Posts Tagged ‘World Trade Center’

Paul A. Rahe

George W. Bush Revisited

by Paul A. Rahe

He left office a year ago today. He has maintained a dignified silence in the last twelve months — even though his successor denounces him in almost every speech and acts as if he is still running against the man. I reviewed President Obama’s disastrous first year on Saturday. Today, I ask, “What, in retrospect, should we think of George W. Bush?”

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The first thing that needs to be said is that he meant well. He is not a vindictive man, and he sought to put behind him the controversies and turmoil of the Clinton years. He thought that his focus would be domestic policy, but, as tends to happen, events intervened.

Had it not been for 9/11, George W. Bush would probably have been a one-term President. He fell short of his adversary in the popular vote but won a majority in the electoral college. He was destined to be weak — but when disaster struck, he was in the line of fire, and he rose to the occasion.

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Posted Jan 20th 2010 at 5:43 am in Congress, Defense, Economics, Education, Featured Story, Healthcare, History, Obama, Politics, Tax Reform, federal spending | 142 Comments

Kyle Olson

Senate Dems and al Qaeda Agree: World Trade Center Represents American Greed

by Kyle Olson

It seems the Democrats have the art of poor taste down to a science.  Who else would think to use an image of the World Trade Center, destroyed by terrorists in 2001 because the towers were a symbol of American greed, to attack a Republican candidate over Wall Street “greed?”

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According to Politico, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ran an ad against Republican Scott Brown, accusing him of opposing a “plan to crack down on greed and corruption.”

Just when I think the Democrats can’t stoop any lower to retain the seat of the former champion of socialized medicine, they sink to using the tragedy of the World Trade Center.  But not in a way to say that Martha Coakley will stand up to terrorists - oh no, instead its used to exemplify what they see as the worst of America.

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Posted Jan 16th 2010 at 11:33 am in Politics, State Politics | 63 Comments

Publius

Democrats’ Worst Nightmare: Terrorism On Their Watch

by Publius

From Politico:

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From the time he launched his campaign for president three years ago, Barack Obama had to consider how he would react to the first serious act of terrorism during the campaign, or if he won, on his watch. His fellow Democrats had been thinking about the moment even longer – since the September day in 2001 when attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon defined George W. Bush’s presidency and gave Republicans a decisive advantage on a defining political issue.

And yet the White House’s response to last week’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit could rank as one of the low points of the new president’s first year. Over the course of five days, Obama’s Obama’ reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself.

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Posted Jan 2nd 2010 at 1:08 pm in Defense, News, Obama, Politics | 361 Comments

Michael Walsh

Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite: ACORN and the James Rainey Saga

by Michael Walsh

The hidden-camera videos by James O‘Keefe and Hannah Giles detailing the inner workings of the taxpayer-funded leftist racket known as ACORN have set off a storm of journalistic controversy, but not in the way one might think.  Rather than engaging the substance of the stories first made available on Big Government and later on Fox News – that ACORN, to put it generously, seems to be staffed by an inordinate number of employees blithely willing to aid and, if possible, abet criminal activity – the dinosaur media has reacted not by investigating the message but by attacking the messengers, all in the name of “journalistic ethics.”

Now, when a “journalist” – I prefer the days when we called ourselves “reporters” – starts lecturing his readers about the saintly nature of “journalism” you know that the entropic, self-referential MSM has just about hit bottom.  Long gone, apparently, are the days of the old Front Page, the 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur – filmed four times – that lovingly limned the street-smart, ink-stained wretches (in the late Herb Caen’s famous phrase) who would stop at nothing to Get The Story.  For decades – and certainly when I started in “journalism” in 1971 – this was model of the enterprising reporter: check your conscience at the bar, get the story, go home, go to bed, get up the next morning and do it all over again.  These guys were our heroes:

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Not pursuing a legitimate news story, as James Rainey and the rest of the Pecksniffian  bien-pensant staff of the once-great Los Angeles Times seem intent on doing, because the young reporters are “agents provocateurs” and “political guerillas,” is bad enough.  Who cares what they are?  It’s like saying Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns are scum-sucking bottom feeders who would steal milk bottles from babies and nickels from newsboys if they thought it was a Page One story; a badge-of-honor insult those old-school newshounds would have worn with pride, alongside the egg stains on their ties and the lipstick on their collars.

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Posted Nov 30th 2009 at 10:21 am in ACORN, Media Criticism, News, Politics | 80 Comments