The damn phone was ringing pretty fucking early. It rang four times and the message machine picked up; no message was left. Then it rang again to the same result. The third time it started ringing, I finally dragged myself out of bed, went over to the phone and picked it up. The clock said it was 0545 in the City of Lost Angles.
I watched Shrub and the R's stampede the country into the Patriot Act, along with Democrats who should have known better. I've gotten to where I believe the last lines of the national anthem less and less: "land of the free, and the home of the brave." I swear, the United States is the nation that panics--and fearful people usually make stupid decisions.
Moments like this I pull up the Jeff Daniels monologue at the beginning of "The Newsroom" - "America is not the greatest country in the world anymore." On Sept 11, 2001, we were standing in our bathroom which was being remodeled. The contractor's wife called him and told him a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV and we saw the north tower burning. A few minutes later the second plane hit the south tower. I looked at the Bride and said, "I don't know who, but we are at war with someone....."
Ben Franklin was asked what kind of government the constitutional convention had given the people. His famous answer was, "A republic, if you can keep it." There are many ways to lose a republic or any democracy - refuse to follow the ideals of your founding documents, fail to educate your people so they know how the government works and their responsibility for voting and supporting that government, not protecting the people from the depredations of unbridled rich capitalists and not promoting social equality of opportunity, among others. We may be demonstrating that we are just like all the other republics and democracies that lost their way and are no more. If that happens, the ones who will be the most hurt and exploited will be those who supported those who campaigned against the government and the people it was trying to help. And there will be no one to help them.....
There's a picture of the Senate after the Anthax (carefully sent to the librul naysayers) worked to get them to pass the Patriot Act, and I swear it looked like Hillary was glaring at G Shrubya (who was speaking) thinking, "you know your daddy's CIA brought this on, now you'll politicize it and milk it, won't you...
I've lost track...is there a final "official story" about the Anthrax? and didn't Cheney get what he thought was Anthrax powder (but wasn't)? where did that story go?
One thing we apparently chose not to learn was that the majority of the suicide hijackers were Saudis, not Iraqis. Of course, the wingers know how to profit from a crisis, and as Dennis Sienkiewicz pointed out, Cheney made quick calls to his fellow investors and manipulated an easily manipulated George W into an invasion. Another unjust war. The Ukrainians are teaching us what just wars look like, but will we learn? If our constant posture is one of anger, fear, and trembling, we never will.
Proposal: All owners of AKs and ARs must fight the next war. No exceptions.
And did this nation learn anything from that day? Not much, except that the terrorists won because we learned fear and of course, blamed it on the “others”, not on ourselves since we had sown the seeds of 9/11 a long time ago and neglected to tend the garden. Then of course, President Cheney and Halliburton reaped billions of dollars from our stupid invasions of Afghanistan and later, Iraq. Two more open festering wounds to breed more terrorists and warriors for Allah…
Everyone today is going on about how Unified we all were 22 years ago. I'm glad to read your response, because for many of us the unity was a façade. We didn't DARE say "what did you expect? Have you been LOOKING at how we are treating other "lesser" countries?" We didn't dare ask out loud "what is going to Afghanistan going to accomplish, exactly? No one has EVER won The Great Game--not the Brits, not the Russians. Even Alexander the Great had trouble." It wasn't as if Afghan nationals grabbed those planes. What did we do with the country that actually spawned those terrorists? Bought its oil, enriching it so we could all drive to the mall instead of having decent public transportation to get us there.
By the time we headed to Iraq it was OK to be cynical again. But until then the word was "If you dissent from our response, the terrorists have won."
And though we temporarily squelched the Taliban, that Great Game finally beat us. And it was 10 YEARS after Osama was killed before we left the country. Much of the time before he was killed he was actually in Pakistan--our ally.
This is not to say that I feel nothing for the victims of 9/11 and their families. Of course I do. I feel sympathy and horror and sorrow. I just don't think the attack came out of the blue, with no history behind it. Those in the tower were victims--not only of Al Qaeda, but of the forces that caused Al Qaeda to form in the first place.
And I feel for the women of Afghanistan, given hope and then watching it drain away, with a huge number of Americans now frickin' AGREEING at least in part with the Taliban's take on the role of women.
I don't think we will ever really recover if we keep denying our own role. What mindless "patriotism" has led to is 1/6. Better to scream a lot than try to fix things.
"Those are some big fucking chickens, coming home to roost." I was in Boston, beginning a 'train the trainers' session for HR/Diversity folk working for the Commonwealth of MA. Your words are nearly identical to the thoughts in that room that day at the moment the news came in. It was pretty much their instantaneous reaction.
Last night, 60 Minutes devoted the entire hour to the events on 9/11 with focus on FDNY. Watching it really brought home once again just how horrific that day was. The final portion of the broadcast is about the many once-children of firefighters killed in the collapsed who have themselves become members of FDNY. https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/FHUYINKEarGgryw6R0uM2C8Tq1yO7_Gn/
I was two days into a x-country road trip and had stopped in Alamagordo for the night. When I awoke about 7 am, I turned on the TV and was riveted until I was forced to turn it off and check out of the motel. Once into New Mexico, I had left I-10 and continued east on US 70. From Alamagordo, I headed north to Tularosa and jumped back on to US 70. Once east of the mountains, driving east for hours and hours, across wide open spaces on what felt like the top of the world, was reassuring to me as I thought about how huge our country is and what any invaders would likely face from westerners of the many small towns I drove through. I learned to stay in the left lane when I entered the towns because there were very long lines of stopped cars waiting to enter gas stations. And everywhere I looked, there were American flags - flying, painted on the side of buildings. I still have the small American flag handed to me at a stoplight in Arkansas Springs by a man in a wheelchair who may have been a Vietnam veteran. He was giving them to everyone waiting at the light.
I still have the ragged little flag I bought and had taped to my car antenna for over a year. I finally took it off when I felt it was so ragged, it was disrespectful to leave it there.
I kept mine inside the car, on my dashboard until I replaced that car in 2016. Not as convenient on the new dashboard so now decorating a potted plant on my deck.
I do not have the ability to answer my own question, but, what do you think the outcome would be if 9/11 happened while Trump was in the White House.? O'Donnell called out his lies on how many imaginary friends he lost that day, but for someone who only thinks and speaks in lies how much worse do you think it would have been?
Than you, I think, for reminding me of so many times in the last 25 years that made me apoplectic. I lived through all that and had a hard time putting all the pieces together (I didn’t watch Fox, where Rupert told fools what to think). I knew about the Northern Alliance and felt that the loss of Massoud was a game changer and really bad omen. Only later did I hear about “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and would love to hear your take on that sometime.
Another gobsmacking game changer was the 2020 election steal. I watched as W/Dickie turned an epic failure into a war cry for revenge, with absolutely no acknowledgment for “previous.” My best friend and her family celebrated W with a Fox fervor that I could no longer abide.
As to that roller coaster of history, Tom Turo of the New Yorker has a cartoon that said “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everybody else repeats it.” You said it best. We all are on the roller coaster with too many fools.
The Iraq debacle was as deliberate and as stupid as any US action has ever been. So hard to even remember the horror, and the Isis it created (Abu Ghraib helped). W’s “mission accomplished“ bs almost caused a meltdown in the grocery store where the management had it on tv. First time I have ever made a scene in public.
And then came the tea party, with the solution - to white wash “guilty as sin” Repubs and blame a barely black man for every thing that had gone wrong and everything that could.
And their greatest accomplishment, the rise of the white supremacist, religious fascists. Well done America. Biden has a mountain of Schitt to shovel, with precious little help and an army of opposition who are constantly adding to the pile. I’m sure Chaney needed a new heart after all this because his had been dead for a long time. And W now pretends to be the responsible elder statesman. You are a great writer, but no fiction could ever match the unf**kingbelievable story behind this nightmare. And then came chump…
All I could think about as I watched the towers burn was that my son who joined the army in January 2000 would be sent to war.In 2003 that's exactly what happened. My friend,who never met a conspiracy theory she didn't agree with, was sure there were WMD's in Iraq, and we should go take care of them. None of her kids would be sent to war.
I heard so many blather about the WMD, and was having second thoughts after Powell’s speech. It took a while for him to apologize, but I had long since come to my senses.
I gotta say Hayden and Fonda behaved like real jerks at the 1979 Solar Congress in Boulder. There was conflict in the solar movement as to whether oil prices should remain controlled, as Nixon had done, or should be allowed to be set by the market. I'd been curious, and I'd started interviewing solar activists about what they thought. They mostly thought prices should not be controlled.
Hayden and Fonda blew into the conference just when everyone was sitting down to listen to the speeches, and they said, basically, that anyone who thought that prices shouldn't be controlled could get the hell out, or something to that effect.
After the speechifying, I looked for Hayden, but I couldn't find him. I found Fonda, and I said to her that I'd been interviewing activists, including activists who worked with poor people in ghettos, and I told her that a lot of them took a different view from what Hayden had said, and then asked her, don't you think you should just listen a bit, and try to understand their reasoning? NO WAY! she fumed, and walked off.
Now, it's 45 years later, and I hope they've matured. (I haven't been following them although I did see something in the last year either about them, or Fonda, which I remember as sounding favorable.)
Actually, Tom's been gone since 2009. Jane can be a handful, but she's someone with the guts to walk the walk, despite everything that happened the past 50 years, and I always respect that. She does have a habit of "fire! ready, aim..." at times.
The single most ignorant act I can recall was the 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech from the USS Abraham Lincoln where GW proudly pasted a metaphorical "Kick Me" sign to his own backside.
I've probably told this story before, but when I saw the second plane hit (I was playing hooky from work), I called my father, who immediately said it was Bin Laden. my own guess had been that it was obviously the '93 bombers who'd promised to 'finish the job." so the idea that we were "manufacturing enemies" because it was "an inside job" (which I recall didn't take that long to develop "legs") struck me as foolishness (even if "follow the money" at times in the following years was capable of arousing a second or two of suspicion)...suddenly every schmuck and his brother was an expert on explosives, stress analysis, metallurgy, whatever.
a few years later, I was walking in my school's hallway with very little to do because we were in the middle of one of those high-security lockdown "objective tests" when I saw one of our beautiful special ed. teachers on the phone shouting "NOOOOO" in a way that let me know she wasn't howling about missing dinner. actually, it felt like my blood froze when I heard it, so I ran into the classroom of one of her close friends, who said that her new husband-to-be was in Iraq (he'd thrown her a big lunchtime engagement party a month or so before. the story was that he'd broken up with his longtime girlfriend, enlisted in a state of despair, then met Olga (the teacher in question), fell in love, got engaged, then was deployed. it was one of those typical Iraqi deals...Humvee hit an IED and everybody was blown to pieces. when this was confirmed an hour or so later, my first reaction was "those motherfuckers," which was followed by someone else saying something like "yeah those fucking Arabs," at which point I wheeled on him and said that the motherfuckers I was talking about were "Bush, Cheney and the whole motherfucking bunch."
after that, a few teachers didn't want to talk to me for a while (one or two forever), and my attitude was, basically, "fuck them." I like to keep my work colleagues friends, but in that case, I couldn't have cared less.
as soon as I heard "War on Terror," I felt myself go through a long, very deep spiritual eye-roll, if you know what I mean.
and then, around 2004 or 2005, I couldn't help but notice that the bullshit coming out of Washington was EXACTLY what we were hearing in 1968. spookily word-for-word.
I could make the case that Bush killed my old man, since his rage over the Iraqi invasion coincided with his aneurysm rupturing in the OR. but I hardly need to...Bush's more public criminality is more than enough to make us despise him for his weakness and stupidity. the best thing I can say about him is that he seems more personable than the next Republican who lost the popular vote.
Amen and amen, Tom! I am so damn sick and tired, for one, of the way the Stars and Stripes has been co-opted to mean, "I'm bigger better Patriot than you are!" The morons who ran around with multiple flags on their trucks and gas guzzling SUVs; who planted the flags all over their front yards. I was on Capitol Hill that day and maybe, one of those planes was meant for the Capitol. What followed in the years after was such a cluster-fuck and too many young American lives were lost, fighting wars because someone in the Oval Office had a little dick.
I watched Shrub and the R's stampede the country into the Patriot Act, along with Democrats who should have known better. I've gotten to where I believe the last lines of the national anthem less and less: "land of the free, and the home of the brave." I swear, the United States is the nation that panics--and fearful people usually make stupid decisions.
Moments like this I pull up the Jeff Daniels monologue at the beginning of "The Newsroom" - "America is not the greatest country in the world anymore." On Sept 11, 2001, we were standing in our bathroom which was being remodeled. The contractor's wife called him and told him a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV and we saw the north tower burning. A few minutes later the second plane hit the south tower. I looked at the Bride and said, "I don't know who, but we are at war with someone....."
Ben Franklin was asked what kind of government the constitutional convention had given the people. His famous answer was, "A republic, if you can keep it." There are many ways to lose a republic or any democracy - refuse to follow the ideals of your founding documents, fail to educate your people so they know how the government works and their responsibility for voting and supporting that government, not protecting the people from the depredations of unbridled rich capitalists and not promoting social equality of opportunity, among others. We may be demonstrating that we are just like all the other republics and democracies that lost their way and are no more. If that happens, the ones who will be the most hurt and exploited will be those who supported those who campaigned against the government and the people it was trying to help. And there will be no one to help them.....
Too true.
yeah, this may well be what that looks like.
it's definitely SOMETHING. and SOMETHING to get very loud about.
People and Sheeple.
There's a picture of the Senate after the Anthax (carefully sent to the librul naysayers) worked to get them to pass the Patriot Act, and I swear it looked like Hillary was glaring at G Shrubya (who was speaking) thinking, "you know your daddy's CIA brought this on, now you'll politicize it and milk it, won't you...
Yup.
I've lost track...is there a final "official story" about the Anthrax? and didn't Cheney get what he thought was Anthrax powder (but wasn't)? where did that story go?
I'm inclined to think you're right about that...
One thing we apparently chose not to learn was that the majority of the suicide hijackers were Saudis, not Iraqis. Of course, the wingers know how to profit from a crisis, and as Dennis Sienkiewicz pointed out, Cheney made quick calls to his fellow investors and manipulated an easily manipulated George W into an invasion. Another unjust war. The Ukrainians are teaching us what just wars look like, but will we learn? If our constant posture is one of anger, fear, and trembling, we never will.
Proposal: All owners of AKs and ARs must fight the next war. No exceptions.
Hear! Hear!
They will turn them on their neighbors first, sad to say
And did this nation learn anything from that day? Not much, except that the terrorists won because we learned fear and of course, blamed it on the “others”, not on ourselves since we had sown the seeds of 9/11 a long time ago and neglected to tend the garden. Then of course, President Cheney and Halliburton reaped billions of dollars from our stupid invasions of Afghanistan and later, Iraq. Two more open festering wounds to breed more terrorists and warriors for Allah…
Everyone today is going on about how Unified we all were 22 years ago. I'm glad to read your response, because for many of us the unity was a façade. We didn't DARE say "what did you expect? Have you been LOOKING at how we are treating other "lesser" countries?" We didn't dare ask out loud "what is going to Afghanistan going to accomplish, exactly? No one has EVER won The Great Game--not the Brits, not the Russians. Even Alexander the Great had trouble." It wasn't as if Afghan nationals grabbed those planes. What did we do with the country that actually spawned those terrorists? Bought its oil, enriching it so we could all drive to the mall instead of having decent public transportation to get us there.
By the time we headed to Iraq it was OK to be cynical again. But until then the word was "If you dissent from our response, the terrorists have won."
And though we temporarily squelched the Taliban, that Great Game finally beat us. And it was 10 YEARS after Osama was killed before we left the country. Much of the time before he was killed he was actually in Pakistan--our ally.
This is not to say that I feel nothing for the victims of 9/11 and their families. Of course I do. I feel sympathy and horror and sorrow. I just don't think the attack came out of the blue, with no history behind it. Those in the tower were victims--not only of Al Qaeda, but of the forces that caused Al Qaeda to form in the first place.
And I feel for the women of Afghanistan, given hope and then watching it drain away, with a huge number of Americans now frickin' AGREEING at least in part with the Taliban's take on the role of women.
I don't think we will ever really recover if we keep denying our own role. What mindless "patriotism" has led to is 1/6. Better to scream a lot than try to fix things.
"Those are some big fucking chickens, coming home to roost." I was in Boston, beginning a 'train the trainers' session for HR/Diversity folk working for the Commonwealth of MA. Your words are nearly identical to the thoughts in that room that day at the moment the news came in. It was pretty much their instantaneous reaction.
Surprise surprise (not). :-)
Last night, 60 Minutes devoted the entire hour to the events on 9/11 with focus on FDNY. Watching it really brought home once again just how horrific that day was. The final portion of the broadcast is about the many once-children of firefighters killed in the collapsed who have themselves become members of FDNY. https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/FHUYINKEarGgryw6R0uM2C8Tq1yO7_Gn/
I was two days into a x-country road trip and had stopped in Alamagordo for the night. When I awoke about 7 am, I turned on the TV and was riveted until I was forced to turn it off and check out of the motel. Once into New Mexico, I had left I-10 and continued east on US 70. From Alamagordo, I headed north to Tularosa and jumped back on to US 70. Once east of the mountains, driving east for hours and hours, across wide open spaces on what felt like the top of the world, was reassuring to me as I thought about how huge our country is and what any invaders would likely face from westerners of the many small towns I drove through. I learned to stay in the left lane when I entered the towns because there were very long lines of stopped cars waiting to enter gas stations. And everywhere I looked, there were American flags - flying, painted on the side of buildings. I still have the small American flag handed to me at a stoplight in Arkansas Springs by a man in a wheelchair who may have been a Vietnam veteran. He was giving them to everyone waiting at the light.
I still have the ragged little flag I bought and had taped to my car antenna for over a year. I finally took it off when I felt it was so ragged, it was disrespectful to leave it there.
I kept mine inside the car, on my dashboard until I replaced that car in 2016. Not as convenient on the new dashboard so now decorating a potted plant on my deck.
I think I need to dig mine out of the box of mementos (including all the local newspapers for days) and stick it in a houseplant. Thanks for the idea.
I'm afraid I've always had an allergy to flags. especially then. especially now.
The reason to remember is so that we don't set up for a repeat but our honchos seem to have forgotten that part.
True dat.
I do not have the ability to answer my own question, but, what do you think the outcome would be if 9/11 happened while Trump was in the White House.? O'Donnell called out his lies on how many imaginary friends he lost that day, but for someone who only thinks and speaks in lies how much worse do you think it would have been?
We'd have done all we did, immediately and far worse. And then some more idiot stuff.
Than you, I think, for reminding me of so many times in the last 25 years that made me apoplectic. I lived through all that and had a hard time putting all the pieces together (I didn’t watch Fox, where Rupert told fools what to think). I knew about the Northern Alliance and felt that the loss of Massoud was a game changer and really bad omen. Only later did I hear about “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and would love to hear your take on that sometime.
Another gobsmacking game changer was the 2020 election steal. I watched as W/Dickie turned an epic failure into a war cry for revenge, with absolutely no acknowledgment for “previous.” My best friend and her family celebrated W with a Fox fervor that I could no longer abide.
As to that roller coaster of history, Tom Turo of the New Yorker has a cartoon that said “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everybody else repeats it.” You said it best. We all are on the roller coaster with too many fools.
The Iraq debacle was as deliberate and as stupid as any US action has ever been. So hard to even remember the horror, and the Isis it created (Abu Ghraib helped). W’s “mission accomplished“ bs almost caused a meltdown in the grocery store where the management had it on tv. First time I have ever made a scene in public.
And then came the tea party, with the solution - to white wash “guilty as sin” Repubs and blame a barely black man for every thing that had gone wrong and everything that could.
And their greatest accomplishment, the rise of the white supremacist, religious fascists. Well done America. Biden has a mountain of Schitt to shovel, with precious little help and an army of opposition who are constantly adding to the pile. I’m sure Chaney needed a new heart after all this because his had been dead for a long time. And W now pretends to be the responsible elder statesman. You are a great writer, but no fiction could ever match the unf**kingbelievable story behind this nightmare. And then came chump…
All I could think about as I watched the towers burn was that my son who joined the army in January 2000 would be sent to war.In 2003 that's exactly what happened. My friend,who never met a conspiracy theory she didn't agree with, was sure there were WMD's in Iraq, and we should go take care of them. None of her kids would be sent to war.
Why am I unsurprised?
I heard so many blather about the WMD, and was having second thoughts after Powell’s speech. It took a while for him to apologize, but I had long since come to my senses.
I gotta say Hayden and Fonda behaved like real jerks at the 1979 Solar Congress in Boulder. There was conflict in the solar movement as to whether oil prices should remain controlled, as Nixon had done, or should be allowed to be set by the market. I'd been curious, and I'd started interviewing solar activists about what they thought. They mostly thought prices should not be controlled.
Hayden and Fonda blew into the conference just when everyone was sitting down to listen to the speeches, and they said, basically, that anyone who thought that prices shouldn't be controlled could get the hell out, or something to that effect.
After the speechifying, I looked for Hayden, but I couldn't find him. I found Fonda, and I said to her that I'd been interviewing activists, including activists who worked with poor people in ghettos, and I told her that a lot of them took a different view from what Hayden had said, and then asked her, don't you think you should just listen a bit, and try to understand their reasoning? NO WAY! she fumed, and walked off.
Now, it's 45 years later, and I hope they've matured. (I haven't been following them although I did see something in the last year either about them, or Fonda, which I remember as sounding favorable.)
Actually, Tom's been gone since 2009. Jane can be a handful, but she's someone with the guts to walk the walk, despite everything that happened the past 50 years, and I always respect that. She does have a habit of "fire! ready, aim..." at times.
Thanks for the laugh ("fire! ready, aim...")
She is not afraid to admit being wrong, love people who can take responsibility for their periods of insanity. A rare thing these days.
The single most ignorant act I can recall was the 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech from the USS Abraham Lincoln where GW proudly pasted a metaphorical "Kick Me" sign to his own backside.
True, as always interesting, sad and hopeful, or what’s a heaven for?
I've probably told this story before, but when I saw the second plane hit (I was playing hooky from work), I called my father, who immediately said it was Bin Laden. my own guess had been that it was obviously the '93 bombers who'd promised to 'finish the job." so the idea that we were "manufacturing enemies" because it was "an inside job" (which I recall didn't take that long to develop "legs") struck me as foolishness (even if "follow the money" at times in the following years was capable of arousing a second or two of suspicion)...suddenly every schmuck and his brother was an expert on explosives, stress analysis, metallurgy, whatever.
a few years later, I was walking in my school's hallway with very little to do because we were in the middle of one of those high-security lockdown "objective tests" when I saw one of our beautiful special ed. teachers on the phone shouting "NOOOOO" in a way that let me know she wasn't howling about missing dinner. actually, it felt like my blood froze when I heard it, so I ran into the classroom of one of her close friends, who said that her new husband-to-be was in Iraq (he'd thrown her a big lunchtime engagement party a month or so before. the story was that he'd broken up with his longtime girlfriend, enlisted in a state of despair, then met Olga (the teacher in question), fell in love, got engaged, then was deployed. it was one of those typical Iraqi deals...Humvee hit an IED and everybody was blown to pieces. when this was confirmed an hour or so later, my first reaction was "those motherfuckers," which was followed by someone else saying something like "yeah those fucking Arabs," at which point I wheeled on him and said that the motherfuckers I was talking about were "Bush, Cheney and the whole motherfucking bunch."
after that, a few teachers didn't want to talk to me for a while (one or two forever), and my attitude was, basically, "fuck them." I like to keep my work colleagues friends, but in that case, I couldn't have cared less.
very, very well said, Tom.
alas...
as soon as I heard "War on Terror," I felt myself go through a long, very deep spiritual eye-roll, if you know what I mean.
and then, around 2004 or 2005, I couldn't help but notice that the bullshit coming out of Washington was EXACTLY what we were hearing in 1968. spookily word-for-word.
I could make the case that Bush killed my old man, since his rage over the Iraqi invasion coincided with his aneurysm rupturing in the OR. but I hardly need to...Bush's more public criminality is more than enough to make us despise him for his weakness and stupidity. the best thing I can say about him is that he seems more personable than the next Republican who lost the popular vote.
Amen and amen, Tom! I am so damn sick and tired, for one, of the way the Stars and Stripes has been co-opted to mean, "I'm bigger better Patriot than you are!" The morons who ran around with multiple flags on their trucks and gas guzzling SUVs; who planted the flags all over their front yards. I was on Capitol Hill that day and maybe, one of those planes was meant for the Capitol. What followed in the years after was such a cluster-fuck and too many young American lives were lost, fighting wars because someone in the Oval Office had a little dick.