The Day the Sky Fell - By Tea Party Friend - Daniel Greenfield Thursday, September 9, 2010
Tuesday. Another morning in downtown Manhattan. The canyons of the financial district swell with men and women in business suits, briefcases confidently swinging, a cup of coffee or a pastry dangling from one hand. Few of them were bothering to look up at the sky. They owned the sky. Despite the bombing of the World Trade Center that had come in the winter of 1993, or the much earlier, and now ancient bombing by left-wing anarchists on September 16, 1920, confidence was in the air. There had been a Dot Com bubble, but the worst was over.
By subway entrances, hawkers in aprons shilled copies of the Daily News or the New York Post, more rarely Newsday. The news was simple enough. The New York Giants felt unappreciated. Mayor Giuliani vowed to overhaul the city's school system. New York City Opera was beginning its season with a production of The Flying Dutchman. Tom Clancy topped the New York Times paperback bestseller list with The Bear and the Dragon, a novel about the danger from Russia and China. The world as they knew it was coming to an end, but they had no idea. Just a shadow passing high above the sunlit towers. Just a shadow swooping down out of the sky.
Shortly thereafter amid the howling of sirens and crowds streaming across the Brooklyn Bridge and uptown to safety, amid the rain of falling ash and the unbelievable sight behind us - came the simple revelation. The skies no longer belonged to us.
Our Soil, Our Sky, Our Blood. Subliminally we had known the day would come. We had acted out such spectacles countless times in movies, to dull the edge of the horror and make it palatable, adding happy endings to keep things simpler and cleaner. But we had denied it, just as we had denied history and destiny. We had treated any warnings as "Chicken Littles" crying that the sky would fall. And when the sky fell, we wondered who could have seen it coming.
But it was not the first time that Muslim terrorists had struck New York. It was only the first time that they had succeeded in causing so much death. We had let the media dismiss the first 1993 attack as the work of bunglers. We joined blow dried reporters in chuckling about the terrorist so stupid he tried to get back a deposit for a vehicle he had used in the attack. But we had forgotten what the attack really meant. That we were in the middle of a war. And in a one-sided war, the enemy does not have to be lucky every time. Just once. Just a few men with box cutters and some flight lessons. A plan that would have seemed absurd if it had failed, but a nightmare when it succeeded.
It is human nature to focus on petty complaints. The New York of that Tuesday morning was outraged over Mayor Giuliani's crackdown on petty quality-of-life offenses. By that afternoon even the dimmest yuppie had figured out that they were in the middle of a war, whose issues and implications made the rights of squeegee men to spray your car window and ask for change, something too small to be worth talking about. That shocking contrast was part of a dramatic transformation of the American consciousness by that metaphorical hole in the sky.
We knew the sky no longer belonged to us. Airline transportation which we had mostly taken for granted had become a weapon to be used against us. And anyone and anything could be next. We were at war. And some of us wanted to ask the men who had done this, what we could do to get our sky back. Others wanted to take it back by force, by destroying the perpetrators and using them to send a message. That our soil, our sky and our blood were off limits.
Our growing power had made wars into a distant proposition, fought on foreign valleys and beaches, across oceans to the west and the east. But power is limited not only by the reach of its wielder, but by the strength of his grip and the flexibility of his arm. We had reach, enormous reach. And great power. But our grip was weak and we could not make the blade go where it was needed. Our enemies understood that, even if we did not. And so we faced a new war. A war in which the enemy moved among us, played on our emotions, treated our decency as a shield, and our laws as a trench dug into the raw earth.
That Tuesday we faced a new world. A world in which the sky fell. And some of us rose to face the challenges. And some of us fled into the comforts of the Monday that had before, and all the days and years before it. Escaping history. Fleeing destiny. Forgetting that the world had changed, and no amount of politics as usual could make it stay the same.
Victory over Evil
When a nation loses its way and gives up on its own destiny, exchanging the birthright of its own exceptionalism for the porridge of self-amusement - it takes a collision with an unthinkable evil to remind it of its place in the world. Too many Americans had accepted the postmodern view of the world, one in which there was neither good nor evil, just a variety of opinions and viewpoints. That postmodern world seemed more comfortable with its welcoming non-judgmentalism and its disbelief in destiny. It was a world that did not ask anything of us, except to occasionally pretend that we care.
9/11 changed that. It tore down the sky and opened a gaping hole in the self-centered arrogance that had been the legacy of the '90s, best exemplified by its champion, the morally ambiguous William Jefferson Clinton. It reminded us that we cannot just be satisfied with bread and circuses. That the world does not exist for our amusement. And that all views and beliefs are not created equal. That despite the ironic detachment of pop culture, there was a right and a wrong. And that despite the retreat from faith in a higher being, to a faith in our own technocratic castles in the sky, there was such a thing as good and evil. And not that we had forgotten that we were meant to be the good - evil had come to pay a call on us.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, and even long before then, many Americans had ceased to believe that there was an evil out there. Only different views, governments and cultures. But in defeating one evil, a power vacuum had opened in which an old dormant evil could thrive again. And so it shall always be.
We had come to think of the "good life" as a natural and inevitable outcome of our own gifts and talents. But it requires more than that. It requires that we stand ready to resist those who would destroy it. On 9/11 we met our opposite, the mirror image of what we had allowed ourselves to become. Fanatics with a murderous faith, confronting a country that had come too close to forgetting its own. Destroyers attacking a civilization of builders. Barbarians besieging the gate of a civilization that had forgotten the sacrifices which had built their cities, and the price paid to raise up their walls.
9/11 interrupted the culture of passivity with a warning and a challenge. Either we would defy and defeat evil anew, or it would consume us whole, as it had done to so many cultures and countries around the world. Our "good life" could not be seen as an unchallenged gift, but an inheritance we would have to fight for over and over again. There is horror in that, but there is also greatness. Because men and women are not uplifted by wallowing in comfort and plenty, but by testing their bodies and souls against challenges, and prevailing over them.
We were not made to be a nation of credit card holders and sofa cushion sitters, fast food eaters and spectator sports watchers. These things are part of the reward of wealth for the challenges that we have already overcome. But to take consumerism as a gift, rather than a reward, is to become debauched by it, as so many peoples have by wealth and plenty before us. We do not need to feel guilt for what we have, only guilt for forgetting why we have it. Because generation after generation fought challenges of every sort to win it for us. And if we allow ourselves to forget or to imagine that those challenges were only in the past, we throw away what they fought so hard to gain for us. Not mere wealth, but freedom.
9/11 was not only a call to arms, but a call to awareness. The awareness that what we have is not free, it must be paid for in generation after generation. There is no final victory and no permanent armistice. As long as human evil endures in the world, so long we must be prepared to fight against it. The latest phase of a very old war has come again. We can be uplifted by the struggle against it, or destroyed by the submission to it. The choice is ours. The consequences of that choice however will follow us across generations and to the end of time. Source: canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/27473
TEA PARTY ROCKS
CLEVELAND - Politically weakened but refusing to bend, President Barack Obama insisted Wednesday that Bush-era tax cuts be cut off for the wealthiest Americans, joining battle with Republicans - and some fellow Democrats - just two months before bruising midterm elections.
Singling out House GOP leader John Boehner in his home state, Obama delivered a searing attack on Republicans for advocating "the same philosophy that led to this mess in the first place: cut more taxes for millionaires and cut more rules for corporations."
Obama rolled out a trio of new plans to help spur job growth and invigorate the sluggish national economic recovery. They would expand and permanently extend a research and development tax credit that lapsed in 2009, allow businesses to write off 100 percent of their investments in equipment and plants through 2011 and pump $50 billion into highway, rail, airport and other infrastructure projects.
The package was assembled by the president's economic team after it became clear that the recovery was running out of steam. There was a political component, too: With Democrats in danger of losing control of the House in November, Obama is under heavy pressure to show voters that he and his party are ready to do more to get the economy moving and get millions of jobless Americans back to work.
Obama made one of his strongest appeals yet to allow the tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush - in 2001 and 2003 - to expire at the end of the year on schedule, but just for individuals earning more than $200,000 annually or joint filers earning over $250,000. The changes would affect dividend and capital gains rates and various other tax benefits as well as income from wages and salaries.
The president's strategy - pushing for legislation to save some tax cuts but not all - carries its own risks. Since all the tax breaks would expire automatically at the end of the year if Congress failed to act, that could result in sweeping increases for taxpayers at every income level - a major blow to recovery hopes and a colossal dose of blame for voters to parcel out to lawmakers and the White House.Some influential Democrats, and Obama's own former budget director, Peter Orszag, have suggested a compromise might be necessary - one to temporarily extend all the tax cuts, perhaps for a year or two - given the current election-year animosity between the two parties.
But in his remarks in Cleveland, Obama strongly signaled he wasn't about to sign off on any such deal.
"Let me be clear to Mr. Boehner and everyone else. We should not hold middle class tax cuts hostage any longer," the president said. The administration "is ready this week to give tax cuts to every American making $250,000 or less," he said. It was a slight misstatement of his own position, since the $250,000 would apply to household income. The threshold for individuals would be $200,000
White House officials said Cleveland was picked as the speech site expressly because Boehner, who probably would become House speaker if Republicans take back control of the chamber in November, laid out his party's economic agenda here in a fiery Aug. 24 speech.
At that time, the Ohio Republican called for Obama to fire key economic advisers and to support an extension of all the Bush tax cuts.Boehner kept up the attack on Wednesday. "If the president is really serious about focusing on jobs, a good start would be taking the advice of his recently departed budget director and freezing all tax rates, coupled with cutting of federal spending to where it was before all the bailouts, government takeovers and 'stimulus' spending sprees," he said after Obama spoke.
Earlier, Boehner was even more specific on ABC's "Good Morning America," saying Congress should freeze all tax rates for two years and pare back federal spending to 2008 levels. The deep recession began in December 2007.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs noted that keeping the Bush tax cuts in effect just for two more years would represent a change from past calls by Boehner to keep them in place permanently.
"My question for him is: Are they abandoning the permanent or are they going with the two-year plan? I've seen him saying permanent so many times that I tend to believe that," Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One. "That's his plan and I think that continues to be his plan."Republicans, and some Democrats, argue that the fragile state of the economy makes this a poor time to raise taxes on anyone - and that increases could stifle wealthier people's appetite for spending.
Obama argued that the rich are more likely to save additional money than spend it. And he said the struggling U.S. economy can't afford to spend $700 billion to keep lower tax rates in place for the nation's highest earners.
That $700 billion is what the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates it would cost the Treasury to continue tax cuts for top earners over 10 years. What Obama wants to do would cost just over $3 trillion over the same period, the panel estimates.
The debate over the Bush tax cuts is an unwelcome one for dozens of vulnerable Democratic incumbents just weeks before Election Day. Already, a handful of Democrats in conservative or swing districts, such as Reps. Gerry Connolly in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Bobby Bright in southeastern Alabama, have come out publicly for extending all the cuts - at least temporarily.
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., engaged in a tight re-election battle, said he "would not support additional spending in a second stimulus package" and that any new initiatives such as Obama's infrastructure package should be paid for with leftover funds in the $814 billion stimulus package passed last year.
Still other embattled Democrats, wary of alienating middle-class voters, are siding with Obama. In central Ohio, for example, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy has said the tax cuts for higher earners should be repealed but middle-income people should see no tax increases.
Obama acknowledged recovery had slowed noticeably, with unemployment hovering just under 10 percent.
"The middle class is still treading water, while those aspiring to reach the middle class are doing everything they can to keep from drowning," he said.
Polls have shown a steady slippage in Obama's approval ratings and an accompanying rise in Republican prospects for winning House and Senate seats in November. That has chipped away at Obama's leverage to get things done in Congress.
Obama has sought to frame the election as a choice between continuing his policies or reinstating those pursued by Bush. He acknowledged in an interview with ABC after his speech that "if the election is a referendum on are people satisfied about the economy as it currently is, then we're not going to do well, because I think everybody feels like this economy needs to better than it's been doing."The excerpt was aired Wednesday on ABC's evening news. Fuller portions of the interview were airing Thursday morning on "Good Morning America." Source: www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/US-bush-tax-cuts/2010/09/08/id/369613 Obama Won't Yield on Tax Hikes
Wednesday, 08 Sep 2010 08:17 PM
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