Moments

Obviously it was incredibly naive to think that this crew would, after 9/11, come anywhere close to doing the right thing. But what I certainly wasn't capable of predicting at the time was how a horrific event perpetuated by extremist religious fundamentalists could somehow be converted into a sustained attack on... liberals. What I didn't understand then was the basic conservative worldview that if it's good it's conservative and if it's bad it's liberal.

Philadelphia's shame, Little Mikey Smerconish, is pining away again for those great grand days when we all held hands and got along after 9/11, when there was no political disagreement. Of course there was tremendous political disagreement and incredible hostility to people like me who watched in horror as our media decided that in this bold new era their responsibility was to be as sycophantic as possible. But little Mikey was on the winning team then, and now he's blaming that little bad feeling inside on awful nasty political divisiveness instead of the muffled shrieks of his vestigial conscience.


The political blogosphere grew in the aftermath of 9/11, and quickly bored of the not exciting enough war in Afghanistan, self-styled "war bloggers" quickly turned on the enemy at home. It's useful to remember, in this imagined time of national unity, just how quickly the Right claimed the tragedy as their own and used it as a cudgel to beat their fellow citizens with. It only took Andy Sullivan 5 days to publish this in the Times of London:

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount a fifth column.

The fact that New York City is generally considered to be one of the enclaves of the "decadent Left" wasn't enough to dissuade him from putting those words into print.