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Sen. Murray Won't Apologize or Resign
Wes Vernon
“Oh, my goodness!” responded Murray spokesman Todd Webster when NewsMax.com asked him if the senator planned to apologize to the relatives of those who died in the bin Laden-inspired murderous 9/11 attacks.
Last week, Murray said to high school students, “We’ve got to ask, why is this man [bin Laden] so popular around the world?” and added, “He’s been out in these [poverty ridden] countries building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, and people are extremely grateful. We haven’t done that.”
Those comments (complete with a hint that perhaps the U.S. deserved the attacks of last year because the world’s downtrodden camel drivers or homeless blame us for the poverty inflicted by their own corrupt, Marxist, and/or autocratic governments) drew a blizzard of protests.
The uproar over Murray’s comments boiled down to two categories:
1. Those who believe the senator seemed to glorify bin Laden and greatly exaggerated his alleged good works.
2. Those who believe she ignored (“We haven’t done that”) the facts and figures on billions of American taxpayer dollars that have gone to foreign aid, to say nothing of the U.S. charities which are the most generous in the world.
Murray later resorted to damage control as the gathering storm over her remarks became all the more fierce. She then assailed bin Laden as “an evil terrorist”
For a time, Washington’s senior senator appeared to be backing and filling in ways not unlike Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., for statements he made on a 54-year old presidential bid by Sen. Strom Thurmond, D-S.C., but without Lott’s groveling, and certainly without any apologies.
The kindest thing one can say about Murray’s comment was that it appeared to be a recycled a version of the discredited foreign aid lobby’s rallying cry during the Cold War, i.e. that no matter how much money or help we send around the world, it will never be enough, because the communists will always beat us to it, and that we should feel perpetually guilty. If you substitute “bin Laden” for “Communists,” that appears to be the lawmaker’s point.
The only problem with it is that, in the Cold War and the War against Terror, the guilt-trip argument is and was patently false, as clearly shown by any measure.
Treatment by the left-wing media displayed (yet again) a double standard. One for a Republican senator (Lott), and another for a leftist Democrat (Murray).
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