9/11

That morning I was in the barber shop, watching it all unfold on a small tv set, and by the time I was finished I had seen the pictures of mobs of people walking out of downtown Washington, headed for safety. I was so furious I drove down to AEI, against that sad exodus, and I was glad I had, because many European friends called, most of them saying “you must be terribly frightened.” I told them no, we were not frightened, we were angry, and we were going to be angry for a long time.

There are many who are saying that we have lost that anger, that we have reverted to a 9/10 state of mind. I have my doubts.

Certainly nobody in my house has reverted, and my sense of the American people is that they have not either. But many of our opposition leaders, journalists, broadcasters, and editors, and, apparently, the overwhelming majority of the professoriate, clearly have. Otherwise it would not be possible for them to actively undermine the war. It is wrong to say they have forgotten the significance of 9/11, because they never grasped it. For them, patriotism has always been unworthy of sophisticates like themselves, and fighting enemies on foreign battlefields is something that rubes and rednecks do. They understand neither the world nor their fellow countrymen. They think we can achieve peace by being nice–did you hear Senator Biden prattling on and on about the need to talk to our Iranian enemies?—and they don’t know that our commissioned officers are college graduates, many of them from the best universities. I doubt more than a small fraction of leading journalists know that you need a college degree to get a Marine commission. Their ignorance about, and contempt for our military, fester beneath the surface of their reportage.

How I wish Barbara Olson had the chance to confront them, live and in color. She knew them well, these self-satisfied, self-indulgent ignoramuses whose misunderstanding of the world was acquired at overpriced universities and at elegant dinner tables where they dined with like-minded people. How she would have ridiculed them and their alma maters, the Harvards, Georgetowns, Virginias and Chicagos who have just given their stages to Mohammed Khatami, the mass murderer who is pimping for the evil regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

She would not restrict her acid wit to those schools. She would also direct it at an administration that has failed so miserably to explain the urgency we need to destroy her murderers. She would surely demand an accounting from all those who signed off on Khatami’s visa. How could you? she would ask. You know–you say all the time–that Iran is the greatest supporter of the terrorists. You know–everybody knows–that the villains who organized my murder found sanctuary and support in Iran when they slinked out of Afghanistan. How could you then open our country to its former president? Have you no shame?

I have plenty of time to listen to constructive criticism of our war strategy; I have done plenty of it myself. I crave revenge, as do most Americans. But I have no time for the fools and fabricators who invert reality, who warn that the greatest threat to a decent world is a bloodthirsty America that is actively planning an invasion of Iran, when the truth is that this administration is so feckless that it will not even support the millions of freedom fighters already there.

Most of the fools and fabricators are Lefties, but there are plenty on the Right, and the Republican Party has an abundance of them. Indeed, some of them sit at the right hand of the president. Karen Hughes, one of W’s closest friends and advisers, permitted herself this bit of politically correct appeasement-speak last December 19th, apologizing to our enemies on al Jazeera:

“The U.S. acknowledged [after] the events of September 11 that our policies might have created feelings of frustration and hatred, [causing those individuals] to board those airplanes, [fly them into the twin towers], and kill people. We want to change these circumstances, and this is what we are doing today…”

Barbara would have no time for any of the Bidens, Hagels, Lugars, Deans, Kennedys and Murthas who tell us we are wrong to be angry, wrong to seek the destruction of our enemies, wrong to advance freedom, wrong to defend our borders, wrong to use every technological miracle to discover and divine our enemies’ intentions, wrong to lock away captured killers.

She would spit at the very idea of coming to terms with those who want us dead or dominated. She would have cancelled her subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post, because she would not want the poison in her house, and she would not want to give a nickel to the corrupt rich kids who own and guide the papers.

She would be right. And she must be avenged.

Published by Pajamas Media, the Best of the Blogs, and POLITICSCENTRAL.