"What A Week I'm Having!"
---Dr. Kornbluth, Marine Sciences/Crypto-zoologist

Just like Eugene Levy's character in "Splash!" I've had a rough week. Has it really been 5 years since I was woken up by my mom with an early morning phone call and told to turn on the news? I remember watching the 2nd plane hit the WTC live, and I remember feeling like suddenly the fabric of "reality" had been ripped away and I had seen something that couldn't exist. It would have been like suddenly seeing the sky disappear and seeing a giant man with a white beard tinkering with clockworks that powered the universe revealed.

My mind stopped working. I was dumbfounded. The feeling was only exacerbated when the first tower suddenly folded in on itself and I watched (what I thought was) 10,000 people die in an instant. When the 2nd tower went down I remember thinking, "this is the Apocalypse."

Do you remember those first days and weeks after the attacks? I remember crying for those New Yorkers, for those travellers on the planes, for those shlubs at work who were murdered. Only later when I learned of the cops and firemen who knowingly charged up the stairs of doomed buildings and were killed by falling debris, falling bodies, roiling smoke - did I realize I had underestimated the calamity.

Yet the bravery of those people stood out the most in my mind. I never, for even a moment, thought that whoever was behind these attacks had "beaten" us. I never for a second believed that this would be a catalyst to drive further wedges between Americans. For a few days, maybe even weeks, America felt like a family. I wondered about the futility of working in Hollywood, of writing fiction, of caring about silly new bands, of honking at slow cars, of not registering that all of those people around me were actually real with real lives.

September 11th changed all that.

I also remember feeling united. I felt we were at an historic moment and if we had been asked as a nation and as a people to participate in a Great Plan to right the wrongs of the world, I think we all would have done it. If Bush had gone on television and announced that every American needed to send in a check for $10,000 to help the suffering of the world, we would have done it. We would have had the Will, and that would have shown us the Way.

Instead, Bush squandered his golden moment. He blew our good will. He whored out our sense of duty and patriotism. He fucked us. He turned us against each other more than any other president ever had done. He made us hate each other like no one else has ever accomplished. He manipulated and used the events of that day to propagate an agenda that had nothing to do with the attacks.

It was if someone had walked up and punched a friend in the nose, and someone said, "give me your car keys, I'll chase that guy down and get him." So you handed over your car keys and waited. Later on, you found out that instead of catching the guy who socked your friend on the nose, the guy who borrowed your car actually went out and got drunk then went drag racing and finally drove your car into a drainage ditch. And then sent you the bill for the tow truck.

For 5 years I have been fighting this boiling rage when I think of those attacks and then what Bush has done with our sense of unity. We are spending over 8 billion dollars a month on this war in Iraq. It's a war that we know was based on multiple lies. The people who killed those New Yorkers and Washingtonians on 9/11 are still at large. We know for a fact that Bush's reluctance to commit the right number of troops allowed the murderers to escape in the siege of the Tora Bora compound.

He fucked us again. Now Bin Laden exists like an Orwellian bogeyman. He is trotted out any time Bush's poll numbers sag. He is used to cow us, to frighten us into being We The Sheeple. Fear is our daily dosage.

I spents some time watching all of the video links of 9/11 footage on the Truth Dig website, which is here. Of particular merit are 3 links on that page: 1.) David Letterman's speech on his first night back after the attacks, 2.) Jon Stewart's speech on his first night back, and 3.) a quad-split assemblage of images happening in real time of the WTC attacks with the real time footage of Bush arriving to read to that elementary school class.

As you watch this footage, you must remember that Bush was told by a Press Aide as his limo caravan pulled up that a jetliner had crashed into the WTC. As he got of his limo, Bush was pulled aside and Karl Rove repeated the information. So before Bush even went inside he knew that horrific loss of life had just happened. This is not the 7 minutes that he sat there looking like a deer in the headlights, as documented in the "Fahrenheit 9/11" movie. Watch this clip. It will make you boil with anger.

This clip demonstrates why you don't elect a moron to be your leader. It shows why you don't allow someone with a negligible intellect to be commander in chief of your armed forces. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you need to have a leader who is capable of grasping the meaning of events and knows how to sort information and make decisions. Bush clearly, obviously, painfully was demonstrated not to be this person.

Listen to the other clips, and hear a man trapped on the 105th floor beg for the fire department to hurry up and rescue them and then watch in horror, as the tower begins to collapse and you hear the man scream and then the call is cut off. The man had young kids at home. Watch other people leap to their deaths. My friend Alex has a friend who lost his father on one of the planes that crashed into the WTC. Where is justice for this son? Watch horror beyond comprehension and then recall that Bush's incompetence allowed these murderers to go free. 5 years later and Bin Laden is still a free man, the hunt for him given up so that he could settle a score against Hussein.

I have not lost that sense of belonging to something large and beautiful. The concept of an America with shared values still lives, despite the Republican efforts to tar their opposition as cowards, appeasers, terrorists, Nazi sympathizers, and traitors. Republicans have used all those terms to describe Democrats, and I'm not talking about the man on the street; these are elected congressman and senators who've used this rhetoric. I for one am sick of this bullshit. It's no longer acceptable to allow these lies to fly around unchecked. Any time someone defends the Bush record or attempts to label a critic as unpatriotic, remember those thousands of dead killed on 9/11. Remember the families they left behind. And when you remember, let that anger boil up and then rip the veil of delusion from those person's eyes and explain all of the ways Bush failed, lied, fucked up, and botched the job he was trusted with.

This November, turn the Republicans out of office. Our democracy has been attacked. Not by Bin Laden but by the Bush cult who have sought to strip away our freedoms and liberties, who have engaged in torture, hiding suspected militants in illegal overseas prisons, illegal wiretapping, paying the press to write favorable stories which is the same as censoring the press, curtailing free speech and intelligent debate by labelling the opposition as traitors and so on. They have not won. They have not succeeded in turning this America into a free-market version of a totalitarian theological society. We are better. We are stronger.

It's now your duty to use your democratic freedoms to bring this country back from its strange delusion.

Read the following piece by Keith Olberman and try to use his example.

Thanks,
Paul


Keoth Olberman - 9/11

This hole in the ground

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Sept. 11, 2006 | 3:19 p.m. ET