I watched the "tribute" video to the victims of 9/11, and greatly appreciated Keith Olbermann's comment that, if any tv network had run that footage, they would have been quite rightly excoriated for exploitation of people's grief and loss. Something else in the crawl at the bottom of the screen nagged at me, though: "McCain will give his acceptance speech at 10:11 PM ET." Why on earth such a specific time? Oh, yeah: Minnesota isn't in the Eastern time zone; it's in Central. In other words, John McCain will accept the 9/11 party's nomination at 9:11, a week to the day before the 7th anniversary.
I just finished Fareed Zakaria's latest book, The Post-American World, yesterday. He talks at length about the way that Dick Cheney has taken to heart Machiavelli's maxim that it is better to be feared than to be loved, pointing out that fear was the cornerstone of the failed policy of the Evil Empire, while being loved (or at least liked) was a key element of the success of the United States in the Cold War. In the last 7 years, President Bush has alienated our friends and allies, destroying decades of goodwill; indeed, it is only the goodwill that most of the world holds for the people of the United States that has saved us from the worst of the backlash against our government and its policies.
The path to victory over terrorism is not easy, but it is quite clear. We must stop living in fear, using the fear of terrorism to score partisan political points, leaving our friends in fear of our overreaction to the inevitable next terror attack. We must work to build a true global coalition to shut down the terror networks, and we must work assiduously to regain the trust and admiration that Bush has so glibly squandered. When 19 people with a total budget of $500,000 can bring our nation to its knees, no amount of militaristic bluster can possibly instill the level of fear required to dissuade every possible terrorist.
Rudy Giuliani lost the Republican nomination, but it is clear that the GOP is intent on remaining the 9/11 Party. It's shameful, it's exploitative, and it's downright dangerous, both to our domestic politics and to our international relations. It feeds and emboldens, rather than discourages, terorrism.
Shame on the 9/11 Party for once again going to the "wolves at the door" well, and shame on John McCain for agreeing to give his speech at 9:11.