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![]() Just Above Sunset
July 17, 2005 - Common Decency is So Overrated
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Tom Watson, over at The Huffington Post, as James Wolcott notes, discusses the difference between how the folks in Britain mourned our losses on September 11th and
how the leader of the free world breezed out of the summit after their losses over there last week. He titles it Bush's Flight From Terror: God Save the Queen – On the morning of September
13th, 2001, the officer in charge of the Coldstream Guards Band and 1st Battalion Scots Guards received a call from Buckingham
Palace. Banish tradition. The music accompanying that day's tourist-swathed ceremony at the changing would be different. That
day, the band played The Star-Spangled Banner. The Brits were with us. Wolcott's answer? Because, to repeat myself,
he just couldn't be bothered. And Wolcott points to Simeon
Jenkins writing at the same site from London – Can anyone on your side
help? Five days after we had four bombs explode on the London Tube and with everyone saying, stay calm and stay normal, US
Air Force officials ordered personnel in Britain to avoid London, whether or not in uniform and including their families.
The order has since been rescinded, but the damage is done. Well if you haven't been
following that see this from CNN or this from the BBC. I think the idea was that London was now a bombed-out ruin of
a city, just a shell of what it one was, and full of mad bombers who would kill Americans with roadside bombs at the drop
of a hat. It seems we got it confused with Baghdad, Mosul or Fallujah. Oops. Well, we lifted the ban.
But the ban didn't go unnoticed - Thursday night Google shows 230 news stories about it from around the world. We are quite willing
to stand by our British brothers and sisters, as long as we can stand a good safe distance and still do our shopping. Britain's Queen Elizabeth
stood in silence at Buckingham Palace. In London's Trafalgar Square, a giant banner declared 'One City, One World.' Has the United States
or even simply Washington, DC held a silent moment for the victims of the London bombings? Has any national gesture of solidarity
been proposed? Yeah, well, we're special. They're not. |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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