OK, so call me retrograde, old fashioned, a bigot or the ever-popular ‘raaaaacist’ but I actually believe in free speech and free thought; for everybody, not just the ones that I agree with.
There is the caveat to this, of course. If you depend upon the larger public finding your persona, your manufactured or intellectual output appealing enough to purchase it … well, there might be potential customers disenchanted and disinclined to do so, should they find your exercise of free speech insulting or offensive. They are perfectly free to refrain from partaking in your product or purchasing it … it is, so I have been assured, still mostly a free country. Buy Chick-fil-A, or not. Listen to the Dixie Chicks … or not. Read the New York Times … or not. Watch Game of Thrones… on not, depending on how much you feel strongly about personal opinions. The right to speak is, has been, and ought to still be paramount.
Terrorism
President Obama’s 9/11 in Libya
President Obama faces his own “9/11” today as Islamist crowds attacked both America’s Libyan and Egyptian embassies and killed our Ambassador in Libya and two other Americans with a rocket.
So what can we expect from Pres. Obama?
A strongly worded diplomatic communique? A demarche? An Arclight air strike across Libya?
What we seem to have gotten was a weakly worded diplomatic communique with a political back pedal, when criticized.
If this follows the usual Obama Administration script, expect to see multiple emails asking for campaign contributions based on Gov. Romney “not stopping criticism of the American government at the water’s edge“.
UPDATE:
Gatewaypundit now has photos of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s body being paraded through the streets of Libya.
What I cannot believe is that both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are claiming those photos are of the Ambassador being taken to a hospital.
We should be getting a Pres. Theodore Roosevelt “America wants Pedicaris alive, or Raisuli dead!”.
Instead we are getting the ROTC Cadet from ANIMAL HOUSE screaming “REMAIN CALM. ALL IS WELL!” as the riot engulfs him.
Archive Post: Try To Remember That Time in September
(From my old Sgt. Stryker archive – a meditation on 9/11, written on the third anniversary)
Around the time of the first anniversary of 9/11, I saw a drawing commemorating, and making a bittersweet comment about anniversaries, memory and the passage of time. Quick pen sketches of the WTC towers, each with a sequential date underneath; 9/11/02, 9/11/03, 9/11/04, but with each repetition, the outline of the towers became mistier, more diffuse. The first anniversary to me was almost unbearable, as much of a psychic battering as the event itself. The second was a sad and thoughtful occasion, and now we are facing the third year, and the day falls on a Saturday; not a work day for most of us. Curiously, that seems to set the event a little aside, this year. I will not be walking into the glass and granite lobby of the office building where I work— a lobby that looks eerily like the lobby of the WTC buildings, owing to the fact they were built at about the same time, following many of the same architectural precepts, and which houses many of the same sort of businesses, although on a much smaller scale— on a glorious September day, not knowing that the towers had already been hit, they were burning, and thousands of people doing the same job they did every day would be dust and ashes in the next few moments.
9/11 Plus Eleven Years
Originally posted 9/11/2011
Simply evil: Christopher Hitchens suggests that sometimes the simple and obvious explanation for an event is more accurate than an explanation which relies on an elaborate structure of “nuance”
A time bomb from the Middle Ages. Roger Simon explains how 9/11 altered his worldview and many of his relationships
An attack, not a disaster or a tragedy. George Savage explains why the persistent use of terms like “tragedy” by the media acts to obfuscate the true nature of the 9/11 attacks. Much more on this from Mark Steyn
Claire Berlinski was in Paris on 9/11. Shortly thereafter she wrote this piece for City Journal
Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney were F-16 pilots with an Air National Guard squadron. Their order was to bring down Flight 93 before the terrorists in control of it could create another disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center…but their aircraft were configured for training, with no live ammunition and no missiles. A video interview with Major Penney here
“Caroline Glick – Israel on the Eve of US Elections”
Worth watching. Glick bluntly describes the delusional nature of current US foreign policy and predicts terrible consequences unless we change course. As she puts it in her closing remarks, Israel embarked on a similar delusional course of action in the early 1990s at the eventual cost of thousands of lives. Current US policy repeats Israel’s naive mistakes on a grand scale and will be much more costly unless we change it. And we have the power to change it merely by voting in a new government.