Reporting a Void; Science as Frankenstein; Democrat-Socialists Gone Wild and McCain/Palin's First Gaffe

Now Playing: "This Room Is My Castle Of Quiet" by Billie May and his Orchestra, from Space Capades

Seven years ago today this happened. Please take a few minutes, if you haven't already, and watch the video footage again. Understandably, the passage of time has transformed the evil of that day into an abstraction - yet it is vital that we review the events of that day as a concrete reality, not just "September 11, 2001."

This is the first time I've watched it since that day, and what I feel now is anger. Anger at the animals - porcine, to be precise - that did this; at their fellow pigs who cheered them after the fact, both in the Middle East and in some of America's "colleges"; at the fools in American government who gutted our national defense and intelligence capabilities throughout the 1990s; at the King of the Fools, Jimmy Carter, the official midwife to these animals - via his craven cowardice and "diplomacy" in the face of blatant aggression ca. 1979; at Carter's present-day apprentices within the Democrat-Socialist Party, from Obama to Reid to Pelosi to the rest of that pack; and at the gutter-sludge that follow and feed in their wake, the Moores and Churchills and Penns and Baldwins and Sheehans and Code Pinkos and MorOn.orgs and plethora of random others who despise America to its core.

Fortunately, that human debris has been driven back by the good and the decent the world over, from President Bush and Vice President Cheney to Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the firemen and policemen of NYC, to all of those in Congress who have consistently stood up against the cake-eating pragmatists who lost their stomach for America's defense within mere months of that monstrous attack.

I will say without the slightest hesitation that a review of that awful day brings into stark relief the dangerous stew of shallowness, irresponsibility and scarcely-concealed contempt for Americanism that is the Obama-Biden ticket.

The last time the American voting population got complacent enough - complacent following the Reagan-engineered collapse of the Soviet empire - to elect an irresponsible charlatan as President, it led to eight years of criminal neglect of American national security. Wildly-popular and poll-friendly neglect, but...neglect. Can you say "Peace Dividend?"

Which in turn led directly to the atrocity we remember today.

Some "peace."

So, is it time to re-elect Jimmy Carter? Oyeah! HipHipHooray!

We would do so at our grave peril, for the world is a vastly more dangerous place, and America's place within it significantly more precarious, than it was thirty years ago. It is essential that we have someone in the White House with enough rudimentary intelligence to distinguish good from evil.

Obama, as part of that New/Old-Left trendiness steeped in "PC"-relativist muck, has shown evidence of disdain for the idea of moral distinctions per se. I guess moral distinctions might offend the evil and hurt their feelings.

=> An important truism of life is the difficulty that lies in getting people to appreciate a herculean job of preventing a mess - precisely because the mess has been...prevented.

The "mess" in this case is a pleasant metaphor for: another catastrophic attack on America. The man who's done the herculean job of preventing it, for seven full years, has not just had his successful work ignored, he's been the target of some of the most consistently vicious and personal attacks any American politician has had to endure, in many cases precisely for that effort. His name is President George W. Bush.

I have leveled some hefty - and valid - criticism of the Bush Administration myself over his two terms, but the one thing you cannot fault President Bush on is his record of keeping the United States of America safe.

Columnist Ann Coulter of all people, a caustic political commentator for whom I ordinarily have little use, has nevertheless proven herself to be capable of flashes of admirable insight. Her September 10 article "Bush 7, Terrorists 0," is one such example and a must-read in this context. An excerpt:

"As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure projects, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself - it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.

Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years...

By [the leftists'] own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.

A year after the 9/11 attack, The New York Times' Frank Rich was carping about Bush's national security plans, saying we could judge Bush's war on terror by whether there was a major al-Qaida attack in 2003, which - according to Rich - would have been on al-Qaida's normal schedule.

Rich wrote: 'Since major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough.' ('Never Forget What?' New York Times, Sept. 14, 2002.)

There wasn't a major al-Qaida attack in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. Manifestly, liberals thought there would be: They announced a standard of success that they expected Bush to fail.

As Bush has said, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, the terrorists only have to be right one time. Bush has been right 100 percent of the time for seven years - so much so that Americans have completely forgotten about the threat of Islamic terrorism."

So...go have a look at those horrific videos, ask yourself why we've had no such horrors since - and at the very least breathe a word of thanks that we've had a President who cares more about national security than maintaining high poll numbers or "creating a legacy."

Then ask yourself the implications of a President-wannabe's plan to have a series of cozy chats with, among a vertiable who's who of international tyrants, a militant Islamofascist regime that stands on the brink of producing nuclear weapons and which has openly vowed to obliterate America and its chief Mideast ally by any means available. In context of foreign policy, "popular" and "poll-friendly" can also be deadly.


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Since we're on the subject of appreciating negations: You may have completely missed it, but the universe failed to disintegrate on Wednesday when physicists started up the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility in Switzerland.

I'm not a particle physicist, but the panicky hysteria surrounding that experiment was at once comical and disheartening. For many, including hysterical types within the scientific community itself, the torch and pitchfork are always close at hand, should Victor Frankenstein persist in his unholy experimentation which will surely Doom Us All.

For those of us who are not torch-wielding villagers, and despite the ethics of its funding, we can look with optimism at the LHC as another avenue to unlocking physics puzzles that currently seem insurmountable. The LHC is a state-of-the-art tool with the potential to propel technology to dramatic new heights, perhaps including development of new, cheaper sources of raw energy, and long-overdue improvements in space propulsion.

Another interesting article, from this side of the gothic horror tracks.


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To move just briefly to the Presidential campaign: It should come as no surprise that the vestigial, recidivistic Left have devolved, immediately and as if on cue, to their standard-default, the ad hominem, in their frantic effort to regain verticality after McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his Veep candidate.

Again, Robert Bidinotto has done some extensive cataloging of the post-Palin mudslinging by apoplectic Leftists in his September 10, September 09 and previous posts.

As I've alluded previously, ad hominem slurs are ultimately the only tool Leftists have at their disposal in any kind of political debate, because their ideology is flatly indefensible - logically, ethically, politically, even pragmatically - much less promotable. The increasing vileness and barbarity of their attacks only underscores the intellectual vacuity of their position, and ought to be left as the wonderfully self-refuting comedy that it is. As the saying goes, never get in the way of an opponent who is busily self-destructing.

Most recently there's been the flap over Obama's "Lipstick on a pig" gaffe. As Bidinotto put it:

"For an allegedly glib guy of such supposedly superior intellect, Barack "57 States" Obama seems instead to be a one-man gaffe factory. Today's example of his chronic case of hoof-in-mouth disease is his inadvertently likening Sarah Palin to a pig... Now, of course he didn't mean it that way; but his cheering audience took it that way, which speaks volumes about what he's attracting. More to the point, the Great Orator's epic verbal stumbles are making George W. Bush seem like Demosthenes. Maybe he should take some public speaking tips from his running mate, Joe "Neil Kinnock" Biden. Or perhaps he should just humble himself and take solace in his Muslim faith. No, he meant Christian faith. Whatever."

The McCain/Palin camp, in its first major gaffe since the Palin pick, chose not to ignore the slur, but rather to demand an apology. In displaying the kind of glass-jawed fragility previously owned by the Obama camp, McCain/Palin have turned an instant Obama negative - which ought to have just lain there in the middle of the road, emitting its fetid stench - into a needless confession of weakness.

Ermm, bravo?

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