I watched V For Vendetta again yesterday, as I house sit for a friend. It’s worth watching as a reminder of where we are today in our country and where we’re headed. The parallels are so numerous, such as the government playing on fear, causing fear, invading our privacy to save our freedoms. The list goes on and on. Unfortunately, our citizenry are undereducated, too uncritical, busy watching reality TV or worrying about their economic existence to care about responsible citizenship, while our Congress is busy building their wealth and influence or complicit with this Regime to do their sworn duty.

But Todd, they're going to kill us all. All of us. Killingly. And those of us that they don't kill will be subjected to Islamofascist rule. Do you want to live in a world where "Qatar" is pronounced "Cudder?"

I have wondered many times what this country would have been like now if GWB had uttered these words in the days after 9/11:

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

It's beyond me what you see in the quote that's helpful to your cause.

This:

And what's more we can give it back and we will give it back--with compound interest.

actually reminds me of Neo-con and Vulcan "shock and awe" as a presciptive reaction to 9/11, i.e., the sleeping peaceful giant awakes and flexes and shows its awesome power, and says to the world: don't tread on me.

You are also conveniently ignoring that prior to Pearl Harbor, an actual attack on American soil, it was very quite difficult to get Americans interested in getting involved in WWII. Those kamikaze attacks weren't happening to them. With Pearl Harbor, they did buy into getting involved in the war in order to draw a line at not getting to the stage where it could happen.

I'd like to add that Phelicity's comment above is a very good one. I would like to take it and apply it to the specifics of your argument....Americans at the time did not seriously fear kamikaze pilots hitting the mainland because they didn't believe it could happen and it hadn't happened...this was part of the shock of 9/11, when it finally actually did happen. This was indeed part of the genius of the bin Laden plan, but the FDR prescription is what he envisioned happening as well.

I might also add on the irrational fear front, that fear of Japanese attacks resulted in Japanese-Americans being interned, and only a few years after the war ended, McCarthyism.

And why this sort of response was not immediately on the toungue of Democrats ever since 9/11 is beyond me. This is particularly so since living out in the hinterlands myself I can tell you that if they were afraid on the east coast, they sure weren't in my neck of the woods.

Republicans want Americans to be cowards (like the Democrats in Washington DC)because then they can be bullied into anything... for example, submitting to unconstitutional domestic spying for no good reason, submitting to obscene defense budgets while the nation's schools fail and healthcare is unavailable for more Americans every year, and this is only the beginning of the list. When our leaders fail to display the courageous attitude our greatest leaders such as Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy displayed in the face of adversity it only aids and abets the forces of domestic tyranny in the US.

It is clear that certain leaders suffered a psychological shock from 9/11 which led to a sort of PTSD condition.

The obvious ones include Bush, Cheney, Giuliani and their second stringers like Rumsfeld.

Once scared witless, the responses that follow tend to be irrational and excessive.

What isn't clear is whether the support staff (Feith, Libby, Rove, Wolfowitz, various generals) also were traumatized or whether they saw this as an opportunity to push forward their authoritarian restructuring of the government. I tend to think the latter. Authoritarian leaders tend to attract similar followers.

And it is the technocrats that ultimately destroy a society. Compare Hitler (an insane sociopath) with his staff (Eichmann, Speer, Goering, etc.).

The real failure in the US was that of congress (and still is). They have shown no interest in protecting democracy, or the rule of law, or even of their own constitutional prerogatives. Is there something about the current electoral system that only selects weak willed, subservient, craven individuals to run for office?

This is where change has to take place. I assume that the strong and independent don't run because they can't get the money needed which comes from big business and the military/industrial/congressional complex.

I don't know how to break this cycle of dependency, but the current election cycle isn't a hopeful sign. A bit of net roots fund raising hasn't really changed the dynamics of most of the contested elections in any meaningful way.

This is something that we need to sort out as a country, if for no other reason than to get off the “war” footing that is draining us and starting to promote a very rational fear of our government that’s supposed to be protecting us.

We have ourselves to blame for allowing the extremists to trade on 9/11 but the manipulation behind it has to be exposed. Remember that the whole GWOT was fueled by a carefully orchestrated campaign of fear-mongering that began on 9/12.

The Iraq war is a prime example of how propaganda and lies exploited the publics’ fears such as linking al Qaeda to the “Axis of Evil” poster-boy and pre-demonized Saddam Hussein. We were put on a constant “yellow” alert and warned to watch for the suspicious behavior of neighbors. Regular orange alerts (based on “chatter”) or foiling of new terror plots were dragged out when priming was needed. The anthrax attacks were tied into the whole and every nationalist group using terror methods became part of that horde. The whole war of terror may have started as one giant CYA project by the government for allowing 9/11 in the first place. And all of this was nicely packaged by a news media that trades in alarmism anyway and sold to the public in living color.

I think the further the government went with this (and we were generally aware of profiling, roundups, torture, rendition, Gitmo, spying, etc.), the further many people felt complicit in it and the more it had to be rationalized. Edward R Murrow's show about Milo Radakovitz may have marked the end of McCartyism by prompting people to reassess their own passive acquiescence in the "Red Scare." If we don’t try to honestly expose everything that has gone on in these sad times and deal with it, we’ll continue the same more or less.

1) FDR's mention of suicide bombers was based on simple analysis of the situation. The U.S. was far from German air bases, and Germany did not have aircraft carriers. That meant that any air attack would have to be a suicide attack since there would be no way for aircraft to return to a home base. The attack from Japan, war from the west, was a surprise. Everyone anticipated an attack from the east, but Japan was considered too far away and unlikely to take such a bold action. Any attack on the U.S. mainland would have to be a suicide attack.

2) I still have my copy of New York Needs You Strong, a booklet put out in October 2001 to encourage New Yorkers to stay in mental and physical shape for the challenges ahead. It sounded surprisingly retro and surprisingly apropos.

Unlike Ellen, I am a great admirer of FDR and after my brief comment recalling the Doolittle Raid, which was crazy and suicidal but miraculously worked mostly as intended, I went looking for context of the SOTU remarks in my favorite book of the period, Roosevelt and Hopkins, An Intimate History by Robert E. Sherwood.

There really wasn't anything much on the SOTU itself but I did think this paragraph detailing reactions from late day December 7, 1941, provides some insight. From page 435 (emphasis mine):

The news of the shocking extent of the casualties and the damage to capital ships spread rapidly throughout Washington. Many newspaper men knew the details but refrained from publishing them even before the government had time to put censorship into operation. The jittery conduct of some of the most eminent of our government officials was downright disgraceful. They were telephoning the White House shouting that the President must tell the people the full extent of this unmitigated disaster — that our nation had gone back to Valley Forge — that our West Coast was now indefensible and we must prepare to establish our battle lines in the Rocky Mountains or on the left bank of the Mississippi or God knows where. In going about Washington in those first days, it sometimes seemed that maybe the Nazi and Fascist propagandists were right, that maybe our democracy had become decadent and soft, that we could talk big but that there were too many of us who simply did not know how to stand up under punishment. But the atmosphere inside the White House was very different; here, one felt, was the United States of America. Telegrams and messages flowed by the hundreds and thousands from people all over the country. I read all of them that were received in the first few days and, if I had been misled by any doubts, these messages to the President put me right. The spirit that they expressed welled up in the press and over the radio and gave an inspiring and valid promise of the manner in which this country was to handle its gigantic job.

This is a really great book, 1949 Pulitzer Prize. I founded it by accident at my local library a couple of decades ago. Once I started reading I could not stop. Anyone interested in WWII or FDR who hasn't read it already should scrounge up a copy. Amazon has been showing it as a pre-order for several months so don't count on getting a copy through them.

San Francisco, 1942. Every child was required to wear an identification tag around his neck so that were he found dead after a bombing a parent could be notified.

A screaming siren in the night meant total blackout of the city, every family huddling together in one room waiting for the bombs to fall.

It was seldom that our Sunday dinner didn't include a young man or two soon to be shipped out to fight somewhere in the Pacific theater. My mother kept up a correspondence with them and their parents - more often than not getting a letter informing her that their son had been killed.

There was fear, Ellen. Roosevelt didn't have to create it.