Barack Obama is running for president as a person who wants to tone down the partisanship in Washington. His good buddy is Dick Durbin, the most partisan man in Congress.
Neither one had the class to leave the cheap shots at home for a day. Neither acknowledged America has not been attacked since. To do that would be to commit the highest sin of all: praising the Bush administration.
Here's Obama's statement:
Six years ago, on a bright and beautiful Tuesday morning, a new kind of enemy came to America's shores. Americans will never forget the images of that terrible day – the planes vanishing into buildings, the thick black clouds of smoke, the haunting images of the missing.Here's Durbin's statement:
On this anniversary, we pause to remember each and every victim of those attacks. We celebrate the lives that were tragically cut short. We grieve with the families and friends who lost loved ones. We honor the service and sacrifice of the emergency responders who set an example to the whole world that in America we are our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper. And we pause to honor the brave men and women of the United States military – and their families – who have borne such a heavy burden for the last six years.
We also remember how Americans were stirred to a common purpose. On the lines to donate blood or the candlelight vigils that stretched across our country, there was no red America and there was no blue America. We were united in our grief for our fellow citizens. We were united in our resolve to stand with one another and to stand up to terror. We were united as Americans.
What we saw that morning also forced us to recognize that in a new world of threats, we are no longer protected by our own power. The terrorists who plotted and carried out the 9/11 attacks killed man, woman and child indiscriminately. They distorted the great world religion of Islam. They came from no state or empire, but rather on behalf of a murderous ideology.
Six years later, the threat to America has only grown. Al Qaeda has reconstituted a new safe-haven where it trains recruits and plots attacks. Al Qaeda's top two leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, continue to disseminate their hate-filled propaganda and inspire legions of followers. Like-minded extremists have struck in scores of countries. The war in Iraq continues to fuel terror and extremism. A Taliban insurgency rages on in Afghanistan. In too many disconnected corners of the world, hate is casting a shadow over hope.
Our calling today remains the same as it was on 9/11. We must write a new chapter in American history. We must bring justice to the terrorists who killed on our shores. We must devise new strategies, develop new capabilities, and build new alliances to defeat the threats of the 21st century. We must extend hope to the hopeless corners of the world, and reaffirm our core values to counter the hateful message of the extremists. And we must secure a more resilient homeland.
To write that new American story, we must recapture that sense of common purpose that we had on September 11, 2001. America is bigger than the challenge that came to our shores. Let us honor the legacy of those we lost by coming together anew. Let us always mark this day by affirming that hope will triumph over fear, and that a new generation of Americans will seek a safer, freer, and more perfect union.
Today, on the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on our nation, many Americans in Illinois and across our nation are searching for their own ways to rescue some lasting good out of the evil and heartbreak of 9/11," said Durbin.
We who are privileged to work in this building have a special obligation to work together to prevent the next attack. We need to listen, and heed, the recommendations of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission to make America safer. We passed important legislation that moves us in that direction this year, but we need to do more.
Technorati Tags: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Dick Durbin, Illinois, Iraq, liberals, terror
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