David McElroy

It was 12 years ago today when 19 men hijacked four airplanes and crashed three of them into buildings in New York City and Washington, D.C. Many millions of words have been written about those attacks and their cause, but it seems that most people are still just as clueless about why the attacks happened as they were 12 years ago.

George W. Bush famously told us that the attackers hate Americans because we are free. In a speech to Congress, he said, “Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Bush was out of touch with reality, even though his defenders continue to look for ways around this. Those who attacked this country were very plain about their grievances and their motives. They hated this country because of the U.S. government’s constant interference in the affairs of their nations. This isn’t news to anyone who’s followed the history of the last hundred years and who’s listened to what these groups have said.

The U.S. government has spent the last century intervening in the affairs of people in the Middle East (and elsewhere). Our rulers have supported tyrants and claimed it was in the name of freedom. They’ve spent billions and billions of our tax dollars to give dictators the weapons with which to murder their people and each other. Our government has chosen which groups to support and which regimes to bring down, all on the basis of which groups were willing to act as puppets for what people in D.C. wanted. (And they sometimes support a dictator today and then call him the devil tomorrow when it suits their purposes.)

That’s why they hate us. It has nothing to do with our “democratically elected government.” It has nothing to do with our freedom of religion, speech and so forth, although they surely wouldn’t respect those things. They hate us because of things that have been done to their nations and families — in our name — by the U.S. government.

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Hollywood’s anti-war left is missing. It’s bad enough that celebrity faces ought to be showing up on the backs of milk cartons any time now.

Hypocritical double standards are common in politics, so it’s not just the progressive left that’s guilty. But there’s one aspect of this that goes beyond simple partisan hypocrisy. According to actor Ed Asner — who has a long track record as one of the leading voices of the left in Hollywood — many of his fellow progressives are afraid of being called racists if they dare to criticize a black president.

“A lot of people don’t want to feel anti-black by being opposed to Obama,” Asner told the Hollywood Reporter.

That attitude isn’t just hypocritical. It’s flat-out racist.

When a Republican president was preparing to attack Iraq, Hollywood’s political elite was out in force to oppose him. (And I agreed with them.) But that was acceptable, because he was white and an evil Republican. Obama is not only a fellow Democrat, but … well … you know.

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For several days, I’d been suffering from a mild cold, so I was using NyQuil to sleep at night instead of staying awake coughing. I realized one night that I was out of NyQuil, so I made a quick trip to the Target near my house to get some.

When I handed the 12-ounce bottle of NyQuil (a generic version, actually) to the clerk, she scanned it and asked for my driver’s license. I asked her why. She said it was required by law. I told her it’s not required by law, since it’s not a controlled substance and the law doesn’t require identification or recording of purchases in Alabama. She looked at me as though I was questioning a basic law of nature. She couldn’t understand why I would object to having my personal information stored in a database in exchange for handing her cash for cold medicine.

I left without the NyQuil. I told the clerk that I’d buy it someplace else that doesn’t invade my privacy. I walked out feeling angry at Target. And then I drove to Walmart and bought twice as much of the medicine without any ID of any kind.

Why does Target want to record my information when Walmart doesn’t?

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