Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
President Bush’s Mistaken 9/11 Speech
Bush Granted Moral Equivalence of 9/11 Perpetrators With the Wrong “Domestic Terrorists.” It Should Go To “May 19” and Their Successors, Not January 6th.
Many of us, I suspect, are relieved that the 20th Anniversary of September 11, 2001, is over. Most have moved on, back to work, to the continuing crisis in Afghanistan, an election in California, and other issues at home. It was not fun to relive the horror of that day, the loss of life, and the anger it rekindled. But it was necessary.
For the most part, the remembrances and events of the day were well suited to the occasion. Many of us chose to highlight some of the “silver linings,” from acts of heroism to the kindness of strangers in places like Gander, Newfoundland.
Sadly, the remembrances did not rekindle the national unity we experienced after that terrorist attack.
And former President George W. Bush didn’t help matters with an ill-advised reference in an otherwise fine speech in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the sight where 33 courageous passengers of United Flight 93 helped force down an airplane that most believe was headed towards the US Capitol.
The reference was this:
“The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within.
There’s little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
Two problems here. First, not everyone finds “comfort” in the “security measures” incorporated into our lives, including “sneak and peek” warrants. Some believe those measures instigated a “surveillance state” that is trading freedom for security. While our freedom to speak and live is much more threatened by wokeist cancel culture and tech censorship, some post 9/11 measures, such as the Patriot Act, have been abused. Many of the original Patriot Act provisions have expired or been changed.
Second, Bush appeared to place the January 6th Capitol rioters and “paraders” on the same fetid moral grounds as the 9/11 attackers. Not expressly, but that’s how many interpreted it, including mind-mannered journalist Byron York of the Washington Examiner and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. Bush hasn’t denied it. “Children of the same foul spirit,” Bush said.
That’s an equivalence the first person sentenced from the January 6th Capitol incursion, 49-year-old grandmother Anna Morgan-Lloyd of Bloomington, Indiana, might take exception to.
Somehow, I don’t acquaint Anna Morgan-Lloyd’s parading inside the Capitol – which is illegal – with what Mohammed Atta did on 9/11. Or any of the other foreign nationals who hijacked 4 commercial aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and into the ground near Shanksville.
Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old from Bloomfield, Indiana, was sentenced to three years of probation, 120 hours of community service, and ordered to pay $500 in restitution.
Prosecutors say that she did not engage in any violence or vandalism, and had no premeditated plan to enter the Capitol that day. She did post a photo with friends inside the Capitol and wrote on Facebook that it was the “best day ever.”
“Legally, I could give you the six months,” Judge Royce Lamberth told Lloyd. “But is that what really we want our judiciary to do?”
I’m sorry that I have to repeat this. As someone who has spent most of my 44-year professional career in and around the Capitol, I was horrified by the terrible events of January 6, 2020. You do the crime, and you do the time.
But let’s also be honest. There’s much we don’t know about the events of that day, still, especially since some 1,400 hours of surveillance video has yet to be released to the public that might help tell the story. And in a Rasmussen survey published September 14th, 49% of Americans polled believe those charged from January 6th incursion are “political prisoners.” Forty-two percent disagree.
And I need to say this, too. George W. Bush is the arguably most decent human being ever to have served as President, at least in modern times. His decency is a hallmark of his remarkable family. I worked in his father’s Administration. I supported every single one of Bush 41’s and 43’s presidential campaigns, including 1980. Bush’s support for wounded veterans, his presidential comportment, and his compassion for immigrants is legendary, some say to a fault. We disagree on some things. But being a good and decent person doesn’t prevent you from being wrong, sometimes spectacularly so.
Bush could have easily have found a more relevant group of domestic “terrorists” to equate with 9/11 terrorists. For example, May 19th, or M19 for short – a female-led home-grown terrorist network that was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s that broke into FBI offices, including one in Media, Pennsylvania in 1973 and bombed several federal offices and buildings, including Roosevelt Hall at Fort Lesley J. McNair, home of the National War College, on April 26, 1983. They also bombed the Computer Center at the Washington Navy Yard and the Navy Yard Officers Club around the same time.
They also bombed the U. S. Capitol on November 7, 1983. William Rosenau wrote a book about May 19 (the birthday of the late Malcolm X and North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh). I highly recommend it.
Some of the names may ring a bell, such as Susan Rosenberg, an M19 leader. Susan Rosenberg nor the others finally charged for that bombing in 1988 were ever convicted or sentenced because they were also serving time for previous terror attacks. From William Rosenau’s book, chapter 12:
“At 10:48 p.m. on the seventh (November, 1983), a call came in to the Capitol switchboard. “Listen carefully, I’m only going to tell you one time,” a male caller told the operator. “There is a bomb in the Capitol Building. It will go off in five minutes. Evacuate the building.” Then he hung up.
At 10:58 p.m., a blast went off on the second floor of the structure’s north wing. The explosive load blew doors off their hinges, shattered chandeliers, ripped into a stately portrait of Daniel Webster, and sent a show of pulverized glass, brick, and plaster into the Republican cloakroom. Security guards gagged on the dust and smoke. The shock wave from the bomb was reported to have sounded like a sonic boom. A jogger outside on the Capitol grounds heard the blast: “It was loud enough to make my ears hurt,” she said. “It kept echoing and echoing — boom, boom.”
The blast left a fifteen-foot-wide crater in a wall. . . National Public Radio received a message from the Armed Resistance Unit: “Tonight we bombed the US Capitol.”
May 19 and its various other names usually timed their bombs to destroy property but not harm people – to “send a message.”
And May 19, through Rosenberg, is connected with last summer’s violent riots.
During President Bill Clinton’s last hours in office on January 19, 2001, he commuted the remainder of Rosenberg’s 58-year sentence (she served 16 years). She now does speeches and raises money for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization under the auspices of an organization called “Thousand Currents.” Elements of BLM, along with Antifa and anarchists, were hectic last year doing M19 kinds of things under the guise of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. You remember the 570 violent events in 140 US cities over much of last summer, as detailed by RealClearInvestigations.
Just curious. What kind of person takes a call from a convicted terrorist who blew up part of the US Capitol and agrees to contribute to her “cause?” Children of the same foul spirit, indeed.
While the January 6th rioters assaulted 140 police officers, 2,037 were injured during the BLM/Antifa riots. Twelve were shot. One died, St. Louis Police Captain David Dorn.
Democrats cheered Bush’s speech, even though I don’t recall many kind words from them about him or his presidency. It’s not hard to figure out why. Bush played into the narrative Democrats are pushing – that January 6th’s incursion was an “insurrection” and, as Biden told a joint session of Congress, “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Biden inherited 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan when he took office, while Nancy Pelosi and others demanded 25,000 National Guard troops at the US Capitol for at least four months. Some are still there.
We continue to be told that “a national threat priority” comes from “extremists (who) may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.” You anti-maskers! Anti-vaxxers! Terrorists! I don’t know what’s been politicized more: the COVID pandemic or the January 6th incursion. It’s a close call.
Yes, we have a history of domestic terrorism and violent acts in the US Capitol and around the country going back to the Civil War, if not before. Since 2001, there have been 541 terrorist attacks on US soil. We will see more, even though the global trend has been down over the past several years. But thanks in no small measure to Biden’s horrific and shameful withdrawal in Afghanistan, it is returning as a haven for terrorists. And that’s one reminder of 9/11 we must prepare for.
Published in General
This post was promoted to the Main Feed by a Ricochet Editor at the recommendation of Ricochet members.
Like this post? Want to comment? Join Ricochet’s community
of conservatives and be part of the conversation. Join Ricochet for Free.
There are 24 comments.
Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.
Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.
I will admit to not previously being that down on this Bush, mostly because of the manner in which he was demonized by the left while in office, and because he kept Al Gore and John Kerry from the Presidency.
However, he’s now dead to me for reasons that are not CoC compatible.
And to the families of the 3,000 killed on 9/11, you think you have it bad? Well someone put their feet a Speaker Pelosi’s desk without first wiping them on the welcome mat, so we all have our crosses to bear.
His statement is mysterious and vague.
I believe it’s defensive. His administration implemented the Patriot Act, and it seems he’s quite proud of it. That the justification for the “extremists at home”.
There are all kinds of “extremists”.
I wouldn’t be too afraid if benign representatives were in control of the NSA and other Intel/Enforcement agencies. But that’s not the case. And it would be naive to believe that such power would remain in control of the ‘forces of good’ for very long. And they haven’t, if they ever were.
So either W is too stupid to see that ( I was a defender of his intelligence back in the day) or he doesn’t much care.
Our Federal law enforcement and Intel agencies are not here to prevent every random bombing.
I don’t normally give much credence to wink-wink-nudge-nudge dog-whistles and parsed vagaries, but Bush clearly twice separated into two groups home-grown domestic terrorists and overseas terrorists; and though drawing the distinction, clearly linked and characterized their motives and methods as the same. He didn’t speak up about anti-fa or BLM at the time so I doubt that he was referring to them. This is pretty apparent to me that he was referring to what the entire U.S. government has singled out as “the number-one threat to the United States”: labelling “white supremacists” as domestic terrorists.
Sometimes it seems like they FIRST identify certain people who get involved with violent acts as “domestic terrorists,” and THEN – to differentiate them from BLM etc who they believe must be tolerated and even celebrated – they label them as “white supremacists” which is actually the WORST thing, of course. To them.
“they are children of the same foul spirit…”
Who wrote this for him?
Peggy Noonan? Some other WSJ contributor with an English degree?
Or is he now a special preacher who can determine the spiritual odors of non-defined ‘extremists’?
This will not go away.
Bush43 is the worst president in US history. He is a bad guy and similar to Hunter Biden, except his addiction was to booze instead of crack. Bush43 failed up all the way to White House. One of the reasons he is the worst, is that he broke the country after 9/11 by saying anyone against his wars of choice was “unpatriotic”. I think his “you are either with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric put us on the path to having half our citizens being indifferent/uncaring/hateful of our country. It created a divide that Obama utilized to drive us further apart. If you follow the Colorado River upstream from the Grand Canyon, it is just small divide. Bush43 is the wellspring for all the division we now have in country.
Or maybe it was the terrorist attack itself that began separating those who really love and appreciate America from those who think it COULD BE great “if only…”
Absinth.
But a flourish of flowery poetically-evocative words hides a lot of meaning, or no meaning at all. It this case, I think it was a lot of foul meaning in disguise.
And yes, Bush 43 “knew how to speak to evangelical groups” and this is what he’s doing here.
I liked (or supported) Bush more when the Left hated him. Looking back he was the same mad globalist tool that his father was. I can’t say he was the worst President, maybe his father was.
What would you expect from someone who says that a warrior religion like Islam is a religion of peace?
Nope. We had great national Unity. Bush43 had a 91% approval rating. Everyone like firefighters and flags. Then Bush43 started calling dissenters of his crappy policy as unpatriotic.
Bush41 at least was a war hero. As a president, he was partly bound by Reagan’s policies. Of course, Bush41 was a coastal elitist and globalist and a tool of the Intellectual Community. He was a poor leader and failed to make political hay out of the fall of the Soviet Union. Bone head. However, it was Bush43 that nationalized public schools with NCLB and greatly expanded Medicaid without adding in market reforms or sustainability.
I neither disagree nor agree really. I look at it differently. I look at it as a dynastic progression, in which each person is not an individual but an extension of the parent. In other words, Bush 43 was nothing more than his father’s father’s son carrying on the family business goals of continuing the formation of the NWO (which is now apparently called the Great Reset) by specifically laying waste to the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then it was 0bama’s turn to destroy Syria and Libya. And it was supposed to be continued by Hillary. That’s why Jeb’s campaign was so late and lethargic: he had no real reason to run because he wasn’t supposed to win.
It really does look like a Uniparty to me. McCain, Romney and Jeb were never supposed to win. It was supposed to be 0bama, 0bama, Hillary and Hillary. But Trump messed things up. And so then we got hmmmm — Joe Biden, 0bama’s VP and 0bama’s administrative staff — who put the finishing touches on Afghanistan. What more is Biden going to do? Lose Taiwan and South Korea? Maybe I don’ really believe it, but it seems more plausible very time I think about it.
Of course this implies an overarching leadership, a group of puppet masters, a cabal or something. That’s why it seems so crazy.
I don’t think W. Bush is the worst, I reserve the low spots on my list for those who were innovative and unprecedented in their disregard of their oath of office. Bush had no imagination, everything in his playbook was taken from his predecessors. Actually, it’s amazing how similar he is to Woodrow Wilson. Their attitude towards global progressivism is identical.
And then there was Neill who was busy signing contracts for the family while his brother and nephew were in power. The Bushes, the Bidens? What’s the difference?
If Jeb had won the Florida governorship on his first run in 1994, then there would be no need for “plan B” (George) to be pushed into the presidency. Yes, if Jeb had won in 1994, we’d have never been subjected to George W as president.
Are you saying that we would have had President Jeb winning in 2000, or President Algore? Not sure either of those would have been better.
I realize that many consider Kurt Schlichter a bomb thrower but I agree with his premise in today’s Townhall column.
I’d encourage any Texas Ricochetti to vote against George P. Bush for whichever office he’s looking to advance in to there (or any of their progeny). It’s past time to bring (vote) that political dynasty to an end.
What about Hunter Biden vs Chelsea Clinton in the Democrat primaries?
Bush’s speech itself could have referred to Antifa and BLM. There was nothing in it that applied only to violent Trump supporters. Antifa and BLM …Defiling national symbols, check. Disregard for pluralism, check. Disregard for human life…Antifa and BLM killed people last year. I’ve never heard of any MAGA yahoo who’s killed anyone. I agree it’s likely he was referring to 1/6 but if so I think he outsmarted himself in his choice of words.
Them too. I don’t believe they announced running for anything. Yet.
Well, they do say that six people were killed or died as a result of the 1/6 event. With the police suicides it’s probably up to 8.
They say that..but the only person killed by another was Ashli Babbit.