There’s something intrinsically American about fixing problems and laying blame. When something goes wrong, we form commissions, do investigations and generally delve into our failures in a way other countries don’t seem to.
With 9/11, there was a rawness for a long time that blocked most finger-pointing. We had the 9/11 Commission, but there wasn’t the sense that anyone was really to “blame.”
Now, though, 11 years after the attacks, a soft “trutherism” is taking hold.
The “hard” truthers believe a range of conspiracy theories involving the attacks, from claims that fire doesn’t melt steel to charges that the government brought down 7 WTC. But soft truthers “merely” insist that the Bush administration didn’t pursue the information that an attack was being planned on America.
On yesterday’s 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, The New York Times opted to run reporter Kurt Eichenwald’s “soft truther” op-ed — immediately stirring up all the usual Bush-hating suspects.
Among those gleefully tweeting about the piece were The Huffington Post’s political editor, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and the “Hardball” team.
Keith Olbermann took to Twitter to rant that Bush was “a president who ignored more warnings than we ever knew, then exploited 9/11 for political gain,” and, “Now we can understand the look on Bush’s face. He had been fully warned, he had ‘known better,’ his arrogance had led to an attack on USA.”
They blame the Bush administration for not following vague threads of information and for not connecting various dots — dots that could only have been connected in retrospect, since key agencies were legally barred from sharing information at the time.
But aside from all the factual rebuttals as to why the Bush administration is obviously not to blame for the 9/11 attacks, the new truthers are very reminiscent of the old ones. While they’re different from the folks who insist there were no planes at all, the impulse looks to be pretty similar.
It’s hard to believe, even all these years later, that 19 men from faraway countries decided to kill themselves in an effort to kill as many Americans as possible. As that day recedes into history, it gets even more difficult to grasp that secretaries sitting at their desks, waiters serving breakfast or families going on vacation were killed for some holy war that makes no sense to free-living Americans.
It’s much easier to continue hating George W. Bush — to focus on bogus charges that he sat back and did nothing while his country was attacked — than it is to understand nameless, faceless people who still want us dead today.
Both types of truthers want something else to be the reality. They want someone safe to blame, someone who didn’t chop off Daniel Pearl’s head and doesn’t blow himself up to advance a cause we find bizarre.
The government, and the Bush administration specifically, is that safe target. Better to insist that the Bushies just screwed up than to acknowledge that we remain under threat, that (even with those restrictions on cooperation removed) our government may not be able to stop some future attack.
That truth is just too scary to face.
Karol Markowicz blogs at alarmingnews.com.
Twitter: @KarolNYC