295 The Widows of 9-11

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial by Dorothy Rabinowitz about "widow fatigue."

"Out of their loss and tragedy the widows had forged new lives as investigators of 9/11, analysts of what might have been had every agency of government done as it should. No one would begrudge them this solace.

Nor can anyone miss, by now, the darker side of this spectacle of the widows, awash in their sense of victims' entitlement, as they press ahead with ever more strident claims about the way the government failed them. Or how profoundly different all this is from the way in which citizens in other times and places reacted to national tragedy. . . " And she goes on to describe the horror of the bombings in Britain in 1940 and 1941.

As I've watched and listened to the hearings, and read the criticism of both the Clinton and Bush Administrations I'm wondering if in the long run they won't benefit President Bush.

Afterall, the most hateful critics of Bush seem to be crying, in hindsight, that he should have been aware of how to stop 9/11 even on vague, poorly worded intelligence summaries. These same people wanted him to take preemptive action, like racial profiling of Arabs in the country legally, taking legal flight classes. On the other hand, they didn't want him to take preemptive action when he had very specific intelligence on WMD, which haven't been found yet. They wanted him to take action against terrorists in the summer of 2001 without any support from allies, but didn't want him to take action in 2003 when allies who were in cahoots with Sadaam wouldn't support him.

The 9-11 hearings are so political they are starting to smell really bad. And the widows are diminishing the memories of their loved ones, behaving as though the lives of the rest of the nation have no meaning at all as they play into the hands of the terrorists and set us up for more tragedy.