A new favorite of my Democratic friends is Heather Cox Richardson. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, one of friends sent me her column about 9/11 and the ensuing 20 years. HCR is a fervent Democrat in my experience and places the blame for our country's problems in recent years on the Republicans:
But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy today’s events commemorated. Those people, concentrated in the Republican Party, worried that permitting all Americans to have a say in their government would lead to “socialism”: minorities and women would demand government programs paid for with tax dollars collected from hardworking people—usually, white men. They wanted to slash taxes and government regulations, giving individuals the “freedom” to do as they wished.
In 1986, they had begun to talk about purifying the vote; when the Democrats in 1993 passed the so-called Motor Voter law permitting people to register to vote at certain government offices, they claimed that Democrats were buying votes. The next year, Republicans began to claim that Democrats won elections through fraud, and in 1998, the Florida legislature passed a voter ID law that led to a purge of as many as 100,000 voters from the system before the election of 2000, resulting in what the United States Commission on Civil Rights called “an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement,” particularly of African American voters.
This view of the world matches mine from most of my life. I have been a fervent Democrat and have attributed most of our country's problems to the Republicans. However, since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, my view is that the Democrats have adopted Republican deficiencies and become equally culpable. In particular, the Democrats and their supporters pushed false charges from the intelligence community blaming Russia for Trump's election and initiating a new Cold War with Russia on that basis. Democrats also used race to divide the county, fighting back in kind against Republicans.
So I have a different take from HCR on the 20 years since 9/11/2001. She now sides with former president Bush in "calling out the similarities between today's domestic terrorists who attacked our Capitol to overthrow our government on January 6 and the terrorists of 9/11". As Bush put it:
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.
I agree with Matt Taibbi who characterized the equivalence as follows:
the insane comparison of the 9/11 hijackers — people who committed intentional mass murder of thousands — with yahoos who waved Trump 2020 flags and took selfies on the Senate floor before ultimately pleading to crimes like “obstruction of an official proceeding,” the heaviest felony prosecutors could muster.
So I've diverged from Democrats such as HCR in my view of the world. She continues to see Republicans as our main problem whereas I see both Republicans and Democrats such as her as the problem. There has been little accountability for our failures since 9/11/2001, and we need accountability for our increasingly bipartisan failures. In that light, I commend the following:
A modest proposal: Fire all of the post 9/11 generals, by Andrew Bacevich
Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick,” published in 1729, suggested that the impoverished Irish might improve their condition by selling their children to be “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled” and served on the tables of well-to-do English gentry. My own modest proposal envisions nothing quite so drastic.
But whereas Swift’s “Modest Proposal” was intended as a satire, mine is not. Absent serious efforts to reform the senior officer corps, we can expect more Afghanistans to come. Listen to General Mark Milley, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, who expected Afghan forces to hang on “from weeks to months and even years following our departure” and tell me I’m wrong.
HCR wrote a post on 9/8/2021 describing decades of Republican malfeasance and noting approvingly that finally Republicans are being held accountable:
While Ford recoiled from the prospect of putting a former president on trial, prosecutors today have seen no reason not to charge the people who stormed the Capitol. More than 570 have been charged so far.
Yesterday, a 67-year-old Idaho man, Duke Edward Wilson, pleaded guilty to obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers. He faces up to 8 years and a $250,000 fine for assaulting the law enforcement officers. And he faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for obstruction of an official proceeding.
This law was originally put in place in 1871 to stop members of the Ku Klux Klan from crushing state and local governments during Reconstruction.
HCR started blogging 2 years ago in reaction to and support of Adam Schiff, chairman of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Schiff has been notoriously wrong about Trump's involvement with Russia, claiming repeatedly, for example, that the Steele dossier was legitimate.
Back in 2017, (Schiff) was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and therefore the man Democrats counted on to lead the charge that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin in order to steal the election. He did so with gusto. Quoting from a dossier prepared by ex-British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, he regaled a March 2017 committee hearing with tales of how Russia bribed Trump adviser Carter Page by offering him a hefty slice of a Russian natural-gas company known as Rosneft and of how Russian agents boosted Trump’s political fortunes by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails and passing them on to WikiLeaks...
Hours later, he assured MSNBC that the evidence of collusion was “more than circumstantial.” Nine months after that, he informed CNN’s Jake Tapper that the case was no longer in doubt: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help, the Russians gave help, and the president made full use of that help.” In February 2018, he told reporters: “There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation. And I think some of that non-public evidence is evidence on the issue of collusion and some … on the issue of obstruction.”
The press lapped it up. But now, thanks to the May 7 release of 57 transcripts of secret testimony – transcripts, by the way, that Schiff bottled up for months – we have a better idea of what such “non-public information” amounts to. The answer: nothing. A parade of high-level witnesses told the intelligence committee that either they didn’t know about collusion or lacked evidence even to venture an opinion. Not one offered the contrary view that collusion was true.
But rather than admit that the investigation had turned up nothing, Schiff lied that it had – not once but repeatedly.
Let that sink in for a moment. Collusion dominated the headlines from the moment Buzzfeed published the Steele dossier on Jan. 10, 2017, to the release of the Muller report on Apr. 18, 2019. That’s more than two years, a period in which newspapers and TV were filled with Russia, Russia, Russia and little else. Thanks to the uproar, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein secretly discussed using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to force Trump out of office, while an endless parade of newscasters and commentators assured viewers that the president’s days were numbered because “the walls are closing in.”
Schiff’s only response was to egg it on to greater and greater heights. Even when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued his no-collusion verdict – “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” his report said – Schiff insisted that there was still “ample evidence of collusion in plain sight.”
Schiff's biggest campaign contributors are defense contractors including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK, Harris Corporation, and Raytheon.
But surpassing all these is Parsons Corp, a multinational engineering services firm... Parsons has maxed out for Schiff ... an honor it hasn’t bestowed on any other congressperson...
Parsons’s various subsidiaries receive huge amounts of government largesse. Its “Government Services” subsidiary landed more than $740 million in government contracts in 2017, most of which came from the defense department, while its “Global Services” subsidiary has raked in tens of millions of dollars worth over the last few years, almost all from the Pentagon.
Parsons benefited directly from Schiff’s vote for the Iraq War, becoming the second largest reconstruction contractor in the country... And as if war-profiteering wasn’t enough, Parsons’s work in Iraq tended to be rife with problems... While other lawmakers criticized the company for its failures, Schiff was muted...
So HCR wants accountability for the unarmed protestors who went to the Capitol on January 6, but is a big supporter of Adam Schiff and in fact founded her blog in support of his intelligence findings. It is obvious to me that her demand for accountability is misplaced. Republicans should be held accountable for our many fiascos over the past 20 years, but so also should Democrats such as Adam Schiff and others in the bipartisan foreign policy establishment.
