Demosophia in his pocket essay, Days of Vanishing Infamy, has a private epiphany while trying to understand the nature of our national inner child:
As I watched Nina Totenberg on CBS's Inside Washington desperately attempt to keep alive the hope that 9/11 could have been avoided, raising her voice, as she pleaded with Evan Thomas, so that her final words could only be heard by dogs, it occurred to me that this was simply another manifestation of the old wishful thinking that has consistently disinformed these folks. I guess I've come to understand the expectation that government ought to solve all our problems for us, before we're even aware of them, but this current fixation amounts to a wish that government solve all our problems before they even happen. And Bush is to blame because, well, this one got through the veil of verisimilitude that stands between us and the "real world." Damn him!Posted by Vanderleun at April 11, 2004 4:32 PM | TrackBackUltimately it isn't that I object to the notion that we made mistakes, or that we oughtn't devote considerable energies to fixing institutional problems. But blaming this President, or any US President, for the events 9/11/2001, or 12/07/1941, amounts to a kind of wistful fantasy that's akin to the expectation that one can fly if one simply wishes on a star with enough sincerity and conviction. It's entirely in line with the fantasy among the Left that Bush somehow hoodwinked us into paying more attention to BIG DEMOCRACY, and to the War on Terror (Totalitarianism), than to their small democracy grievances. And taken to its logical extension it explains the conviction among many of those Moveon folks, that Bush actually engineered 9/11 precisely to divert us from the real agenda.
