9/11 REDUX

The presidential candidates are revisiting 9/11, hoping to once and for all assign blame so the appropriate party can be destroyed and left bleeding at the side of the road.

Donald Trump is fond of reminding us that 9/11 happened on the watch of George W. Bush. The Donald is not exactly assigning blame. He's just saying.

For his part, Jeb Bush says his older brother kept us safe after 9/11, apparently by invading Iraq and so forth.

Trump says invading Iraq was a disaster. And for once he's right.

Coming to Dubya's defense, one of the other candidates (either Cruz or Rubio, who can remember) proposes to blame Bill Clinton for not taking out Osama bin Laden after the first World Trade Center bombing.

The problem with that, after Dubya came into office—by whatever means—he was not required to follow Clinton's lead. What would have prevented him from blasting bin Laden off the face of the earth?

Only the small matter of focus.

Dubya had it in for Saddam Hussein from the git-go. After all, he was the reckless galoot who tried to put a hit on Dubya's dad, George H. W. Bush.

After 9/11, Dubya wasted no time laying the blame on Hussein's doorstep. The case was so prevalent in the nation's psyche, over 80% of the soldiers who participated in the invasion of Iraq said they were there to avenge 9/11 (data from the Harper's Index).

When that argument failed to emerge from the nebulous, Dubya and his gang switched gears and pointed to Weapons of Mass Destruction as the reason for invasion. Turned out they eagerly accepted faulty data to make their case.

Trump calls that a "lie."

It most certainly was an error, but I don't think you can call it a lie unless they knew it wasn't true when they said it. Happily pouncing on any shred of flimsy evidence doesn't make your conclusion a lie. Just shoddy. And, frankly, unworthy of a proper President.

Thing is, it's too late to impeach Dubya.

Jeb says the man kept us safe after 9/11. It remains a dubious claim. Just because no major attack occurred in this country, doesn't mean Dubya provided the juice to keep it from happening. Sometimes there's a little delay getting your revenge-seeking butt into gear.

How long did Muslim extremists simmer, gritting their teeth over the outrageous behavior of the West (installing the unwanted Shah of Iran because the elected government messed with British Petroleum, etc.) before the first bombing in the Big Apple?

(Ah, New York, New York, the target so tasty they named it twice.)

In the aftermath of a decade of war in Iraq, ISIS seems to be coming along nicely. And those guys can recruit on the basis of Dubya's actions as provisional president (the invasion of two Islamic countries).

But they don't have to. Nowadays, ISIS can recruit solely on the fact the United States and its allies are ruthlessly bombing the sacred Islamic State.

But if ISIS wasn't already legitimate, simply being attacked would cut no ice. Fortunately for them, they can say they were attacked in the first place because they opposed the past actions of America.

And we're back in Dubya Country.

But maybe 9/11 was inevitable.

Beneath all the political bluster, the fact remains: human beings are defective creatures. They will always find a way to screw things up. And they will always know they're acting out of the best of intentions, based on the best data available.

People simply know what they know, and everything they see proves them right. (Trafficking in crap is what separates us from the animals.)

The West acts the way it does because it's the right thing to do. Muslims will always defend their nonsensical religion because they know that's the right thing to do.

If Muslims see every event as an attack on their religion, so be it. There's no way to dissuade them. Try to tell them our past actions were in response to a rivalry with the Soviet Union. They don't care. They know different.

Are Muslims so feverishly self-conscious of their religion because deep down they suspect their Prophet was either a lunatic or a liar?  Hard to say, but it's worth noting Mohammad was ridiculed at first when he came forward to say he'd been in contact with an angel of God. (By the way, "Allah" means "the God" in Arabic.)

Christianity is also reality-challenged. Their main guy, Jesus of Nazareth, doesn't show up in regular history (just religious "history"). And the fellow is meant to fix a problem ("Original Sin") created when two other fictional characters (Adam and Eve) defied a hypothetical Supreme Being some six thousand years ago.

If that wasn't all, by rights the world should have ended twenty centuries ago, according to the Bible. Pretty sure it didn't.

Or maybe it did and we're all in Hell now.

I guess that could explain some of this crap we're going through.