[Warning: Profane Fisking Ahead]
But today he is a dickhead asshole motherfucking prickfaced liberal bastard.
Let’s start with the headline:
“On 9/11, government let us down”
No, you incredible cunt. Government was just as surprised as anyone else. This is like saying “On 12/7/1941, government let us down” and being an idiotarian revisionist fuckhead who claims FDR knew Pearl Harbor was going to happen and did nothing about it. I’d say that government did a pretty good job of not letting us down once the planes actually hit the buildings. I suspect Rudy Giuliani would say the same thing.
What should I write about 9/11, I asked a former New York City official who was in office when the World Trade Center collapsed. He said, “Write that the government let us down.”
Who is this prick? He needs to be removed from any political position he holds (or has ever held, retroactively). I see that Cohen never bothers to identify him. Maybe Cohen has invisible friends like Dick Gephardt.
Then he could not be stopped. He started with the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and what was learned about Al Qaeda and terrorism then. He went on to the bombing of the Cole and how that was for sure an Al Qaeda operation. He did not mention the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers, a residence for American servicemen in Saudi Arabia, but he did mention the bombing of two American embassies in Africa. Those cost 224 lives.
All of which happened on which President’s watch? Started with a C, seven letters, ugly bitch wife now in the Senate…yes, Bill CLINTON’s watch. Although at the time he was probably watching interns nibble at his crotch, which may explain his distraction.
It has been almost a year since Sept. 11, but still the anger was in his voice. The government should have known something was coming, he said. The government should have done something.
Yes, and the government ought to give us all a lollypop and tuck us in at night. FUCK YOU.
“I lost a lot of good men,” he said. “What people don’t know, the best died that day. The best men we had.”
Oh, YOU lost a lot of good men? (Must be a fire official.) YOU lost a lot of good men? WE ALL LOST A LOT OF GOOD MEN AND WOMEN, YOU OFFICIOUS BUTTWIPE. And they weren’t all in your precious New York City, either. Some of them died in Pennsylvania thwarting 25% of the day’s attacks. A bunch more died at the Pentagon. It wasn’t limited to your little area of influence.
At whom should our anger be directed? Well, certainly at the murderers and those who helped them. Kill them all. But a piece of the outrage has to be reserved for the government. It screwed up.
Regardless of what you say, Mr. Cohen, you smart boys in the media screwed up too. I don’t recall any articles in the paper suggesting that terror attacks by al-Qaeda using civilian airliners against large buildings in our main cities were imminent. Yet you reporter types always manage to find out other things you aren’t supposed to know about. How did you miss this?
That was the message of a column I wrote shortly after Sept. 11. I called the terrorist attack a “massive intelligence failure,” which it was on its face. Back then, though, we knew little. I pointed out that there had been ample warnings, including an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which William Cohen, then secretary of defense, had warned of the imminence of a terrorist attack. Almost no one paid attention.
William Cohen was Secretary of Defense on 9/11? You write poorly, too. Get your antecedents right.
I’m sure a lot of people “listened”. The problem is that Democratic bullshit for the past 30 years has emasculated our intelligence services. How were we supposed to know anything was going to happen? You’re so smart, you didn’t figure it out either.
Now we know so much more. We know the Clinton administration was lethargic in trying to nail Osama Bin Laden. It mounted a missile attack on his Afghanistan compound, but when that failed, nothing much more was done.
We also know that the Clinton administration was offered bin Laden’s head on a platter and turned it down, even though they knew who he was and what he represented.
We also know, though, that government officials were growing increasingly concerned. National security adviser Sandy Berger told his replacement, Condoleezza Rice, that the Bush administration would spend more time on terrorism and Al Qaeda than any other subject. The new administration dawdled.
Like the previous one DIDN’T? What kind of morons do you take us for?
The FBI had warnings – tips about shenanigans at flight schools. The memos were filed and forgotten. The CIA was on the case but short on operatives who spoke Arabic or Pashto. The airlines were asleep. A terrorist was seized in the Philippines with a laptop stuffed with airline timetables, but no one was putting two and two together.
Again, this is hard to do with a Democratically-emasculated intellgence service.
Maybe in another column I will dwell on grief, mourn the dead and salute the heroes. But this one is to remind that 9/11 happened not because the terrorists were so competent, but because the government was so incompetent. From the Oval Office on down, what should have been done was not. Terrorists succeeded because the government failed.
Hmm. I thought they succeeded because someone at the Boston and Newark airports missed the box cutters in the terrorists’ luggage, and because we’re not allowed to racially profile people, but perhaps I’m too stupid to know the intricacies like Cohen does.
The former city official had one other thing to say. The people who died – the firefighters, cops, ordinary office workers – were often brave. But to label them all heroes, while sometimes apt, obscures the fact that they were also victims who were ill-served by their superiors, their equipment, their government.
What the fuck is THAT supposed to mean?
The tendency now is to play the sad bagpipes and fly the glorious flag and rally around those whose job it was to ensure that nothing like 9/11 ever happened. Yet it did.
Well, duh, you sanctimonious twat. Are you saying that they should not be honored for attempting to mitigate the disaster once it happened?
An accounting has yet to be made.
Yeah, of all the liberal wussy-faced clowns like you who need to be stood up against the wall and shot when the war on terrorism is over for being pansy left-wing jerkoffs.
This whole experience reminds me why I almost never read Richard Cohen columns. I guess from time to time I have to, in order to know the enemy.
