9/11: the postmortem

Krugman is the only one who hit the nail on the head today. A large excerpt from his blog post for today:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Indeed.

So let's see . . .

After 9/11, we attacked the wrong country. (And we don't care; odd, that.)

And now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis in living memory, the government has attacked the wrong problem. We don't have a deficit problem or a debt ceiling problem; we have a demand problem. And the reason no one has money to spend is because they don't have jobs. The plan just enacted by congress will make both these situations worse, not better. After long debate, our nation just punched the wrong opponent again.

This is quite a country we've got here. And things will stay this way until progressives, young people, democrats and independents rise up and elect people who can actually think. I haven't much hope for this happening.

Good luck to us all. We're going to need it.