Democracy Has Prevailed.

August 9, 2007

"...19 kids lured onto planes..."

"...19 kids to be lured onto airplanes..." *

That quote is referring to the 9/11 terrorists.

Which crazy Democrat presidential hopeful said that?

NONE.

Which crazy Republican presidential hopeful said that?

NONE.

It was the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, who just proclaimed that at a presser.

In his increasingly desperate attempts to justify the War On Iraq, Bush just turned the 9/11 terrorists into VICTIMS.

And, I guess Osama bin Laden is just some big old knucklehead . . .

Can you even imagine the fallout if a Democrat -- ANY DEMOCRAT -- had turned the 9/11 killers into VICTIMS to try to justify ANYTHING?!?

CONTEMPTIBLE.

(Not to mention that Mohamed Atta was 33 years old forchrisakes.)

Please, someone, tell me I misheard him. Please!

* UPDATE: I've changed the quote that begins this post to match the transcript rather than my memory -- it doesn't make it any better.

The full quote is: "It matters if the United States does not believe in the universality of freedom. It matters to the security of people here at home if we don't work to change the conditions that caused 19 kids to be lured onto airplanes to come and murder our citizens."

Apparently, I'm not the only one who had problems with it.

Dan Froomkin at washingtonpost.com asks: "Kids? Lured?"

Worse still, according to the Mouth of the Potomac blog at NYDailyNews.com, this isn't the first time that Bush has gone "off on the root causes and sociology and such behind the “19 kids” who hijacked the planes on 9/11."

"Last April 20, in East Grand Rapids, Mich., Bush said “I happen to believe that, kind of, managing stability doesn't address the root cause of the problems that caused 19 kids to get on an airplane and kill 3,000 of our citizens.” He made similar comments in Ohio, Georgia and California."

They call it "Bush's Krupke Moments" as in when the Jets in "West Side Story" sang to Officer Krupke:

"Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand."


11 comments:

Sherry Pasquarello said...

can't his staff(handlers) or cheney just make him stick to scripted words???

Maria said...

See the update, Sherry.

It apparently IS in the script since he keeps saying it.

Sherry Pasquarello said...

ack!!!!


i supposed they have fiqured out the we, the american people really are stupid and spineless , lazy or a combination of all.

Sherry Pasquarello said...

oh another thing for the bush followers...

why, when others first questioned the reasoning behind people that would fly a plane into a building, they were villified as radical lefty hippie tree hugging suck ups, bush does worse, even saing they were "kids" for pity's sake and it's o.k???

could it be he is softening his retoric towards the highjackers because they were saudis???

Richmond K. Turner said...

I honestly don't think he meant it in the way that you are taking it, Maria. I think it's even worse than that.

The President (and everyone around him) is seemingly unable to understand that there might be differing ideas about life and living than those which are commonly held by Christians of Western European ancestry. He thinks that absolutely everyone out there thinks the same way he does, that one's life is a sacred gift from the Almighty and that it's the gravest of sins to give up one's life willingly, let alone to do so in an attack that kills other people.

So in his world, there is no way that any person could ever volunteer for a suicide attack such as 9/11 or one of the hundreds of suicide bombings seen since the start of the Iraq War. The only way that these killers could ever bring themselves to do such a thing, in Bush's mind, is to be duped, brainwashed, an lured by evil manipulators who trick them into doing such a thing.

What this perspective fails to realize is that not everybody in the world shares this notion that one's life is absolutely sacred. There is obviously a distinct subset of the Islamic world that has convinced itself that it is truly glorious to die in this manner.

My own belief is that these beliefs are a perversion of Islam, and that they require an extremely skewed reading of the Koran. So it may be the case that, at the start of the suicide bombing movement, the initial attackers did indeed have to be duped and lured into committing these horrific crimes. But it's gone so far beyond that at this point that "luring" is no longer necessary. There are 9-year-old boys in Palestinian refugee camps whose one and only dream for their future is blow themselves up on a Tel Aviv street corner. Nobody has to lure them to adopt this mindset; it's part of the culture they have been raised in, and it seems completely normal to them.

The President lacks the ability to understand that there are different ways of thinking about things, and that not everyone believes (or even wants to) what he believes. To me, that's even scarier.

Sherry Pasquarello said...

yeah, that is even scarier.

Anonymous said...

He's been doing this for years. Who can forget the "food on your families," or the "stratergery," etc.

The difference now is that this is s serious subject and the media isn't laughing. So he won't get as big of a pass, though it'll still be a pass.

Tim Murray said...

"And, I guess Osama bin Laden is just some big old knucklehead . . ." HA HA HA HA

John K. said...

This is it? This is all you got? For 6 years all you have is checking to see if the President has dotted an "i" or crossed a "T"? No wonder C. Sheehan is running against the Speaker of the House.

Anonymous said...

John K. wrote:

This is it? This is all you got? For 6 years all you have is checking to see if the President has dotted an "i" or crossed a "T"? No wonder C. Sheehan is running against the Speaker of the House.

Lord, I hope that was satire. If not, it means there's a real live human being out there who thinks that it was an intelligent point to make.

John, honestly, how would the right side of the blogosphere react if it was, say, John Kerry, who called the 9/11 hijackers "kids" and turned them into victims?

Be honest now.

MrUnibrow said...

I heard and I couldn' believe my ears. I quickly put together the 4 times (with video links) President Bush called the hijackers "the 19 kids" in a blog called The 19 Kids of 9/11