Indeed, my theory is that this is the main reason why we haven’t seen anything resembling a sequel to that attack since then – not just because it’s become a lot harder to pull off, but because Islamic supremacists belatedly realized how counterproductive 9/11 itself turned out to be.

And yes, invoking lost loved ones to justify your opinions is bad form. Let’s save that kind of talk and please focus on the issues.

@bubbles – You know the rules. Please stop the name calling. I don’t care if people are acting silly, you don’t need to top them by throwing around that stuff.

Intellectual integrity: Ur doin it rong!

But that’s the point, L. It’s not a simple remebracne if the innocents. It states unequivocably that there’s no difference between a deliberate act of evil and an unintended consequence.

I.e. there is, in fact, a difference between someone who deliberately burns your house down and your kooky Aunt Selma who forgot to turn off the oven.

But that point is lost on the ‘gerryfs’ of the world.

Way to be a bunch of douchebags.

War comes with many tragedies, notably the inevitable loss of innocents. Thank you Mike for remembering ALL who have lost their lives as a result of this tragedy: Americans, Afghanis, and Iraqis. I am sorry we are at the point where a simple remembrance of the innocents in war must turn in to political finger pointing and a blame game.

Since it is 9/11, lets be sure that we are specific about remembering the victims of 9/11 and of course the innocent victims of American military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We wouldn’t want to give the impression that we are trying to make a political point. Right?

And gerrf: Putting lipstick on an ad-hominem attack with no substantial rebuttal to any specific point being made is still an ad-hominem attack with no substantial rebuttal to any specific point being made.

Yeah that is nonsense, isn’t it? How could one possible define “success” in the war on terror as the absence of any successful terrorist attacks?

And as for Clinton (yes, I did vote for him)? Well there that failed attack on the WTC. Remeber? The one he treated like a criminal investigation instead of an act of war. Big success THAT was, wasn’t it? No more terror attacks after THAT.

Jimmy’s comment was spot on. There is no moral equivalency between the rat-bastards who attacked my country on 9/11 and the American soldiers, fallible as they are, who have NEVER intentionally targeted civilians.

You want to weep for someone? Weep for the millions of innocents who died at the hands of tyrants while holier-than-thou intellectual pacifists patted themselves righteously on the back for doing absolutely NOTHING.

Congratulations, Mike. You’re better than the rest of us. You’d never deign to muddy your lily-white hands with the dirty business of standing between evil and the innocents. Bravo.

Read into that what you will. I’m going to go wish my father a happy birthday.

No kidding! Eight years of terrorist bombing all across our great land! Allowing terrorist thugs to kill our children and destroy our homes & businesse…….

Nevermind…

Right, Mike?

Mike. I used to think Jimmy and those like him were honest conservatives who honestly disagree, but no person could read everything by others so consistently wrong.

It is the tried and true GOP strategy of grabbing on to one word or phrase (lipstick on a pig) and twisting it into something so outrageous as to make you lose your focus on the real issue.

Why?

Because they have nothing.

For eight years, the GOP has made mistake after mistake after mistake. They flaunted their arrogance and lied to their followers who are only too willing to believe because they think these people actually represent them.

Like fools, we spend all of our time saying, “That’s not what I meant!” and they laugh behind their hand because they beat you again.

They have nothing. Their ideas are old and don’t work for the vast majority of people. They retain power by dangling a carrot in front of sincere people and then slap thier knee is glee when those people by it. The worst thing is they despise most of the people who vote for them; they hold them in utter contempt for their stupidity and laugh all the way to voting booth.

God bless all the victims of 911, including the thousands of Iraqi and Afghan children who died as a result.

You were essentially making a proposal which was similar in nature to the one I articulated in the next post:

We should pray for all of the innocent victims in Iraq and Afghanistan, because, as with 9/11, the moral responsibility of all of those innocents being killed is borne upon the Islamic terrorists operating in those countries… The victims of 9/11 share a kinship, therefore, to the vitims of Islamic terrorism all over the world, from Algeria to Thailand.

I don’t see how you can spin it any other way. It sure sounds to me, though, like you were playing the moral equivalence canard.

It is my opinion that people like you want to drag us down to the level of the perpetrators

Is that what you mean when you are talking about the children of Iraq and Afghanistan? That “America” is acting like a terrorist? That the children of Iraq and Afghanistan are victims of “America” in the same, morally equivalent way that 3000 Americans were victims of Al-Qaeda?

I suppose then you are one of these guys who “supports the troops,” but you don’t support their missions. Well, someone is is dropping the laser guided bombs, someone is firing the artillery and firing the bullets from machine guns, and it ain’t president Bush. Are you prepared, therefore, to call out our troops for what they really are?

If a young arab man volunteers to strap on a suicide vest, walks into a crowded market place and detonates himself and everyone else around him on orders from Osama bin Laden, do you “support him” but not his mission?

From Mark Steyn:

Well, the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, declared during the Afghan campaign that the United States Air Force pilot and the suicide bomber are morally equivalent — both “can only see from a distance: the sort of distance from which you can’t see a face, meet the eyes of someone, hear who they are, imagine who and what they love. All violence works with that sort of distance.”

That doesn’t even work as glib lefty equivalence. The distinguishing feature of the suicide bomber is that he doesn’t see at a distance. He looks into your face, meets your eyes — and he still blows you up, because even face to face he can’t imagine who you are or what you love. He can’t see anything about you, other than that you’re the Other. So, like the Beslan schoolhouse slaughterers and Daniel Pearl’s decapitators, he looks into the eyes — and then he kills. The United States Air Force pilot is running on GPS technology — that blip’s a mosque, that one’s a nursery — and from hundreds of miles and thousands of feet he can still see the common humanity more clearly. And, most perplexing of all, he can see more clearly than the archbishop of Canterbury, insulated by the distance of his own assumptions.