In Anticipation

It’s entirely possible that today’s cartoon won’t elicit more than the usual shrug and turn of the page. On the other hand, experience teaches that right-wingers freak out whenever you attack their sacred cows–and the gaudier the golden cow, the angrier they become when you point out that it’s nothing more than a lump of yellow metal.

By way of explanation for anyone who may have missed it, last week’s Republican National Convention featured a Tuesday-night September 11, 2001 commemoration wherein widows of the fallen were paraded out under blue tinted lights to urge implicitly and explicitly that America (in Rudy Giuliani’s words) owes it to the victims of 9/11 to vote the straight Republican ticket. As delegates whooped “yeahs” worthy of a football game, these horrible people pimped their dead husbands to score votes for a GOP that has nothing whatsoever to bring their killers to justice while increasing funding to the countries that played a role in the attacks. They actually compared the supposed actions* of the passengers of United Flight 93–“doing something”–to “doing something” this November, i.e., voting for Bush.

It doesn’t matter that some of the dead may have been Republicans. 9/11 should have never been used for partisan politics and it needs to stop now.

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*Western Pennsylvania newspapers and TV stations report that debris was found eight miles away from the crash site, indicating that the flight was either shot down by the Air Force or suffered a catastrophic explosion. As much as we would all like it to be true, the fact that the US government has never publicly released the flight data recorder or voice cockpit recorders from United 93 sheds further doubt on the Drinkcart of Death theory.