Politics? What politics?

This morning CNN gave a platform to a woman named Monica Gabrielle who was criticizing the Bush Administration's dealings with 9/11.

Fair enough - she's a citizen. But so am I, and I'm not on CNN, so why should she be? Does she have any particular expertise to add?

No, she's just a 9/11 widow. I wouldn't trade places with her, but then I don't think that her loss in itself confers any relevant expertise in solving associated security or other problems. In fact, the type of questions she was asking were counterproductive inasmuch as they were phrased as attacks on the Bush Administration.

So I looked her up. Ah, here she is:9/11 widows Seek Apology from Limbaugh Over Slanderous Claims.

Slanderous? According to their post, Rush said (emphases added):

Here, listen to this montage in case you missed it on Friday, and understand that these family members are actually part of the Democratic Party machine, as they do this.

VOICE I: I think for someone like President Bush who has not cooperated with this commission, who has stonewalled this commission.

VOICE II: This president and his administration blocked the creation of the commission, have stonewalled the commission.

VOICE I: If this was realistic from the morning of September 11th, it would show President Bush before a group of school children listening to them read, while the twin towers were burning.

VOICE II: If he wants to show a picture of 9-11 depicting what he was doing, it should be a picture of him sitting and reading in a classroom to school children. That's where he was on 9-11.

VOICE I: And we need to find out why 3,000 people were murdered on his watch.

VOICE II: Well, you know, this happened on his watch.

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to hear some original thoughts from any of these people, but I don't think that the Democrats trust them to speak originally.

END TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: The two unnamed voices are those of Monica Gabrielle and Kristen Brietweiser.

Now I'll grant that if someone accused me of sounding like a Democrat I'd feel slandered. But look at the above and notice the similarities - I have a hard time believing that two people who hadn't rehearsed or compared notes would have come up with statements that were so close.

Especially the school children bit - now all of a sudden a President interested in education and meeting school children on their turf, and these women would present it as a bad thing. That's too far-fetched not to be contrived. It makes about as much sense to blame her for her husband's death - if she would have jumped his bones that morning for a nice long session he wouldn't have been at work yet when the plane hit.

I didn't record her statements, but you can find some examples of questions she wanted to ask here on Randi Rhodes' website (remember Randi Rhodes? She's the one on Air America who wanted President Bush's family to take him for a ride).

The questions are doozies, on par with "do you still beat your wife?". #1 was "Why was our nation so utterly unprepared for an attack on our own soil?" I'll answer that one when you tell me why people were bitching so much about the additional restrictions on airline passengers *after* 9/11.

How about this one? "2. On the morning of 9/11, who was in charge while you were away from the National Military Command Center? Were you informed or consulted about all decisions made in your absence? " Yeah, as if it would have made any difference. But suppose he had been there, he had information in time, and he had scrambled fighters to divert or shoot down 4 civilian airliners so the buildings would be spared. It would have been the right decision - the plane passengers were goners anyway, and but for the last plane, anyplace where they crashed would probably have had a lower population density than what they did hit. Would she have applauded such a decision?

Or this: "5. Please explain why no one in our government has yet been held accountable for the failures leading up to and on 9/11." Well, Clinton, Gore and Jamie Gorelick were already out of the govt by then. I wonder if she's equally curious about why Gorelick is on the 9/11 commission?

I could go on, but I'll close with this one, which says more about where she's coming from than any other: "For Vice President Cheney....5. Please describe any discussions/negotiations between the Taliban and either public or private agents before Sept. 11 regarding Bin Laden and/or rights to pass a pipeline through Afghanistan, or any other subject pertaining to Afghanistan. " That one ought to be a guaranteed conversation stopper for anyone with the IQ of a lobotomized pissant. Nope, no Democrats here.

Enough of this crap. It's depressing enough to know that partisan idiots like this exist, much less that CNN would give them a platform to distribute their militant ignorance.