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Jeff Jacoby on why the 9/11 fund was a miserable failure:
To begin with, there was the injustice of having the feds bestow multimillion-dollar jackpots on the Sept. 11 families when countless other families struck by tragedy get nothing. Asked at the Boston forum why the death of an employee in the World Trade Center is more deserving of compensation than the death of a hurricane victim in Florida, Feinberg acknowledged that "from the perspective of the victims," it isn't. There was no satisfactory way, he confessed, to answer the letters that came from other shattered families:
"Dear Mr. Feinberg, my son died at Oklahoma City. Where's my check?"
"Dear Mr. Feinberg, my daughter died in the African embassy bombings in 1997 in Kenya. How come I'm not eligible?"
"Dear Mr. Feinberg, my wife died in the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, committed by the very same people. How come I'm not getting a check?"
"I even got a letter," he recalled, "from somebody who said, `Mr. Feinberg, my husband last year saved three little girls from drowning in the Mississippi River, and then he went under and drowned: a hero. Where's my check?"
I can go Mr. Jacoby one better: ...
"Mr. Feinberg, my son/husband/Daddy died in Iraq/Afghanistan. He was a Reservist/Guardsman: a civilian soldier. He didn't do this for a living. He gave his life to make sure nothing like September 11th ever happens again."
But you're unlikely to hear any of those families pipe up with "Where's my check?" Nor are you likely to hear any Active Duty families clamoring for a piece of the federal pie.
The other day I was trying to decide how I became so snarky. I used to be such a nice person... I think I can trace it back to the first time I heard the Jersey Girls.
How come the media never show us the 9/11 widows who support the administration? Instead, we see a small but vocal group of women demanding to know why terrorists kill innocent people. I expect next they'll demand to know why objects dropped from a 3 foot height inevitably fall down instead of up.
Those ladies still give me nightmares - they were like the midgets at the surreal three-ring circus that was the 9/11 commission. I trace my ongoing sarcasm abuse problems to the moment I witnessed the ghastly spectacle of Kristin Breitweiser and the aptly-named Dick Ben-Veniste on the same TV screen.
There are some tragedies so awful that even millions of dollars in federal disaster compensation cannot heal them.
Pray for me. And on second thought, I'll take some of that money.
