Tag: 9/11

Bin Laden Dead. We Have the Body

Osama Bin Laden killed in a US attack and we have the body. It will soon be popular to nay say this or use it as a platform to attack someone or something but for now everyone should rejoice to the end of his existence.

I cant even focus on the news unraveling cuz im just waiting for the hipsters, hippies, grad students and toocool4schoolers to start mocking the [totally valid] celebration with “A’merika Fuk Ya, lol #imperialism” Photoshops and texts while they high five each other endlessly over how clever and above-it-all they are…

Update: That was fast… already on Twitter, this update comes into my feed:

Naysaying tip: “Does this eliminate the US foreign policy that caused his anger to begin with?” is the worst question to ask now, but terrible to ask at any time. It has reminded me however that that specious line of argument even exists though. I can’t caution enough against the moral depravity and intellectual foolishness in falling into the “it’s our fault they murder us” trap. Asking “what made him angry with us” enough to order the murder of all Americans in any country is disgusting. When you have a Hitler, a Stalin, a Bin Laden, a Saddam or a KKK lynch mob on your hands, you are a fool to take their murders as legit responses to government policies. The standpoint of asking “why are they angry with us” has no shred of merit.

Update: President Obama’s Address to the Nation about this is excellent. Watching it as I type and he’s nailing it. From facial expression to speech delivery – he GOT this.

Update: He’s doing his trademark “i” disease and ruining it… making it all about him… c’mon dude. show a little class and talk about the intelligence, military – earn unassailable points from your opposition and supporters alike by dropping a shoutout to your predecessor perhaps (Update: Obama mentioned that G.W. Bush said, as Obama is reiterating now, that we’re not at war with Islam) – less of this “i” and “me” and “under my direction”. It’s tacky. You’re addressing a democracy, not subjects in a dictatorship. This is a Presidential Address, not a blog…

Interesting notice from @NewYorkObserver on twitter: Look at Obama’s face when Seth Meyers made joke about Bin Laden last night:

Best reactions on Twitter:

@buckhollywood Worst Timing Ever: @LadyGaga- Are monsters ready for me to announce the premiere of The Judas Video? The Motorcycle Fellini Pop Art Fantasy?!

@BillyHallowell I’d argue Bin Laden was already dead inside before this happened, but now…it’s official.

@jpuopolo: CIA finally unlocked the Killed Bin Laden Badge! They have been working on that one for years!

Update: Fox News is playing footage of large crowds in the streets of DC changing USA and waving flags in celebration and I admit that the hipster in me is compelled to naysay it too..but…logically, I find no way to. If you agree mass murderers are evil, then you agree that their deaths are celebratory events…so… fuck ya, USA.

Haunting tales of the Twin Towers jumpers on 9/11

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did — who jumped — appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

Read more: The Falling Man – Tom Junod – 9/11 Suicide Photograph via Esquire.com

Another story from the Daily Mail:

For those who have discovered that their loved ones may have been among the estimated 200 or more who plunged to their deaths, this uncomfortable official reticence can only compound the suffering they have already endured.

University administrator Jack Gentul cannot possibly imagine his late wife’s torment before she died. Alayne Gentul, mother of two and the 44-year-old vice president of an investment company, was in the South Tower and had gone up to the 97th floor to help evacuate staff after the other tower was hit. In her final moments, she rang Jack to say in labouring breaths that smoke was coming into her room through vents.

‘She said “I’m scared”,’ he tells me quietly. ‘She wasn’t a person who got scared, and I said, “Honey, it’ll be all right, it’ll be all right, you’ll get down”.’

Alayne Gentul’s remains were found in the street outside the building across from the tower — sufficiently far from the rubble to suggest she had jumped. Mr Gentul, who has since remarried, is not convinced she took that option but is clearly irked that some believe jumping was some sort of cop-out.

‘She was a very practical person who would have done whatever she could to survive,’ he explains in a quiet voice. ‘But how can anyone know what one would do in a situation like that, having to choose how you go from this Earth?’

The notion that she jumped is, indeed, consoling to Mr Gentul in some ways, in that she exercised an element of control over her death.

‘Jumping is something you can choose to do,’ he says. ‘To be out of the smoke and the heat, to be out in the air, it must have felt like flying.’

Race-baiting Glenn Beck Boycott is an Epic Fail

A few weeks ago, a group no one has ever heard of, called Color of Change, started a boycott against Fox News opinion show host Glenn Beck because Beck stated an opinion they found unacceptable: Beck said he thinks Barack Obama is essentially racist (oh no he di-int!).

Color of Change, under the headline Stop the race baiting,  immediately organized Beck-haters to call or contact advertisers  to notify they will be boycotting their product as long as they continue to run their ads on Beck’s show.

stoptheracebaiting.hypocrisy

Problem: Van Jones, the leader of Color of Change is the Dictator of Race Batia. He has first place trophies on his shelves for the annual Race Bating County Fair. If he were on the supreme court he would be Race Bater Ginsburg.

The picture to the right from the Hannity show makes it look like Van Jones is wearing a Hannity pin on his jacket. so. like. i thought that was funny.

First: Jones called President Bush a racist…

Stop the race baiting? In a Sept. 1, 2005 Huffington Post op-ed, “Bush’s Role in the Drowning of New Orleans,” Jones wrote:

Don’t say that a hurricane destroyed New Orleans. Hurricanes don’t drown cities.It was a “perfect storm” of a different kind that put that great city underwater: Bush-era neglect of our national infrastructure, combined with runaway global warming and a deep contempt for poor African-Americans. [emphasis added]

Hmmm. Should someone be getting outraged over a person accusing the President of being a racist, if..um.. they called the President a fkking racist?

Van “Stop the Race Baiting” Jones also thinks white people are poisoning black communities. Hmm. that’s a pretty inflammatorily race baiting accusation. Plenty evidence to call this hypocrite boycott against Beck a fraud and and a scam, but as the late Billy Mays would say: But wait! there’s more!

Goodness… So the guy Beck has been calling out then orders a boycott against Beck for saying one thing that was less offensive than any of the things he himself has said. and he works in the Obama administration. Awesome.

Oh ya, and he thinks President Bush was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Maybe he changed his mind though? Cuz last night he issued a statement apologizing and said the petition he signed suggesting that President Bush “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen” perhaps to justify war in Afghanistan or Iraq, “does not reflect my views now or ever.” Except, it seems that “or ever” should have had an asterisk after it to clarify that in *this* case “ever” means “except in 2002 when he endorsed the same claim”.

An administration source told Jake Tapper of ABC News that Van “Stop the Race Baiting” Jones did not carefully review the language in the 9/11 conspiracy petition before agreeing to add his name in 2004 – but oops – this morning information surfaced that shows Jones was on the organizing committee of a 2002 march making the same 9/11 conspiracy claims.

clinton-van-jones1
Van Jones pictured with the 3 most powerful men in the world

It’s all no big deal though, right? It’s not like he’s a Republican or anything (then it would be REALLY serious).

Okay, so Van Jones is a raging hypocrite and a master-race-bater who is almost as intolerant of white people as he is of criticism. Big deal. What liberal isn’t, right? (yuk yuk). Charles Krauthammer nails it in the video below where he rightly notes that calling Republicans assholes and the fact that he had admitted to being an actual Communist [and black nationalist] may be lame and all but pretty small potatoes, but goes on to say that being a 9/11 conspiracy wingnut IS in fact a big ass fkking deal showing signs of psychotic paranoia and must disqualify you from working in the federal fricken government.

As for that “stop the race baiting” boycott? Fail.
A few advertisers simply diverted their commercials on Fox News to other programs on the channel rather than Beck’s. Some boycott. Color of Change allegedly lied about advertisers dropping out, and Beck’s ratings have never been higher. His show airs at 5 freakin PM eastern (2pm Pacific) and is getting at least 2.5 million and often going over 3 million viewers. To put in context how massive 3 million viewers is on a daytime cable news channel, consider this perspective: The CBS Evening News averages about 4 million viewers a night. The Daily Show and Colbert Report each get around 1.5 million viewers a night, in primetime.

Far from Beck even inching in the direction of losing his job, to make things even more hilariously embarrassing: many are predicting that Jones will be the victim of “backfire scheme of the year” and have to resign before Monday.

EPIC FAIL.

*UPDATE: Midnight Sunday morning, as predicted, Van Jones resigned…


9/11 Anniversary. McCain and Obama visit ground zero

7th anniversary already. Bush 7, terrorists 0? or did they just get bored with us and decide to give the whole jihadist war on the Great Satan a rest for 7 to 10?

McCain and Obama at ground zero today, shook hands, then dropped roses in the memorial pool at the still unreconstructed site (no excuse for that) of the former World Trade Center in Manhattan. Demonstrators (mostly truthers) were out making a scene or course.

The two candidates met with firemen, police and others involved in the terrifying aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in which Al-Qaeda-hijacked airliners hit and demolished the Twin Towers.

The most striking thing about this video is clear I think: not the unity or spectacle of the contrasting opponents side by side or any of that garbage. It’s their walks. They both have silly walks… McCain waddles. Obama sways his arms and shoulders like a 1920’s cartoon. Ya, McCain is old and was tortured for a bunch of years which might excuse his a little, but what’s Obama’s explanation for that ridiculous swagger? I think this makes the election clear at this point. America needs to decide whether they want a president who waddles or limply swaggers.

The truce extended later to a televised forum where the two half-jokingly offered each other the job of cabinet secretary for civic service in their respective administrations.

McCain praised Obama’s “outstanding” early career as a community activist in Chicago — reversing belittling comments made previously by his running mate Sarah Palin — while Obama called his rival’s lifetime of service “inspirational.”

Exit: I wasn’t an Instapundit reader at the time, but its interesting to see the event unfold in Reynolds unique blogging format. Archive of Instapundit.com from 9/11/01 here.

How Modern Liberals Think

A speech full of astute observations on modern liberals.
The thesis: that it is through a passionate pursuit of utopianism that Liberals go so against established logical norms. That because none of these ideas, moral codes, philosophies, etc have worked in producing an ideal world, they must be rejected in favor of the ideas, codes and philosophies they compete against. They reject (what western society had previously established as) common sense and conventional wisdom precisely because they are common and conventional.
Evan Sayet was a writer for “The Arsenio Hall Show” and then the very first Creative Consultant on “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher”.

From March 5, 2007
Featuring: Evan Sayet. Writer, Lecturer and Pundit.
Hosted by: Becky Norton Dunlop, Vice President, External Relations, The Heritage Foundation.