Obama Doesn’t Understand the True Spirit of 9/11

posted at 10:39 am on September 12, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ National Defense ]    printer-friendly

Yesterday, a number of people, including Hot Air’s own Doctor Zero, wrote impassioned, heart-felt essays that solemnly reflected on the grievous loss America sustained on 9/11 and on the spirit and resolve Americans have historically shown in the face of adversity. Nowhere has that unconquerable spirit — the American Spirit — been better exemplified than in the courage and selflessness shown aboard Flight 93 on that fateful day in 2001. Who can forget Tod Beamer’s last words, “Let’s roll,” before he and his fellow passengers stormed their captors and forced the plane down in a barren field far from harm’s way.

Among the commentaries I read yesterday are two I wish I hadn’t. Both were by Barack Obama, a man with an ego so massive that he is not content to add his two cents but rather needs to add four. The first commentary was the transcript of a speech, delivered live at the Pentagon Memorial Park. Like most of his speeches, this one was filled with high-blown, pseudo-patriotic oratory that must have sounded impressive to those lacking the capacity to hear between the lines. The other appeared in the New York Daily News. Like the speech, it was little more than lofty-sounding, soulless rhetoric, feigning emotion.

One line from the Daily News article was accorded its own paragraph but rang especially hollow: “Every year on this day, we are all New Yorkers.” As a New Yorker every day — I live in midtown Manhattan, a few miles northeast of Ground Zero — I take offense at this would-be gesture of solidarity. Based on the company he keeps, it is hard enough for me to think of Obama as a fellow American, let alone a New Yorker. Let’s not forget that one of Obama’s associates, Bill Ayers, was part of a group that attempted to destroy the Pentagon years before Al Qaeda tried the same thing, while Obama’s mentor, Jeremiah Wright, declared in his “9/11 sermon” that the attacks were “America’s Chickens . . . coming home to roost!”

This was Obama’s first 9/11 as president. I would have preferred he just sat back silently and let the nation reflect on the events of eight years ago and mourn its loss. At the very least he could have made the occasion non-political. But Barack will be Barack, which is why he had to remind anyone paying attention that he has attempted to usurp 9/11 and rebrand it in his own image as a National Day of Service and Remembrance. As he said standing in the shadow of the Pentagon:

Let us renew the true spirit of that day. Not the human capacity for evil, but the human capacity for good. Not the desire to destroy, but the impulse to save, and to serve, and to build. On this first National Day of Service and Remembrance, we can summon once more that ordinary goodness of America — to serve our communities, to strengthen our country, and to better our world. [Emphasis added]

Interesting for Obama to tout “service,” as he construes it, on the very day that ACORN, a group of organizers with which he has a long history, made news that is anything but flattering to itself or him.

As to renewing the spirit of 9/11, patriotic Americans have done this admirably year after year without any prompting from Obama. As for serving, we New Yorkers and Americans know perfectly well how to do that, too. It has nothing to do with inciting mobs to march and wave signs and shout threats as a way of demanding more government entitlements. On the contrary, I saw Americans serving Americans on the original 9/11, when I walked over to Bellevue Hospital a few blocks from my apartment to donate blood. I was turned away because so many other people had had the same idea but had arrived before me. That’s the true spirit of 9/11 — that is truly serving your fellow man — and it’s something Barack Obama and his kind will never understand.

Cross-posted at and adpated from Zombie Contentions

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