The backlash has started. Since my posting on the Jersey Girls and their incredible service to the nation in investigating our country's intelligence failtures, my mailbox has lit up with scathing attacks on the four 9-11 widows. Most point to a few right-wing sources - and suggest condescendingly that these courageous women should spend more time with their children, instead of serving as the driving emotional force behind the 9-11 Commission. A few highlights from compassionate conservatives:
"Ever wonder what hell will be like? Maybe it will be a big room where those tiresome "Jersey Girls," who made 9/11 whining into a cottage industry, and the White House press corps have to sit asking each other asinine questions for eternity."
Ralph Kinney Bennett of Tech Central Station, a right-wing Website."Nor can anyone miss, by now, the darker side of this spectacle of the widows, awash in their sense of victims' entitlement, as they press ahead with ever more strident claims about the way the government failed them."
Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal."It has now been firmly established that they are being propelled by anti-war, pro-socialist or social reconstruction Democrat groups."
Rush Limbaugh of right-wing radio.
These comments are, in my view, un-patriotic and worthy of widespread public scorn and ridicule. These four women who lost their husbands have held our government accountable - they dare to ask alound "how can 19 Saudi nationals attack the United States and kill nearly 3,000 people." The Commission is the result of their efforts - it may not be comfortable politically for the Clinton and Bush Administrations, but it's vital. And we owe a debt of gratitude to the Jersey Girls: Kristen Breitwieser, Mindy Kleinberg, Lorie Van Auken and Patty Casazza
