Quote du Jour

Philadelphia blogger Atrios notes at Eschaton the reluctance of many bloggers to write about the transcript of the final minutes of United Airlines Flight 93, which was played at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial this week.

He does point out that my old pal Will Bunch at Attytood was an eloquent exception.

I would like to provide a snappy answer as to why Kiko's House was silent, but I can't. I went back and forth on whether to do a post after reading the ghastly transcript and ended up feeling a numbness that often descends on me when I recall September 11, 2001 and the days thereafter.

I first experienced this when the Dear Friend and Conscience (DF&C) and I drove from Pennsylvania to the Minnesota north country right after 9/11. The highways were virtually empty. There were no aircraft overhead except for the occasional fighter jet. We passed Chicago's O'Hare Airport, which was like a ghost town. Seemingly everywhere -- the porches of farmhouses, highway overpasses, trailer parks along the interstates -- there were American flags. And all I could feel was a numbness.

Anyhow, Atrios has this to say:

Bunch wonders why there's little blogosphere commentary on the subject. I guess in a way we're all a bit like Michael Moore who started off making a movie about 9/11 and then ended up making one about Iraq. The media's general refusal to confront the reality of 9/11 rather than the myths they helped create is impossible to puncture, and at this point is largely dwarfed by subsequent clusterf*cks. It was long ago decided that Bush's tremendous ability to stand on a grave site and mumble incoherently through a bullhorn was a display of "tremendous leadership" which trumped the miserable failure of the previous days, and even now it's like farting in church to suggest otherwise. One goes against such ironclad conventional wisdom at one's peril, and there are more current failures to deal with . . .

Ahem. Amen.