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Who can forget [Rice's] famously stupid, "who could have ever predicted this would happen?" comment? ... Bush and his team utterly refuse to recognize that 9/11 was preventable ...
Amen and hallelujah.
But I will go a step further, even though I realize that this is beating a lonely drum in the Salon letters (and especially with Joan Walsh).
It's not just George Bush who tells himself (as another letter writer put it) what he wishes were true, rather than what really happened. The phrase "no one could have expected nine eleven" has become generally accepted as the truth even by liberals, for reasons which are dangerous and unpleasant to consider but must be faced.
It's the nature of authoritarian troglodytes in all societies at all times in history to want to overturn social order and replace it with a cult of naked power based on fear. People like Bush happen, they aren't mysterious or strange or shocking or unexpected — it just takes a certain basic level of wisdom to identify the threat they represent.
A functioning liberal society establishes, and maintains, protections from people like Bush achieving power. The real problem facing the American republic is not that Bush came along or that there were people who supported him. The real problem is that, when he inevitably did, those protections failed.
So long as otherwise well-meaning liberals are unwilling to face that fact, or grapple with the unpleasant question of why it happened, we — and our world — will remain in acute danger.
"No one could have predicted nine eleven" is what we all say, not just Bush, in order to avoid having to face that grim fact. But Bush's failures are easy to understand and, unfortunately, beside the point.
It's absolutely essential that we understand why we failed. And however commendable they might be, merely putting Obama in the White House, and looking critically at Bush, are not enough.
