Sunday, Jan 18th
Last update08:39:27 AM GMT
Editorial Glance
He may be playing the hero now, but the ex-president’s trip to Haiti is a reminder of the mess his administration left behind.
Bill Clinton, the Second Coming of Hope. The First Coming, the U.S.-led invasion in 1994 adorned with 20,000 American troops, did not turn out so well. By 1996, when the American military decamped, you’d be hard pressed to find a Haitian on the streets of Port-au-Prince who wasn’t suffering miserably from hope.
In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy.
Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.
This is the crucial question that must be answered before a successful struggle for liberty can be fought and won. If it is shown that the majority of Americans will readily trade their freedoms for a fake carnal security then the cause has already been lost.
This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood.
The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe. A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved.
Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber's attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic airliner was thwarted by passengers and revealed gaping holes in airline security only months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
But President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made no public remarks for six days about the so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the media or Democrats that Bush's response was sluggish or inadequate.
The US, the world’s greatest supporter of terrorism, is the main financier of terrorist groups that stage attacks within Iran, and US money succeeded in financing protests against President Ahmadinejad’s re-election and in dividing the ruling Islamic clerics. It was American money, weapons, and diplomatic cover that enabled the Israeli war crimes against the Lebanese people during 2006 and against Palestinian civilians in Gaza during 2008-2009, crimes documented in the Goldstone Report.
It is interesting to note what happens to espionage cases in the United States. If you spy for China, or Cuba, or Iran you will be exposed, excoriated in the media, locked up and denied bail, convicted, and sentenced to many years in a federal prison.
Spies are traitors in every sense of the word, unless, of course, if one is spying for Israel.
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