‘Remembering The World Trade Center: 15 Years Ago’

Islam, Jihad, Terrorism

I recall calling Chris Matthew Sciabarra around the time September 11 happened. Like the best of New York, Chris was hyper, in fight-but-never-flight mode. That’s my Chris. And he has commemorated the attack on the greatest city in the world—was I overcome by patriotism when I visited New York!—his hometown, in the most personal way each year.

REMEMBERING THE WORLD TRADE CENTER: FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
By Chris Matthew Sciabarra

Fifteen years. It has been fifteen years since my city, the city of my birth, the city I still call home, was changed forever by an attack of unbearable madness.

New Yorkers were awakening to a beautiful late summer day; the cicadas were particularly loud, as they always are at this time of year, their songs echoing throughout a tranquil urban landscape. It had rained the night before—I remember that all too clearly, because I was scheduled to go to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees face off against the Boston Red Sox. They had already won three straight games—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—against their celebrated rivals, and we were going for a four-game sweep. But on September 10th, the Yankee game was rained out before it began. I had last seen the Twin Towers up close, driving a visiting friend back to Penn Station on the weekend before September 11th, as we craned our necks upward to see the tops of those remarkable buildings. No other opportunities presented themselves for me to drive passed the Towers again, for a week later, they would be no more.

Like many New York dog owners, my first order of business of the day was to walk my dog. When I walked outside with Blondie, I was stunned by how such a rainy Monday had given way to such a blazingly sunny, clear Tuesday morning, with a breathtakingly beautiful, virtually cloudless, blue sky. It was a working day, but also the day of highly contentious primary elections for the next mayor of the Big Apple. A heavy voter turnout was expected, for Rudy Giuliani was at the end of his two-term limit, and a new mayor would be elected to run City Hall, and to take over the political reins of a metropolis that had weathered the storms of high crime and urban blight over a controversial eight-year period of tumultuous social and cultural change across the political landscape. A heated mayoral race was shaping up in both of the major political parties; Michael Bloomberg would ultimately win the Republican Party nomination over Herman Badillo, and Mark Green would ultimately win the Democratic Party nomination over Fernando Ferrer. But because of the events that took place on the morning of September 11, 2001, the primaries would be postponed till September 25th. None of the Democratic candidates received a majority of the vote on that date, and it was not until October 11th that Mark Green beat Ferrer in a run-off; on November 6th, Green would be defeated by Bloomberg, who would eventually dispense with that two-term limit (a “one-time only” agreement with the City Council) and reign over the city for three terms.

Politics, politics, politics was on the minds of so many voters that morning. And since the polls opened at 6 a.m., many went to cast their votes before work. Some took their children to their first day of school. It was a godsend to be running late for those who worked in the Twin Towers, but who arrived at their destination after their typical 9 a.m. start. If the planes had struck an hour later, there may have been 50,000 people in the Towers. But two of the most iconic buildings in the world had already been struck. There was simply no workplace to enter anytime after 9:03 a.m.

Over the years, I had developed a habit of taping news events, in case I’d want to write about them. I remember especially taping the full twenty-four hours of coverage devoted to the New Year’s Eve millennium celebration, welcoming the year 2000, as broadcast on ABC television and hosted by Peter Jennings. There was no Y2K apocalypse; the Berlin Wall had fallen; the communist menace that was once the Soviet Union was a thing of the past. A new century, a new millennium, had arrived with a blast of optimism.

Nobody ever dreamed that in less than two years, that optimism would be crushed under the weight of domestic and foreign threats that had been growing underground for decades, awaiting for the right moments to spring forth.

As the early morning hours progressed, I was communicating with a friend on email. And uncharacteristically, even though I knew it was Primary Day, I was not watching “Good Morning America,” my morning show of choice on the ABC network. A little after 8:45 a.m., my sister called me from work; she was serving as Deputy Superintendent of High Schools at 110 Livingston Street, the headquarters of the New York City Board of Education (later renamed the NYC Department of Education, under Bloomberg). She told me that a plane had struck the North Tower of the Trade Center and I should turn on the TV. It must have been a terrible accident, we both reasoned.

I turned the TV on, and simultaneously grabbed the first VHS tape I could find. It was a tape that I had used only five days before this sun-drenched morning: a recording of the MTV Video Music Awards that aired on September 6, 2001. It was a particularly memorable night, held at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, because Michael Jackson made a surprise appearance in performance with *NSYNC of their song “Pop” [YouTube link]. Jackson was in town recording a special in honor of his 30th anniversary in the music industry, and that special, taped from Madison Square Garden on September 7th and September 10th, was later aired by CBS in November [full concert YouTube link], featuring a performance of “Dancing Machine” also with *NYSNC [YouTube link]. (MJ is one of the famous people who avoided death on 9/11; he was due to attend a WTC meeting that morning, but had overslept.) On the same video tape was a documentary feature that appeared a day or two after the MTV Video Music Awards. It was “Backstory,” a production of AMC—when that channel actually showed “American Movie Classics.” The feature told the story of the making of “An Affair to Remember,” a tear-jerker of a film, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. In retrospect, little irony was lost on me as I reached for this tape in preparation for this essay, for in that 1957 film, the Empire State Building, then the tallest building in the world, plays a key “role” in the unfolding plot events of the love story. The documentary reminds us how “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993) had countless references to the Grant-Kerr classic.

In my reviewing of all the video tapes that I recorded of the news events of 2001 and beyond, I decided that, for the purposes of this year’s fifteenth anniversary, I would focus only on the September 11th coverage as it unfolded on my television, in the minute-by-minute all-day taping that I had archived for future reference. For this essay, then, I confine myself only to the television coverage that I watched from 8:45 a.m. until midnight on that tragic day.

And so, when I popped in that first tape of the dozens of tapes I own of the television coverage of the tragedy and its aftermath, I saw that as soon as the AMC “Backstory” concluded, a startling image suddenly appeared on the screen of a helicopter view of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, which had eclipsed the Empire State Building of “An Affair to Remember” as one of the two tallest buildings in the world. The tower was billowing black smoke. I was immediately transported, as if by a Time Machine, back to that tragic morning, and I can relate here my thoughts, feelings, and actions throughout that day by following the timeline of what I witnessed on TV and on the streets of my hometown. …

… There’s more. Read Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s essay: “Remembering The World Trade Center: 15 Years Ago.”

It Takes A Village Idiot To Vote For Hillary

Donald Trump, Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Russia

“It Takes A Village Idiot To Vote For Hillary” is the current column, now trending on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

If you strapped Bill Clinton to a polygraph (or some lie detector that can’t be fooled by the Clintons)—I suspect he, too, might confess to a preference for Vladimir Putin over Barack Obama.

Mr. Clinton had been appropriately scathing, in 2008, about Obama’s mythical status in the media. A “fairy tale,” he called the current president.

However, his wife and her supporters on The Hill and in media have ruled that any remotely realistic utterance about the Russian president—such as that he’s a strong leader who’s popular with his people and acts in their interests—puts you outside the camp of the saints.

Mrs. Clinton is making it a habit to tell Americans what to say and how to think if they want to qualify as … Americans.

In particular, Hillary’s AltRight screed, best described on Twitter as the Control-Alt-Delete speech, focused on Mrs. Clinton’s crusade against deviationists. Provided by a twitter handle called “Hillary’s PR Team,” here’s a distillation of the interminable smear against Trump and his supporters, peddled as “substantive” by the moron media:

Prejudice and paranoia, hate groups, harmful stereotypes, hateful supporters, systemic racism, dark conspiracies, dark conspiracy theories, racist lies, bigotry, racist, white supremacist bigot, white nationalist leader, KKK, racially tinged rumors, Alex Jones. …

Yes, Hillary’s Control-Alt-Delete harangue began with the biggest deviationist of all, Donald J. Trump. Trump “disregards the values that make our country great,” fumed the fire-and-brimstone Mrs. Clinton on that occasion.

To his great credit, Trump flunked another test of “true American principles,” established by Hillary, following the NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief” forum, on September 7.

As the media reminds us, Trump disqualifies himself for the presidency daily. This time it was for speaking the truth about Putin at the forum. The Russian people’s approval of their president stands at 82 percent. But the correct American values, as decreed by our northeastern elites, depend on disparaging Putin and his people. After all, Russians are stupid. They need Clinton and her Radical Republican counterpart, Speaker Paul Ryan (or a color-coded revolution organized by both), to induct them into the American government’s ways.

Enforcer Hillary (and Speaker Ryan) was having none of it. A preference for the Russian president over our American president was plain “unpatriotic and scary,” to be stamped out and marginalized.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton,” argues historian Clyde N. Wilson, whose métier is American intellectual history, “is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee—self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing.”

Wilson uses the term Yankee “historically to designate a peculiar group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around.”

By Yankee, Dr. Wilson does not mean “everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 [commemorated this weekend] were Americans. The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees.”

In their journey from the “hyper-Calvinism of their early days,” to “their present atheism,” Yankees like Hillary have long ago replaced religious zeal with a progressive’s political fanaticism. And while they’ve “abandoned anything that might be good in their religion,” contends Wilson, bossy busybodies like Clinton have never given up the notion that “they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.”

Again, by continuously enforcing the “standard of all things American and good,” Hillary is not that different from her Republican colleagues. They, too, deploy the values cudgel as energetically, to whip the base into shape. Or, to read many of us out of the American family.

To compound his unorthodoxy, Trump failed to fall back on the American exceptionalism exemption, in judging the actions of American leaders—good by default—relative to other world leaders. At the “Commander-in-Chief” forum, Trump intimated that Mr. Putin’s transgressions were “no less troublesome than Mr. Obama’s transgressions.” Quite right. Ask the innocent victims of Obama’s energetic drone program ongoing: villagers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen. …

… Read the rest. The complete column is “It Takes A Village Idiot To Vote For Hillary.”  Read it on Townhall.com, where it’s trending.

A Rear Admiral Gives ‘Rear’ A New Meaning

Donald Trump, Elections, Hillary Clinton, Military

She worked for and supported George Bush, master and commander of futile, unconstitutional, immoral invasions in the Middle East. But Rear Admiral Deborah Loewer, “a 31-year Navy veteran and director of the Situation Room during the September 11th attacks,” will be voting for Hillary, not least because Donald Trump—a civilian until now with no policy making background—is not making the right SOUNDS about Vladimir Putin, who, says the rear admiral, invaded his neighbors.

Remind me what “Rear” stands for in “Rear Admiral.”

Crazy Clinton Decrees, Don’t Talk About The Fed

Debt, Donald Trump, Federal Reserve Bank, Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton has issued a decree about the Federal Reserve Bank, to the extend she understands that the Fed’s monetary policies are what monetize the debt she and her kind run up.

According to Clinton, the tool that greases the operations of government “should be off-limits for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates. You should not be commenting on Fed actions when you are either running for president or you are president,” commanded this illiberal, controlling, presidential candidate.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, gets that the Fed is “keeping the rates down so that everything else doesn’t go down,” and that, “We have a very false economy.”

And he says so.

To contrast with the lack of awareness of monetary policy among his rivals, Donald Trump’s awareness of the destruction created by the Federal Reserve system was commended in “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed”:

“The consummate homo economicus, Trump is a rational actor in the market place. Unlike the rest of the GOP contenders who’re guided by political calculations; Trump speaks like a man to whom rational economic choices are second nature. And so he gets that the ‘stock market is bloated’; that the Stock Exchange is a laughing stock, and that soaring stock prices are a consequence of centrally planned, monetary stimulus.” (p. 45.)