Shame on us.

    The last time I was evacuated from anywhere was at the Victoria's Secret Warehouse and Distribution Center in Columbus. It was on 9/11/2001. We had spent the morning in the break room watching the World Trade Center Towers go down (over and over as they did that day on on the news loop) and by about 11:00-11:30 am, someone had called in a bomb threat to Victoria's Secret. We were evacuated. Our department and several others went to the truck pad behind Shipping. It was a cloudless warm day and we spent three hours out there while the bomb squads searched the 200,000 sq.ft. distribution center. Being only a couple miles from the Airport, the lack of air traffic was noticable and very eerie. People with radios reported the third plane going down in Pennsylvania. and the details of the attack on the Pentagon. I went through most of a pack of cigarettes while we waited. I remember thoughts of dismay that we had such an inept president. Little did I know then that the shock of that day would do so much self-inflicted damage to our country.   Within hours of the revelation that Bin Laden was behind the attacks, viscous racist rants against Muslims were all over the  right wing radio call-in shows with racist moderators like Limbaugh encouraging them. Limbaugh, the known racist and newly anointed leader of the republicans, daily claimed to know the thoughts of anyone to the left of Pat Buchanan (another known racist) and proclaimed them anti-American and Evil.    These kind of attacks would become standard fare on Fox News. After Mr. Cheney's wars, meant to claim the world as America's Dominion at any price, the racism could be seen as the new heart of the republican party when it tried to paint Obama as the uppity black man who didn't know his place. Caricatures of Obama as a half naked native witch-doctor, a dancing Sambo, or a monkey were proudly waved at tea-party rallies and they flooded the internet. The plan by the nation's right wing wealthy to drive down the cost of labor has driven down the standard of living for most americans but these racist citizens are willing to pay that price in order to be able to publicly express their hatred with the new coded language  they've learned from Limbaugh, Beck, Palin and their ilk.  To avoid paying television writers more money, we are pushed a swill of drunken adults behaving like whining 2 year olds, contestants encouraged to lie and conspire for money, and news presented by Bozos with monstrous egos, small intellects, bigotry and bully bravado. Now they're running candidates for the American presidency with about the same qualifications. So, as we remember those lost that day and honor heroes lost among them, let us shame those leaders who used it as an excuse for political gain and to denounce the war mongering administration that harnessed racial hatreds to murder half a million Iraqis for no reason but bully bravado.