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.

FLIGHT 93 MEMORIAL: FIGHTING BACK
By Michelle Malkin

The Flight 93 Memorial
The Belmont Club

The hijackers of Flight 93 were motivated by deeply held Islamic beliefs. Misguided or not they considered themselves Jihadis. Soldiers of Allah. They went down screaming “Allahu Ackbar”. This was not four guys out to make some money who just happened to be Muslim. Their goal was to kill and terrorize as many innocent civilians as possible because that’s what they thought their god wanted.

The innocent Americans trapped on Flight 93 quickly realized they were going to die unless they fought back. They fought and they died, but it wasn’t in vain. They thwarted the Jihadis and drove home, for those of us who were paying attention, what is still to this day the most valuable lesson in our struggle against their ilk: negotiation and wishful thinking is wasted on this villain, our only choices are to resist or perish.

The brave people of Flight 93 deserve a fitting and dignified memorial. Not an homage, intentional or not, to the religion that motivated their depraved killers.

Hurricane Halliburton
By John Nichols
The Nation
Sunday 11 September 2005

With the wheels rolling for the purchase of his own $2.9 million home on the east coast, the Cheney was more or less ready to commiserate with the folks who had lost their homes on the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately, not all of the locals were prepared to thank the vice president for finally showing up.

Cheney was greeted in Gulfport, Mississippi, by a survivor of the disaster who – recalling the veep’s blunt salutation for Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy during a visit to Capitol Hill last year – repeatedly shouted: “Go f— yourself, Mr. Cheney.”

Class envy? Charming. And a dash of ad hominem too. How witty.

If Cheney had actually interacted with anyone on the ground, however, he would have heard a lot more. But the vice presidential visit was merely the latest in a series of photo opportunities by administration aides who are scrambling to undo the damage done by their plodding and disengaged response to a catastrophe that was made much worse by initial federal neglect and incompetence.

Hmm. First he knocks Cheney for not visiting quickly enough, then calls his visit a mere damage control photo op. Something tells me there’s no pleasing Mr. Nichols.

Joe Allbaugh, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has a new job. He’s lobbying for the Halliburton subsidiary in Washington and elsewhere. Conveniently, Allbaugh showed up in Louisiana on the day before Cheney’s visit with the purpose, in the words of a Washington Post report, of “helping his clients get business.”

Even if Allbaugh drops the ball, Halliburton is well covered.

The vice president can always be counted on to “make certain that we’re doing everything that needs to be done.”

And then the big scary corporation popped out of the closet and gobbled up all the funding that should have gone to our soft headed bleeding heart liberal causes instead. BOO! Why make an argument based on fact when sarcasm and innuendo are so much more entertaining?

Jack Kelly: No shame
The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed
Sunday, September 11, 2005

“The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

Reporters are supposed to at least pretend to be objective and unbiased, aren’t they?