How're we doing?

Some commentary on the day after the 5 year anniversary of 9/11:

Keith Olbermann's 'special comment' on Bush: Who has left this hole in the ground? via Crooks and Liars. Olbermann:

...they bicker and buck-pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing — instead of doing any job at all.
Five years later, Mr. Bush… we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir — on these 16 empty acres, the terrorists… are clearly, still winning.
...Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero…
So too have they succeeded, and are still succeeding — as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

Billmon, on Whiskey Bar, also talks about the hole in the ground, 'The sixteen-acre ditch':

If you had told me, five years ago, that on the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in history Ground Zero would still be nothing but an enormous hole in the ground, I wouldn't have believed you -- just as I wouldn't have believed that a major American city could be thoroughly trashed by a Category 4 hurricane and then left to moulder in the mud for a year...

From Billmon's comment: even the pools that marked the location of the towers yesterday, where W and Laura floated wreaths, are fake, or at least temporary.

More of interest:
The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, from Democracy Now, interview with David Corn and Michael Isikoff, authors of the book that exposed Richard Armitage as the source of the Valerie Plame leak.

In the Telegraph: Stop Blaming America for Terrorism, by Anne Applebaum. This one's raised a lot of comments from British readers.

On that 9/11 miniseries from ABC/Disney: In The Nation, ABC 9/11 Docudrama's Right-Wing Roots, by Max Blumenthal, which claims the series is the result of a long-standing campaign to blame the Clinton administration for the attacks.

Christopher Hitchens, in Opinion Journal: Solidarity: Our first duty is to stand together against bin Ladenism. Hitchens:

...there was the president, and most of the media, speaking about "an attack on America." True as this was and is, it is not quite the truth.
...Anyone who lost their "innocence" on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to "us"? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism's other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.

And, from Newsweek: The 'Islamofascists': Bush's new national-security offensive has been plagued by debate over what to call the bad guys.