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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRuss Feingold's book - While America Sleeps: A wake-up call for the post 9/11 era
Just out, here's a review by the publisher...
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/213720/while-america-sleeps-by-russ-feingold
In While America Sleeps, Russ Feingold details our nations collective failure to respond properly to the challenges posed by the post-9/11 era. Oversimplification of complicated new problems as well as the cynical exploitation of the fears generated by 9/11 have undermined our ability to adjust effectively to Americas new place in the world. This has weakened our efforts to protect American lives, our national security, and our constitutional values. Ranging from institutional failures to get it right by Congress, the executive branch, and the media to the way we have spoken of the war on terror, the nature of Islam, and American exceptionalism, too often we have not made the best choices in confronting, in Churchills words, the new conditions under which we now have
to dwell.
Senator Feingold explores the way in which the American public has been fed inadequate information
or mere slogans to explain 9/11, Al Qaeda, and related events. This compares unfavorably with the candor often associated with, for example, FDRs fireside chats during World War II. Lumping Al Qaeda into a catch-all category known as bad guys, failing to make it clear that Islam itself is not a threat to our way of life, and underestimating the extreme difficulty of fully invading individual countries as a way to root out international terrorism are examples of this misdirection. Moreover, our general inability to keep our eyes on the international ball seems to have grown even worse in the years following 9/11.
More than ten years after one of the greatest wake-up calls in human history, our nation seems to have again grown complacent about the issues that suddenly seemed so urgent immediately after 9/11. While America Sleeps suggests ways in which we can awaken a new national commitment to engage with the rest of the world and one another in a less simplistic and more thoughtful way. Feingolds hope is that when the history of this era is written, it will be said that our country was taken off guard at the height of its power at the turn of the century and stumbled for a decade in an unfamiliar environment, but in the following decade America found a new national commitment of unity and resolve to adapt to its new status and leadership in the world.
What's next for Russ? A run for Governor?
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Russ Feingold's book - While America Sleeps: A wake-up call for the post 9/11 era (Original Post)
Scuba
Feb 2012
OP
DCKit
(18,541 posts)1. The only problem 9/11 solved was for PNAC: "How do we get away with invading Iraq?"
Then they promptly showed that, even with 20+ years of planning, they didn't know WTF they were doing and were also incapable of learning on-the-job.
But they sure do know how to funnel money from the Treasury and taxpayers to Big (pick an industry).