I was reading the morning papers (on-line of course), and Richard Cohen’s column had some interesting thoughts. His contention that Bin Laden has won resonates. He lays out a very good case that everything Bin Laden set out to accomplish he has, and the Bush Administration has taken each of his accomplishments to the next level for him.
Richard Cohen – Bin Laden’s Victory – washingtonpost.com: “I was here on Sept. 11, 2001 — downtown when the twin towers collapsed. My instantaneous reaction — the thought that came to my mind as I heard the sound of the buildings coming down — was for revenge. I would, to this day, kill Osama bin Laden with my own hands. But as much as I hate the man, I have to recognize that from his vantage point, from his mountain fastness somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, he has won. What he had set out to do, he has done. That is more than we can say.”
Go have a look at the whole article. While you are at it check out Eugene Robinson on A War of Words.
“There was a time, not so long ago, when no one ever spoke of an American “homeland.” During World War II there was a home front, and of course there has always been a heartland between the two heartless coasts, but no one thought of our big-shouldered cities, traffic-choked suburbs, purple mountains’ majesties and amber waves of grain as anything called a homeland.
The United States was always a place for people who had left their homelands behind, a polyglot, rainbow-colored nation whose defining characteristics were vitality, mobility, dynamism and the restless urge to push toward the next frontier. But now we inhabit an official homeland, with an official Department of Homeland Security to protect it.”
It seems to me that he doesn’t quite carry his thought to the logical end…Everything this administration does is filtered through a verbal smokescreen. When they reduce the coverage of the Clean Air Act it is with a Clear Skies Agenda. Corporate Welfare to the pharmaceutical companies is an added benefit to Medicare. Yes this administration has learned how to fight a war all right, sadly for the American Military it is a “War of Words”
