Dismay and shame.
The dismay is well expressed here.
And the shame here.
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it. ...Paul Krugman
Maybe an important aspect of the great divide in America is the difference between those Americans who are able to feel shame and willing to make genuine apologies, and those who can't admit to shame and toss off self-justification as a cheap plastic substitute for remorse.
Shamelessness is a marker of the fake conservative. As Andrew Bacevich, a (genuine) conservative, writing in a conservative journal, says:
To escape from our era of ideological fantasy requires acknowledging this reality — facing the dismal consequences that 20 years of American arrogance and misjudgment have yielded. Seldom has a nation relinquished a position of advantage as quickly and recklessly as has the United States in just the past two decades.
What this means for the so-called conservative movement today is this: It’s time to face the music, assess the damage — much of it to be laid at the feet of the faux-conservative Republican Party — and begin the hard work of recovery and restoration.
