Paul Krugman's Shameful Political Attack And Rewrite of History

By now, most of the readers of yesterday's Drudge Report are aware that a columnist for the New York Times, Paul Krugman, wrote the following blog entry and published it just prior to the time of day when the first World Trade Center tower was attacked on 9/11/2011:

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te 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.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Aside from the fact that this criticism of Bush, Giuliani, and Kerik are so politically motivated and so shamefully out of place on a day of solemn remembrance, it is also factually wrong. Krugman would have you believe that the events of 9/11 were something that Bush and other neocons had just been eagerly awaiting: An excuse to go to war. But, this is a pure rewrite of history. Simply, the Afghanistan War would have never happened if the Taliban had complied with George W. Bush's demand that they turn over Osama Bin Laden and stop harboring Al Qaeda. That's the reality that Krugman's blog entry seems to have conveniently and so "liberal-mindedly" forgotten.

As far as being fake heroes, I think Bush, Giuliani, or Kerik would "all" admit that the heroes of that day were those who lost their lives and those who saved the lives of others; and, not themselves. What these men did, following 9/11, was to simply do their jobs to protect the citizens of this country. Each was an extremely strong and competent leader at a time of intensely wrenching turmoil in our history. A fact that we can all be thankful for and a fact that, apparently, Krugman doesn't seem to comprehend.