“They hate us for our freedoms”? If only they knew

Immediately after September 11, 2001, while the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldered, some of the more thoughtful members of the punditocracy and the population asked the obvious question of why: “Why did this happen? What had the US done that was so bad?” For some—George W. Bush, for instance—the answer was clear. It wasn’t what the US had done, it was who we were. “Americans are asking, why do they hate us?” he said in a joint address to Congress on Sept. 20, 2001. “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” He used “freedom” 13 times in that one speech. It would, as it turns out, become a recurring theme for the president. In his second inaugural address, Bush used “freedom” 27 times, more than twice as many times as his joint