George W. Bush's 9/11 Speech: The January 6th Rioters Were Just as Bad as the 9/11 Terrorists I Started Two Foreign Wars to Stop

I know this is days old now. But...

We are now hearing the escalating rhetoric from the establishment leftist-dominated uniparty -- of which George W. Bush is either an esteemed member, or campaigning like hell to join -- to use actual military force against "domestic enemies."

And "domestic enemies" are increasingly defined as "anyone who dissents from the establishment leftist-dominated uniparty."

Byron York called Bush's 9/11 speech -- claiming that the January 6th rioters were essentially the same as the 9/11 terrorists we fought two actual wars against for 20 years -- "Rachel-Maddow-esque."

Bush's second jaw-dropper was his oblique comparison of the 19 terrorists who hijacked four commercial jetliners on 9/11 with the rioters who descended on the Capitol on Jan. 6. Speaking of 9/11, Bush said, "Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal." Then:

And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.

If they're "from the same foul spirit," does that mean we must "confront" them using the techniques and tools Bush ordered to be used against foreign terrorists?

He kind of leaves that hanging, huh? An ominous ellipsis. "Dot dot dot," you can figure out what the establishment leftist-dominated uniparty is thinking but not yet daring to say.

So they got this coke-addled, brain-damaged chimp to imply it for them.

To prepare the battlespace for the next war. The last war.

Bush did not explicitly say so, but he appeared to be referencing Jan. 6. And he used the rhetorical trick of denying that there was "cultural overlap" between the 9/11 terrorists and the Jan. 6 rioters before outlining areas of such overlap. They were similar in their "disdain for pluralism," Bush said, and in their "disregard for human life," and in their "determination to defile national symbols." In these, Bush argued, not only was there cultural overlap between the two groups -- they actually came from "the same foul spirit."

With that, Bush joined a group of commentators, mostly but not entirely on the Left, who maintain that 9/11 and 1/6 are similar. And they do so in the face of the obvious, enormous differences between the two. The Sept. 11 attacks killed roughly 3,000 people, brought down New York's tallest skyscrapers, destroyed part of the Pentagon, crashed four passenger jetliners, resulted in two wars, and changed U.S. foreign policy for decades. The Jan. 6 riot led to the natural-causes death of one Capitol Police officer, the shooting death of one rioter at the hands of police, the "acute amphetamine intoxication" death of another rioter, and the natural-causes deaths of two more. Had the 9/11 attackers survived, they would have been charged with mass murder. Most of the 1/6 rioters have been charged with "Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building." Parts of the Capitol were ransacked, but not seriously enough that Congress could not meet and finish its election certification work on the night of the riot. The riot was appalling, and the participants deserve punishment, but it was simply nothing like Sept. 11. To visualize the difference, imagine that, on the night of the 9/11 attacks, there was a convention that went on as scheduled at the World Trade Center.

The bottom line: There is simply no comparison in scale, act, motivation, or anything else between Sept. 11 and Jan. 6. And yet now, a former president suggests that those two enormously dissimilar events were actually similar, both coming from "the same foul spirit."

Cry more, Sniffling Bitch.

The extreme left, predictably, "swooned" over Bush's speech.

Some on the left denied that, but Matt Taibbi proved it with tweeted swoons from Rob Reiner, leftwing propagandist claiming to be a historian Michael Bechschloss, CNN propagandist Ana Navarro, Bill Clinton and... Keith Olberman.

The political left, the Hollywood left, the academic left, the CNN left, the MSNBC left.

I'd say that sampling proves that the bulk of the institutional left showed a Strange New Respect for the Connecticut born, Kennebunkport raised neoliberal George W. Bush.

Glenn Greenwald has no doubts about why the speech turned the rabid left into giddy fanbois: It lays the predicate for turning all of the infrastructure and armaments of the War on Terror on the real enemy, the dissident populits.

As I said: the speech was widely praised on the left.

Including the grifters of the Conservative, Inc. cryptoleft.

Update: Clear-eyed leftist Michael Tracy notes that the Deep State is using the War on Terror infrastructure to prepare a new War on Disease super-state:

9/11 enabled drastic new powers to be seized on what was initially claimed to be a temporary emergency basis -- but then those powers became entrenched as a permanent feature of ordinary life. A similar thing is happening right now with policy-making around COVID

Prescott Bush

George H.W. Bush

George W. Bush

Three generations of imbeciles is enough.
Posted by: Hadrian the Seventh

Update: Good piece on this at American Greatness, thanks to Mark1971.

This historic blunder [the losses of two wars] would be enough for an average underperforming president, but George W. Bush is no average underperformer. These words were delivered not only on the occasion of the common man's selfless sacrifice par excellence, but also hot on the heels of our ruling class' greatest military blunder and most embarrassing episode in perhaps our entire national history. The idea that George W. Bush would have the audacity to do anything other than demur the opportunity to speak on 9/11, just weeks after the total failure of our entire engagement in the Middle East, is astonishing.

Instead of heaping praise on this small group of valiant Flight 93 Americans, and humbly asking their forgiveness for his errant and misguided attempts to avenge them, including the embarrassing foreign adventurism undertaken in their name, Bush instead searched the American landscape for a recent, festering wound to scratch . . . and broke it wide open. Why? Why did he feel the need to do this?

Alluding to the events on January 6, 2021, Bush lectured ordinary Americans--some of them the very people who felt compelled to answer his call to defend America 20 years ago at Ground Zero--on what he considers to be their latent propensity to act like the terrorists he and his fellow negligent elites allowed to murder nearly 3,000 of us. One can believe that the misguided and foolish rioting of January 6 was profoundly wrong, and still feel in one's bones how inappropriate and small Bush was to profane the remembrance of our heroes with his tedious little lecture.

That extra step to insult is truly breathtaking. This great failure of a wartime president alluded to the chaotic milling about and general parading through the Capitol by a bunch of nincompoops (who neither brought weapons nor used them) and compared it to heinous crimes of murderous zealots. He likened people who essentially walked into the Capitol building and then back out again while harboring incorrect political sentiments to those who slaughtered as many innocents as they possibly could using hijacked commercial jets which they transformed into great flying bombs of incinerating fuel. American citizens behaving badly should not be compared, under any circumstances, to the people who pulverized, at terrific speed, airplanes full of innocents into some of our most iconic and important buildings, instantly killing themselves and everyone onboard in a final nihilistic act of rage and impotent fury.

The sheer violence to common decency, statesmanship, and self-awareness that George W. Bush, a man I voted for twice, achieved with his 9/11 speech is, I confess, difficult to comprehend.

I find it easier and easier to comprehend, to be honest.

That's who these people are. That's who they've always been.

posted by Ace at 05:22 PM

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