Gov Deval Patrick (D-MA) 9-11 Comments, Mark Steyn

MARK'S ROAD TRIP

Will Patrick Finally Be Taken To Task Over 9-11 Comments?







In New England, talk show hosts trying to hold Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's feet to the fire have had a tough week.

Despite his asinine comments about 9-11 delivered to the family members of terror victims, Patrick has so far largely escaped the scrutiny he so badly deserves. With the Patriots cheating scandal and other issues (even OJ) dominating headlines locally, he's been one lucky governor.

When he has been pressed on the issue, local media establishment suck-ups have come to the rescue.

Behind the scenes, however, several of us have been lobbying bloggers and talk show hosts, hoping to generate the kind of attention this requires. So far, we've had varying degrees of success.


Now, however, we may have caught our own lucky break. Thanks to a road trip by highly influential columnist Mark Steyn, Patrick is finding himself skewered on websites and in newspapers across the country this weekend. Red State has an excellent take here.

From his latest column:

This year I marked the anniversary of Sept. 11 by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn't exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio talk-show colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commem- oration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, "was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States."

"Mean and nasty"? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry's sent back the aubergine coulisagain. But evidently that's what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days – the shot heard around the world and so forth. Anyway, Gov. Patrick didn't want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, "was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other."

I was laughing so much I lost control of the wheel, and the guy in the next lane had to swerve rather dramatically. He flipped me the Universal Symbol of Human Understanding. I certainly understood him, though I'm not sure I could learn to love him. Anyway, I drove on to Boston and pondered the governor's remarks. He had made them, after all, before an audience of 9/11 families: Six years ago, two of the four planes took off from Logan Airport, and so citizens of Massachusetts ranked very high among the toll of victims. Whether any of the family members present Tuesday were offended by Gov. Patrick, no one cried "Shame!" or walked out on the ceremony. Americans are generally respectful of their political eminences, no matter how little they deserve it.

We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words "each other": They posit a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim – that the "failure to understand" derives from the culpability of both parties.

The 9/11 killers were treated very well in the United States: They were ushered into the country on the high-speed visa express program the State Department felt was appropriate for young Saudi males. They were treated cordially everywhere they went. The lap-dancers at the clubs they frequented in the weeks before the Big Day gave them a good time – or good enough, considering what lousy tippers they were. Sept. 11 didn't happen because we were insufficient in our love to Mohamed Atta.

This isn't a theoretical proposition. At some point in the future, some of us will find ourselves on a flight with a chap like Richard Reid, the thwarted shoe-bomber. On that day we'd better hope the guy sitting next to him isn't Gov. Patrick, who sees him bending down to light his sock and responds with a chorus of "All You Need Is Love," but a fellow who "understands" enough to wallop the bejesus out of him before he can strike the match. It was the failure of one group of human beings to understand that the second group of human beings was determined to kill them that led the crew and passengers of those Boston flights to stick with the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late.

Unfortunately, the obsolescent 1970s multiculti love-groove inclinations of society at large are harder to dislodge. If you'll forgive such judgmental categorizations, this isn't about "them," it's about "us."

The long-term survival of any society depends on what proportion of its citizens thinks as Gov. Patrick does. Islamism is an opportunist enemy but you can't blame them for seeing the opportunity: In that sense, they understand us far more clearly than Gov. Patrick understands them.

[...]

A while back, I had the honor of a meeting with the president, in the course of which someone raised the unpopularity of the war. He shrugged it off, saying that 25 percent of the population is always against the war – any war. In other words, there's nothing worth fighting for. And I joked afterward that some of that 25 percent might change their mind if Canadian storm troopers were swarming across the 49th Parallel or Bahamian warships were firing off the coast of Florida. But maybe not. Al-Qaida's ad hoc air force left a huge crater of Massachusetts corpses in the middle of Manhattan, and Gov. Patrick goes looking for love in all the wrong places.

How many people in any society think like Deval Patrick? That's the calculation to make if you want to figure out its long-term survival prospects.

Thanks, Mark, feel free to drive through the Bay State anytime you like. Don't worry about your swerving, that just means you're fitting in nicely with local motorists.

Let's hope your words resonate across the nation.


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