Bloomberg's Follies

Imagine how you felt ten years ago after an attack by radical Islamists against our country's most iconic buildings murdered 3,000 American civilians.   Now imagine someone telling you at the time that, ten years later:

• There would still not be a new building at Ground Zero.
• The Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, would have openly supported building a mosque near Ground Zero.
• Bloomberg would have also refused to invite any clergy to the memorial service commemorating 9/11.
• Bloomberg would have also refused to invite any firefighters to the memorial service.

You wouldn't have believed them, would you?   We couldn't have become so pusillanimous so quickly, could we?   Really?  

On the last point, the failure to invite firefighters to the memorial, here's Mark Steyn's comments:

As Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. “Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago.” On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed — CIA, FBI, FAA, INS — the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York. When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies — ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit, who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel. Far “too soon” for any of that at New Jersey City University, but perhaps you could reenact the moment by filling out a peace tag for Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree” and then letting it flutter to the ground.

Upon arrival at the foot of the towers, two firemen were hit by falling bodies. “There is no other way to put it,” one of their colleagues explained. “They exploded.”

Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum’s “Peace Quilt”? Sadly not. We’re all out of squares.

On the first, the delay in building a new World Trade Center, bigger than ever... a country that was both confident in its culture and prepared to continue its role as the world's superpower would have built a 2,000 foot tall structure on the site by now, with five towers, the middle of which extended skyward in a grand "fuck you" to our enemies.   Then our President, at the opening of the new buildings, would have said that, henceforward, the building was going to be called the American Trade Center.   And, if it were me,(or, more precisely, if it were my Dad, since I learned this manner of dealing with enemies from him) the President would have added that, if so much as a firecracker goes off around that building that we can trace to radical Islamists, a B-52 will drop a twenty megaton bomb on Mecca.