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Babs and crowd have no business criticizing Bush for delaying ANYHING. Just for a reminder:

From the MRC's "Notable Quotables" Archives
October 1, 2001

http://www.mrc.org/notablequotables/2001/nq20011001.asp

Don’t Frighten the "Allies"

"This was a very firm message to the international community, and it’s not necessarily the message those abroad wanted to hear. Moderate Arab nations, even NATO allies, were not looking for a lot of bellicose language about war. They weren’t looking for ultimatums, but that’s what they got, and that’s what they’ve been hearing in private. In fact, the only thing that I think some of the nations abroad, especially the moderate Arab nations, were looking to hear was the fact that this is not a war against Islam, it’s not a war against Arabs. They got that part of the message, but for the most part, this is not going to be reassuring to the international community, which was looking for something probably a little bit softer."
-- ABC’s Claire Shipman following President Bush’s address to Congress on September 20.

...AND THE UGLY

Rebuking American Arrogance

"Whoever attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and our sense of daily trust and freedom, must be found. But America must find itself, too. The targets clearly represented America’s global power, a power that is not innocent of arrogance, either militarily or economically. With all the condolence that can be offered, it is incongruent to think that the world’s leading exporter of the tools of death and destruction would not someday be visited with an evil in return."
-- Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson, Sept. 12.

"When stock traders sing ‘God Bless America,’ and [New York Stock Exchange CEO Dick] Grasso says, ‘America is ready to go back to business,’ it is unclear how much of America’s business is worthy of God’s blessing. So much of it is so obviously decadent, a nation of SUVs backing out of huge, energy-sucking suburban houses to purchase insane stores of food at Sam’s Club – with a stop at Starbucks along the way. There is no regard to how it came to be that the rich can get goods and grains so cheaply while the poorest 20 percent of the world can access only five percent of the world’s meat and fish."
-- Jackson’s column in the September 19 Boston Globe.

"Americans felt they had the power, and the right, to act alone, to pursue national interests regardless of the wishes of others. In that spirit...a new administration came to Washington this year determined to pursue its vision of American interests without much regard for the wishes of others, even old allies. The United States, the world’s finest monument to the rule of law, has often shied away from international arrangements that might protect our interests. At home we long ago rejected the idea that might makes right; in world affairs we’ve been much less certain. Now, ironically, we have been attacked by murderers who, through twisted logic and a blinding hatred, seem to have concluded that their might will set us right."
-- Washington Post Associate Editor Robert Kaiser writing in the September 16 "Outlook" section.

Consumerism = Terrorism

"There are billions of have-nots in our world. Most of them lack adequate housing, basic sanitation, access to health care, clean water and decent food -- not to mention a lack of schools, cars, televisions or telephones. When one U.S. Congressman said on the House floor that he wanted to make those responsible for the acts of terrorism 'rue the day they were born,' he seemed unaware that for many people in the targeted areas, death would be a relief. "...question your own appetites and desires and think about their impact on the world. The next time we go shopping, note that those $100 sneakers that you like so much cost only $2 to make in some foreign sweatshop. And the diamonds that adorn so many fingers and ears may have cost some boy in Africa his fingers and ears."
-- Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy, September 19.

Despising the Stars and Stripes

"My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I’m wrong – the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way we’re both right....[The flag] has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses."
-- The Nation’s Katha Pollitt in an October 8 column.

U.S. Also Guilty of Mass Murder

"Am I angry? You bet I am. I am an American citizen, and my leaders have taken my money to fund mass murder. And now my friends have paid the price with their lives.
"Keep crying, Mr. Bush. Keep running to Omaha or wherever it is you go while others die, just as you ran during Vietnam while claiming to be ‘on duty’ in the Air National Guard. Nine boys from my high school died in that miserable war. And now you are asking for ‘unity’ so you can start another one? Do not insult me or my country like this!
"Yes, I, too, will be in church at noon today, on this national day of mourning. I will pray for you, and us, and the children of New York, and the children of this sad and ugly world ."
-- Message posted by left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore on his Web site, September 14.

America, Nation of Cowards

"The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards."
-- Novelist and playwright Susan Sontag writing for the "Talk of the Town" section of the Sept. 24 New Yorker.

Separated at Birth?

"We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away, that’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, not cowardly."
-- ABC’s Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, September 17.

"You people are cowards, who’s throwing missiles from thousands miles, an act of cowardice. Don’t expect this kind of cowardness from us."
-- Khalid Kwaja, described by Dan Rather as "Osama bin Laden’s teacher, comrade-in-arms and spiritual brother," in a July interview with CBS shown on 60 Minutes II Sept. 17.

PLUS THE TRULY INANE

Real Problem: Male Nixonites

"Rather than seek the ideas of young, and possibly female, experts with new ideas, Washington Post op-editors give column inches to Nixon administration Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Nixon speechwriter George Will. The Post editors are apparently time-warped by the soothing sounds [of] the failed patriarchs of the past: Former Nixon advisor Donald Rumsfeld, and former Nixon administration bureaucrat Dick Cheney, our Vice President ‘in charge of the government,’ as network television reassuringly put it, while President Bush officially went missing when Manhattan’s towers crumbled."
-- Former Time magazine correspondent Nina Burleigh, in a Sept. 12 commentary for TomPaine.com.

If Only Welfare State Were Bigger

"We have gone through, I think, a kind of, what I would call a silly season, of thinking that there is really no need for a federal government, when in fact the federal government fought the Civil War, solved the Great Depression, fought the First and Second World Wars, won the Cold War. And now we’re going...to find out why we are not just a loose confederation of states, but a republic and a federal national government and that’s what this period is for."
-- NPR’s Nina Totenberg on Inside Washington, Sept. 22.

Call It an "Unpleasant Incident"

"We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist....To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack."
-- Steven Jukes, global head of news for Reuters News Service, in an internal memo cited by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz in a September 24 article.