And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife. And the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Apologies if this was posted already, I didn't read all pages of the comments.

Just because "9/11" is in the title of the post doesn't mean we should veer the discussion here into WTC7 and the "missing plane" at the Pentagon or the melting temperature of iron girder supports.

Sheesh. Isn't destroying evidence of torture and obstructing a milquetoast bi-partisan investigation enough government criminality to discuss for one day?

Let's open our hymnals to "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative"

"We're targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter."

"Oh," I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. "How about 'angry black man'?"

"Yeah, that sounds good. What's his voice sound like?"

So I cued up one particular actor's CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character.

After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, "That's the guy!"

So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, "I'm calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt."

I'm not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was "I'm ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don't vote for the Democrat I'm going to come to your house and take care of some business."

The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be "I'm not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house."

We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone's character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls.

Remember -- they were Democrats; they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.

Yes, yes, I can see how the idea that Noonan used a british epithet for gay by accident is such a compelling theory!

Republicans have made this kind of thing a god damn science. It's the only science they do respect. They are professionals at this.

The coup de grace:

"After ten full years inside the GOP, ninety days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal."

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004957.php

Way back some anonymous person alleged that Al Gore first brought up Willie Horton to the public attention in 1988.

This is false. Another conservative lie designed to evade responsibility for their bigotry. Al Gore did ask about weekend furloughs to Dukakis in a debate, but he never mentioned Horton by name (nor by race, which the Republicans most definitely did!)

http://www.slate.com/id/1003919/

I'd let it slide, but that's how these lies continue.

I really like this:

Horton told Playboy magazine in 1989 that a woman who identified herself as working for "an organization affiliated with the Bush campaign" phoned him and wrote letters to him up in prison trying to get him to endorse Dukakis.

Yes, yes, I can see how that bad man Al Gore started all this. George H Bush was totally innocent in the Willie Horton affair!