As to the US having cooties for the Europeans and Japan, well, the data show that from 2000-2005 Germany, France, Netherlands, Greece and Portugal were all down 18-21%; Japan fell by 23% during that period. Other countries increased, including the UK, Denmark, Spain, Croatia, Iceland, Ireland, Poland Romania, Russia, Ukraine. Which proves . . . . .? Taiwan also fell by about 30% and we are their only important friends in the world – meaning?. And Tommie hasn’t seen immigration hell until he has to traverse Heathrow unescorted by the NY Times bureau in London (to say nothing of Paris on a warm August morning when the immigration service is on strike).

There was a signficant fall in South American travel to the US. Several of the countries have fallen economically and their citizens can no longer afford to come here (think Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia). Others fell into the visa trap (Brazil especially) as standards tightened. Every country in the ME fell (average >30%) except for one (starts with I, four letters, no peeking); no explanation needed there.

Well, I travel internationally more than once a month and the planes are always full, and I have another idea – a lot of green card holders converted to the USA team. Maybe it was to avoid the hassles at immigration or maybe they feared pogroms or who knows. But somebody is filling up all those flights, and there are more of them, using larger planes than there were in 2000.

No I did not. I went through the wikipedia list as best I could to select major attacks. I am quite sure I missed more than a couple!

Thanks for pointing that one out.

AJStrata

Ignorance is George Bush thinking Arabs can be turned into post-Christian Western liberals or Mexicans can become Americans.

Ignorance is declaring that the military needs to be rebuilt when you are a candidate and then being elected President and going to war with the same military you declared were in need of rebuilding. Ignorance is trying to fight a existential battle against blood thirsty animals without increasing Military Spending over what some leftist buttwipe of a President had spent. Ignorance is not firing nearly everyone of note inside of the CIA, DIA, FBI for failing to discover a plot by a bunch of ragged losers from a loser culture. Ignorance is imposing assinine ROE on our soldiers. Ignorance is valuing Hajis buildings over US lives….

There is plenty of ignorance in this administration. More evidence if any is needed is that we are going to be beaten like red haired stepchildrent at the polls in 2008 by a bunch of buttwipes whose philosophty is so corrupt they don’t even have the balls to trumpet it themselves…and we are going to lose to them. How can we lose to a bunch of leftists? That is the question we need to ask ourselves.

This: 9/11 has made us stupid

No, 9/11 just brought American ignorance of the world to the fore. Stupidity and ignorance are two different things. Stupidity is not knowing how to add and subtract. Ignorance is George Bush thinking Arabs can be turned into post-Christian Western liberals or Mexicans can become Americans. Only those who are ignorant of foreign cultures can believe such nonsense and that includes plenty of intelligent people handicapped by their own middle class parochialism. Americans are particularly vulnerable to this kind of ignorance due to their hegemonic role in the world.

BTW, I went through ZRH a couple of months ago. Nice place, but it carries less traffic than DCA, to name a nice US airport. And even Little Tommie cannot fly directly from ZRH to LGA.

If it had not been for people like this there might not have been a 9/11. And if people forgot about it and something like that happened again, the Tom Friedmans of the world would be the first ones to complain and bitch and moan.

The stuff about Gitmo is just insane, not to mention stupid. What are we going to do with these people? Turn them loose? Send them home to be killed? Try to put them on trial in this country after we have grabbed them in a battlefield situation?

Stupid.

Friedman, in his opinion piece in today’s New York Times, writes that 9/11 “made us stupid” and implores “us” to get back into “our old habits and sense of openness”:
[…] Times columnists are not allowed …

The only requirement for winning this award is to have made the stupidest or most asinine comments or publication in the previous week. You have earned it Thomas Friedman, congratulations….

Thomas Friedman thinks you are “stupid” if you still care about the atrocity committed against this country by Islamofascists in New York on 9/11/2001. He thinks “9/11 is over” and we all should just move on. Even worse, he has …

As alluded to in your post, you can deal with a militant entity before it gets powerful – or after it attains the power. We chose the latter in WWII and the world paid a dear cost.

Try it again, Friedman.

That’s crazy.

Fool.

And, a fool is forever…