What a complete, horrible mess the US nine years and some 24 hours following the attack on the World Trade Center, an event apparently which has become a turgid line drawn in the sands of time — we’ll always be caught nasty-faced in the before and after.

In the front-page explosion off the San Francisco Examiner, pictured to the left there, are the impressions slapped on the tragedy by all the subsequent death, dying and bullshit, which in the long, perilous run, most-likely worst than the actual horror of 9/11/01 — the word ‘Bastards‘ in a huge headline, and way down below, the real page turner, ‘A Changed America.’

On Monday morning, the day before that Tuesday, I was driving my then-21-year-old daughter to work.
She was living at home during a transition: Her fiance was in the US Navy, stationed at Norfolk, Virginia, and she was concerned about how life would be in the military.
And in a moment of true wisdom, I replied (and in paraphrase), the military is cool right now, not much going on, there’s a lot of benefits, and it’s pretty-much like any other job, then smiling at her with some sarcasm (as I recall), and said, “unless there’s a war.”

(Illustration found here).

Although the memory on the rest of that early-morning conversation is cloudy, those last few words are remembered fairly distinctly — words played and re-played over a near-decade, starting the very-next day.
Damn, didn’t I just open mouth, insert feet, and ass.
What has come to pass since, was-then beyond my imagination.

Not only did the US get attacked that day nine years ago, the entire planet shifted somehow, causing a kind of horrific clock to begin ticking, gearing for a wind-down in the now-an-extreme-near-future.
Back then, I didn’t even know of the term, “blowback,” or of Osama bin Laden/al-Qaeda, and for damn-sight sure, didn’t even consider how dangerous and crazy was George Jr.’s operation.
In the process of history, who’s been more-worse for the US, Osama and his boys, or the Decider and his Dick?

Ted Koppel, a fairly-decent MSMer, in an eloquent piece for the Washington Post this morning, seemed to sum up the vast, overwhelming problem the past near-decade.
Koppel says Bin Laden baited a nasty rat trap, George Jr tried to snatch the cheese, and presto, bad shit hit the fan.
Some good bits:

And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another.
Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves.
Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.
…
Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan.
Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, “black sites,” extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it — more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead.
Our military is so overstretched that defense contracting — for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence — is one of our few growth industries.
…
Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald’s.
Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?

Read the whole piece — worth it.

Of course, Koppel is concerned with national security and US foreign policy, but George Jr. did so, so much more to create, indeed, a changed America.
And of whom did they (at the Examiner) write in such bold lettering, which bastards?
The US has become a divided, nasty, mean-spirited place, and with the ugly rise of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., this twisted narrative is without-shame spattered across the airwaves, especially with the non-event, so-called ‘ground-zero mosque’ non-controversy.
Via RawStory:

“Here’s the chilling proof that Ground Zero stretches well beyond the boundaries of the World Trade Center site,” Murdoch’s New York Post boasted.
“The map was obtained by The Post from sources after the Fire Department did not respond to requests to review it. It shows that remains were found just 348 feet to the south of the mosque site at 45 Park Place.”
Although the Post article does not make it clear how the map was obtained, it appears that the Fire Department was opposed to its release.
An even more ominous version of the same map, with lurid red dots glowing like puddles of freshly-spilled blood against a dark background, was deployed by the hosts of Fox News’ Fox & Friends on Friday morning.

There’s a video at the RawStory link of Fox and Friends — bastards.