Ten Reasons the Democrats Should Trounce Bush, Part 1. Today is the third anniversary of the first reason Dubya should be ousted in a landslide: the 9/11 attacks happened on his watch!
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His Administration was so bumblingly incompetent that even when cued by reports from various sources that Islamist terror organizations were actively considering hijacking airplanes and using them as missiles, he did NOTHING. He didn’t strengthen cockpit cabin doors against break-in. He didn’t put air marshals on planes. He didn’t even warn the public that terrorists were considering such measures, so that if anyone attempts to hijack an airplane, the passengers should assume that they will all be killed when the hijackers deliberately crash the plane like a giant bomb, unless they stop the hijacking He didn’t warn people that the New Hijacking is not like the Old Hijacking, where someone would commandeer a plane and demand to be taken to Cuba or some other airport or try to hold the plane or its passengers for ransom, but is intended to employ the plane as a military weapon and in the process kill everyone on board and as many people on the ground as possible.
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When the passengers on the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 heard, from cellphone calls, what had happened to other hijacked planes that day, they rallied to attack the hijackers! But it was too late. The hijackers were already in the cockpit, already at the controls, and the passengers couldn’t retake the plane before it was deliberately crashed into the ground.
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Still, the plane failed to reach its intended target, because the passengers heroically saved others, at the cost of their own lives. If only the Bush Administration had WARNED all potential air passengers, long before they boarded the plane, that if anyone even TRIES to hijack their plane they must jump them, beat them, kill them if need be because otherwise they will all die, it might very well be that NONE of the planes hijacked September 11th could have been hijacked; NONE of the people killed at the World Trade Center and Pentagon would have been killed; and NONE of the vast economic devastation we suffered would have happened!
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New York Magazine in 2002 did a one-year-after summary of some numbers, which includes these:

Jobs lost in New York owing to the attacks: 146,100 * * *

Point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average when the NYSE reopened: 684.81

Economic loss to New York in month following the attacks: $105 billion

Estimated cost of cleanup: $600 million

Total FEMA money spent on the emergency: $970 million * * *

Estimated amount of insurance paid worldwide related to 9/11: $40.2 billion

Estimated amount of money needed to overhaul lower-Manhattan subways: $7.5 billion

In addition to the costs to the Tristate New York Metropolitan Area (in which I happen to live), the Council on Foreign Relations reported, “A study by the Milken Institute, an economics research group in Santa Monica, Calif., estimates that the attacks will cost the nation more than 1.8 million jobs by the end of 2002.”
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Recent figures aren’t easy to come by, to show the cumulative cost over the three years since the attacks, and it’s not easy to trace the interconnections between, for instance, that one day’s events and a huge drop in air travel and related losses to the travel and tourism industry — how many people canceled vacations altogether as against how many merely shifted destinations and mode of transportation. What is plain, however, is that the cost to the people of the United States of the 9/11 attacks — which could have been prevented — is immense.
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Bizarrely, the Bush Administration has presented its failure to protect us as a proof of its fitness to govern! We are supposed to feel safe under the leadership of the very people who brought us this disaster! Astounding.
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“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
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For having permitted the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration must go, and any competent presidential candidate would be able to crush the national Republican Party using that alone.
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There are 8 weeks left till the election. Before November 2nd I will have sorted thru all the many, many reasons the Democrats should be able to destroy the Bush Administration and select the other 9 of the Top Ten Reasons the Democrats Should Trounce Bush. Had I been more alert to the calendar, I would have started this series two weeks ago and added one entry a week. Never fear. Even tho I have to double-up on reasons at least twice, I’ll get all 10 stated before the election, and summarize the list on Monday, November 1st. Stay tuned.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:27 PM