{"id":8338,"date":"2006-08-30T14:38:10","date_gmt":"2006-08-30T18:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8338.html"},"modified":"2006-08-30T14:38:10","modified_gmt":"2006-08-30T18:38:10","slug":"an-odd-sense-of-sacrifice-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/an-odd-sense-of-sacrifice-4\/","title":{"rendered":"An odd sense of sacrifice"},"content":{"rendered":"

The president sat down with Brian Williams yesterday for an interview, and the NBC anchor raised a question<\/a> I haven’t heard mentioned in a while.<\/p>\n

WILLIAMS: The folks who say you should have asked for some sort of sacrifice from all of us after 9\/11, do they have a case looking back on it?<\/p>\n

BUSH: Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can appreciate that the president didn’t want to say, “Nope, no sacrifice necessary,” because that would appear shallow. But the reality is, the fact that Bush came up with such a vague answer is telling.<\/p>\n

Consider the president’s examples. We “pay a lot of taxes,” but this isn’t a sacrifice Bush asked the nation to take after 9\/11; it’s a sacrifice he asked us not<\/i> to take by cutting taxes (repeatedly). The “economy went into the tank,” but that’s not a burden Bush intentionally sought out and asked Americans to take on; it’s a burden he hoped to avoid.<\/p>\n

Air travel “was disrupted,” but that, in essence, means longer lines at the airport. So, confronted with a reasonable question about sacrifice in the face of a national crisis, the best the president could come up with is the need to get to the airport earlier than we used to.<\/p>\n

After 9\/11, I think Americans were probably prepared to do a lot more. They just weren’t asked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The president sat down with Brian Williams yesterday for an interview, and the NBC anchor raised a question I haven’t heard mentioned in a while. WILLIAMS: The folks who say you should have asked for some sort of sacrifice from all of us after 9\/11, do they have a case looking back on it? BUSH: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}