I saw Bush 43 was trending in a search engine, and wondering what the idiot had opened his mouth about now and wish all ex-presidents still did us the favor of shutting up and going away, and the top result took me to this crap.

George W. Bush Didn’t Keep Us Safe
The president was warned about the risk of terrorist attacks, but we weren’t. Not about the 9/11 attacks, the wars or the scar they’ve left on our world.

Twenty years ago today, I woke up in my basement apartment in Manhattan’s East Village to the sobs of my roommate down the hall. When I went to check on her, she sat on her bed holding a cordless phone to her ear while facing her 10-inch box television set. She pointed to the screen. I looked and saw what we would all come to learn was United Flight 175 crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

She was on the phone trying to reach her family. Her father had been in Boston for a business trip and was scheduled to fly out of Logan International Airport, where the hijacked jetliners originated. She didn’t know what day or which flight. He wasn’t on either of those hijacked that day. Others weren’t so lucky. I woke my other roommate, and we walked outside into that eerily beautiful September day, the perfect blue sky scarred by the plume lifting from where the World Trade Center once stood.

This is part of the problem. This emotional bullshit that has nothing to do with it all. It's this sort of fore-fronting the dramatic and emotional impact that let Bush get away with so much. 9-11 was a big deal because we made it a big deal. We let the government pass the PATRIOT act and go to war on bullshit, because people were not thinking clearly. Being upset is understandable, but you can't bring that approach to public policy.

Two days later, the winds shifted, bringing the toxic smell of burning industrial destruction and death across the city. The world would never be the same.

We had no warning. U.S. leaders knew for months that an attack could be coming; cable news focused instead on shark attacks and salacious politics. President George W. Bush didn’t keep us safe.This is the problem with relying on him to do so. Those who sacrifice essential liberty to gain temporary security get neither. You put your trust in an establishment to "keep us safe" and surrender your powers and this is what they deliver. The ONLY people who did ANYTHING to keep anyone safe on 9-11 were the passengers and crew of Flight 93, who were hampered by, and lost their lives because of, federal regulations designed to keep them safe. No military personnel got punished for failing us on 9-11.
Instead, the security apparatus started cracking down on airline passengers, the very sort of people who kept the hijackers of United 93 from hitting their target. They all died on that plane, because they were not allowed to bring weapons or anything that could be a weapon onto the plane, and because federal hijacking procedures instructed the crew to let the hijackers into the cockpit. All in their assessment of what would keep us most safe. In a less free country, that took security even more seriously, there would be crackdown on communications and the victims of flight 93 would never have learned in time that other hijacked planes had been used as suicide bombs and been inspired to act. And as a result, nearly 3,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks that day. Hundreds of thousands more died in wars fought in their wake, and more still were displaced as refugees. In the 20 years since, Bush’s failures led to an immense and metastasizing conflict both outside of our borders and, increasingly, within ― setting the stage for the regeneration of the far-right in the form of the wealthy reality TV show star Donald Trump. It’s been two decades, but the scars left by 9/11 and worsened by American leaders’ failures have not healed.
In a democracy, our leaders' failures are our failures. And this drivel is all about evading the problem and clouding the issues and keeping those who accept it buying into the myth they sell us.

Bush, the unpopularly elected 43rd president, installed into the position by the five members of his political party serving lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court ― including one put there by his father And two of the opposition were put there by his opponent's running mate, confirmed by a Senate over which said opponent presided. Anyway, they did not place Bush in office, but ruled against Gore's suit to recount ballots only in counties he had won, and to overturn the Florida SecState's certification of the election results according to instructions of the state constitution. Who put the judges on the Florida Supreme Court, which decided to ignore their state's constitution and let the Democratic candidate's appeal to look for more votes go through? Oh, right. The long-time Democratic governor who appointed five of seven justices before hitting his term limit and his chosen successor was defeat by Bush's brother.― and his administration ignored warnings that began in January 2001 about the imminent threat from Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda group.
Bush famously began his term asking for plans to go after bin Laden & al Qaeda, saying he was "tired of swatting flies"

Bush and his foreign policy principals were first warned that January by CIA Director George Tenet and counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke that they needed to take immediate action to counter the terrorist groups. Both Tenet and Clarke, holdovers from the Bill Clinton administration, felt that their warnings were not being taken seriously.Hey Paul, you brought up the partisanship thing, so if we have to question the motives of the justices, what about these guys? Could their appointment by a different administration indicate divided loyalties, and slanted perceptions of the current administration's response and reception of their ideas? I mean, this is George Tenet who claimed the case for Iraq having WMD was a "slam dunk", right? Clarke sent national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a memo on Jan. 25 requesting an urgent National Security Council meeting on tackling the al Qaeda threat with an outline of a plan to do so.

But when such a meeting finally happened in April 2001, the nature of the threat was dismissed by Bush’s national security team. Instead, they suggested the focus should be on “Iraqi terrorism,” according to Clarke’s 2004 book, “Against All Enemies.”

In May, the CIA began to warn of an al Qaeda group inside the United States plotting attacks. On May 1, the CIA Daily Brief warned of a potential attack from “a group presently in the United States.” Another warning of an “imminent” attack came on June 22.

Senior administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dismissed these as a possible disinformation trick by al Qaeda, a Muslim militant group. The CIA continued to send warnings, including a June 29 memo and then another in the Daily Brief on June 30 titled “UBL [Usama Bin Laden] Threats Are Real.” Bush replied to this briefing with the infamous line, “All right. You’ve covered your ass.”
Notice Paul is not sharing with us the content of these memoranda.

That line is often erroneously stated as Bush’s reaction to the more famous Aug. 6 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” This memo outlined historic intelligence on al Qaeda’s activities, including the thwarted millennium bomb plot and bin Laden’s alleged consideration of crashing hijacked planes into buildings before stating:

FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
THIS is what he actually gives us. THIS is the thing Blumenthal thinks is the smoking gun proving Bush failed to keep us safe. And it is bullshit. What was ANYONE supposed to do on the basis of this memo?Recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York is as close to a specific datum as we can get. No one needed to be told that bin Laden was determined to strike the US, he had already done so, several times.
I could have told Bush as much in January of 2001. There were movies made about Muslim terrorists planning a strike on NYC that were clearly inspired by "UBL", such as "The Siege" in 1998. When the principal of the school I was teaching at on 9/11/01 stuck her head in my classroom door to say that the WTC crash was a terrorist act and bin Laden was claiming responsibility, I knew exactly whom she was talking about, and this was before the internet was even called that, and I had barely ever used it. The CIA does not get points for saying what was obvious. Someone please show me the memo that says they planned to hijack airplanes and crash them into skyscrapers or government buildings. Because if I was told that the Presidential Daily Brief of 8/6 was an ironclad, rock-solid prediction of events in the next 36 days, I would have immediately deployed the Marines and FBI to surround every government building at Borough, City, State and Federal levels in NYC, where they all would have had a great view of two airplanes flying overhead to smack into the non-government WTC!

This was the 36th time the CIA had warned Bush about imminent threats from bin Laden and al Qaeda, If they were all so detailed and accurate as the 36th, I can see why Bush had stopped listening. according to journalist Barton Gellman’s “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.”

Near the end of August, Tenet received a report titled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” Around this time, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen later alleged to be the 20th 9/11 hijacker, was arrested for overstaying his visa in Minnesota after his flight instructor became suspicious of his desire to learn to pilot large commuter jets before gaining any other flying skills. One week later, the CIA warned embassies in Paris and London of “subjects involved in suspicious 747 flight training,” referring to Moussaoui as a potential “suicide bomber.” Aside from Moussaoui, another potential hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen, was denied entry to the U.S. on Aug. 3.

Far more warnings came from the CIA, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies throughout that summer of an imminent attack or suspicious activity potentially related to a terrorist plot. Eventually, around the end of the summer and beginning of September, the Bush administration came around to discussing and elevating some of Clarke’s and Tenet’s concerns. But if they’d taken them seriously sooner, could the attacks have been prevented? By Paul's timeline, Tenet finally learned something actually pertinent to 9/11 "near the end of August" and the administration began taking him seriously "around the ...beginning of September. How much earlier could they have taken them seriously? That movie I mentioned, "The Siege"? Its point was to essentially denounce ethnic profiling, in a movie where a bunch of Arab-Americans carry out terrorist attacks, and the military promptly begins locking up young Arabic males. What could have been done in response to the specific data Tenet received? Lock up foreign Muslim males? Shut down the airlines? Not let Muslims on the planes? That would all be ridiculous and people of Blumenthal's ilk would be shrieking to the heavens if it had been tried. If Moussaoui had been snatched up by the FBI with nothing more to go on that flying lessons, Paul and his friends, butthurt about Bush being in office in the first place, would have been caterwauling about his innocence and refusing to believe the notion that he was intending to crash a plane into anything.

It’s hard to prove a counterfactual. But history suggests something more could’ve been done, even if it’s impossible to say the attack could have been prevented. Journalist Peter Beinart examined whether the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented in 2016, after Trump blamed George W. Bush for failing to protect the United States on 9/11. Beinart raised Clarke’s argument that when he warned the Clinton administration of imminent al Qaeda attacks in December 1999, Clinton ordered “daily meetings with the attorney-general, the CIA, FBI,” which filtered down to the “field offices to find out everything they can find.” Clarke credits this process and the urgency taken by Clinton on it for foiling the Jan. 1, 2000, millennium plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport and other international targets.So if loyalty to a man who appointed you is so strong that you'll flagrantly violate right and wrong to put his son in office despite the optics of going against the results of a meaningless popularity poll in a country full of ignorant twits who believe it's the metric by which presidents are or should be selected, how can we possibly trust Clarke's assessment of Clinton's actions, especially which redound on Clarke in a positive light? How do we know the LAX wasn't saved in spite of the bureaucratic hassle Clinton's demands put the FBI agents under? They got one major bomber out of that investigation, catching him with a car full of explosives on a ferry at the border, turned up bupkus on all their investigations of other suspects, and the one bomb maker they identified got away.

The Bush administration did not begin such a process. The 9/11 Commission revealed a lot about information-sharing policies in federal bureaucracies that hindered investigations into the plot. That were put in place under the Clinton administration, by Jamie Gorelick, one of the 9/11 Commissioners! John Ashcroft read a letter by an FBI agent to FBI HQ complaining about the information-sharing policies when Clinton was president to that very commission, and the FBI's response paraphrased as'we don't make the rules, but these are how we have to play' Ultimately, the buck stops with the president.

Bush must, too, bear responsibility for his decisions after the attacks. The 9/11 attacks unleashed the American id from its vegetative state induced by the end of the Cold War. Pundits announced it was time to put childish things away, like those concerns about shark attacks and congressmen’s affairs with younger women. Funny how those threatened the Republic when they came to light about Donald Trump, committed at a time when he was not in a position of public trust.

It was time to get serious. And serious meant violent. The immediate and ongoing reaction was one of bloodlust.

Shock jock Howard Stern was on air recounting his failure to “bang Pam Anderson” as the hijacked airliners smashed into the World Trade Center towers, according to the book “Management of Savagery.” After briefly handing over his airwaves to a live CBS report on the 9/11 attacks, Stern returned to declare: “We’ve got to bomb everything over there. … We’ve got to drop an atomic bomb. … a devastating war, where people die. Burn their eyes out!”

“Now is the time to not even ask questions,” Stern added. “To drop a few atomic bombs. Do a few chemical warfare hits! Let their people suffer until they understand!”

Four days later, a 42-year-old Boeing aircraft mechanic in Mesa, Arizona, told his friends he was “going to go out and shoot some towel-heads” and then murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American, because he had a beard and wore a turban. A wave of anti-Muslim violence spread across the U.S.Citation needed. All you've got is an attack on a Sikh. Meanwhile, one of the first things Bush said after the attack was to call Islam a religion of peace and denounce anti-Muslim violence.
Michael Moore spent a lot of his time bitching about Bush's efforts to get bin Laden's innocent relatives out of the country. Because, see, I thought the subject of this peace was Bush's failure to keep us safe, but there's a lot of digressions about Jews getting upset about the attacks.

The day after Sodhi’s murder, Cheney appeared on “Meet the Press” to tell Tim Russert of the Bush administration’s coming approach to its open-ended “war on terror”:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyers in the Justice Department began crafting legal justifications to create an illegal torture regime and an illegal surveillance state. The law would be bent to allow the U.S. to enter the “dark side.” Innocents would be swept up in these “methods” to be tortured, crucified, water-boarded, psychologically assaulted, sodomized, raped and beaten to death. Others, including wedding parties, small children and at least four U.S. citizens, would die by distantly piloted drones as Bush and his successors sought to cross names off their “Kill List.” Bush did not keep us safe is the titular premise of this piece. The tone of this paragraph suggests drone strikes are bad thing, but is Bush responsible for Obama's 1800 plus drone strikes on top of his own 57? Didn't Obama run in opposition to Bush's war on terror policies? This suggests Obama, once he got a talking-to from the grown-ups decided Bush's methods were a fine way to keep us safe (and, after all, there have been no major Islamic terrorist attacks on US soil since the first drone strikes started), or else there is a systemic problem bigger than Bush, and whining about his methods is a distraction from the real machine at work here.

The invasion of Afghanistan in October seemed to be a swift success, but the Bush administration’s decision to use a light force and rely on local militias to go after bin Laden at Tora Bora allowed the mastermind to escape.

Looking back now, it was this moment that made last month’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and all the chaos that came with it inevitable. With bin Laden on the loose after he fled to his caretakers in Pakistan, the war’s aim shifted to an imperial project of nation-building. The war turned away from revenge of the actual perpetrator of the attack; Afghanistan didn’t fill the hole left in downtown Manhattan, the west side of the Pentagon or the field in central Pennsylvania. So...they should have remained concentrated on revenge, instead of diverting to building up the country? As I recall, there were not a lot of complaints from the opposition to the nation-building, rather they wanted it in their flavor, getting the proto-SJW agenda in play and looking for ways to pin the failures and flaws of the program on the administration, rather than questioning its existence at all.

So Bush and his allies determined that something bigger would be needed. Or, as Clarke recounted Rumsfeld telling him after 9/11, “there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq.”

This new Iraq War, encouraged by leaders of both political parties and intellectuals both liberal and conservative and religious and atheist,Bush is the leader and responsible for the agenda of a LOT of groups.
This is some serious power attributed to him! No wonder Paul is upset that he did not keep us safe! could fulfill this bloodlust. Lies about weapons of mass destruction By George Tenet fueled the push for war, but it was the reliance on the classic American myth of regeneration through violence embedded in our psyches through our literary, political and cinematic history that propelled us forward.

The U.S. would take on the “Axis of Evil” of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, none of which had anything to do with 9/11, and remake the world. Libya, Sudan and Syria would follow.All of which were carried out or cheered on by the Left. Bush did not go into Darfur, to the chagrin of Hollywood, who greatly preferred it to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama attacked Syria and and Libya. Clinton closed our embassy in Sudan designating the country a sponsor of terrorism and Bush reopened it the year after 9/11 The violence committed against us would be repaid with our own violence, but our violence would be regenerative.

Or to put it more crudely, New York Times columnist and Iraq War evangelist Thomas Friedman told PBS’s Charlie Rose that the purpose of the war was to tell the Muslim world to: “Suck. On. This. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia…. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”

This was, unfortunately, an abjectly American response to the tragedy of 9/11. So, really, it's almost like Bush was just doing what we wanted him to on a visceral level.

“The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience,” American studies professor Richard Slotkin wrote in his book “Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860.”

That myth has given meaning to American foreign policy from the wars of Indian extermination through the imperial wars of conquest fought against Mexico and Spain, the war in Vietnam and today with our global war on terrorism. The frontier, as envisioned by the progressive historian Frederick Turner, the first to fully examine the American frontier myth, provided a “safety valve” for American society to release its internal tensions. Material wealth earned through expansion and, of course, the violence against those in the way, prevented internal conflict in a society long divided by politics, religion, class and race. Martin Luther King Jr. thought of the safety valve differently, calling the Vietnam War “some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

But the need to fulfill our myth of regeneration through violence could not be met by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars ultimately failed because they served no real purpose for the American public other than the need to exact immediate revenge. And our leaders, starting with Bush but including Barack Obama and Trump, repeatedly lied about them, as revealed by the Afghanistan Papers. Remember how this was about Bush's failure to keep us safe? Safe from what? America's violent impulses? How, by the way, does any of that make us different from anyone else? How about all the countries which had revolutions that expressly attempted violence for the purpose of regeneration? Because this idea that violence is some sort of essential character to the American soul is hindsight criticism from people who disapproved of America or its actions and are trying to indict anyone else they might disapprove of as being part of this hypothetical evil movement. But the French Revolution and like, the whole history of communism is about people who SAID that was why they were committing justice, who explicitly justified their actions through a very similar formulation. Was there some sort of regenerative motive to the actual hijacking on 9/11? And how does this American impulse to regenerate themselves in violence relate to such events or perpetrators as the student activities on university campuses in the 60s or race riots or BLM or Antifa?

These failures weren’t just a loss for Americans yearning for some sort of resolution to the 9/11 attacks. They were enormously deadly. They left behind not only tens of thousands of dead and wounded Americans but also hundreds of thousands of dead Afghans and Iraqis, whose lives are worth no more or less than ours. That includes the lives of the last 13 U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan, some of whom were babies on 9/11, on Aug. 26, and the lives of the 10 people, including seven children, killed by a U.S. drone strike three days later in response to those soldiers’ deaths. Even more people died from the wars’ repercussions after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s military, disbanded by the imperial U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, joined forces with al Qaeda in Iraq and then mutated into the Islamic State, wreaking havoc across the Middle East and creating a mass migration of millions of refugees fleeing for their lives.

The ultimate effect of all this violence, as many authors are now cataloging in books such as “Reign of Terror,” “Management of Savagery” and “The End of the Myth,” among others, has been what King described as that “demonic, destructive suction tube” blowing in reverse. Just as our Cold War foreign policy led to the U.S. funding bin Laden, ultimately blowing back on 9/11, our post-9/11 turn to violence blew back, too. Within the U.S., it created a regenerated, anti-democratic far-right led by the reality TV fabulist Trump and the Republican Party he has come to dominate. Bush failed to keep us safe, allegedly, but he's right in the middle of that chain of events. And why is all the responsibility on us? Why does no one suggest in the Middle East that the destruction caused by ISIS or the collateral damage from drone strikes are blowback from letting religious leaders who oppress half the population and chuck gays off of roofs preach violence and hatred and stir up guys to go around hijacking stuff. Assuming all Middle-Easterners are helpless animals, who simply react in biologically programmed ways to our actions in regard to them, how is 9/11 Bush's failure, if it was blowback from the funding of militant Afghans proposed and sponsored by Democratic legislators, Charlie Wilson and Paul Tsongas, runner-up for the Democratic nomination for President in 1992, who ran for the privilege of removing Bush's dad from office, and got half a million more votes from liberals than Bush's future opponent, Al Gore did four years before? BTW, during the Bush 41 administration, the only complaints I heard about funding al Qaeda were in "The New American", the magazine of the John Birch Society, which I found a favorite tool for trolling my history and environmental science teachers. According to the JBS at the time, we were funding the most anti-American and radical Islamic groups while criminally neglecting groups like those of Ahmed Massud, who would be assassinated by the Taliban the week before 9/11.

The often delusional thought of the regenerated right-wing under Trump is too easily blamed on the rise of former president himself. But it should be traced to Bush’s failure before 9/11 and decisions afterward.

As they lied their way to war in Iraq, a senior Bush administration aide (often rumored to be, but never confirmed, as political adviser Karl Rove) was quoted in a 2004 New York Times magazine article as saying that journalists and political pundits live in “what we call the reality-based community” but “that’s not the way the world really works anymore. … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality ― judiciously, as you will ― we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” That's just typical gloating of those in power and slamming their critics. People have been saying that since the advent of popular journalism.

If nations are formed by imagined communities, empires create imagined realities.Those two statements do not logically follow one to the other. It’s no wonder Trump, someone so capable of imagining new realities, would emerge under the conditions his predecessors created for him. We go from a statement that reporters assert a view of reality when criticizing politicians, but politicians actually create the reality for commenters to then study and talk about, to an assertion that nations being formed by communities imagined into being to a faulty syllogism asserting that since nations are formed by imagined communities, empires just make shit up, and because the US became an empire in 1803 1849 1865 1867 1898 1945 2003, a delusional individual could emerge as a leader. Though "someone so capable of imagining new realities" is exactly how many visionaries would be described. Like Karl Marx or Barack Obama, for instance.

When we woke up on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, we had no warning about what was to come ― not the attack, the wars, their failure and their political threat to democracy at home. It was the first day of my teaching career. I should have seen everything proceeding from there.

The Bush administration had every chance to act beforehand, You colossally failed to demonstrate that, choosing to gloss over the contents of the first 35 warnings issued by the CIA to instead devote a significant portion of your word count to a recitation of how violence is allegedly a specific and besetting sin of the USA.but we can’t know what would have happened had they done so. We do know what their decisions, and the decisions of the Obama and Trump administrations, resulted in afterward, and it isn’t pretty.

The plume of smoke that scarred the Manhattan skyline on 9/11 may have dissipated, but the scar our country’s actions have left on our souls remains deep. Twenty years later, it’s time to create a different reality.Isn't...isn't that what you accused Donald Trump of wanting to do? Isn't his capacity to do so something for which you blamed Bush?
Trump's national security platform, which so engendered the ire of the progressive commentariat, focused on denial of entry into the US of certain categories of people who committed acts of terror. These sort of actions were basically the only thing that might have stopped the 9/11 hijackers without a program of surveillance on American soil completely untenable to any decent American. Border security is EXACTLY how the foiled LAX attack cited in this very article was achieved during Clinton's presidency. The Jersey moms caterwauling about Bush's failure to save their husbands' lives on 9/11, and their ilk, raised children who shriek demands to abolish ICE. The person who arrested the aspiring LAX bomber was a Customs inspector, whose department was split off from the Customs Service and made a component of ICE.

This article, and its companion pieces with a theme of "Never Forget" on the other end of the 9/11 masturbatory community, are why 9/11 had such harmful effects on us and are the problem with the country. This is not a thoughtful reexamination of the response to 9/11 and its cause, it is simply rehashing partisan talking points I've heard before, with
a lot of torturous nonsense attempting to tie that Very Bad No Good thing in the past to whatever the author does not like about his political enemies today. Meanwhile, the other side, when they are not desperately [trying to weasel out](https://anncoulter.com/2021/09/08/9-11/) of their Howard Stern-like reactions preserved for posterity and easy access by the internet, are basically trying to do the exact same thing, reminding us all of that No Good Very Bad event and why the current President must be stopped, because this was all clearly the fault of the party in which he was an important Senator at the time. And the problems evolving from Afghanistan and Iraq are all the Democrats' fault for jogging Bush's elbow.

Sidebar: If this is blowback from blowback from the Cold War, where'd the Cold War come from? Well, if we had not intervened in World War Two, Germany would probably have destroyed the USSR. But we had to intervene, because Nazi Germany was blowback from the Treaty of Versailles and Trianon, which came about specifically because of US intervention in World War One, according to Paul Hindenburg, the de facto military dictator of Germany at the end of that conflict. We had to get involved in World War One, because of our international involvements, as a result of our acquiring overseas colonies, which was a necessary outlet for our national energies after the Civil War, which was blowback from our acquiring more territory for slave and free states to squabble over in the Mexican War, which was a border clash that came into being through the purchase of territory from France that gave us a disputed border with Mexico. France was selling the territory, because an Italian-born adventurer was able to rise through the military of a new French republic, which was inspired by the founding of an American republic in defiance of our monarch, with the French literally replacing images of God with images of Ben Franklin in Notre Dame. America was founded by blowback from the establishment of Episcopalianism and its enforcement as the One True Religion in England, which was blowback from Henry VIII needing money and a son, which was blowback from his dad usurping a throne and creating a police state, which was blowback from Henry IV defeating Welsh rebels and bringing hostages to his court to fuck his daughter-in-law, which was blowback for him usurping the throne from his cousin, which was blowback from his dad being rich and powerful and having the Bad Parliament, which was blowback from HIS dad creating Dukes because of his rivalry with the King of France, which was blowback for his aunts all cheating on their husbands, which was blowback from his granddad persecuting the Knights Templar, which they were in France to be persecuted, because some asshole Kurd conquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders, so really, the Kurds getting fucked over by Bush 41 was their own long string of blowback, but back to the Crusader thing, that was blowback for the Muslims' conquest of the Holy Land, which was blowback for the Byzantines weakening Persia, which was blowback for the Persian invasion of Mesopotamia, which was blowback from the overthrown of Emperor Maurice, which was blowback from his campaigns against the Yugoslavs, which were blowback from Justinian buying off the nomads, which was blowback from his trying to reconquer the West, which was blowback from the West being lost in the first place, which was blowback from the Roman invasion of Germany leading to Teutoberg (amazing how fighting Germany keeps coming up on this list), which was blowback from the fall of the Republic, which was blowback from the expansion of Rome's imperial authority, which was blowback from the Punic Wars, which were blowback from the Phoenicians colonizing North Africa, which was blowback from the rise of Tyre, which was blowback from Egyptian imperialism. So it was Egypt's fault. Glad we cleared that up? Actually my mom could probably tell you why Egypt was fucking around in the Levant back then, but I tended to tune that stuff out to read about countries whose most interesting thing was not their funeral arrangements.

Anyway, the long and short is, we're fucked, because no one learns anything. And shut up and listen to the mask mandates! Your government is only trying to keep you safe, and never mind that if we had cut ourselves off from China like Trump wanted, the virus would never have made it over here, and if we had not fucked over Chiang, China would not have had a coronavirus lab in Wuhan in the first place, because according to the progressive consensus, the Kuo Min Tang were a bunch of backwards feudal reactionary kleptocrats who could never have managed scientific development on that level. And if we had not got involved in World War Two in the first place, China (and Vietnam and North Korea) would be Japan's problem. And let's not get into the Boxer Rebellion.