{"id":367493,"date":"2018-07-01T01:08:47","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T00:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/still-better-than-hitler-for-the-most-part\/"},"modified":"2018-07-01T01:08:47","modified_gmt":"2018-07-01T00:08:47","slug":"still-better-than-hitler-for-the-most-part","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/still-better-than-hitler-for-the-most-part\/","title":{"rendered":"Still Better Than Hitler \u2026 For the Most Part"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<p>Shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, George W. Bush told a Joint Session of Congress that \u201cthey\u201d did it because \u201cthey hate our freedom.\u201d\u00a0 Everybody knew who \u201cthey\u201d were.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, in those halcyon days, when it was still not acceptable for an American president to level ethnic or religious slurs against Muslims except by indirection, that morsel of idiocy drew justifiable derision.<\/p>\n<p>There were, of course, many outraged citizens who took Bush\u2019s words seriously.\u00a0 Before long, though, the level of hysteria diminished and their numbers declined.<\/p>\n<p>From Day One, everybody whose head was screwed on right knew that blowback from Western, especially American, machinations in the historically Muslim world better explained why \u201cthey\u201d did it.\u00a0 As time went on, ever larger numbers of people came the same realization.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, the hysteria never quite went away.\u00a0 Thanks to the uses our political class and our media made of it, 9\/11 marked a turning point.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, \u201cour freedom\u201d has fared poorly.\u00a0 For that, \u201cthey\u201d don\u2019t deserve all the blame; not by any means.\u00a0 Most of the damage has been self-inflicted.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever there is in patriotism that is admirable or even tolerable also took a hit after 9\/11.\u00a0 When Bush spoke his drivel and for some time thereafter, displays of the stars and stripes were ubiquitous from sea to shining sea.\u00a0 The flag-waving had a chauvinistic component, but there were also whiffs of rational&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/06\/29\/trump-still-better-than-hitler-for-the-most-part\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, George W. Bush told a Joint Session of Congress that \u201cthey\u201d did it because \u201cthey hate our freedom.\u201d\u00a0 Everybody knew who \u201cthey\u201d were. Even so, in those halcyon days, when it was still not acceptable for an American president to level ethnic or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-367493","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}