A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore:
I really want to know — and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect — how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C’mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don’t start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.
I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.
Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?
Well, I don’t think we have much common ground and you’re a poor excuse for an American, but I’ll try to answer. You want to know if those of us who voted for George Bush feel safer. Unlike you I don’t claim to speak for anyone but myself. My answer is: hell yes assclown. Certainly safer than Al Gore, John Kerry, or you would have made us. Even after 9/11 none of you would have lifted a finger against the Taliban. None of you would have taken out Saddam and his sons. None of you would have confronted the Jihadi threat. Of course we’re safer now that Al Qaeda’s Afghani training camps are closed, Saddam’s WMD shell games are over, and Jihadis are flocking to paradise by way of Iraq. Of course you would have trouble seeing the value in any of this. You never recognized the threat, or blamed us for creating it ourselves. Sorry if I sound confused – you’ve never been very clear on that point.
Unlike you I don’t hold civilization or the people who sustain it to blame for the sociopaths who want to tear it down. Unlike you I don’t sympathize with those sociopaths and undermine those who fight them. And unlike you I don’t blame Bush or FEMA for Katrina. I blame the dehumanizing welfare state and the mentality of dependency engendered by it. And that was wrought by the kind of soft-headed leftist idealism you espouse. You alone are to blame for your short-sighted and self-serving partisan vitriol, your hypocritical holier-than-thou criticisms of the righteous, and your two-faced attitude toward your country and countrymen.
And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?
So a letter demonstrating your ignorance of what has been achieved and utter contempt for those who paid for it is how you honor those who died? On 9/11 I learned that we were vulnerable and unprepared. Today I see that we are better off, thanks to the efforts and sacrifices of many brave and mostly unsung individuals, to which those of us who cherish civilization all owe a great debt. I also see that you are just as narcissistic and pompous as ever. Mr. Moore, in all sincerity and with all due respect please write your next open letter in Arabic so your most ardent fans won’t need to translate it.
Reading Mr. Moore’s complete letter left me with no desire to support his view. Biting, divisive remarks provide no answer. Your remarks leave me with more of the same (tit for tat, I guess). Did you take a look at GWB’s magic 8-ball to draw your conclusions on history under Gore or Kerry?
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/09/29/ret.gore.speech/index.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/553175/posts
On 14 Sep 2001, Congress authorized the president to use military force under the War Powers Resolution, Additionally in response to the Congress “authorization of national emergency” the president readied reserves of armed forces to active duty. This is all before the actual declaration of war against Afghan/Taliban.
20 Sept 2001 – President addresses joint sessions of congress in which the Taliban is implicated and has been directed to :
Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land. (Applause.) Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens, you have unjustly imprisoned. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers in your country. Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and hand over every terrorist, and every person in their support structure, to appropriate authorities. (Applause.) Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating.
07 Oct 2001 Declaration of War
The Taliban was in the crosshairs even if Dennis Kucinich were president. OK, maybe not then, although he voted Aye on 14 Sept.
So you can swap pineapples for potato-mashers. Why re-right history? Moore completely loses credibility with the “self-affixed label” remark.
The Bush preparedness record is poor at best. We continue to have holes in our defense and our “best defense is a pre-emptive offense” approach has put us in a quandary. (The quandary being how do we pre-empt the “Axis of Evil”-and-then-some at once without international support).
Now the real lesson of Katrina is about to unfold. How can we possibly promise to rebuild NO to its fullest grandeur? OK, we have the technology, we can rebuild her – but its gonna cost a little more than $6 million dollars – and I offer the following – has the national hurricaine center done a scenario of back to back Category 4’s striking the same general vicinity in the same season and what NO would need to prepare for that? Dont look now, here comes Rita.
Here is your trillion dollar leadership decision. Every dollar spent on NO is a dollar not available for the war on terror and homeland security.
Moore summarized a good deal of what the other many Bush-hating naysayers have said. I’m glad you disagree with them.
Nobody needs a magic 8-ball to know that Gore and Kerry blame the US for 9/11, want the US to pass a “global test” before using its military, consider terrorist attacks a criminal justice issue, and even if the perpetrators were eventually captured and convicted they would close Gitmo or any other place we lock them up.
That’s certainly a more realistic and literal understanding of their own statements than Moore or his sound-alikes accord Bush. Dismissing my comments as divisive tit-for-tat may be convenient but it’s hardly fair.
US foreign policy indeed shares the blame for 9/11.
Kerry (& possibly Gore) want US military actions to pass a “global test”. They say nothing about it being “before” the action is taken, although they did prefer engaging the world powers to form a coalition prior to the Iraq invasion ala Afghanistan.
Kerry and the Clinton policies are similar in that they both believe the best way to fight the terrorists is by following the same methods the criminal justice system follows with identification and evidence gathering and where necessary employ black ops to take them out (i.e., Clinton’s empty tent and aspirin factory assaults).
The following site summarizes Clinton Era activities on the war before the war on terror. You will need to scroll thru the blog responses to see the entire chronlogy. Its pretty thorough from 92 thru 2000 but does state it is a work in progress.
http://fredtalk.fredericksburg.com/showflat.php?Number=569499
On Gitmo et al, you are probably right. I believe Gore would have invaded Afghanistan or supported a Northern Alliance uprising, bin Laden would have fled to western Pakistan (different leadership, same result) and Taliban detainees would have been held, interrogated, released to the new Afghan government, interrogated again and summarily executed. Looks like Bush holds the moral high ground on this one.
Tit for tat is fair because instead of not gracing Mooronic remarks with a response, you chose to respond with speculations of how the world would be without Bush. Had you left your response to your last statement “So a letter…” you would have had my fullest support instead of my support with criticism.
I could not have referred to Moore’s “ignorance of what has been achieved” in the last paragraph without the explanation provided in the previous two.
The question was “do you feel safer”? You don’t have to hate Clinton to recognize that during his tenure attacks and other warning signs indicated an increasing threat. (Was Moore asking his question then?) Instead of taking action we built walls of political correctness between our intelligence organizations. It was not Clinton’s fault, it was the zeitgeist, almost everyone was asleep. This pre-9/11 zeitgeist is what Gore and Kerry and Moore still fantasize was working and could still work. If only we were nicer to the terrorists.
After 9/11 we have taken steps, against the protestations of Gore, Kerry, and Moore, that have made us safer. Rather than acknowledge this they pretend they don’t see it, and find other long-standing problems (atmospheric CO2, hurricanes, Iran, Korea) to whine about as if they’re new.
Our foreign policy is not responsible for the Jihadis. To say it is is like blaming someone walking down the street for the mugger who attacks them. It doesn’t matter if the muggee is careless or wearing jewelry, or the mugger is angry and has nothing, or for that matter if the muggee earlier sold a gun to the mugger.