag and the soldiers who fight and die for it.

These are not acts of bravery or noblesse oblige by the media and the Dick Durbins of the Democratic Party. These are the desperate flailing and thoughtless wailings of two institutions that would sell their souls for the power they once enjoyed.

But absent the selling of their souls, some Democrats instead eagerly sell their country. Armed with an obsessive hatred for Bush, no statement is out of bounds, and no attempted coup to retain power is too destructive.

As we approach the four-year anniversary of September 11, we do so as a country divided. It is almost a near-certainty that America will be the victim of a future terrorist attack, but still so many of us forget.

It is certain that if terrorists had Americans as prisoners, they would behead them, or mutilate them. It is certain that terrorists have no Geneva Convention, nor prisons that provide such luxuries as air conditioning or well-balanced and faith-based meals. It is certain that, if given the opportunity, terrorist like Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri, and Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, would gladly cut our throats, and laugh.

So to the Americans who forgot about September 11, I pity you. When the next major attack comes, it is you who will suffer the most because it is you who have given away the most.

You have given away your noblesse oblige as an American. And like the liberal establishment did after September 11, you will be the first to cry over it, and the first to go for a latte as if nothing happened.

Indeed, you are the ones that Senator Dick Durbin is talking to. You are the ones that Newsweek writes for. You have lost your way in the war against terrorism just as surely as Senator Durbin has showed us his way of winning it, and that is by appeasement.

Archives of "The Citizen Politican"

Vincent Fiore is a freelance political writer who lives in New York City.

Send an e mail to Vincent Fiore