What kind of people go after widows and orphans?
Salon.com has a good opinion piece by James P. Pinkerton on “The neocon conundrum,” namely how do they justify our continued presence in Iraq?
In the way of such things at the Sound of the Crowd, here are a few excerpts in bold with my comments in [brackets]. In the way of Salon, if you want to read the whole article, you’ll need to be a subscriber or watch a brief ad.
“The consequences of failure in Iraq would be unthinkable,” the president told the nation on Tuesday night. To sum up the hawks’ arguments, if we leave Iraq we will have…Loss of prestige and influence in the Arab world and beyond. As Osama bin Laden said in November 2001, the U.S. is the “weak horse” in this race, so others will be looking to the stronger horse.
[What?]
As retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey told Time magazine, “There are no more U.S. troops to send to Iraq” – without a draft, that is. So we don’t hear the White House saying much about the rest of the “axis of evil” anymore, because the North Koreans and Iranians know that the U.S. can’t attack when it’s mired in Mesopotamian quicksand. Meanwhile, North Korea is reported to be showing off at least three of its nuclear weapons.
Another group that shouldn’t be questioning is the widows of those who were killed on 9/11. “This spectacle of the widows, awash in their sense of victims’ entitlement, as they press ahead with ever more strident claims about the way the government failed them,” is appalling to Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, so she wrote a takedown of them on Thursday.
[Added to an instance of a man who lost his father on 9/11 being berated by Bill O’Riley on his talk show…well, I refer you to the headline.]
