Ann Coulter
Initial reports from National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration officials investigating the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 are now ruling out slavery or Indian dispossession as the cause. This is in contradistinction to the attack of Sept. 11 – according to the theory propounded by Bill Clinton in his speech to Georgetown students last week. "Here in the United States," Clinton said, "we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed." Not content to turn a nation of wandering nomads into an agricultural cornucopia capable of feeding and sustaining nearly 300 million people, we also "once looked the other way when a significant number of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights." (Um. They didn't have the concept of "mineral rights.") "And we are still paying a price today," the impeached former president explained. We're all on tenterhooks waiting for the pious windbags who denounced Jerry Falwell (Walter Cronkite) to express comparable indignation with Clinton's remarks. At least Falwell restricted the cosmic payback to this nation's current ills. Clinton went back to the first Crusade. "Those of us from various European lineages are not blameless," he said. Indeed, he reminded the students again and again that "this is a country that was born in slavery." Yes, the Puritans came here on rickety ships, chancing disease and pestilence, in search of slavery. If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban? Clinton also noted that "we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion or sexual orientation." The terrorist attack was not, however, connected to rape, sexual harassment, the smearing of witnesses or crimes committed by any recent American president. So at least we dodged that bullet. Still, this is no time to be feeling all morally superior to the people who recently slaughtered thousands of our fellow countrymen. "[B]e smart enough," Clinton lectured the students, "to get rid of our arrogant self-righteousness" (which itself was not at all self-righteous). Among his typically vacuous platitudes, Clinton repeatedly invoked the virtue of diversity and the global community. But despite all his heartfelt paeans to diversity, he couldn't help but to touch upon the fact that much of the global community enjoys killing and oppression. Over and over again, Clinton stated the blindingly obvious: "[T]here are a lot of people who just don't see the world the way we do." He treated these different ways of seeing the world as charming idiosyncrasies in the abstract. "I'm glad America is a lot more different than it was when I was your age. This is a much, much more interesting country." It was only when he moved from vague generalities about the global community to the dry particulars of the different ways of seeing the world that the blossom kept falling off the rose of diversity. Thus, other diverse ways of seeing the world out there in the global community included this: "Seven hundred thousand people died in Rwanda in 90 days from people killing each other with machetes." I don't know, can't we be just a little morally self-righteous about not having done that? No. Liberals acknowledge nothing morally superior about America, aka a country "born in slavery." The one shining moral principle Clinton associates with America is that we think "nobody's got the truth." We don't think we're better and that's why we're better, if you follow his logic. Thus, according to Clinton, it's precisely because "nobody's got the truth" that "you see all those sanctimonious guys beating those women with sticks in the Taliban." (Better put some ice on that.) But wait – we don't beat women in the street as official government policy! Doesn't that mean we're maybe a little bit closer to the truth than the Taliban? One area in which Clinton ignores the bromide that "nobody's got the truth" is his belief in the never-ending value of the redistribution of money. Directly addressing the attack on New York (at least the U.N. escaped harm!) Clinton's prescription for victory was: "First we have to do more to reduce poverty and create more economic opportunity." Is he one of the crazies still waiting for proof that multi-multimillionaire Osama bin Laden is behind the attack? Would a federal Department of Caves really help? Even the left has given up on defending Bill Clinton's blather. Most of the media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, responded to Clinton's latest cry for help by refusing to report on the Georgetown speech. Everyone wishes he'd just go away and stop sending himself botulism out of anthrax envy.