Posts Tagged ‘terrorist’

America is at War with Itself

Thursday, September 11th, 2025

By Bob Gaydos

Front page of the special edition published by the Middletown, New York Times Herald-Record on January 11, 2001.

Front page of the special edition published by the Middletown, New York, Times Herald-Record on January 11, 2001.

Twenty-four years ago today, like millions of other Americans, I was preparing to go to work. The boys were off to school. It was a sky-blue September day. The news was on the TV, a practice of mine, in case there was something I needed to know about before I got to the paper.

There was.

The image on the TV screen froze me and shook the sleep out of my head. My God!

What was I seeing? They replayed it.

I quickly got myself together and headed off to work. But I stopped for a few moments in a nearby park to gather my thoughts and process what I had just witnessed. The radio news informed me that, in addition to the two planes flying into the Twin Towers in New York City, a plane had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania and another had hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

September 11.

After about an hour of processing reports on what had happened, a meeting was held and it was decided that The Times Herald-Record would publish a special edition that afternoon, the first one, I believe, in the Middletown, N.Y. morning newspaper’s history. My job was to write an editorial explaining what had happened. Or at least trying to explain it. About 500 words. “We need it in an hour.”

I don’t have a copy of that editorial and I’m sure it was mostly emotion. I do remember writing, “America was at war.” (Any colleagues who were in the newsroom on that day may feel free to corroborate or add any details you may remember in the comments section.)

The world changed that day. America changed. We the people had been attacked. We were one nation, under the spell of the dynamic leadership of New York’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani. America’s mayor. We grieved together, healed together and called for retribution together, against whoever it was who had attacked us.

So we started a war against, not the country where the terrorists responsible for the attacks came from (Saudi Arabia), but against a country (Iraq) that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. We justified it by claiming Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” that it could use against someone, maybe us. That was a lie our government told us. We found out later.

Then we went after the actual attackers in the mountains of Afghanistan. We actually found and killed their leader, then decided to stay in Afghanistan for some 20 years, trying to save it from itself.

In the ensuing years, Giuliani went from “America’s Mayor” to embarrassingly ridiculous mouthpiece for every lie put forth by Donald Trump, including the lie that he lost his re-election bid in 2020 to Joe Biden because the election was rife with vote fraud.

Also in the ensuing years, the Republican Party steadily turned itself from a party that espoused defense of all Americans into a party of an aggrieved white minority whose leaders in Congress legislate only in the interests of wealthy donors who contribute to their campaigns. Into a cult that believes and repeats Trump’s lies or repeats them for political gain or out of fear.

Whatever galvanized us into one people 24 years ago (a common enemy I suppose) started disintegrating as soon as we started demonizing any group of people different from us (Muslims) as the enemy. The enemy has since become any non-white, English-as-a-second-language-person working a low wage job. Also blacks and the homeless. And gays. At least to Trump and his followers.

The World Trade Center was eventually rebuilt, Trump exposed the fear and bigotry at the center of the Republican Party and gave free rein to the fissures long hiding within American society. It won him two terms as president.

A couple of years ago, the FBI said the greatest threat to America comes from domestic terrorism. Not Iraq. Or Afghanistan. From the white supremacist groups who organized the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol and still threaten any who reject their cause.

In 1970, cartoonist Walt Kelly coined a phrase in his Pogo comic strip: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Indeed.

Today, the war to preserve American freedom and democracy is being fought every day right here at home. The FBI under Trump no longer worries about our nation’s enemies. It has become a weapon to go after his enemies. Federal agents roam the streets of our cities snatching up anyone who doesn’t look “American” while National Guard troops stand by as props. The invasion orders came from the White House. A meek Congress, under Republican control, watches as our constitution, our very history, is being shredded, bit by bit.

And yet, millions of Americans still stand on the side of what’s right. Still remember how we felt as a unified nation in the wake of the attacks 24 years ago. They are speaking out, demonstrating, resisting the attacks on our rights and freedom, the goons in masks, the lying sycophants in Trump’s administration. Federal judges of every stripe across the nation still honor the words and spirit of the Constitution, while the Supreme Court with a majority of Republican appointees, unfortunately seems intent on rewriting it.

Yes, America is at war. With itself. It’s a war that can and must be won to preserve the ideals of liberty and justice for all. Not for a chosen few. Not for the rich and heartless. Not for the white supremacists. It has become a daily battle, but not one without victories. Trump has surrounded himself in the second term with a cadre of new sycophants, but a stunningly inept cadre.

With constant daily pressure from the public and politicians willing to speak out, even some of the press has begun to remember its constitutionally protected duty as the Fourth Estate: To speak out strongly and repeatedly against the enemy when the United States of America is at war. Even, nay especially, when it wakes up at war with itself.

We need that editorial in an hour. Every hour.

 

 

News? War Trumps Everything

Sunday, October 15th, 2023

By Bob Gaydos

F5BE3EB8-ADE1-4B6F-8DBA-31EEF43376F0    Reporting the most significant news of the day is always a combination of judgment and opinion, seasoned by experience. But, within the variables, one thing is certain: War trumps  everything.

      The terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel was so brutally vicious, claiming the lives of more than a thousand innocent civilians, including women and children, the elderly, people dragged out of their homes, young people at a festival, even babies and also resulting in the taking of hostages that it (1.) overshadowed the unprecedented shutting down of the House of Representatives because Republicans, the majority party, had removed their chosen Speaker and could not agree on a new one, putting in peril (2) funding for the government itself, (3) aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia and (4) aid to longtime ally Israel in its declared war against Hamas, which (5.) did not seem to trouble the small group of rightwing radical Republicans holding the government hostage, or their anointed leader, Donald Trump, who (6.) gave his blessing for new Speaker to Jim Jordan, the ineffectual Ohio congressman who aided and abetted Trump in the failed January 6 insurrection and whose only goal seems to be to shut down the government and, in the process, all the investigations and court proceedings against Trump, who (7.) took the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel as an occasion to compliment Hezbollah, another Islamic terrorist group with a target on Israel and (8.) to blame Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for the success of the surprise attack, most likely as payback for the fact that Netanyahu (9.) was the first foreign leader to congratulate Joe Biden on his election as America’s president in 2020, something which Trump, Jordan and the rest of the MAGA crowd are still  (10.) trying to undo even as (11.) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a member of one of America’s most celebrated political families, flip-flopped between conspiracy theories and strategies in his own ego-driven campaign for the 2024 presidential election, having (12.) announced that he is dropping his plan to run as a Democrat to run instead as an independent candidate, probably because he was gaining little traction among Democratic voters since his extreme views more closely resemble those of Trump supporters, (13.) a development which caused confusion among political prognosticators as to whether Kennedy as an independent candidate with a famous Democratic name  would take more voters from Trump or Biden, (14.) something which would be more of a worry for Democrats if RFK Jr. even vaguely resembled his late father politically and personally (he’s no Bobby Kennedy) and had also not recently been accused of anti-Semitism, but, again, was complicated by (15.) Kennedy’s unambiguous reaction to the Hamas attack on Israel: “This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now.”

    War trumps everything.

rjgaydos@gmail.com