by Ann Coulter
The result of all this glandular hysteria is: The five top-rated cable news shows are all on Fox News. Bill O’Reilly has more than 3 million viewers a night, while CNN viewers are measured in the hundreds of thousands and MSNBC by the occasional show of hands. Still, the establishment news shows on ABC and NBC have more than 10 million viewers apiece—yet another tribute to the overwhelming power of inertia. Even the fake news on CBS has more than 7 million viewers. Brit Hume gets a lousy million viewers and liberals think it’s fascism in America.
Inconsolable over the death of the old media, liberals told us that the nation was being torn apart by “angry voices,” “polarizing rhetoric,” “angry white men,” “the politics of division.” They said the nation has never been so divided, forgetting the somewhat polarized era America experienced between 1861 and 1865. Then people remembered the sweetness and light we got from liberals during, say, Watergate or the Bork hearings, when they had total control of the media. Liberals’ idea of harmony is: Democrats win everything all the time and no one else can talk.
Next Democrats tried explaining that they were being shellacked by the superior media savvy and rhetorical skills of Republicans—like that silver-tongued devil George W. Bush. They said their ideas were too complex to fit on a bumper sticker. This is crazy. “I [heart] partial birth abortion” fits quite easily. They said they just needed to retool their message, formulate winning sound bites, and talk about “God’s green Earth” and maybe Democrats wouldn’t keep frightening people. But the retooling didn’t work. It turned out it really was the Democrats’ message that Americans hated.
Finally, the Democrats hit on an ingenious strategy: They would choose only messengers whom we’re not allowed to reply to. That’s why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women. You can’t respond to them because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering. Liberals haven’t changed the message, just the messenger. All the most prominent liberal spokesmen are people with “absolute moral authority”—Democrats with a dead husband, a dead child, a wife who works at the CIA, a war record, a terminal illness, or as a last resort, being on a first-name basis with Nelson Mandela. Like Oprah during Sweeps Week, liberals have come to rely exclusively on people with sad stories to improve their Q rating. They’ve become the “Lifetime” TV network of political parties. Liberals prey on people at a time of extreme emotional vulnerability and offer them fame and fortune to be that month’s purveyor of hate. Victory goes to the most hysterical.
One way or another, the Bush administration was heartless for responding whenever it was attacked. It was cruel to respond to Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq, leading Cindy to become a rabid anti-war protester. Sheehan called Bush “the biggest terrorist in the world,” a “fuhrer,” an “evil maniac,” and a “filth-spewer.” But according to liberals, no one was allowed to sound a note of dissent—because Sheehan lost a son in Iraq. It was treason to respond to Joe Wilson, who accused the Bush administration of lying about the case for war with Iraq based on Wilson’s trip to Niger. Wilson called Bush a “liar” and Cheney a “lying son of a bitch.”’ But no one could say Wilson’s alleged expertise was based on a nepotistic junket he was sent on because his wife worked at the CIA.
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times made the point plainly by comparing Sheehan to Joe Wilson, saying, “The Bush team tried to discredit `Mom’ [Sheehan] by pointing reporters to an old article in which she sounded kinder to W. If only her husband were an undercover C.I.A. operative, the Bushies could out him.” One wonders how exposing anything about Cindy could discredit her more than the poor imbecile’s own words have.
In addition to Sheehan and Wilson, over the last few years the Democrats have used:
• a grieving Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was murdered by a lunatic on the Long Island Rail Road, to lobby for gun control
• a paralyzed, dying Christopher Reeve to argue for embryonic stem-cell research
• a gaggle of weeping widows to blame President Bush for 9/11
• a disabled Vietnam veteran, Max Cleland, to attack the Iraq war and call Bush, Cheney, and every other human who ever disagreed with him a “chicken hawk”
• a rare Democratic Purple Heart recipient, Congressman John Murtha, to argue for surrender in Iraq
In all these cases, Democrats took the position that the spokesperson immunized the message from criticism, no matter how vicious or insane it was. Former New Republic editor and gay marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan brandished the openly gay chaplain to New York City’s firemen, who himself died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, in his ongoing, nonstop argument for gay priests. The chaplain died on 9/11, therefore the pope should back off.
Democrats will even use our own people against us! After Democrats claimed Barry Goldwater was clinically insane when he was the Republican candidate for president, as soon as he went senile and started attacking the “religious right,” he became a conservative oracle for the media. Reagan aide James Brady was respected by liberals only after he was shot in the head by John Hinckley and became a spokesman for gun control groups. Back when Nancy Reagan was consulting an astrologer about Reagan’s schedule after he was shot by
Hinckley, liberals denounced her as a nut controlling the White House with a Ouija board. But after Reagan died of Alzheimer’s disease and Nancy expressed support for embryonic stem-cell research, liberals anointed her Seer of Technology. I can’t think of a single example of conservatives doing this. Far from trying to prevent liberals from responding, we enjoy watching liberals try to mount a counterargument—especially in the case of Cindy Sheehan, with that weird disconnect between the viciousness of her comments and her itsybitsy, squeaky voice.
After 9/11, four housewives from New Jersey whose husbands died in the attack on the World Trade Center became media heroes for blaming their husbands’ deaths on George Bush and demanding a commission to investigate why Bush didn’t stop the attacks. Led by all-purpose scold Kristen Breitweiser, the four widows came to be known as “the Jersey Girls.” (Original adorable name: “Just Four Moms from New Jersey.”) The Jersey Girls weren’t interested in national honor, they were interested in a lawsuit. They first came together to complain that the $1.6 million average settlement to be paid to 9/11 victims’ families by the government was not large enough.
After getting their payments jacked up, the weeping widows took to the airwaves to denounce George Bush, apparently for not beaming himself through space from Florida to New York and throwing himself in front of the second building at the World Trade Center. These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an at-tack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all of our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.
The increasingly rabid widows demanded a commission to investigate why the FAA didn’t realize, when it first received word about a “hijacking,” that this was part of a monstrous terrorist attack involving four commercial planes about to be turned into cruise missiles. On Donahue, Breitweiser said, “I’d like to know how our Pentagon, which is the home of our Defense Department, was hit an hour and 45 minutes after the air traffic controllers knew that they had airliners up that were hijacked. I don’t understand how that’s possible.” It wasn’t even an hour and 45 minutes between the first plane taking off from Logan Airport and the third plane crashing into the Pentagon.
American Airlines Flight 11 took off at 7:59 A.M., so obviously nobody knew at 7:59 that any planes were off-course, much less about to attack the nation. Air traffic controllers in Boston first notified higher-ups that Flight 11 had been hijacked at
8:25. That plane crashed into the World Trade Center at 8:46—with F-15 fighter jets in hot pursuit. At 8:47 A.M., the FAA first received notice that United Airlines Flight 175 out of Boston was behaving abnormally. Minutes later, unbeknownst to the FAA, American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked and diverted toward the Pentagon. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashed into the second World Trade Center building, at which point we knew the nation was under attack. Even after it was clear that an attack was under way, there was no way of knowing which of the thousands of other planes in U.S. airspace at the time, if any, was going to crash next, much less where such a crash might occur. The FAA grounded all domestic flights at 9:26 A.M., and at 9:37 A.M. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
The 9/11 Commission became the Jersey Girls’ pet project. Breitweiser said, “We simply wanted to know why our husbands were killed,” and “why they went to work one day and didn’t come back.” Oddly enough, “swarthy Muslim beasts flew planes into our skyscrapers” did not appear to be one of the possible answers. They demanded a commission to investigate—much as wives of the dead at Pearl Harbor demanded commissions to investigate FDR throughout World War II.
We’re already paying the salaries of 535 members of a standing bipartisan commission, which is called “the U.S. Congress.” But by establishing an “independent” commission, the Democrats were able to ensure a whitewash of Clinton’s utter incompetence, cowardice, and capitulation to enemy regimes whose princes might be rich enough to write checks to the Clinton presidential library, during the eight years leading up to 9/11.
The commission consisted of five members chosen by congressional Democrats, four members chosen by congressional Republicans, and the chairman chosen by President Bush. While the Republicans picked gutless moderate Republicans like Slade Gorton and Thomas Kean, Democrats named liberal attack dogs like Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor who testified in defense of perjury and obstruction of justice during Clinton’s impeachment hearings, and Jamie Gorelick, Clinton’s deputy attorney general and the chief architect of the policies that prevented the FBI from unraveling the 9/11 plot before it happened. That’s “bipartisan” in Washington.
This would be like a commission on henhouse management with the Republicans carefully choosing well-credentialed hens and the Democrats sending in bloodthirsty foxes. During the commission’s “investigation,” Clinton’s former national security adviser, Sandy Berger, was caught secreting Clinton-era documents out of the National Archives by stuffing them in his pants and socks. Leave it to a Clinton lackey like Berger to turn a probe of the worst terrorist attack in history into an episode of Get Smart. Sandy Burglar later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to community service and ordered to pay more than $50,000.
The Democrats treated the 9/11 Commission as one more battlefield in their ongoing war with Republicans, while bewildered Republicans looked on helplessly. For Democrats, everything is political—Coretta Scott King’s funeral, Paul Wellstone’s memorial, a Dixie Chicks concert. They will turn a major national disaster like a hurricane breaking the levees in New Orleans into a political football. Republicans demanded that President Richard Nixon resign for one lie; Democrats went to war to defend President Clinton for a mountain of lies and felonies, with not one Democrat voting to remove Clinton from office. Even the Supreme Court was shocked by this: In a breathtaking rebuke, not a single justice attended Clinton’s next State of the Union address, not even the justices Clinton had appointed. Speaking of which: When a Democrat is in the White House, Republican senators vote by huge majorities to confirm extreme left-wing lawyers to the Supreme Court, such as former ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When a Republican is president, Democratic senators turn every Supreme Court nomination—even lower court appointments—into Armageddon.
Conforming to pattern, when a commission was convened to investigate intelligence failures that preceded 9/11, Republicans mistakenly imagined that the purpose of the commission was to investigate intelligence failures, not to be a partisan game for the Democrats to rewrite history.
The only valuable information about government failures leading to 9/11 has come out in the press, not the commission report.
The “Clinton Whitewash Commission” covered up a classified military data-mining project known as “Able Danger,” for example. The Able Danger intelligence operation was said to have identified Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, and perhaps three other hijackers, more than a year before the attack—in other words, back when you-know-who was president. The commission completely ignored this stunning information, almost as if they were trying to cover something up.
When the media got wind of Able Danger, long after the commission had completed its report, the Democratic co-chairman of the commission, Lee Hamilton, denied that they had heard anything about Able Danger. “The 9/11 commission,” Hamilton said, “did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohamed Atta or of his cell. Had we learned of it obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.” A day or two later, Hamilton changed his story, admitting the commission had been told about Able Danger, but claimed they didn’t mention it in their report because it was not “historically significant.” (This time the word obviously was conspicuously absent from his prepared statement.)
Able Danger wasn’t “historically significant” in the sense that the intelligence gathered by this operation did not stop the 9/11 attack. It could not have prevented the attack, because the information produced by Able Danger was destroyed by the Clinton administration.’ So on Hamilton’s theory, the only way for Able Danger to have been “historically significant” is if the intelligence had prevented the at-tack, in which case there would have been no need for a 9/11 Commission. I think that’s what the Commission was supposed to be looking for.
The commission report was also short on information about the policy instituted by Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick—which is odd, since she was sitting right there on the commission, thanks to the Democrats. Gorelick had specifically prohibited intelligence agents from telling law enforcement agents about suspected terrorists in the country. Gorelick issued guidelines that—according to the words she wrote—”go beyond what is legally required.” She said she erected the wall in order to be absolutely sure that any intelligence information gathered would be admissible at a later criminal trial. As terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCarthy says: “The object of a rational counterterrorism approach is to prevent mass murder from happening in the first place, not to improve your litigating posture for the indictment you return after thousands of people have been slaughtered.” Apart from the Great Wall of China, the wall separating intelligence gathering from law enforcement is the only man-made structure on earth visible to space aliens.
Back when Clinton was protecting the nation with the able assistance of his deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, prosecutors and FBI agents were screaming from the rooftops that Gorelick’s “wall” of separation between intelligence and law enforcement would lead to dead Americans. Mary Jo White, the Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote a letter directly to Gorelick, warning, “The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary.” White continued, “Excessive conservatism … can have deadly results.” The commission received a copy of this letter to Gorelick, but curiously did not see fit to include it in the final report.
Then–Attorney General John Ashcroft told the commission that the wall had prevented FBI agents from even being told 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were in the country until weeks before the attack. So 3,000 Americans are dead, but we can all rest easy: Nawaf’s and Khalid’s constitutional rights had been secured the day they flew a plane into the Pentagon. Ashcroft read a letter from an FBI agent to headquarters, angrily remarkin
g that the Gorelick guidelines were giving “the most protection” to Osama bin Laden. FBI headquarters responded, “We’re all frustrated with this issue. These are the rules. [The FBI’s National Security Law Unit] does not make them up. But somebody did make these rules. Somebody built this wall.”
And the somebody who built the wall was a 9/11 commissioner chosen by the Democrats. Apart from the Wright brothers’ invention of the airplane itself, no single innovation was more responsible for the 9/11 attacks than Gorelick’s decision to put up this wall. And yet Gorelick was never called upon to explain why department guidelines ever should have gone beyond what the (literally) suicidal law required. The 9/11 Commission report barely mentioned the wall. Perhaps it, too, was deemed “historically insignificant.” Instead of calling Gorelick as a witness, the 9/11 Commission wasted the time of current administration officials in the middle of a war, demanding that they testify to well-known events.
The 9/11 Commission was a scam and a fraud, the sole purpose of which was to cover up the disasters of the Clinton administration and distract the nation’s leaders during wartime. Not only did the Jersey Girls claim credit for this Clinton whitewash machine, they spent most of the hearings denouncing the Bush administration for not stopping the 9/11 attack from the weak position handed it by the Clinton administation. Specific policies of the Clinton administration were all but designed to ensure that the 9/11 attacks could not be stopped. “Just Four Moms from New Jersey” were satisfied knowing that Clinton felt their pain. That was all that mattered.
