Democrat reaction to 9/11 - a review

Really, I don’t need to say it - anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty is already saying it, but let me add my two-cents.

Karl Rove made a statement last night.

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, “I don’t know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.” …

Now…before getting to the reactions to this statement, can we all agree that the following post 9/11 statements from various liberals are factual and “reality-based” and not made up by someone huffing Redi-Whip?

Let’s start here with Moveon.org’s ‘demands’ some 48 hours after the attack of 9/11/01:

” We implore the powers that be to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction.”

Let’s look at Katha Pollitt - she’s a liberal - who found the display of patriotism and flagwaving following the attack to be disgusting:

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I’m wrong–the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism…A friend has taken to wearing her rusty old women’s Pentagon Action buttons–at least they have a picture of the globe on them. The globe, not the flag, is the symbol that’s wanted now.

And, ummmm…didn’t Bill Clinton bite his lip, ignore the fact that the 19 men who flew in 9/11 were affluent and well-educated, blame “poverty” and tell us we needed to think about how bad we are and have been historically? Why yes, yes, he did! Although he did try to squeeze every injustice in the world into his statement to really, REALLY emphasize how awful we are:

Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound…with blood running up to their knees. ..This country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human and we are still paying the price today… So terror has a long history.

Well…if terror has a long history and every civilization has had a hand in it…then I guess that makes everything alright, and we really should just shut up and accept our turn at being terrorized!

Let’s see…what other liberal (and let’s be clear here, Rove said, “liberals,” not “Democrats” - he did not say that he hated all Democrats and everything they stand for, for heaven’s sake)

Hmmm…what about Susan Sontag? She was a liberal, right?

“Where is the acknowledgment,” Sontag wrote, “that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world,’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”

Or, ummm…Michael Moore? He’s a proud liberal, right?:

Just After 9/11, Moore Blamed America’s “Taxpayer-Funded Terrorism” And Bush Administration For Terrorist Attacks. “We abhor terrorism – unless we’re the ones doing the terrorizing. We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me.…Let’s mourn, let’s grieve, and when it’s appropriate let’s examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in.” (Michael Moore Website Archive, “Death, Downtown,” Posted 9/12/01, www.michaelmoore.com, Accessed 7/27/04) (I believe he wrote this just after writing that, you know…those people in the WTC probably didn’t vote for Bush, so the terrorists had attacked the WRONG SORT of people!)

Liberal Cynthia McKinney accused The American President (and the Jews) of knowing about the attack in advance and allowing it to happen - an idea Howard Dean thought was compelling.

And then let’s read a few more:

Kucinich: “Afghanistan May Be An Incubator Of Terrorism But It Doesn’t Follow That We Bomb Afghanistan …”

But…but…I thought Hillary Clinton just insisted today that the Democrats were united about bombing Afghanistan…

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA): “I Am Convinced That Military Action Will Not Prevent Further Acts Of International Terrorism Against The United States.”

Joe Biden: “The Bombing Campaign, Reinforced Existing Stereotypes Of The United States As A ‘High-Tech Bully …’”

Could Hillary have been wrong?

And then, who can forget Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)

“(Osama bin Laden) He’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. He’s made their lives better.”

Alrighty then…having established that Rove’s remarks were not based on fantasy but in reality…what exactly are the Democrats crying about?

They don’t like someone having opinions? Karl Rove has an opinion. In his opinion, the reaction of liberals (he did say LIBERALS, right? Not DEMOCRATS? I’m just checking) left something to be desired after a deadly attack had been unleashed within our borders.

I’m sorry…explain this to me…Dick Durbin said terrible and disturbing things about our military and the manner in which our country is conducting itself in a war unlike any others…uses words like “Nazi” and “Gulag”…and I didn’t see any of these Democrats, not one, stand up and ask Durbin to “repudiate” his statements (that’s what Hillary said today, right? That Republicans should “repudiate” Rove’s statements?) Well, if the Democrats didn’t feel the need to repudiate Durbin’s statements…or Howard Deans many and colorful hate-speeches, or Hillary Clinton’s own rather excessive remarks of only a fortnight ago- you know, where she basically accused President Bush of having a messianic complex (projection, again?)…then how do these people have the face to go crying into the microphones, demanding “repudiation” and “resignation.”

When Trent Lott made his over-exuberant and excessive praises of Strom Thurmond, the Democrast wailed and hollared and the GOP policed its own and told him to apologize, apologize, apologize (it got tiresome after a while) and give up his leadership position.

When Howard Dean, Dick Durbin, Harry Reid (”the president is a liar and a loser” he said to schoolchildren!) Ted Kennedy (”this war was conceived in Texas!”) and others make outrageous, divisive, over-the-top statements, the press chuckles and the Democrats go silent. No one ever “repudiated” anything. No one ever had to “resign.”

And Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Harry Reid were silent, silent, silent about it all.

Note this, by the way:

None of the leading Democrats who criticized Mr. Rove yesterday called for Mr. Durbin to apologize for his own remarks, with some even specifically refusing to comment when asked.

Asked yesterday about the different reactions, Democrats would say only that Mr. Durbin’s eventual apology sets the stage for Mr. Rove to do the same.

“Senator Durbin — that’s been done and he has apologized. Karl Rove should do the same,” Mr. Schumer said.

Or, as Ralph Kramden used to say when caught: Homminahomminahommina….

My goodness, but these Democrats are thin-skinned. But at least, since they are taking such umbrage at Rove’s opinion…we can see that they are finally admitting they are LIBERALS!

UPDATE: I must say, I do like Pataki’s remarks, here:

“I think it is a little hypocritical of Senator Clinton to call on me to repudiate a political figure’s comments when she never asked Senator Durbin to repudiate his comments. Senator Clinton might think about her propensity to allow outrageous statements from the other side that are far beyond political dialogue –insulting every Republican, comparing our soldiers to Nazis or Soviet gulag guards– and never protesting when she serves with them.”

Oh, and Rep Peter King of Long Island reminds us of one more “”Karl Rove deserves a medal,” King said. “Hillary Clinton, she’s the one who went to the floor of the Senate and implied President Bush knew about Sept. 11 and let it happen.”

Gasp! I had forgotten all about that! Put it up on the list with the others!

The Anchoress pinged back with In today’s MSM quotes just vanish!
Ramblings' Journal tracked back with Old Southern saying: "A Hit Dog Will Holler"
The Anchoress pinged back with If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged…
The Anchoress pinged back with Stories you might have missed
The Colossus tracked back with A Double Standard?

by TheAnchoress @ 12:03 am. Filed under Culture of Treason?, Dumb Democrat moves, Our Hillary!, The Fourth Estate, The Perpetual Adolescents, Why can't weeee be friends

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24 Responses to “Democrat reaction to 9/11 - a review”

ForNow Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 1:37 am
A, you have such a good memory. I forgot about those things that Clinton, Biden, and other said.
ForNow Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 1:48 am
Bush doesn’t often talk in a broad-brush way about “liberals,” and Dem pols and leftist bloggers have gotten spoiled. Rove is political strategist, so such broad-brush talk is natural to him, even if he is now Deputy Chief of Staff.

Broad-brush, broad-brush. Let’s rehears DNC Chairman Dean’s remarks.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean: “I hate Republicans and everything they stand for.” “The struggle between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is a struggle between good and evil–and we’re the good.” Republicans are “brain-dead,” “have never made an honest living their lives,” and “They all look the same. They all behave the same.”, and are exclusively “white Christians.”
ForNow Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 2:53 am
I suppose something had to happen, though Durbin’s speech was more than one might expect.

Something was really wrong and weird when leftists hollered about the possibility of the desecration by some soldier somewhere of a holy book — when many leftists don’t care about any holy book and most of the rest outright despise holy books. It was like they had run off the edge of a cliff and didn’t know it, their fervor for a trivial story revealed them to be interested only in the bad publicity it made for the US, revealed them for all to see.

And they never understood that.

And the news media never honestly faced that aspect of the story. But the left has taken to running off the edges of cliffs for all to see. So I suppose that, if it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else. But Durbin went even farther off the deep end than one might have expected.
TheAnchoress Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 5:38 am
You know what, GD? I’m a former Democrat who still thinks of herself as liberal. Classically liberal.

Like JFK and Hubert Humphrey…who would be called conservatives by today’s standards.
karen Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 6:37 am
Ghost Dansing forgot to say that our Great Pope JP II was a Liberal and so was Jesus Christ, i.e. Sermon on the Mount. That’s according to my Liberal friend, Spud To me, today’s Liberals are about self-importance and self-service… selfish. Or, is that just cause I’m soft-in-the-head?
DaveP. Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 7:34 am
The amazing thing is that after about four years of avoiding the “libral” tag like it was cancer (whch, of course, it is) all of a sudden the Democrats are not only accepting it but embracing it.

GD, I’ll point out that the Founding Fathers and the Framers would’ve tar-and-feathered and horsewhipped you out of town as a traitor. Have a nice day, now.
Jim Hoft Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 9:33 am
Ahhh… now that I have my Anchoress fix, I can go on with my day!

Great post! Thanks for the reminders. I think I like pataki’s remarks the best. I hope Republicans have fun with this. It is utterly ridiculous as Pataki points out.
The Colossus Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 9:41 am
A Double Standard?

Slander the troops? Hell, that’s fair game. But criticize the motives of a politican! Why, I’m outraged, Mr. Rove, outraged! UPDATE: The Anchoress has much, much more….
Zoomdaddy Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Hey where’s the link to the part about the vitality of post-natal stem cells? It 404′d, and I wanted to read more.
Darrell Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 10:56 am
“Liberal” is an often misused term. There is a “Social Liberal” which about describes every person in the US, Republican or Democrat. And there is the term that Socialists and Communists use to diguise their true nature. The Founding Fathers may have been social liberals, but I assure you they weren’t Socialists or Communists.
otho Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 11:44 am
I wish I could be as articulate as you, Anchoress, but I’m new to the bloggosphere. However, in responding to “ghost dansing” (sic), I think you let him/her off too easily. On what does he/she base his/her claims that “The United States’ image is so tattered overseas two years after the Iraq invasion that communist China is viewed more favorably than the U.S. in many long-time Western European allies, an international poll has found”?

What poll? I’m so sick of all this baseless rhetoric masquerading as legitimate discourse.
W Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 11:46 am
If Rove had used the word ‘Democrats’, I could understand the demand for an apology. After 9/11, who didn’t talk about law enforcement and counseling skipped right over to ‘It’s all America’s fault!’Frankly, I think Rove got it exactly right.

After the Durbin embarrassment, the left was turning up rocks to find something to be offended by. They’ve blown it here, none more than our distinguished senators from New York.

A few days ago Mme. Chairman didn’t want to address the Durbin comments in a conference call about some health-related issue that she was selling. She wasn’t too reticent here, eh? Chucky? Here’s a guy who’d knock over his grandmother to get in front of a microphone or a camera. I don’t recall hearing a word from him since the Durbin statement, but he sure was out there yesterday. These people disgust.

Thumbs up to Pataki and Pete King, and all of the bloggers like A. who have compiled the various statements that further prove Rove right.

Somewhere up there, Howard Cosell is smiling and puffing on a cigar: “That Rove kid is just telling it like it is.”

Thanks A. for the chance to vent. W
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 11:48 am
Otho, we read a post like this and wonder why we even bother to blog.

Anchoress covers all the bases- better than almost everyone else.
TheAnchoress Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 11:56 am
Why JPII WAS a liberal. A classical one. That’s why he was classified a “conservative” by these folks.
The Anchoress » Stories you might have missed Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
[...] com”>Email The Anchoress

Stories you might have missed Rather stunning hypocri [...]
TheAnchoress Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
#10, that link is fixed…I screwed up. It was very early in the morning!
The Anchoress » If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged… Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 12:35 pm
[...] If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged… Stories you might have missed Rather stunning hypocri [...]
Phil Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
I’ll write Rove’s apology:

I’m sorry that the liberals reacted like they did after 9/11.

I’m sorry if they took offense to my pointing that out.

I’m sorry that they can dish it out, but can’t take it.
Ramblings' Journal Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
Old Southern saying: “A Hit Dog Will Holler”

Democrats — moonbats all — who tried to downplay, ignore and pooh-pooh the comments of Senator “Dick Dastardly” Durbin (Disingenuous-IL) last week are now up in arms over comments made by White House Advisor Karl Rove this week. The Dems…
stephanie Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 1:53 pm
It’s funny…I saw that in the morning on the news and was pretty indignant- cause I watch the news at 6:30 am every morning, and the only place I saw or heard comments about Durbin were here. So I was VERY offended that the media covered Rove’s speech. The obvious bias appalled me.
After reading the pure hatred and vitriol of this post, I almost feel like I have to defend myself. I feel sad b/c we could have built a bridge, agreed that the coverage was wrong, and moved on.
SO I guess I will defend myself, as a liberal, a bit. We did, collectively as a nation, have a part to blame. That DOES NOT make what the terrorists did right, or mean that we should have just joined hands with the terrorists over the bodies of our countrypeople and sang peace songs. It does mean figuring out how you got where you are, and figuring out how to fix it for the long term. As well as military action.
If that makes me such a horrible, evil person, not fit for society, so be it.
Greg Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
Karl Rove is indeed a genius. By this one little paragraph, he:
1. got the Democrats to associate their party with the “liberal” label. Of course many in that party had been proudly wearing the label, but many others denied that they were “liberals”, presumably because of some feared bad connotations. Now they are all tarred with that label.
2. made the Democrats associate a legalistic or a self-examining response to 9-11 as unpatriotic. The Democrats could have said something like “a true patriot would have gone after the terrorists (or whatever name they chose) with good American police work - like the Germans or the Spanish have done, we would have arrested the bad guys without a war that has cost almost 2000 American soldiers lives, and been safer/more popular.” Of course one could easily argue with that, but, being hypothetical, it would be difficult to actually prove wrong. But instead, they went for the hurt-feelings response of how dare you say that I would do something as unpatriotic as call for a legalistic or self-examining response. Some people might now make the association between a call for indictments and trials of those at GITMO as being a poor (unpatriotic) response to terrorism.
3. give the conservatives an opportunity to rehash all of the times a Democrat and/or liberal has indeed said such things (as with the many examples in this blog and others) - and make them now look unpatriotic (see point 2).
4. make the Democrats look like hypocrites and crybabies to all but their most devoted followers. This seems to be the most popular idea now - because it is so easy to show!
5. imply that a mere (Republican) staff member speaking to fellow Republicans is as important as the number 2 Democrat senator speaking officially on the Senate floor.

There might be other reasons as well.
ForNow Says:
June 24th, 2005 at 5:53 pm
Who’d have thought that gd was so into the US founding documents given the tradition behind his name? Google search on “ghost dance”
DANEgerus Says:
June 25th, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Hillary waved the NYPost on the Senate floor parroting Cynthia McKinney(D)’s claims…

“The president knew what?” she asked. “My constituents would like to know the answer to that and many other questions, not to blame the president or any other American, just to know.”

When challenged Hillary said:

“I am not looking to point fingers or place blame on anybody.” — Hillary Clinton(D) pointing fingers and blaming everyone but herself

And…

on 11/12 2001 Hillary told CNN’s Jonathan Karl:

“If we hadn’t passed the big tax cut last spring, that I believe undermined our fiscal responsibility and our ability to deal with this new threat of terrorism, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in today,”

So it was the tax-cuts that caused 911.
The Anchoress » Blog Archive » In today’s MSM quotes just vanish! Says:
May 30th, 2007 at 11:57 am
[...] also: Rather Stunning Hypocrisy by TheAnchoress @ 8:34 pm. Filed under Our Hillary!, The Fourth Estate [...]