The Opportunists
by Barton Wong

Perhaps the only good thing that has come out of all this is that finally, after months of bitter bickering after the Florida fiasco, there is something that the Blue zone and the Red zone can agree about. But this is also a time when the very worst in human nature also comes to light, not in the perpetrators, but in the victims. Pundits from both the Right and the Left, for whatever reasons, have already begun to use this event as a pretext to serve only their own partisan ends.

On the Right, we have the paleo-conservatives doing their usual whine: "This is a judgment on us for our interventionist foreign policy..." While I try to recall just when in American history the US Air Force launched fully-fueled jets into their enemies' civilian buildings, I will say this. While there have been immense mistakes in the past, (My Lai and perhaps the entire Vietnam War) if anything, as the world's only superpower, the United States has an obligation now to act as the arsenal of democracy and the world's moral center. Let these right-wingers complain all they want. Half a million people in Rwanda needed our help and we just sat back and watched. Remember that.

And a bloodthirsty Ann Coulter, perhaps grief-stricken from the death of her good friend Barbara Olson, wrote:

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

Ms. Coulter gives new meaning to the term "get medieval."

And this is not even to mention the typical litany of religious, bigoted zealots who somehow command a large following and have been telling said following that the blame lies in America's acceptance of gays and lesbians.

On the Left, we also had plenty of hot air. As always, Noam Chomsky couldn't resist commenting; The MIT professor wrote, "The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people." Gee, and here I was thinking that the bombings were a crushing blow to people of the United States.

There will also be those who will do just about anything in their partisan anger to pin the ultimate root cause of this disaster to President Bush and the vast "military- industrial complex." Newsweek's Howard Fineman had the gall to write a "news" piece that criticized Bush not for his actions, but for his lack of natural eloquence and inability to be an "Empathizer-In-Chief." As if Bush should have been practicing crocodile tears and actorly emoting, instead of worrying about national security. Even my own country's National Post said Bush's address "lacked the hallmarks of greatness. Where were the turns of phrases destined to stick in the history books?" The triumph of words over actions seems almost complete.

And John Lahr said "in fear, the nation, to my mind, has always proved mean-spirited and violent." Mr. Lahr may care to tell the thousands of people in all those body bags, just how "mean-spirited and violent," the country they were citizens of is.

Every tragedy brings out the best and the worst in people, and there will always be those who will use a disaster to further their own ends, to say "see, I told you so," as if the nation's grief were just another victory in their ideological war of words.

E-mail Barton Wong at bartonwong at hotmail dot com.