Well, September 11, 2008 turned out to be a day of terror after all.

Not over some terrorist activity, but over a naturally-occurring gift from Mother Nature:  Hurricane Ike, which is currently poised to hit Texas.  Refineries have been shut down as the storm approaches, and gas prices along the gulf coast have risen sharply in reaction.  Rumors have been running rampant that gas is approaching the $5.00 mark, or at least will approach that price, if the hurricane does enough damage that refineries are delayed in reopening and the supply of gas dwindles.

I don’t know whether what happened next happened across the country or only here in the Lowcountry, but people heard reports on the radio of gas along the coast — the gulf coast — potentially reaching the $5.00 mark.  Then, like that little game we all played in grade school where you form a line and the first person whispers something to the second, and it continues down the line until the last person ends up with a completely different message, the “official” story became that gas prices here in Charleston were not only possibly headed towards the $5.00 mark, but that, inexplicably, they would magically jump up to five bucks a gallon today at 5:00pm.

Five at five?  Sounds like a great marketing ploy if whatever you sell is normally more than five bucks.  But it’s not the kind of thing you’d do to advertise a price hike.  And why 5:00pm?  Why not 4:00pm?  That way, they’d be sure to get even the rush hour traffic composed of people who sneak out of the office a bit early when the boss isn’t looking.

Gas stations all around Charleston were suddenly dealing with long lines of angry customers.  Some were suggesting — suggesting, mind you — that people limit their gas purchase to ten gallons…just in case.  Naturally, that fueled speculation of a potential gas shortage.

Suddenly, it was 1979 or so.

All afternoon, our newsroom was getting emails and telephone calls from people who had heard from a friend or a friend of a friend that gas prices were already up around $4.50.  We were hearing that people were getting nasty in line.  (As if a price of $4.50 wouldn’t come close to giving people a reason to be nasty!)  Some people had been informed that by Saturday, there would be no gas left.  Ever?  Seriously?

I had to get a few gallons’ worth of gas this evening, and I paid $3.65 a gallon.  Just last week, I paid about $3.45.  A nice two-dime increase in a single day.

And have I mentioned that this hurricane hasn’t made landfall, yet?  Of course, when has that ever stopped an oil company from sneaking the prices up?

I’m all for getting more hybrids on the road and reducing our dependence on oil as soon as possible.  But in the meantime, until hybrids are affordable for everyone, we need one more new law where gasoline is concerned:  under no circumstances can a gas station raise the price of gas they’ve already paid for and that is sitting in their tanks waiting to be pumped out, just because gas they buy some other time might be higher.

Can I get an amen?

Of course on a day like this, when everyone’s scrambling to get their gas before the pumps “go dry,” the normal rules of supply and demand would still trump the law:  with demand that high, there’s no way the price wasn’t going up.

Bin Laden’s probably laughing at all of this new terror.  I doubt if he could have done better himself.

The weather this morning when I left for work reminded me of an old Agatha Christie movie.  The title, in case you hadn’t guessed, was Evil Under the Sun.

It was set in a posh resort off the coast of Spain and featured the typical “all-star” cast, including Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot.  In one important scene, as a woman gazes down from a cliff at sunbathers below, she talks about how nice the bright sunshine makes everything seem.  Poirot then says this:

“The sky is blue, the sun is shining.  But you forget that everywhere, there is evil under the sun.”

The weather this morning was gloomy.  It was raining.  The sky was gray with thick clouds rolling slowly by without any glimpse of a bright sky behind them.  This is how September 11th ought to be, considering what happened on this date seven years ago.

Oddly enough, September 11, 2001 was not a gloomy day.  It was a bright day with a lot of sunshine.  No clouds in the sky.  It wasn’t the kind of day you’d expect something bad to happen.

Which is sort of the point, isn’t it?

It’s so easy to forget that evil really is everywhere, especially when things seem bright and clear.  But it’s always waiting, and it’s waiting to pull you in when you least expect it, and when it can do the most damage.

It’s also easy to pretend that evil only comes from the dark shadows of our lives.  From that random stranger who’s coming up to us to ask a simple question, but who we suspect must want something else or have some cruel intent.

But those we are close to, people we see every day, even people we love, have evil in them.  That’s hard to accept sometimes, but not as hard as this:  for many of us — myself included — among the darkest evil in a given moment is within us.  Most of us are pretty good at suppressing it.  We spend most of our times hiding it so no one would ever suspect.  But when we’re alone and we’re totally honest with ourselves, we know what the truth really is.

We all put our guard up on those “dark and stormy nights” when we think some boogey man is out to get us.  We need to keep our guard up when there isn’t a cloud in the sky.

And if we’re lucky, we find a few friends along the way to help us when we need it the most.

It’s hard to believe that it has already been seven years since that terrible morning in 2001.

I’ve blogged about how I spent that day in an edit bay, editing footage from the scene that was feeding in from Washington, New York and Pennsylvania.  I’ve talked about watching interview after interview of people dealing with unimaginable emotions, having just witnessed those terrible moments firsthand.  And I’ve talked about watching interviews of family members of those who lost their lives that day.  (Click here for some of my 9/11 posts.)

Somehow, it’s still fresh in my mind.  Not quite as if it were yesterday, but more like it was just a few months ago.

I watched some of the “as it happened” clips of 9/11 on YouTube last night.  I tried to avoid interviews there.  I’ve seen plenty of them since then.  A lot of people still can’t watch those images, and I understand that.  I guess we all deal with things in our own way, no matter how long it takes.

I hope you’ll take time today to remember the victims of 9/11, and their families whose struggle to cope will likely never end.

Did Saddam Hussein participate in the 9/11 terror attacks?

It’s a simple question, and the answer has been confirmed by official sources, including some at the White House.

But the answer still doesn’t come easily for some Americans. Continue reading “Six Years Later, The Myth Lingers”

A recent editorial in the Post & Courier asked if Americans are tired of revisiting the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In the article, a Massachusetts woman says this:

“I may sound callous, but doesn’t grieving have a shelf-life? We’re very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let’s wind it down.”

Yeah, I’d say callous is a good word. Continue reading “Another 9/11″

The last Patrick’s Place Poll asked how you felt about your safety in the five years since the 9/11 terror attacks.

Most people fell right in the middle, feeling about the same about their safety now as then, or a little better. But on the extremes, slightly more people said they felt much less safe than much more safe. Here are the results:

11%: “I feel much safer now.”
29%: “I feel a little safer now.”
29%: “I feel about the same now as then.”
18%: “I feel a little less safe now.”
14%: “I feel much less safe now.”

How much of your vote goes to how much security we feel since 9/11/01? A lot, a little, or are you more focused on other issues at this point?

It was a sunny, virtually cloudless morning in Manhattan. All indications on the ride to work likely indicated that a beautiful, perhaps even uneventful day was ahead.

Twenty-four-year-old Joshua Birnbaum had arrived for work at his job as an assistant bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center. For Josh, a career in finance was a logical step. He was extremely close to his family, and his dad worked in finance as well: one might say that it was in his blood.

But Joshua’s real passion was his music. He spun his aural concoctions of trance music under the name DJ Samsson, a name that served as a tribute to his father, Sam: “Sam’s Son.” He had spent a summer internship at Atlantic Records, where his mother, Marcel, says he made a “lasting impression.” His work at Cantor Fitzgerald was helping him save up enough money to one day build his own recording studio.

His best friend, Leehe, said his smile “always managed to light up the faces of those he surrounded himself with. He had a special charm, or aura, that always followed him wherever he went. His family and his music were the most important influences in his life.”

At 8:46am, American Airlines Flight 11 hits the north side of One World Trade Center between the 94th and 98th floors, just six floors below Joshua. Eyewitness accounts of those in the building at the time say that the impact caused vibrations that could be felt through the building all the way to the foundation. Those below the point of impact began evacuating. Those above those fire floors, Josh included, were trapped.

At some point after the crash, Joshua phoned his mother. He told her that something had hit the building and that there was smoke everywhere. He told her the ceiling was falling down around him. A news crew from the station I worked for at the time interviewed his family. I’ll never forget the footage of his mother recalling through tears the next thing he said in all-too-short conversation:

“I need to tell you I love you. I’m going to die.”

As further evidence of this close-knit family’s love, Marcel does something extraordinary at this point. Rather than trying to keep him on the telephone for every possible moment, if he was living his final ones, she selflessly offers a final piece of advice to her son: she tells him to find someone else on the floor and stay with them so that he won’t be alone. Shortly after that, the telephone line went dead.

Fast forward to January, 2002. Josh’s sister, Jill, stands at the finish line of the San Diego Marathon to fulfill a final promise to her brother. The two had planned to make the trip so that Josh could run in his first marathon. She had promised him that she would be standing at the finish line, cheering him on. After 9/11, she was even more determined to keep that promise.

Jill would later write, “You did it, You crossed that finish line like a true champ. OK, so maybe you didn’t physically cross the finish line in San Diego, but in your life, with all you accomplished and all the obstacles you overcame… you crossed that finish line. And the greatest part about it was that I got to keep my promise. I stood there, with tears in my eyes, sorrow in my heart, and you on my mind.”

She approached organizers of the marathon and asks for Josh’s medal. When they learned who she is and the circumstances of his death, they were deeply moved. As a result, the San Diego Marathon awards the “Spirit of Joshua Award” as a lasting memory to Josh and recognition of one’s achievement over adverse conditions.

Marcel said of her son, “a preserving spirit” who “influenced a lot of people in his life along the way to do positive things.” Sam told our news crew that the important lesson to be learned from Josh’s life is that “in your darkest hours, you can never give up.”

At one of many tribute sites for victims of 9/11, another friend wrote to him, “I wish more people had gotten to know the person you were.” I wish I had gotten to know him. He sounds like the kind of person so many of us need in our lives. I’d have been honored to have been able to count him as a friend.

If there are friends or relatives of Josh who are visiting this blog for the first time because of this tribute, I can only offer my condolences. I can’t begin to imagine the depths of your loss, but I do hope I have done this incredible young man’s story justice.

I hope you’ll join me in saying a prayer for Josh and those who knew and loved him today. I’m sure that for them, these anniversaries will never get any easier.

Additional Reading about Joshua, from which some of this material has been compiled, can be found here:
September 11, 2001 Victims
Newsday
Remeber September 11, 2001
CNN’s ‘September 11: A Memorial’
San Diego Marathon’s ‘Spirit of Joshua Award’

Let me briefly take you back to January, 2002, several months after the terror attacks.

I’m sitting in an edit bay scanning through the footage recorded by a news crew we had sent to New York to do interviews with some of the families of the victims of that dark Tuesday morning. Sure, it was odd for a small television station in South Carolina to send a crew all the way to New York. But a local school had sent boxes of teddy bears to the families as a way to show the families that people everywhere were sharing their grief.

It was my job to promote these stories. I loaded the footage shot for the Birnbaum family’s story, and watched parts of an interview with the parents of 24-year-old Joshua, who died in the World Trade Center. His mother, through tears, described the telephone call she received from her son shortly after a plane had crashed into his building and the words he spoke to her that made me stop the tape.

Can you imagine getting that kind of phone call from anyone you know, much less your own child? She was able to give her son one final instruction, one that I don’t think I’d have ever been clear-headed or selfless enough to be able to give.

Such remembrances are how I got to “know” the person I’m honoring tomorrow. That footage, their words, haunt me to this day, and I suspect that they will, in some way, forever. It’s not an entirely unpleasant haunting; there is sadness in remembering their story, but there is also a reminder in it, in the form of a reality check, that at the end of our lives, how much we’ve been able to accomplish isn’t nearly as important as how many we’ve touched by having lived at all.

By paying tribute to Joshua, it’s a way for me to give something in the way of thanks to his memory for that reminder.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was awakened by a ringing telephone. I had fallen asleep on the couch the night before, having watched some mindless classic sitcom on TVLand or Nick at Nite, most likely, and the television was still on.

The call had come from my mother, who was at work, but had heard on the radio that a plane had crashed into a New York skyscraper. As she told me the news, NBC’s Today show was showing pictures of the World Trade Center where the plane had crashed. We didn’t talk long, but I told her I’d let her know what happened when I found out.

Unlike those who claim to have known immediately and beyond a shadow of a doubt upon seeing that image that we had been the victim of a terrorist attack, that wasn’t my first thought. I recalled an old news story I had read about from 1945, when a B-25 had crashed into the 79th floor of the building on a fog shrouded morning. I could see clearly from the picture that there was no fog…I knew that whatever type of plane had crashed into this building didn’t do so because low-hanging clouds prevented the pilot from seeing it.

Perhaps I subconsciously chose to believe that there must have been some kind of mechanical failure…that typical “hydraulic leak” that is part of so many plane crash movies…that prevented the pilot from being able to steer clear of the tower. I was watching when the second plane hit the tower. That’s when I knew the first crash hadn’t been an accident.

Oddly enough, though, at the time, I thought of another old news story and my mother’s telling of it. She had described being at her sister’s home on Sunday, November 24, 1963, watching Lee Harvey Oswald as police escorted him through the basement of the Dallas Police Department. Right there on live television, they saw murder happen as Jack Ruby shot him. It dawned on me, and I don’t know why my mind jumped to the comparison, that I was watching my own “Oswald moment” that morning.

I called my mom to tell her that a second plane had crashed. I told her that someone must have hijacked both planes. I promised to call back when I knew more.

I was watching Bryant Gumbel who was then on CBS’s The Early Show when he received word in his IFB, an earpiece that allows producers to talk to anchors and reporters, that they were about to switch toalive shot of the Pentagon. “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.” That’s what I heard Gumbel say as a wideshot from some kind of “sky cam” appeared. It showed a distant shot of the Pentagon with a tremendous plume of smoke.

I work in television, as many of you know. I’m not a reporter, though I once was. I’m not a news junkie, per se, unless there is big news happening at that moment, then I want all that I can get. But wheras I should have jumped up, gotten dressed, and headed to my television station where I could have watched the news wires and satellite feeds from reporters on the various scenes at the same time I was watching the actual on-air signal, I just sat there. I suppose I was still trying to soak it all in.

I knew, once I saw that second plane hit, that there would be nothing specific for me to do that day. That’s because I am a promotion producer: I do those commercials that tell you what’s coming up on the evening news. I also do the spots that tell you why our anchors are better than theirs. At the time, I even added our station logo and airtime to promos for syndicated shows like Judge Judy, Montel or The Andy Griffith Show. But it was obvious that none of that would be airing that day. I knew that it was a given that network coverage would go “wall-to-wall,” that there would be no time for local commercials or promos.

I didn’t think about not going in, because I knew that I would be needed in some capacity. That capacity turned out to be producing spots that could air instead of commercials when the networks would allow local news and programming to resume. Most advertisers were pulling their ads so there would have been few commercials to air. But at the same time, the news and production departments wanted to have the option of having some kind of spots that could run in order to give them precious time to “regroup” if something went wrong.

I produced a series of spots that I called “Enouraging Words.” They basically were little more than motivational music, footage of the aftermath, especially people helping strangers that day, and alternating words or phrases that appeared on the screen. Over the course of the next few days, this is what I did. I sat in an edit bay, looking at footage that had fed from the network’s private news feed, being bombarded with images that some of you never saw because they were too horrific. I produced a music video to Ray Charles‘ rendition of “America.” I produced a thirty-second promo that alternated between shots of candlelight vigils and prayer services and quotations from notable Americans.

Over the next few days, as coverage slowly returned to normal, I had produced several spots that all accomplished basically the same thing, just in different approaches. I was proud of the work, but at the same time, drained from having to see all of that footage over and over again. I can’t imagine what it was like to lose a loved one in the terrorist attacks. I can’t imagine what it was like to be there in person and see it happen. But I can’t forget what it was like to be forced to witness replays of it that I thought would never stop.

Someone asked if I had nightmares after the attacks. I didn’t. My nightmares were in the daytime, not being projected in my mind but being shown on video monitors.

Are terror alerts a politically-motivated ploy to raise the president’s approval rating? That’s a question many Democrats are asking these days.

Most of Bush’s opponents don’t want to discuss what they’d like to see the current administration to do about the threat of terror if it can’t be allowed to raise a terror alert when it finds information that suggests a possible target or timeframe.

So far, no one has been willing to go on record saying that there is no threat of terror. No one has been willing to go on record saying that terrorists aren’t plotting new ways to infiltrate the United States. And while many seem to have myriad problems with the Bush administration’s color coding, few seem to have a clearly better alternative.

The same site that tabulates projected Electoral Votes which I mentioned in my last essay provides a link to a plot of President Bush’s approval ratings. Terror alerts and the other notable events have been plotted along with ratings gathered over Bush’s presidency.

It is suggested that an incumbent president’s approval rating is the best predictor of his re-election; presidents with an approval rating below the 50% mark generally do not get re-elected. At this writing, Bush’s median approval rating appears to be around the 47% mark.

But the reason for producing this graph is two-fold: not only does its author hope to offer these numbers as proof that Bush will not get a second term, he also hopes to show that Bush is strategically using terror alerts to boost his sagging approval rating.

Do the facts support his claim? Let’s take a look.

First, he suggests that every time there is a “dip” in Bush’s approval rating, a terror alert is announced. This isn’t entirely accurate. We don’t see sudden drops before terror alerts are raised that are steeper than general decline that is already occurring. It’s unquestionable that Bush’s approval rating has been declining for some time. But the rate of decline has been fairly steady if you remove the terror alerts from the picture. The low point shown before each rise is only a low point because the number then goes back up a bit. Otherwise, it would pretty much be a straight line headed in the same downward direction. There are no real potholes appearing here.

Second, he suggests that the terror alerts always raise Bush’s approval rating, justifying this continuing tactic. It’s not true. Many of the terror alerts do precede a brief spike in the numbers, but not all of them do. Some seem to have no effect at all. Also, there are occasional spikes that occur in the absence of an immediate terror alert, which means that they cannot be the sole cause of improved ratings for the president. Therefore, you cannot even assume that the terror alerts that do precede a riseare the only possible reason for that the rise.

Third, he suggests that as we approach the election, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing. It is not entirely impossible to imagine that our election could be a time at which terrorists wish to strike in the hopes of altering the outcome. Also, this fails to consider the fact that as we dig deeper into the terror threat, it is inevitable that we will find more details about possible plans. The same thing occurs in medicine when a new test is perfected to successfully diagnose illness: more cases are generally found. This doesn’t mean that the number of cases are on the rise or that doctors are trying to scare the general public; it simply means that they have new tools that enable them to diagnose the problem more efficiently.

Fourth, the writer seems to miss one very obvious fact: despite the spikes that have occurred in Bush’s approval rating, none seems to be permanent. If, as he is trying so hard to prove, the Bush administration is issuing terror alerts to “boost” his numbers, it should be clear by now that the spikes are short-lived and that when an alert is issued without either a major arrest or a terrorist attack occurring, the numbers end up dropping lower than they were before the alert is issued. Does this sound like a strategy any team would use for long?

Fifth, he then adds:

“…for the record, we are not claiming that all these alerts are politically motivated. We are sure a considerable amount of these alerts were legit and caused by real and immediate information of potential threats. What is important to note is that many of these “immediate” terror alerts were later on discredited (in some cases they used old data, in other cases the announcements were less immediate and less urgent that we were lead to believe, as the press reported.) Those are the cases that could be interpreted as politically motivated, especially when they seemed to coincide with political news and events unfavorable to the administration.”

The conditional language, (”not all,” “could be interpreted,” “seemed to coincide”), means, in translation, that he could be completely off base. The facts the writer provides do not support the bulk of his case, least of all the notion that Bush is using terror alerts to “improve” his approval rating.

It comes down to this: you have to decide for yourself how seriously you want to take the threat when a new alert is issued. If you choose to assume that a new threat must be bogus because you feel Bush is a bogus president, so be it. But if an alert is issued and an attack occurs, you cannot then blame the government for not doing its part to warn you.

Many people seem so annoyed by even the mention of a terror alert these days that I am beginning to think they would like for this country to completely suspend all homeland security activities until Inauguration Day in January. That way, the possibility of the alert system being used as a political ploy would be impossible.

Of course, this election year, we are learning that virtually anything can be used as a political ploy…even a trio of Purple Hearts!

This is going to come off sounding incredibly crass and uncaring, and I apologize in advance. I am trying to put myself in their place, as I have for the past two-and-three-quarter years, so I am trying my best to maintain sympathy. It’s just getting harder and harder to do.

I’m talking about the 9/11 Victims’ Families. They’re so revered that we even capitalize mentions of them. It seems we hold them in higher regard than those who have lost loved ones in war. Sometimes, I think we hold them in higher regard even than our veterans who have actually been in war.

It’s now getting ridiculous.

Now that the 9/11 Commission has released its official report, the family victims are furious and are speaking their minds…again.

They’re furious because they want someone to blame. One of them actually said that. They feel that the report gives them no one to blame. Blame al-Qaida! It seems to me that they are the ones who plotted the events that lead to those thousands of deaths, all in the name of their own religious views.

They feel that there is no one ruined politically by this, and apparently, that’s what they were hoping for. That makes it so easy for me to lose any compassion for them.

They’re speaking out because they demand to know why so much time was wasted looking backward at what went wrong when they think enough hasn’t been done to prevent the next attack. They stop short of adding that if more had been done to prevent future attacks at the expense of producing a report they expected to skewer one single source of blame, this would not have been acceptable, either.

They are practically out for blood, and have been since day one, because the country didn’t take the threat of terror seriously. Here’s a news flash: they are part of that country…it wasn’t the lawmakers that didn’t take it seriously, it was the fact that nearly none of the citizens took it seriously.

Last year, I read of a school board’s public referendum that failed to implement the installation of metal detectors in local schools because parents didn’t want to see their taxes go up to pay for them. As a people, we have a short tolerance for the same old story…we don’t want to hear about the “threat” of anything…we want someone else to worry about that. When the threat turns into reality, we take some kind of perverted pleasure in running around in a panic, wondering what we’re supposed to do next. But eventually, even the thrill of chaos wears off.

Don’t believe me? Pay close attention to the demeanor of those around you the next time the government raises the terror alert. Does anyone run to the store to buy bottled water and other supplies to stock up their basements in case of some local attack, or do they go on as if nothing happened, rolling their eyes at the mere mention of terrorists trying something again?

The families are somehow surprised that a bipartisan commission that is making suggestions for improvement in homeland security is trying to remain as impartial as possible to encourage the very spirit of cooperation required to make the needed changes happen. That makes me wonder if they have ever heard of politics before…such things happened long before that terrible September morning.

Forgive me for being too harsh if I suggest that it’s time for them to stop invoking the memory of their loved ones for the purpose of political gain. We all lost something on September 11, 2001, whether we had a relative at one of the “ground zeroes” or not. The world didn’t change for just them…it’s a different world we all live in now. You can be sure that any terrorists plotting the next attack aren’t making any efforts at all to track down only those who are related to prior victims to further terrorize those families: we are all in the same boat.

An Op/Ed piece published in Sunday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch gives an interesting perspective to the use of images from 9/11 in campaign ads that have been making headlines and leading to criticism of the Bush camp from victims’ families.

What’s so interesting is that the writer of the essay, Debra Burlingame, is not only a lifelong Democrat, but is the sister of Charles F. ‘Chic’ Burlingame III, captain of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Says Debra: “‘The 9/11 families’ are not a monolithic group that speaks in one voice, and nothing has made that more clear than the controversy over the Bush campaign ads.”

“It is one thing for individual family members to invoke the memory of all 3,000 victims as they take to the microphone or podium to show respect for our collective loss. It is another for them to attempt to stifle the debate over the future direction of our country by declaring that the images of 9/11 should be off limits in the presidential race, and to do so under the rubric of ‘The Families of September 11.’”

“They do not represent me. Nor do they represent those Americans who feel that September 11 was a defining moment in the history of our country and who want to know how the current or future occupant of the Oval Office views the lessons of that day.”

A few other noteworthy quotes:

“I suspect that the real outrage over the ads has more to do with the context than the content. It’s not the pictures that disturb them so much as the person who is using them.”

“As ‘relatives of 9/11 victims,’ they are virtually immune to challenge on the issue of who should have the loudest voice regarding the legacy of this national tragedy.”

And finally, this lifelong Democrat raises this important point:

“Whatever these 9/11 families may think of the President’s foreign policy or the war in Iraq, I ask them to reconsider the language and tone of their statements. We should not tolerate or condone remarks such as those of the 9/11 relative who, so offended by the campaign ads, said that he ‘would vote for Saddam Hussein before I would vote for Bush.‘ The insult was picked up and posted on Al-Jazeera’s Website. In view of the sacrifice our troops have made on our behalf, this insensitivity to them and their families suggests a level of self-indulgence and ingratitude that shocks the conscience.”

I’m happy to see a fair, balanced point of view. I know that there are plenty of people out there — both Republicans and Democrats — who are capable of standing independent of their preferred party’s rhetoric. That a family member of a 9/11 victim has done so as loudly and clearly as Ms. Burlingame has should say something extraordinary to us all…something much more powerful than the obvious, oft-forgotten notion that there are always two sides to every story.

Burlingame’s essay is ©MMIV The Wall Street Journal.

Here’s another gift for Liberals this political year: “Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, accuses the Bush administration of failing to recognize the al-Qaida threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and then manipulating America into war with Iraq with dangerous consequences.” (The full story, as long as AOL keeps it online, is here.)

He’s telling his story to 60 Minutes two days before he is scheduled to testify before a federal panel reviewing the attacks. Clarke is quoted as acknowledging that “there’s a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too.” This generous admission of his own compliance hasn’t stopped him from writing a book about the entire situation in which he denounces the current administration for ignoring the threat of terrorism.

“I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism,” Clark said. “He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something.”

The simple fact is that we all ignored the threat of terrorism. The attacks of 9/11 were not the first terrorist acts committed in this country. But how many of us even thought about the threat on September 10, 2001? How many of us walked around thinking about the security measures designed to protect us? How many of us would have given anyone who suggested such dangers the time of day until we saw the threat become real in our living rooms on the following morning?

FDR, one of the greatest Democratic presidents in history was accused after the fact of ignoring a threat against Pearl Harbor because he knew that if it was bombed, it would mobilize the country against the Axis Powers in World War II. America wasn’t really ready to enter the war before the war came to our soil. That’s this country’s nature: we don’t want to send our sons and daughters off to war until we see the threat in a personal way. I’m not saying that we’re right to feel that way…it’s just that many Americans do feel that way.

Clarke also seems to take exception to the fact that President Bush wanted to know whether Iraq was involved. Isn’t that a logical question to ask? Shouldn’t any of America’s enemies be considered prime suspects? And for the son of a former President who went to war against a particular nation, is it so much of a stretch that the son might consider that nation a particularly obvious threat? The question, at least to me, doesn’t seem so outrageous.

And once again, in a story that belongs in the “Convenient Timing” file, a top advisor comes out with a “tell-all” book about what’s wrong in Washington two-and-a-half years after the fact leading up to a Presidential election! Where were these charges a year ago? Where were these charges two years ago? Why didn’t we hear this story a month after the attack? I tend to automatically question any stories that seem so perfectly timed…but maybe that’s just me.

The latest fuel for political fire seems to be a few campaign ads for President Bush which include images from the 9/11 Terror Attacks. His critics wasted no time jumping on these spots because they felt they were insensitive to victims of 9/11 and used a tragedy to get votes.

There comes a point at which even the more politically charged among us must stop and think for a moment. Does anyone think that there couldn’t possibly be a Democratic candidate who, given the same set of circumstances, might have used images from 9/11 in their own ads?

As the 9/11 attack and the response thereafter gave Bush one of the highest approval ratings (at least for a while) of any president in years, is it a surprise? As the 9/11 attack and the response thereafter dictated dramatic developments in foreign affairs that continue today, is it unreasonable to address them in political ads? Should we ignore what happened?

When Democrats run commercials on economy, I fully expect them to avoid the job issue: after all, all those people who lost theirs during the last four years shouldn’t have to be subjected to the painful reminder of that fact.